White supremacy

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As White Supremacy [ waɪt səˈprɛməsi ] ( English for "white supremacy", "superiority of whites", German also Suprematism , the supporters of Suprematists ) are racist ideologies in English-speaking countries , which are based on the assumption that " Europide " other human " Races " are fundamentally superior and their privileged position must therefore be guaranteed. The term serves as a collective name for a variety of racist ideological systems, including the National Socialist racial doctrine and the racial ideology in the South African apartheid regime.

In addition, the term White Supremacy also includes ideologies that are still widespread in English-speaking countries such as the United States today, e.g. B. the Alt-Right . Many American historians and political scientists prefer the term "white supremacy" over the less precise term "racism" because he, first explicitly designate from which group of people assume these ideologies, and because he secondly, clearly proves that it to power and domination goes and not just something as vague as attitudes or prejudices .

Postcolonial Theory

The Critical Whiteness Studies ( critical whiteness research ), which emerged in the context of postcolonial theories, not only describe the explicit setting of norms for being white ... in the context of colonialism , right-wing extremism and apartheid as a form of exercise of power and rule, but also direct attention with the term white supremacy ( bell hooks ) also refer to the phenomenon that the norms formed in societies dominated by white people are not only viewed as superior, but are also generalized and objectified as "neutral" and "normal". At the same time, they evade critical reflection. White Supremacy therefore also masked “own” white privileges and made them invisible to white positions. While on the one hand “white supremacy” would have a mythical character and the power relations would be veiled, the effects of the normalization of whiteness in the experiences and ideas of those who are not perceived in the category white remain a structure of violence that extends to “terror”. White supremacy is also evident at universities where the white norm determines who has something to say, i.e. defines “knowledge” and is at the center of the discourse, and whose “knowledge” is not perceived as “objective” but rather as "experience".

White Supremacy in the United States

During slavery

The origins of the white supremacy ideology in the United States lie in colonial slavery . While the planters established a plantation economy based on the labor of African American slaves, which made them wealthy and politically powerful, they developed a system of thought that also justified their power ideologically. As the American historian Ira Berlin has described, this ideological system in its heyday not only defined the relationship between blacks and whites, but also traced human relationships generally back to a relationship of domination and submission, including the relationship between parents and children, men and women, employers and workers.

The planters saw themselves not only as masters of their slaves and servants, but developed the ideology of a paternalistic society in which all social relationships were defined by difference and authority and in which they themselves were the movers of all things. They derived their claim to unconditional obedience from the fact that they saw themselves as benevolent Fathers familias who took a fatherly part in their extended “family”, to which they also counted their slaves, assigned them monthly “rations” and gave them presents at Christmas . The plantation appeared in this construction as a collective enterprise, were joined together in the Lord and slaves to their mutual advantage.

The concept of the family only gradually found its way into the ideology of the slave owners. In the early colonial times, the planters did not see their slaves as their "children", but as indispensable but difficult workers who threatened to oppose them at any time. Only in the course of the next 200 years did the stereotype of the eternally immature, eternally growing slave emerge, whose childhood extended into old age. This ideology reached its full form and its greatest significance in the mid-19th century, when the institution of slavery began to become fragile from within and was threatened from the outside by abolitionism .

This ideology usually had nothing to do with the reality of the plantations. There the discipline was still enforced with the whip. The slaves never ceased to resist the work regime, take sick leave, sabotage work, destroy tools, injure work animals or flee . Often this ideology also served to ensure that the planters interfered in the affairs of their slaves down to the most intimate areas and tried to improve their living conditions, the living conditions, the diet, the way of life, the family relationships and the religious Control the lives of their slaves.

After the abolition of slavery

Ku Klux Klan meeting in Gainesville on December 31, 1922

In the same year in which slavery was finally abolished (1865), the Ku Klux Klan was formed , which tried to prevent equality of the now free Afro-Americans by means of terror and campaigned for racial segregation .

Close ties to the White Supremacy ideology also exist in some small American religious communities, especially in the Christian Identity Movement , which regards the Anglo-Saxon or Nordic "race" as "God's chosen people" and its members since 1984 through racist and racist movements acts of anti-Semitic violence have appeared. The Creativity Movement , founded in 1973, calls for a "white religion" and the expulsion of all people of other colors from the USA. Although the Ásatrúar ("Odinists") mostly reject the White Supremacy ideology, a small part of the White Supremacists also profess this neo-pagan religion.

One of the oldest white supremacy organizations in the United States is the Pioneer Fund , founded on March 11, 1937 by Wickcliffe Preston Draper. Draper believed that blacks were genetically inferior to other "races" and called for African Americans to be relocated to Africa. The first president of the Pioneer Fund was Harry Laughlin, author of the book Eugenical Sterilization in the United States ( Eng . "Eugenic Sterilization in the United States"). Laughlin and the organization's second president, Frederick Osborn, were entangled in the Nazis' eugenics programs in the late 1930s. From 1958 to 2002 Drapers was an attorney, Harry F. Weyer, President of the Pioneer Fund, and in 2002 John Philippe Rushton took this position. An important role of the Pioneer Fund is to fund research designed to sustain white supremacy. William Bradford Shockley , who believed that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites, received funding of at least $ 170,000 for his research. In addition, Rushton himself received financial support in his research on the intellectual abilities of different "races". The Pioneer Fund was still active in 2013 , according to the Southern Poverty Law Center .

The founder of the American Nazi Party , George Lincoln Rockwell , created the catchphrase " White Power " based on the black battle term Black Power , which is still widespread in the American neo-Nazi and skinhead scene today.

Even before his election as US president, several racists apparently tried to kill Barack Obama . For this reason, the security precautions for the then Junior Senator from Illinois were higher than any other candidate before.

In American prisons , the white supremacy ideology is very present through the Aryan Brotherhood , a network of criminal racist gangs.

literature

All book titles mentioned are in English:

  • Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era . Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder CO et al. 2001, ISBN 1-58826-032-1 .
  • John Whitson Cell: The Highest Stage of White Supremacy. The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1982, ISBN 0-521-27061-8 .
  • Betty A. Dobratz, Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile: The White Separatist Movement in the United States. “White Power, White Pride!” The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 2000, ISBN 0-8018-6537-9 .
  • Abby L. Ferber: White Man Falling. Race, Gender, and White Supremacy . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham MD et al. 2000, ISBN 0-8476-9026-1 .
  • George M. Fredrickson: White Supremacy. A Comparative Study in American and South African History . Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 1982, ISBN 0-19-503042-7 online .
  • Ghassan Hage: White Nation. Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society . Pluto Press Australia et al., Annandale et al. 1998, ISBN 1-86403-056-9 (cf. also: Simone Prodolliet: Weiss sein ).
  • bell hooks : whiteness in the black imagination . In: bell hooks: Black Looks. Pop culture - media - racism . Orlanda-Frauenverlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-929823-14-4 , p. 207 (Original: white supremacist terror ) (See also: Eske Wollrad: Body politics - feminist-anti-racist reflections on whiteness as myth and terror . European Women's Synod ( Memento of August 24, 2005 in the Internet Archive ): pp. 5–10 d'agost, 2003 Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Body politics - feminist-anti-racist reflections and terror on whiteness as myth and terror ( Memento of December 16, 2004 on the Internet Archives )).
  • Franziska Meister: Racism and Resistance. How the Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy . transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8376-3857-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ What is White Supremacy? ( Memento from July 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Bell hooks: Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination. Displacing whiteness. Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Ruth Frankenberg. Durham, London: Duke UP, 1997, pp. 165-179; bell hooks: whiteness in the black imagination. In: bell hooks: Black Looks , Berlin 1994, 207 (Original: white supremacist terror ).
  3. ↑ Susan Arndt: Being white, Roland Barthes la vaccine and the African-feminist literature. Being white, Roland Barthes la vaccine and African feminist literature ( Memento from January 4, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Susan Arndt: Being white. The misunderstood structural category of Europe and Germany and Susan Arndt: Myths of the White Subject: Denial and Hierarchization of Racism in: Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche, Susan Arndt (eds.) Myths, masks and subjects. Critical whiteness research in Germany. Compilation of the contribution .
  4. ↑ On the term see: Frantz Fanon (1967), Black Skin, White Masks . London: Grove Press. Numerous studies on whiteness refer to Fanon's concept of the mask .
  5. ↑ Susan Arndt: Being white, Roland Barthes la vaccine and the African-feminist literature. Being white, Roland Barthes la vaccine and African feminist literature ( Memento of January 4, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Susan Arndt: The Dynamics of African Feminism. Defining and Classifying African Feminist Literatures. Trenton, NJ; Asmara: Africa World Press 2002. Susan Arndt: Limitless whiteness. Being white without limits? Conceptions of whiteness and feminism in African feminist literature. in: Monika Ehlers, Eva Lezzi, Sandra Schramm (eds.): Foreign desire. Representation forms of transcultural relationships. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau 2003, pp. 107–120. On the concept of masking and myth, see also Arndt's references to: Frantz Fanon (1967), Black Skin, White Masks . London: Grove Press.
  6. ↑ Eske Wollrad: Body Politics - Feminist- Anti -Racist Reflections on Whiteness as Myth and Terror. European Women's Synod ( Memento of August 24, 2005 in the Internet Archive ): 5. – 10. August 2003, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Body politics - feminist-anti-racist reflections and terror on whiteness as myth and terror ( Memento from December 16, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Grada Kilomba on white supremacy at Berlin universities: “When they speak it is scientific, when we speak it is unscientific; ... they have knowledge, we have experiences. These are not simple semantic categorizations; they possess a dimension of power that maintains hierarchical positions and upholds white supremacy. We are not dealing here with a “peaceful coexistence of words”, as Jacques Derrida (…) emphasizes, but rather a violent hierarchy that defines who can speak . “Grada Kilomba: Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism , Münster 2008, p. 28 (italics in the original). On who can speak , Grada Kilomba refers to: Gayatri C. Spivak (1995): 'Can the subaltern speak?' And in the German context: Steyerl & Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2003): Does the subaltern speak German? See G. Kilomba, p. 26 ff.
  8. ↑ Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves , Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-674-01061-2
  9. ↑ a b Berlin, pp. 62f, 147, 204
  10. ↑ Berlin, p. 205
  11. ^ White Supremacy in America: The Ku Klux Klan
  12. ^ Christian Identity: White Supremacy, Christian Supremacy, Christian Nationalism
  13. ^ The Creativity Movement
  14. ↑ Chip Berlet, Stanislav Vysotsky: Overview of US White Supremacist Groups (abstract) , Political and Military Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 1
  15. ^ A b c Steven E. Atkins: Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism In Modern American History . ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, Calif. 2011, ISBN 978-1-59-884350-7 , p. 34 f.
  16. ^ Active White Nationalist Groups . From: Splcenter.org , accessed October 2, 2013.
  17. ↑ Nicholas Riccardi: Threat to kill Obama downplayed . Los Angeles Times . August 27, 2008. Retrieved March 8, 2011.
  18. ^ Mary Bosworth: Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities. Sage, Thousand Oaks / London / New Delhi 2005, vol. 1, p. 40 f.