The terms “White Supremacy” or “White Supremacist” have been tossed around a lot since the election of Donald Trump. I think I have a handle on the meaning of racism. For example, in the early 1970s the African American cleaning women who cleaned the office of the sawmill I worked in weren’t allowed to use the office toilets. Those were for the white office workers only. The black women had to use the toilets that the black workers in the mill used.
An old friend called the other day and described racism in his small Ohio town when he was a kid. It was about the same period of time that I was at the sawmill. My fiend said that African Americans were demanding a few basic rights. One day the African Americans in that town marched for some simple right that white people take for granted. For that act the doors on the homes of all the African Americans in that small town had the white hood of Ku Klux Klan terrorists hung on them. There were, of course, black and white people in that town that remembered at least fifteen lynchings of African Americans in Ohio only a few decades earlier.
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| Klan in Gainesville, Florida - Wikipedia |
“You didn’t see a black person anywhere in our town for quite a few days after they hung the Klan hoods on the doors,” my friend said.
So racism is a system that humiliates and terrorizes people. But what is white supremacy?
“It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [slaves] to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.”
That quote is from the French philosopher Montesquieu as reported by professor James W. Loewen, of the University of Vermont. What Mostesquieu is saying is that African slaves must be less human than us, otherwise we couldn’t treat them so cruelly. We couldn’t be followers of Jesus Christ, who tells us to treat our neighbors as we would want to be treated, and deny an African American lady access to a bathroom unless we believed God made us superior to her. That is White Supremacy.
But Montesquieu was writing in the 1840s. What has that got to do with us today? Of course I wouldn’t have to ask that question to the African American cleaning women or the descendants of slaves living in that Ohio town. But those events took place forty-five years ago. What has that got to do with us today?
Much of the fuss over White Supremacists and White Supremacy this last summer was over monuments to the Confederacy and to its heroes. Those who argued for preservation of those memorials said we must preserve them because they are part of our historical memory. That may be so. The very foundation of the Confederacy was White Supremacy.
Ten days after the Confederacy adopted its constitution Alexander Stephens, the Confederate Vice-President, gave a well received speech in Savanah, Georgia, where he complained that the United States, “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” according to Professor Loewen.
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and moral condition,” Stephens said about the Confederacy.
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| Klan insignia - Wikipedia |
In April, 1863, the Savanah Morning News proposed a new Confederate flag. It would be all white except the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia would be in the upper left corner. In explaining the proposed white flag the editor wrote: “We are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”
That flag became the Confederacy’s second flag. And it, and the other symbols and memorials of the Confederacy scattered around the U.S. today, are emblematic of the absolutely false belief that heaven ordained “the supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race”.
I’m not into name calling but I believe I saw White Supremacy at work all those years ago. And, as I look around the dark corners of the internet, at sites like the American Freedom Party and the Daily Stormer, it is clear that it is alive and well today. But, sadly, it’s rearing its ugly and oppressive head on our streets and in popular culture as well. The formula is the same as it was in 1973 and in the 1840s. Humiliation, insults, threats, terroristic acts, including beatings and killings, will prove that we white people are better than the colored race. Can’t we be better than that?
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