FACT SHEET
White supremacy is based in the belief that European and white people are superior to others on the basis of physical characteristics and ancestry.
History
Western colonialism depended upon a labour force for its expansion. Slavery was used to fill the labour needs of colonial powers, which were expanding beyond the capacity of servants and indigenous peoples. The ideology of white supremacism was developed to justify the exploitation of other people. Although the term is currently used loosely, it is important to distinguish xenophobia from a distinct ideology based in heirarchical racial categorisations.
In America, post-Reconstruction southern Democrats embraced the ideals of white supremacy in order for disadvantaged whites to differentiate themselves from newly-liberated black people, with whom they were in competition for resources. Similarly, restrictions on immigration to America before the turn of the century were based in a presumed white ethno-racial identity. American white supremacism was at its height from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century; South African white supremacism endured from the early 20th century to the 1980s. In Germany, Hitler combined historical anti-Semitism with the newer ideology of white supremacism.
Ideology
The use of heredity as a justification for the exploitation of other groups began in 15th Century Spain where Jewish converts to Christianity faced hostility on the basis of limpieza de sangre (‘purity’ of blood). The concept of race was not developed until the 18th century, however. European scholars made attempts to create typologies of human beings – which were influenced by ethnocentric biases. In 1798, German philosopher Christoph Meiners connected higher intelligence with lighter skin tones. American ‘racial Darwinism’ was particularly invested in positing the intellectual superiority of white people. In both the USA and Germany, the eugenics movement, initially focussed upon ‘breeding out’ disease and disability, began to become applied to racial categorisations. In Germany, a romantic notion of nationhood positioned Jews as the polar opposites of an idealised Aryan identity. The Nuremberg Laws in 1935 institutionalised white supremacism into the German state in ways comparable to America and South Africa, setting the path for the Holocaust.
Impact
From colour bars to racial segregation, the impacts of white supremacism shaped the 20th century. They have restricted full citizenship to white persons of European heritage, as seen in apartheid era South Africa, in America before the Civil Rights movement and in Nazi Germany. Revulsion at the genocide of the Jews by the Nazi regime effectively discredited the ‘scientific racism’ which had been respectable in Europe and America before the WW2.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre lists many avowedly white supremacist movements, but note a declining trend. While white supremacism has historically been ideologically connected with some of the most significant humanitarian outrages in human history, the current turn in hate movements is towards a form of ‘cultural racism’ which creates a hierarchy based in culture rather than race. Nevertheless, white identity politics remain salient, often as a reaction against perceived injustice around policies aimed at correcting historical injustices to black people.