What Do "White Supremacists" Want?
It's tempting to say, who cares, but they have too much power to ignore in our culture.
What do “white supremacists” want? The question is only interesting because, unfortunately, “white supremacy” is the default in the United States, so, at a minimum, any “conservative” advocates preserving “white supremacy” by necessity. A casual review of the persons who advocate “white supremacy,” explicitly or implicitly, leads quickly to the impulse to dismiss them out of hand, even as doing so is well nigh impossible in the United States today.
Broadly, there are two possible reactions to Ms. Davis’ claim here. One can take her seriously and think this situation needs to change. Or, one can dismiss her as a “race hustler” and say that anyone who points up racism and “white supremacy” in our culture is “the real racist.” There are always shades of gray between these, um, black and white extremes, but this is a polarizing issue that rarely produces much subtlety in public discussions.
Certainly the election of our most recent “white supremacist” president, the decidedly not subtle Donald Trump, did not help. Asking “white supremacists” what they want is not much help, either, since they are not a very articulate lot. Nor do they usually exhibit much capacity for logic.
So, in asserting that the Republican Party belongs to Donald Trump now, his loyal fan, Marjorie Taylor Greene said:
He was a president that wanted every single person to achieve and that's why we supported him, that's why I've always supported him. [T]he party is his and doesn't belong to anybody else.
Um, one rather suspects that few of the desperate people who have sought asylum in the United States since Trump took office would agree with this claim. One rather doubts that any of the transgender persons whom he and the Republican Party have attacked would agree with this claim. Lately, the favorite tactic of Republicans is to attack transgender children.
Certainly, vote totals strongly suggest that African Americans as a class do not much think Trump had their best interests at heart:
This was even more true in 2016:
Granting the possibility for shades of gray on any issue, to some extent, with “white supremacy,” your either for it or agin it. It is difficult to get 82% of any group of humans to agree on anything. This issue boils down to two, disjunctive, propositions because a key determinant is whether one takes seriously the opinions of African Americans. That is a large group of people, roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population.
It seems highly unlikely that Trump sees the matter in these terms, and virtually no one has put it this way, but it is the case, as above, that white people are more closely divided than any other group on Trump, which left to African Americans and other minority groups the power to decide the election. We know how that turned out:
As we also know, however, Trump has loudly and repeatedly insisted since election day that the Democrats stole the election from him. All thinking people refer to this as “the big lie” and see it as the major motivation for the attack on the U.S. Capitol to try to disrupt the counting of electoral votes on January 6.
Again, it seems unlikely that Trump explicitly sees his big lie about the election in these terms, but we are free to do so: Trump and his fellow “white supremacists,” in bruiting the big lie, are saying, in effect, that the votes of African Americans and other minorities do not count, or should not count.
The paroxysm of voter suppression measures Republicans are undertaking in various states at this moment is further confirmation of this claim. The NAACP has already filed suit to challenge the new law in Georgia, one of the first states to hurriedly revise its election procedures after Trump lost that state.
One does lose a lot of nuance with this approach, and virtually no human has actually said this exactly, although Tom Cotton has come close, but in terms of abstract logic, the “white supremacist” position suggests that we should reinstitute slavery. The rule had almost zero effect until the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, but we officially prohibited discrimination in voting in 1868 on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” with the Fifteenth Amendment. Wholesale attempts to stop African Americans from voting harken back to slavery, or at least to the period before the Voting Rights Act, which the Republicans on the Supreme Court voted to eviscerate in a case that came from a former slave holding state.
There is nothing at all rational in “white supremacy.” Although the man who wrote it owned slaves, the logic of the Declaration of Independence clearly disallows it. The Constitution implicitly accepted the existence of slavery at its ratification, but that was a concession of convenience for the elitist white men who wrote that document and violated its philosophical underpinnings. After a four year war that is still the deadliest for U.S. citizens we have yet engaged in, we officially prohibited slavery as a legal option in the United States. Our history since that time overwhelmingly shows that we get along just fine without legal slavery. “Race” as a device for dividing up humans is not empirically valid. It is a cultural artifact, and thus susceptible to deliberate change, even as culture changes only very slowly. As James Baldwin famously pointed out, we cannot change everything, but we cannot change anything until we face it.
The time has long past for the rational people of the world to face and strive to stomp out “white supremacy.”