The Keystone of White Supremacy

As I've been reading the new/old Harper Lee book, Go Set a Watchman, I'm realizing that, although I was raised as a liberal in the progressive San Francisco Bay Area, I've missed something very critical about racism in America, and in the South in particular.

While everyone around me, from my parents to my high school teachers who had us read books like To Kill a Mockingbird to other adults I got to know to peers I discussed these issues with, agree that racism is fundamentally wrong and should be stopped, all of these people also instilled in me the notion that prejudice is its keystone.  "Prejudice is caused by ignorance," was the monolithic message I was reared with.  "Even if it's willful ignorance, it's still ignorance," was the second part of that teaching from the liberal culture that raised me.

The idea seemed to be that white racists see other races in terms of stereotypes such as the "unruly blacks", the "greedy Jews" or the "lazy Mexicans" and that this is the keystone of the entire edifice of western racism.  Take that out, I was taught, and racism will crumble.

As I've been reading Go Set a Watchman, I realized that prejudice is part of it, but I no longer think it's the keystone.  To put it another way, a certain type of prejudice is at the center of it all, but it's taken me a more focused lens to see something my liberal culture seems to have missed.  What's missing from that model is that white supremacists don't just think that they're better than other races on a practical level.  They think that white people are fundamentally more moral!

Once I realized this, everything about race in America fell into place for me that had not been fully explained by the prejudice theory.  Fundamental to white racism is not only that people of color are fundamentally "less civilized" and "less disciplined" (and, in the twisted logic of these racists, therefore "less moral") than white people, but that white people have some sort of "responsibility" to civilize them and discipline them so that they can become as "moral" as white people.[1]

Understanding this makes perfect sense out of, say, the white supremacist reaction to Brown v Board of Education as well as to the reason why the Supreme Court actually had to say that separate is not equal.  If racism was focused on conscious hatred or purely practical oppression, the question would not come up.  White supremacists would simply be against any sort of education for people of color.  As it was at the time of that ruling (and still is in many quarters, I think), the goal of the white supremacists was to educate black children separately from white children on the basis that they "need to be taught" lessons in "civilized" behavior, discipline and "morality" that white children "didn't need" to be "taught" and that white children "need to be taught" not only skills that white supremacists want to withhold from people of color, but also some sort of esoterica, including white supremacy itself, however indirectly that teaching might come about.

Obviously, as an anti-racist, I find that whole concept frightening to the bone and completely immoral.  Since I know that people of all races are equal and that, biologically, there is no such thing as race in the first place, I support integrated education and am glad that as much change has come about as there has been, and I hope for more.  However, I'm now seeing that prejudice alone does not entirely explain the white supremacist reaction to that ruling specifically or segregated education in general.

The same moral superiority attitude explains police brutality against people of color.  If white police officers think of people of color as fundamentally less moral and more in need of discipline, it could explain why they'd feel justified in opening fire on, say, a black boy who mouthed off to them or possibly threw a punch at them.  Under an equality perspective, it seems obvious that the killing was way, way excessive.  In fact, that it's murder or something close to!  The cop had a gun, the kid didn't.  However, from a moral superiority perspective, a black boy mouthing off to or throwing a punch at a police officer is a boy who's "rotten to the core", in the eyes of a white supremacist cop.  Such a kid could be seen as a thorough disregard for white attempts to "civilize" black people and his death might be seen as the removal of a "rotten apple" that would "spoil the barrel".  (Of course, if that's a wide spread attitude in the police department of a given city, it may be very understandable that black people would disrespect law enforcement officers there.)

This white man's burden concept [2] would also explain why people of color are so frequently funneled into either (a) our military (b) our prisons or occasionally (c) universities, but only on sports scholarships.

The idea that a person of color could get a university education the same way a white person would may seem obvious to us non-racists, but doing so would be a threat to the white supremacist worldview.  However, a white supremacist might easily imagine a person of color being good at sports.  After all, one expects physical prowess from a class of people expected to perform manual labor.  Since it also takes discipline to be a good member of a sports team, excellence in sports could, in the eyes of white supremacists, signal that an athlete of color is ready to be rewarded by a higher education normally "reserved" (in the mind of the white supremacist) to white people.

The military will give people of color the discipline that the white supremacists think they "need", making them "good colored folks", in their eyes.  Beyond merely being an institution for war and defense, it is also an institution of profound discipline, in which soldiers are broken down, built up, taught to follow orders and so forth: in short, the military teaches people of color exactly the sorts of lessons white supremacists want them to be taught.  Whether or not the military itself, as an institution, is racist is beside the point.  In fact, all the better to hide white supremacist designs.  The bottom line is that, in their minds, I think, it accomplishes exactly the "white man's burden" with regard to the people of color who enter it.

Another option acceptable to white supremacists, I believe, is for people of color to remain working class.  That is, if they don't get into universities on sports scholarships or join the military, they could gain some amount of respect (though not equal respect) by serving white people as dutiful members of the working class.  Such people of color "know their place" in the eyes of white supremacists.

Finally, prison would be reserved for any person of color who did not choose one of the other options, as it would punish them for trying to gain a level of power, status and success on their own, and not under white tutelage.

This also explains the outrage of so many angry white people against the President.  It's not just that he's a Democrat and they're some flavor of conservative.  It's that he's a person of color.  Under egalatarianism, it seems obvious that he's a highly disciplined, moral, upstanding man.  Even if one disagrees with some or even most of his policies, one can still admire the man as a true statesman.  However, from a white supremacist perspective, him being President is the worst possible threat.  It's totally incompatible with their world view.  To them, having him in charge of America stops white man's burden in its tracks and turns what they see as the "natural" and "good" social order on its head, with a person of color in charge.  It doesn't matter whether he's Muslim or Christian, an American citizen or not.  I think all of those are just red herrings.  White supremacists are simply willing to use any means necessary to destroy him, whether through misinformation or through obstructing the normal operations of our government, by refusing to pass the budget.  They never treated President Clinton so terribly.  Why?  Because, even if they hated Clinton's politics, he was white.

As a man opposed to all of this and in favor of equality for all, it, of course, makes me angry to think about all of this.  However, emotions alone will not win the social and political battles that lie ahead of us egalitarians.  In order to win, we must understand the opposition.  Trying to make white supremacists less prejudice is fruitless.  That's why I say that generalized prejudice is not actually the keystone, here.  Take it out, and the edifice of white supremacy may be crippled, but it will still stand.  White supremacists will be blind to any attempt to prove that their being prejudicial.  Since their worldview is that they are morally superior to people of color, saying that it's a stereotype to, say, view black people as "listless", "amoral" or "wanton" will go in one ear and out the other, because the white supremacy keystone is moral superiority, not merely prejudice.

Now, it may seem impossible to dissuade white supremacists from their views and, for some of them, it may be.  For the dedicated, serious sorts of premeditated white supremacists: the leaders of the movement, I think it must be impossible to dissuade them.  However, I think that a lot of rank-and-file white supremacists never really gave it much thought.  They were just raised to be white supremacists and never thought any differently.

Those are the people whose minds I think we can change, but not merely by removing prejudice.  I think what will really change their minds will be to normalize the concept of moral equality among races.  For example, our storytelling media has done a great job, over the decades, of changing prejudices about people of color.  They often portray people of color as business leaders, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, police officers and so forth.  However, this attacks prejudice, but not necessarily a sense of moral superiority, because these people of color can still be immoral.  As long as they are, these portrayals can be dismissed by people raised to be white supremacists (the ones we want to target) as going against the "natural order".

But, what if we began to normalize the morality of people of color?  What if, say, storytelling media made a concerted effort to portray people of color as moral?  What if we began to point out moral deeds of people of color in the news?  If it became normal to see people of color as moral, as well as normal to see them contrary to stereotype, we might really start changing the minds of the rank-and-file white supremacists.  This is because they're victims too.  They've been indoctrinated with the idea of moral superiority and presenting them with something that clashes with that might just work to change their world view.  Of course, the premeditated white supremacists will still be out their pulling the strings of every white supremacist puppet they can manipulate to their ends, but we egalitarians just might be able to cut a few strings by normalizing morality among people of color.[3]

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[1] Since I've been taught that prejudice is wrong, I'll note that, obviously, there's a spectrum of white supremacy in America.  What I'm talking about here is what I have come to see as being at the center of that bell curve, but I acknowledge that variants to the model I describe here do exist.
[2] "White man's burden" was, I believe, coined in the 19th Century as a colonialist term.
[3] There is already a lot of this, but there needs to be more, I think.