CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

When It Reigns: White Supremacy in America

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Let me make one thing clear at the outset. I do not hate Americans who identify as white people. To do so would in part be a form of self-hate and socially backwards. I am not a self-hater, preferring to look at social dynamics rooted in economics and politics. On that note, I do think that self-hate is connected with white supremacy, the practice and theory of human inferiority and superiority based on the policies and politics linked to one’s skin color. There’s a lot to unpack here, without question.

Political dissatisfaction and economic dislocation created the conditions for President Trump’s two terms in the Oval Office. As he openly supported white supremacist groups riding the coattails of his MAGA agenda, this movement in part gains strength from scapegoating brown and black people in a bid to normalize skin color animus. Division of the working class, the majority, is the name of this game. Divide and conquer via disunity.

Take the white supremacist group Patriot Front, masked and riding the metro in Washington DC, recently. This is a public show of white supremacy politics, continuing a toxic trend. A month shy of nine years ago a Unite the Right rally occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. It resembled a KKK gathering of yesteryear. The Old Order of white segregationists never ended, borne of a late-stage capitalist growth industry: income and wealth inequality.

In the slow-motion unraveling of American society underway since the end of the Vietnam War (1973-1975) and the postwar economy (1945-1975), there have been dramatic changes of income and wealth distribution, thus in household dynamics. The family wage that........

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