“White Supremacy is a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.”
(A) Racism as a Political System: White Supremacy
Race is the child, not the parent, of racism.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
1. Race as a social construction. The term ‘race’ - problematic due to its biological reference, derived from a breeding line or stock of animals whose qualities are inheritable genetically. Essentialism (racial categories as derived from nature) versus social constructivism (racial categories as derived from human choices)
2. Racism as white supremacy isn’t an act, it is a system. Racism is not the same thing as prejudice. Everyone is socialized to have prejudices - to treat people perceived as different differently. Racism is prejudice backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, that “functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors.”
3. “The direction of power between white people and people of color is historic, traditional, and normalized in ideology. Racism differs from individual racial prejudice and racial discrimination in the historical accumulation and ongoing use of institutional power and authority to support the prejudice and to systematically enforce discriminatory behaviors with far-reaching effects. People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism.”
- Ten richest Americans: 100% white
- US Congress: 90% white
- US governors: 96% white
- Top military advisors: 100% white
- People who decide which TV shows we see: 93% white
- Owners of professional football teams: 97% white
- The median White family now has 41 times more wealth than the median Black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family... Since 1983, median wealth for all U.S. households declined by 3 percent, adjusting for inflation. Over this same period, the median Black family saw their wealth drop by more than half."
(B) The Racial Contract
4. “Instead of pretending that the social contract outlines the ideal that people tried to live up to but which they occasionally failed (as with all ideals) fell short of, we should say frankly that for whites the Racial Contract represented the ideal, and what is involved is not deviation rom the (fictive) norm but adherence to the actual norm.” (p. 57- all references to The Racial Contract)).
5. Political Contract:
An account of the origins of government and our political obligations
(a) as a contract which establishes society (taking individuals out of the ‘state of nature’
(b) as establishing the state (transferring power to a governing entity)
6. Moral Contract:
An account of the founding of the moral code which regulates the behavior of citizens.
7. Racial Contract: Political, Moral and Epistemological - “that set of formal and informal agreements… which set the limits of the contracts’ validity between the members of one subset of humans as ‘white’ and another subset as ‘non-white’ and of a different and inferior moral status. (p.11)
- Not a contract between whites and non-whites, but an agreement among those “categorized as whites over the nonwhites, who are thus the objects rather than the subjects of the agreement.” (12)
- An agreement which actually constructs race, ‘invents the white race for the first time.” (63)
(C) The Legal Creation of “White people”
8. The label “white” reflecting a group of humanity appears nowhere in law until 1681. It first appears in an enactment passed by the Colonial Assembly of the Colony of Maryland, an antimiscegenation law which criminalized interracial marriage. It punished a “white” woman or man who married a person who was of African descent or a member of a native tribe by banishing them from the colony.
9. Did racism cause slavery or slavery cause racism? Freemen of Africa descent could and did marry British white men, own land, and vote, run for office, during this pre-Black code era. Edmund Morgan states that colonists in Virginia during the 1660s and 1670s were “ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior” (1975: 155). Furthermore, it is noteworthy that marriage among those of African descent, mostly men, and those of European descent, mostly women, were not unusual and appear to have been met with acceptance (Smedley 2007: 105). The body of historical evidence suggests that slavery did not emerge as a result of widespread British animosity and hostility toward Africans because of their skin color.
10. The “racial bribe”. Bacon’s Rebellion: In 1676, discontented people erupted in the colony of Virginia with laborers of European and African descent, bond and free, uniting in the fight against unpaid labor, the plantation elite, and those governing the colony, in an effort to realize greater opportunity and independence. Colonial Administrators consciously imposed a divide-and-conquer strategy, known as the “racial bribe” to split the laborers against each other.
11. Legal Creation of Racism to support slavery. In rapid succession Afro-Americans lost their right to testify before a court, to engage in any kind of commercial activity, either as buyer or seller; to hold property; to participate in the political process; to congregate in public places with more than two or three of their fellows; to travel without permission; and to engage in legal marriage or parenthood
12. The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 were a series of laws enacted by the Colony of Virginia's House of Burgesses regulating activities related to interactions between slaves and citizens of the crown colony of Virginia. The enactment of the Slave Codes is considered to be the consolidation of slavery in Virginia, and served as the foundation of Virginia's slave legislation.
These codes effectively embedded the idea of white supremacy into law by the following devices:
- Established new property rights for slave owners
- Allowed for the legal, free trade of slaves with protections granted by the courts
- Established separate courts of trial
- Prohibited blacks, regardless of free status, from owning arms [weapons]
- Whites could not be employed by blacks
- Allowed for the apprehension of suspected runaways
(D) Norming and racing of space / demarcating civil and wild
13. Space, taken for granted as just there for the adult white male, is created by the racial contract. “You are what you are in part because you originate from a certain kind of space, and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures like you.” (42)
14. Non-Europeans as savages, who live in the ‘wild.’ The classical social contract defines human beings by negation: we are the nonsavages, the ones who made it out of the ‘state of nature.’
15. European civilization as a planetary-evolutionary process, not just a part of the world, but the advancing frontier of civilization at the microlevel (continents and nations), local level (city neighborhoods), and microlevel (the nonwhite body). (43-44)
16. The epistemological dimension of norming - Restriction of knowledge of European cognizers; true cultural achievement and progress as white, nonwhite culture as permanently locked into superstition and ignorance.
E.g. The European “discovery” of the New World (45)
17. Moral dimension of norming - The inherent moral depravity of non-European space E.g. the Dark Continent, the Inner City, the Nonwhite Body. (51)
(E) Establishing Personhood & Sub-personhood
18. The racial contract est. a particular “somatotype as the norm, deviation from which unfits one for full personhood and full membership in the polity.” (54) personhood defined as a negation of subpersonhood.
19. Answers Aristotle’s problem by defining servile and non servile beings; defines subperson somatically, in terms of deficient rationality;
E.g. Heathen unwillingness to recognize God’s word (59), American slavery system, Jim Crow laws invalidating black testimony in courts, cultural racism in testing where nonwhites show themselves incapable of mastering White culture (61); aesthetic somatic norms which identify whiteness with beauty.
(F) The Racial Contract justifies the European conquest of the world, underwrites the social contract
20. All modern social contract theorists are white supremacists. 64-72
21. European colonization of the third world: the ‘expropriation contract’ (Locke): “God gave the world to the use of the Industrious and Rational.” (67)
(G) The Racial Contract as being continually re-written: From de jure to de facto white supremacy
22. Phase 1 de jure white supremacy - expropriation contract, slave contract, colonial contract
23. Phase II de facto white supremacy - the racial contract writes itself out of formal existence; ongoing tension between continuing de facto privilege and formal extension of rights of nonwhites. 73
24. Naziism as an attempt to turn the clock back to more exclusivist version of the racial contract (78)
(H) Racial Contract enforced through violence and ideology
25. The liberal-democratic state of the social contract: based on consent of the governed and neutral with respect to the lives of its citizens vs the racial polity of the racial contract as imposed through violence, (nonconsensual) and not neutral - imposing white supremacist ideology on nonwhites. (83)
26. “…if in the racial polity nonwhites may be regarded as inherently bestial and savage (quite independently of what they happen to be doing at any particular moment), then by extension they can be conceptualized in part as carrying the state of nature around with them, incarnating wildness and wilderness in their person.” (87)
Dropping a culture bomb on nonwhites: “If the social contract req. that all citizens and persons learn to respect themselves and each other, the Racial Contract prescribes nonwhite self-loathing and racial deference to white citizens.” (89)
(I) The Racial Contract creates a radicalized moral psychology
27. “Whites will act in racist ways while thinking of themselves as acting morally. In order words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be morally handicapped…” (93)
E.g. failure to denounce crimes, downplaying suffering of nonwhites, “national web of self-deception” (97), exaggerated alarm at nonwhite violence against whites, inability to place the Jewish Holocaust in its larger context.
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