White Supremacy: A Working Definition

What is white supremacy?

Many are taught to equate white supremacy with the Ku Klux Klan. I was. My public-school teachers and conservative Baptist church leaders taught me that the KKK wasn’t simply a paradigm example of white supremacy; according to them, the Klan was white supremacy. Consequently, I grew up thinking of white supremacy as something small, fringe, backwards, relatively recent, and politically impotent. But the narrow view I received, endorsed, and lived from is wrong—and embarrassingly so.

White supremacy is both ideology and structure. And both forms of white supremacy began shaping the world in the 15th century. In the first recorded racialized slave auction (1444), Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara writes:

[The seamen began] to take out those captives, and carry them on shore... And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.

For Azurara, not all the enslaved are equal. Some he deems “white,” and so “fair to look upon, and well proportioned.” Others he deems “black,” and therefore “ugly”—as if they had come from Hell itself. In between heavenly and hellish flesh are the mulattoes, the mixed he understands simply as “less white.” This racial scale is a paradigm example of ideological white supremacy. And European colonizers repackaged and disseminated this white supremacist scale as they constructed pigmentocracies—governments for and by those deemed “white.” As C.R. Boxer writes, “both Iberian empires remained essentially a ‘pigmentocracy’ . . . based on the conviction of white racial, moral, and intellectual superiority—just as did their Dutch, English, and French successors.” As they constructed a global racial order, each European colonial power believed they were Whites, masters, and the true Christians.

I haven’t time to offer a full account of the varying ideological or structural species of white supremacy. Nevertheless, what I’ve shared suffices to show that the narrow view of white supremacy I and many others inherit and live with is false—and glaringly so. Still, a question remains: What’s a better conception of white supremacy than the false its-the-KKK one I and millions others have received?   

Eddie Glaude Jr offers a compact working definition that I recommend. Glaude writes:

White supremacy involves the way a society organizes itself, and what and whom it chooses to value….And that’s white supremacy without all the bluster: a set of practices informed by the fundamental belief that white people are valued more than others.

Glaude captures that white supremacy involves society-shaping ideologies and practices with a normative—not merely descriptive—vision that places greater value on “whiteness” and “white people.” Yes, there’s more to say. But this is a good start.