White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them.[1] The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.[2][3]
White supremacy underlies a spectrum of contemporary movements including white nationalism, white separatism, neo-Nazism, and the Christian Identity movement.[7] In the United States, white supremacy is primarily associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Aryan Nations, and the White American Resistance movement, all of which are also considered to be antisemitic.[8] The Proud Boys, despite claiming non-association with white supremacy, have been described in academic contexts as being such.[9] In recent years, websites such as Twitter (known as X since July 2023), Reddit, and Stormfront, and the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, have contributed to an increased activity and interest in white supremacy.[10][11][12][13][14]
Different forms of white supremacy have different conceptions of who is considered white (though the exemplar is generally light-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed — traits most common in northern Europe and that are viewed pseudoscientifically as being traits of an Aryan race), and not all white-supremacist organizations agree on who is their greatest enemy.[15] Different groups of white supremacists identify various racial, ethnic, religious, and other enemies,[15] most commonly those of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceania, Asians, multiracial people, Middle Eastern people, Jews,[16][17][18]Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.[19][20][21][22]
In academic usage, particularly in critical race theory or intersectionality, "white supremacy" can also refer to a social system in which white people enjoy structural advantages (privilege) over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level, despite formal legal equality.[23][24][25][26][27]
^John Philip Jenkins (April 13, 2021). "white supremacy". britannica. Archived from the original on April 27, 2022. Retrieved August 14, 2022.
^American Association of Physical Anthropologists (March 27, 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Archived from the original on January 25, 2022. Retrieved June 19, 2020. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.
^"Ostensibly scientific": cf. Theodore M. Porter, Dorothy Ross (eds.) 2003. The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7, The Modern Social Sciences Cambridge University Press, p. 293 "Race has long played a powerful popular role in explaining social and cultural traits, often in ostensibly scientific terms"; Adam Kuper, Jessica Kuper (eds.), The Social Science Encyclopedia (1996), "Racism", p. 716: "This [sc. scientific] racism entailed the use of 'scientific techniques', to sanction the belief in European and American racial Superiority"; Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Questions to Sociobiology (1998), "Race, theories of", p. 18: "Its exponents [sc. of scientific racism] tended to equate race with species and claimed that it constituted a scientific explanation of human history"; Terry Jay Ellingson, The myth of the noble savage (2001), 147ff. "In scientific racism, the racism was never very scientific; nor, it could at least be argued, was whatever met the qualifications of actual science ever very racist" (p. 151); Paul A. Erickson, Liam D. Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory (2008), p. 152: "Scientific racism: Improper or incorrect science that actively or passively supports racism".
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^ abFlint, Colin (2004). Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A. Routledge. p. 53. ISBN978-0-415-93586-9. Although white racist activists must adopt a political identity of whiteness, the flimsy definition of whiteness in modern culture poses special challenges for them. In both mainstream and white supremacist discourse, to be white is to be distinct from those marked as nonwhite, yet the placement of the distinguishing line has varied significantly in different times and places.
^Ansley, Frances Lee (1989). "Stirring the Ashes: Race, Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship". Cornell Law Review. 74: 993ff.
^Ansley, Frances Lee (June 29, 1997). "White supremacy (and what we should do about it)". In Richard Delgado; Jean Stefancic (eds.). Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Temple University Press. p. 592. ISBN978-1-56639-532-8.
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