White Supremacy Live and in Living Color
From father to son, and from mother to daughter, racist ideas are passed across generations, ensuring a degree of racialized thought amongst Whites or just simple avoidance of the subject. By avoiding discussions and addressing the horrors of racism the opportunity to institutionalize racist policies continues. Understanding the soup of tidal transformations in the vortex of a racist system is more easily grasped if one applies the power of various disciplines across time to look at the events that morphed and synthesized and flowed from the past. To this end, the student of history, political science, or sociology should employ history, sociology, economics, anthropology, geography, philosophy, and many other disciplines to answer the questions arising from complex systems embedded in events in a country unable to get rid of white supremacy. When political structures are changed or transformed due to social pressures these superstructures do not completely disappear.
A verbal superstructure exists which consists of erasures and omissions of historical facts. This would include the current educational cleansing that is taking place in actions by educational agencies and conservative legislators. By removing objective truths, Black History, from the curriculum, everyday verbalizations will reflect a sanitized white supremacist point of view. The racist verbal structure consists of sayings, clichés, comments, poems, bar room conversations, songs, words, email jokes, racial jokes, party conversation pieces, and other verbiage that places minority groups in a less than human category. Racialized words were rooted in loyalty to white supremacy and slavery. It is so strong that if students are asked to fill in the blanks of this statement: “The only good Indian is a ______,”
The visual superstructure consists of viewing the arrest of minorities on TV shows like COPS. Such programs portray the community where these individuals live as a “bad part of town.” Wide sweeping generalizations about minorities buttress the verbal superstructure already in place. Painting blacks and Mexicans into a “criminal” category by repeated use of visual images, hardens the stereotyping by showing minorities running from the police, being arrested, selling drugs, etc. These propaganda structures continue racist thought both in visual images and in the words that white supremacy uses. In the past, racist minstrel shows in black face accomplished this more overtly. These visual images conjures up mental images and corresponding associations that reduce human beings to the “others.” When one rides through a poor community these visual images are reproduced in the mind. This is how a community with many good people is turned into a “bad part of town.”
A final method that exists is what I would call a graphic superstructure. It differs from the visual superstructure in that graphic images, and less neutral images, are utilized to characterize minorities. For example, with graphic images on the news, in movies, and elsewhere, Black and Brown people are often displayed as lazy, deceitful, low performing in the academic areas, and supposedly still best suited for singing, sports, and comedy. They are shown as super strong, ignorant, and always with a mouth full of curse words. For Example, what images come to mind when we think of Jim Bowie, David Crocket, William Travis, Sam Houston, and the Alamo itself? It registers in the mind, as if by automatic reflex, the ideas of freedom, justice, bravery, and an almost holy and sanctified image of the fight for Texas Independence. The slavery image is hidden, not because it was not a factor, but to hide the objective reality that all of those Alamo heroes were brutal, cowardly, deceitful slave owners.
