Sarah Huckabee: Does Black History Make White People Hate Themselves?
Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee's Crazy Rant against Teaching Historical Truth?
Back to Basics: Returning to the Matter of White Inferiority Syndrome and how it feeds
White Supremacy Myths!White supremacy has been a useful tool to control the anger of the poor and vulnerable. Racialization processes in the US rely on a historical politico-legal and socio-cultural repertoire of old modes of othering upon which the foundations of the structurally racist system rest. This socio-cultural repertoire which started from the Spanish Inquisitions against Moors, Ottoman Muslims and Jews, later was transformed and applied to indigenous populations in Americas and enslaved Africans and is based on the fear of being seen as inferior and as an attempt to wipe out the advances of a foreign culture by claiming their creations and intellectual properties as your own whilst simultaneously vilifying the creators. t throughout US history, consistent policies and practices have been at the core of racialization of minorities in the US, a legacy brought to the country by the Spanish colonizers from Jewish and Muslim inquisitions in Europe (Grosfoguel, 2010; Hannaford, 1996; Harrison, 1995; Hirschman, 2004; Rana, 2007) and applied, before any other group, to dark skinned indigenous populations in the Americas (Glenn, 2015; Grosfoguel, 2012; Rana, 2007; Steinman, 2016).
When frustrations threaten to bubble over, the illusion of superiority helps to channel anger away from the real authors of white underprivilege towards softer targets, such as children, women, the elderly and the physically or psychologically infirm. Even then the white supremacist needs to have superior numbers before being comfortable in their oppression. A level playing field feels like an attack to them. White supremacists seek a return to a fictionalized history replete with tales of “manifest destiny”, a 19th-century belief justifying the white European conquest of America. They espouse: “We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours,” Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, wrote in White Jacket.
But today’s white nationalism is unlike the cocky white supremacy of the 19th century, when the West pretty much ruled large swaths of the world and required an ideology to justify its global dominance. In place of the white man’s burden of yore, many whites, especially men, now feel they are regarded as the burden.
The far-right movement in the US and Europe, as well as mainstream conservatism – to a lesser degree, seems to have appropriated the language of oppression and subjugation more common among the formerly enslaved and segregated African-Americans, or subject populations who lived under colonial rule, uncommon among a cultural collective still perched at the top of the human power hierarchy.
In societies whose diseases have killed more than guns or any other superior technologies have for centuries visited mass slaughter upon weakened populations across the planet, there is now talk of a “white genocide” – a paranoid theory that there is a conspiracy to wipe out the white race through immigration and multiculturalism because of the wrongs of their forefathers which they want to hide from their children.
“White supremacy is still dealing with the aftermath of the anti-racist struggles of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, spearheaded by the black liberation movement, as well as the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles across the global south,” Matthew Lyons.“ Most lynchings in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries took place [when] white privilege and power was being eroded,” Barry Van Driel, vice-president of the International Association for Intercultural Education, explained to me. “That leads to identifying with an authoritarian and strong white leader to protect white interests.” Especially the dwindling numerical advantage as white societies globally become unable to sustain their populations due to lack of genetic diversity.
Like the patriarchy and the class system, race primarily serves the top dogs, not the lower classes. In fact, racial supremacy has been used since its invention to control the anger and frustration of ordinary and poor whites in two ways. Firstly, although many whites have always been almost as economically disadvantaged as other “problem” groups, their sense of belonging to the so-called “superior” group helps distort their subordinate reality and absorb their frustrations.
Secondly, when these frustrations threaten to bubble over, this illusion of superiority helps to channel anger away from the real authors of white underprivilege towards softer targets, namely “inferior” ethnic, religious and racial groups.
This is what the fascists and Nazis in Europe expertly did in the first half of the 20th century!