CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

White Supremacy Protects Power, Not White People

Image by Colin Lloyd.

White supremacy is named for race, but its organizing logic is the preservation of power.

Public conversation about Jeffrey Epstein tends to settle in a predictable place. The focus turns to personalities: who visited the island, who exercised poor judgment, who should have known better. We end up arguing about people like Noam Chomsky instead of asking how the structure allowed it to happen. Attention remains fixed on individuals.

What falls out of view is the system that made Epstein’s protection possible: white supremacy.

By white supremacy I mean the racial order that shaped American institutions — organizing property, citizenship and state violence through slavery, Indigenous dispossession, the exploitation of racialized labor and exclusionary immigration law. In the United States, elite preservation has never operated outside racial hierarchy; the institutions themselves were built inside that hierarchy.

Elite protection is not unique to racially ordered societies. Oligarchies and authoritarian regimes also insulate power. The question is not whether protection occurs but within what historical architecture it operates.

Epstein moved inside elite financial and political networks that have long been structured by race and class power. When things started to surface, it followed a predictable pattern: delays, gentler media coverage and quiet protection of reputations to contain the damage and protect the system. Institutions tend to stabilize the order from which they benefit.

Epstein’s victims were young, often economically vulnerable and the harm was severe.

Public recognition clustered around victims whose suffering could be acknowledged without forcing a broader structural reckoning. The harm and the outrage were both real. But the story stayed focused on individual wrongdoing instead of looking at how the system itself is built.

When elites hurt their own, cohesion weakens. Containment becomes harder when the harmed have access to the same power........

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