During Joe Biden’s recent address to Howard University, a historically Black higher learning institution, he offered a forthright perspective on white supremacy. “On the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to stand up for the best in us. To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat. To stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did in my inaugural address – to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.”
Biden is stating what has long been established as fact in the United States, that extremist white supremacist groups are the foremost domestic terror threat. On this basis, his calling out and condemnation of white supremacy is welcome, authoritative and well intended.
The problem is that it doesn’t do Black people the favours he may think. Biden defined white supremacy in terms with which society is now most comfortable: a phenomenon on extreme, unhinged, uncouth and often violent fringes. That may be a form in which he sees it evident in the US. All countries are different; manifestations vary. But here’s the thing: most Black people who use the term define and view white supremacy quite differently.
To us, white supremacy is not just an armed white man with a swastika tattooed on his forehead. It is the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (called by then senator Joe Biden, who drafted the legislation, “Biden’s bill”) juxtaposed with the Anti-drug Abuse Act of 1986 – which together led to the mass incarceration of, principally, Black men. It also explains the enormous sentencing disparity between powder cocaine and cheaper crack cocaine, which was more widely available in poorer and predominantly Black communities. Under the 100-1 crack versus powder cocaine disparity that existed before 2010 (when it was reduced to 18-1), the distribution of just 5g of crack, versus 500g of powder cocaine, carried a minimum five-year federal prison sentence. It also explains the difference in coverage, criminalising and compassion between the “crack epidemic” and the “opioid crisis”.
White supremacy is not just a klansman burning a cross, it is the fact that no one was held liable for the horrors inflicted on the people of Iraq. If the victims of the Iraq war were white, it is hard to believe that the architects of the assault would be on BBC Radio 4 opining on the issues of the day.
White supremacy is not just Combat 18 in combat gear: it is a homeless Black man with mental health issues being choked to death on a subway train by a white marine veteran, members of a Fox News TV audience cheering at the report, and the attitude that sees the former soldier premptively hailed a hero and bolstered with public donations of $2m towards his legal fees.
White supremacy is not just 14 words, it shapes what is seen as worthy history and what is dismissed as “wokery”: who is viewed as worthy of respect and empathy, and who are dismissed as grifters with a ‘victimhood mentality’.”
Though the main and intended beneficiaries of white supremacy are white people, perplexingly, when we speak of white supremacy, we are not exclusively speaking about the actions or ideologies of white people. Some of the foremost proponents of white supremacy are Black and brown. For some it is so normalised that they struggle to understand a world without it. Others understand what happens to those who oppose white supremacy and are rightfully scared. And for some others it is a simple equation: if you can’t beat them, dine with them (and pray they don’t dine on you).
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, said: “White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt … the defining feature of this country’s relationship with slavery is not that we practised it, but that we led the way in abolishing it.” She added: “The unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself, combined with identity politics, is a recipe for communal disaster.”
This sounds very much like our our home secretary – as see-through as spring water – going to ludicrous extremes to appeal to the normalised nature of white supremacy in Britain, and in her own party?
So here is a memo to the president and all who see the world as he does. It is too easy to equate white supremacy with the outlier, the diseased mind plotting atrocities in a West Midlands kitchen, the gun- and Trump-loving, tobacco-chewing redneck who just can’t get the N-word out of his vocabulary. Because to many who look like me, white supremacy is not the fringe, it is central to much of what happens in society; to vast areas of legislation, to the economic hierarchy, to practices and perceptions. Yes, we see the immediate urgency of the threat of white supremacy in extreme forms – as Biden does. However, normalised white supremacy – in all its forms – is just as dangerous.
To much of society, “white supremacy” is merely a pejorative term, but to many of us it is reliable descriptor that helps us understand society: it is a knowledge that protects our family, our community, our sanity – our very selves.
Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker, and the author of Think Like a White Man
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