White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them.[1] The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.[2][3]
As a political ideology, it imposes and maintains cultural, social, political, historical or institutional domination by white people and non-white supporters. In the past, this ideology had been put into effect through socioeconomic and legal structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, European colonial labor and social practices, the Scramble for Africa, Jim Crow laws in the United States, the activities of the Native Land Court in New Zealand,[4] the White Australia policies from the 1890s to the mid-1970s, and apartheid in South Africa.[5][6] This ideology is also today present among neo-Confederates.
White supremacy underlies a spectrum of contemporary movements including white nationalism, white separatism, neo-Nazism, and the Christian Identity movement.[7] In the United States, white supremacy is primarily associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Aryan Nations, and the White American Resistance movement, all of which are also considered to be antisemitic.[8] The Proud Boys, despite claiming non-association with white supremacy, have been described in academic contexts as being such.[9] In recent years, websites such as Twitter (known as X since July 2023), Reddit, and Stormfront, and the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, have contributed to an increased activity and interest in white supremacy.[10][11][12][13][14]
Different forms of white supremacy have different conceptions of who is considered white (though the exemplar is generally light-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed — traits most common in northern Europe and that are viewed pseudoscientifically as being traits of an Aryan race), and not all white-supremacist organizations agree on who is their greatest enemy.[15] Different groups of white supremacists identify various racial, ethnic, religious, and other enemies,[15] most commonly those of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceania, Asians, multiracial people, Middle Eastern people, Jews,[16][17][18] Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.[19][20][21][22]
In academic usage, particularly in critical race theory or intersectionality, "white supremacy" can also refer to a social system in which white people enjoy structural advantages (privilege) over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level, despite formal legal equality.[23][24][25][26][27]
White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 17th-century scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that helped shape international relations and racial policy from the latter part of the Age of Enlightenment until the late 20th century (marked by decolonization and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1991, followed by that country's first multiracial elections in 1994).[citation needed]
White supremacy was dominant in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, and it persisted for decades after the Reconstruction Era.[29] Prior to the Civil War, many wealthy white Americans owned slaves; they tried to justify their economic exploitation of black people by creating a "scientific" theory of white superiority and black inferiority.[30] One such slave owner, future president Thomas Jefferson, wrote in 1785 that blacks were "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind."[31] In the antebellum South, four million slaves were denied freedom.[32] The outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy being cited as a cause for state secession[33] and the formation of the Confederate States of America.[34] In an 1890 editorial about Native Americans and the American Indian Wars, author L. Frank Baum wrote: "The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."[35]
The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only.[36] In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white were disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Professor Leland T. Saito of the University of Southern California writes: "Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion."[37]
The denial of social and political freedom to minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the civil rights movement.[38] The movement was spurred by the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy. David Jackson writes it was the image of the "murdered child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism."[39] Vann R. Newkirk II wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy."[40] Moved by the image of Till's body in the casket, one hundred days after his murder Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.[41]
Sociologist Stephen Klineberg has stated that U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965 clearly "declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race".[42][a] The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened entry to the U.S. to non-Germanic groups, and significantly altered the demographic mix in the U.S. as a result.[42] With 38 U.S. states having banned interracial marriage through anti-miscegenation laws, the last 16 states had such laws in place until 1967 when they were invalidated by the Supreme Court of the United States' decision in Loving v. Virginia.[43] These mid-century gains had a major impact on white Americans' political views; segregation and white racial superiority, which had been publicly endorsed in the 1940s, became minority views within the white community by the mid-1970s, and continued to decline in 1990s' polls to a single-digit percentage.[44][45] For sociologist Howard Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States.[46]
After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology to the American far-right.[47] According to Kathleen Belew, a historian of race and racism in the United States, white militancy shifted after the Vietnam War from supporting the existing racial order to a more radical position (self-described as "white power" or "white nationalism") committed to overthrowing the United States government and establishing a white homeland.[48][49] Such anti-government militia organizations are one of three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States, with white-supremacist groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, and racist skinheads) and a religious fundamentalist movement (such as Christian Identity) being the other two.[50][51] Howard Winant writes that, "On the far right the cornerstone of white identity is belief in an ineluctable, unalterable racialized difference between whites and nonwhites."[52] In the view of philosopher Jason Stanley, white supremacy in the United States is an example of the fascist politics of hierarchy, in that it "demands and implies a perpetual hierarchy" in which whites dominate and control non-whites.[53]
The presidential campaign of Donald Trump led to a surge of interest in white supremacy and white nationalism in the United States, bringing increased media attention and new members to their movement; his campaign enjoyed their widespread support.[11][12][13][14]
Some academics argue that outcomes from the 2016 United States Presidential Election reflect ongoing challenges with white supremacy.[54][55] Psychologist Janet Helms suggested that the normalizing behaviors of social institutions of education, government, and healthcare are organized around the "birthright of...the power to control society's resources and determine the rules for [those resources]".[6] Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.[56][57]
As of 2018, there were over 600 white-supremacist organizations recorded in the U.S.[58] On July 23, 2019, Christopher A. Wray, the head of the FBI, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the agency had made around 100 domestic terrorism arrests since October 1, 2018, and that the majority of them were connected in some way with white supremacy. Wray said that the Bureau was "aggressively pursuing [domestic terrorism] using both counterterrorism resources and criminal investigative resources and partnering closely with our state and local partners," but said that it was focused on the violence itself and not on its ideological basis. A similar number of arrests had been made for instances of international terrorism. In the past, Wray has said that white supremacy was a significant and "pervasive" threat to the U.S.