White Supremacy Remains A Central Issue In America’s Ongoing Fight For Civil Rights
The problem of white supremacy is the most important struggle of the civil rights movement. It has never gone away and continues to rear its ugly head within the Trump administration.
Race is fiction but it has served to control society since the founding of the United States.
Even when segregation officially ended, the power of white supremacy remained and is now used to end Black History programs, deport people with non-white last names, claim there is no longer any racism, use racial profiling, increase wrongful incarcerations, use fake history, turn slave mansions into bread and breakfast places, maintaining racist Confederate statues, ignoring the centrally of slavery in the founding of America and the reason for the Civil War, remove Black Generals from service, erasing Black history at parks and military bases, and the list goes on.
There is no other struggle more important than fighting white supremacy in our society, it rules the nest.
How Policy and Power Continue to Shape Inequality
History has shown that any increase in Black achievements is seen as a threat to white dominance. White supremacy is not just individual acts of hatred but a systematic institution that is used to falsely arrest people of color and justify brutality by claiming to fight crime. Crime is a problem, but so is the system that created it and brought poverty and lack of education to the community in the first place.
White supremacy is the wall that needs to be torn down and nothing will completely change until it is institutionally dismantled. America was built on slavery, genocide, and stolen land using manifest destiny (God) to justify hatred and conquest.
From the plantation to the prison system white supremacy continues to shape public policy and seeks a new Jim Crow. When the community rose up and declared that Black Lives mattered racists claimed “all lives matter” while ignoring the historical truth that Black lives never mattered and white lives always mattered.
Racial Fiction and the Illusion of Progress
White supremacy creates racial fiction and racial amnesia. First, it creates the fiction that lighter skin still matters more than darker skin, and at the same time pretends that racism was never a real problem. People who bring it up are “playing the race card,” when in fact whites supremacists control the whole deck.
According to Curtis A. Smith, “Nobody alive today invented this system, but everyone benefits or suffers from it. That’s the great trick of Whiteness – to make its advantages feel like merit, and its violence feel like history.” America was built on the backs of slaves and white supremacy became the blueprint to ensure its eternal presence.
Historical Foundations of Systemic Inequality
According to Smith, in his book titled, You Too Can be Invited to the Cookout: A Conversation with White America, “America is like a phone with slaveholder software. You can put all the civil rights apps you want on it—you can install a Black History Month, give it Juneteenth wallpapers, hell, even upgrade it with a DEI folder—but the operating system (OS) underneath is still version 1.0: Manifest Destiny with White default settings.”
The war against white supremacy has taken on a new intensity as neo-racists and MAGA extremists seek to take us back to the “happy days” of when America was great via white supremacy.
The system of white supremacy must be rooted out and exposed as a pattern that destroys and is the child of slavery based on skin color. The throne of white supremacy cannot be adjusted for us to sit there, it must be completely destroyed so that a truly non-racist society can be built.
