Hegemony and "White Supremacy"
Hegemony and "White Supremacy"
We are less racist than ever, but in a moral panic about "white supremacy"
“White Supremacy” is much with us. Here is a chart from Google’s Ngram viewer, tracking occurrences of the phrase in Google books. The chart ends in 2019, the year before the 2020 BLM riots, so we may expect any update to show a further spike in “white supremacy”:
To read this chart naively, we are experiencing an epidemic of racism. But of course the opposite is the truth. Our society (and by “our society,” I mean the Anglo-Saxon world as a whole) is less racist than it has ever been. Outside their mothers’ basements, we have few racists in our society. And yet we have a positively neuralgic fear of racism, and have talked ourselves into a moral panic about it. It is perhaps human to be most afraid of the danger that threatens least.
“White supremacy” has changed its meaning. It once named social and political systems in which white people enjoyed legal and other privileges. Today, it names an indistinct and rapidly expanding mess of attitudes and practices arguably in some way related to past racism, while retaining the strongly pejorative meaning that rightly attaches to the original specific sense. The term has changed denotation (direct meaning) while retaining an engrained and politically powerful connotation (implied meaning). In common use the tainted connotation obliterates the memory of any specific meaning.
In Gramscian theory, a hegemonic ideology tells us what is simply common sense, and unproblematically true. The prevalence among the upper classes of the belief that our society is one of “white supremacy” speaks of left hegemony; the ability to expand almost beyond recognition the term’s direct meaning while retaining its opprobrious connotation speaks likewise of the hegemonic power of the left.
The once canonical text on its topic, White Supremacy by George M. Frederickson, compares the two most prominent historical examples of white supremacy, Apartheid South Africa and the American South, showing the significant similarities, and some differences, between the two. White Supremacy was published in 1981, a work of anti-racist scholarship inspired by the idealism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in which Frederickson had participated.
I read Frederickson as an undergraduate, and it was eye-opening, as I had imagined that Apartheid South Africa (then, at the risk of dating myself, a hot topic on campus) was some uniquely perverse society, and did not see it in a wider global context.
White supremacy, for Frederickson and indeed in common parlance at that time, named social systems in which people with white skins had legal privileges, and people with black skins were reduced to slavery or other forms of servitude. For progressive and Marxist historians, white supremacy served economic aims by creating a supply of cheap labour. One need not be a Marxist to see that the Marxists were right about that.
By contrast, the current sense of “white supremacy” is much less definite, more vague, but also more pervasive. I first noticed it in the works of bell hooks (lowercase), the Marxist feminist who became prominent in the 1980s, and has acquired a large, admiring and increasingly mainstream following ever since. The panegyrics on her recent death were fulsome.1 Quite possibly someone else got to this extended sense of “white supremacy” first, but having read a great deal of Marxist and Marxisant theory, I first noticed this neologistic use of “white supremacy” in hooks. While one can find an antecedent to anything, hooks, with her large academic and activist following, licensed and propagated this new, fuzzier but more permeative usage. A genuinely oppositional figure in her youth in the 1960s, her movement inward toward the centre of hegemonic discourse paralleled the trajectories alike of feminism and of Marxism.
[To risk an excursus, the lowercase “bell hooks” is a nom de plume, borrowed from a revered ancestor whose greatness imposes lowercase upon the descendant, or so she explains. We live in a world that fetishizes transgression, which here takes orthographic form. But I follow Eliot in believing that an author should say what she has to say in the way in which she has to say it.]
For hooks, white supremacy is epitomized by Betty Friedan, of all people: not everyone’s idea of a racist. Friedan’s Feminine Mystique of 1960 discusses the shortcomings of the lives of implicitly white middle class housewives, and therefore, according to hooks, Friedan was guilty of reinforcing white supremacy.2 Nor is this a drive-by insult; the attack on white feminists, led by Friedan, and the narrowness of their concerns, is the central purpose of hooks’ polemic.
When I look for white supremacy in the world of 1960, I think not of Betty Friedan but of Joe Biden’s old friend George Wallace, and of H.F. Verwoerd, the ideological architect of Apartheid, then Prime Minster of South Africa. But in all fairness, hooks has half a point: it is true that Friedan’s easy and unthinking slippage into a discussion of middle (and upper) class women as though their problems were one and the same with the problems of all women was made possible by the racial hierarchy of Friedan’s society. What is unthought and unexplored is often what is most ideological, which is to say most engrained. But it is also the case that Friedan spoke for one part of a vast egalitarian movement, of which the civil rights movement was a core part, a movement that ultimately gave us bell hooks. So give hooks half, but only half, a point.
Hooks’ sense of “white supremacy” extended the narrower directly political and economic meanings to include adjacency, presumption and silence, these being imputed to Friedan. It has now gone mainstream (at some risk of understatement), and become associated not with the U.S in 1960, but with the U.S. today. Hooks’ work is notable for its stream of confident assertions concerning white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and other large abstractions drawn from the Marxist tradition. The abstractions are mutually reinforcing, amplifying rather than qualifying one another. They pertain, not to some past situation, but to the U.S. in which she was writing. Her assertions are almost always unreferenced and unargued, as though they were matters of straightforward observation, requiring only the aperceptive courage to point them out. They often serve as peroration, which is to say as conclusive and motivating rhetorical climaxes. It is a style that expects and needs a friendly audience.
Hooks did much of her writing in the politically conservative period from 1980 forward into the the current century. In the same decades, the academy was overrun by the left, with bell hooks in the vanguard. The preferences of the academy licensed her frequent departures from scholarly precision, giving her place and prominence. The radical scholar Russell Jacoby observed this contradictory phenomenon, writing that he would give all the English departments in the world for a seat on the Supreme Court. I am not sure that it would have been from his point of view a good long term bargain. Her side has attained hegemonic power, and hegemony lasts a long time.
The intellectual historian Quentin Skinner has built a massive scholarly corpus around the concept of political languages, by which he means the rhetoric than can be used to political effect at any given time. Skinner observes that the term “slavery,” with its deeply ignominious connotations, was successfully deployed by Whig polemicists of the seventeenth century to describe the position of Englishmen under royal rule, thus discrediting the latter. We have in “white supremacy” a term whose ignominy has been similarly borrowed, repurposed, and re-deployed with learned support against not against the society of George Wallace but against that of Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
An expansion of meaning has overtaken, or been forced upon, the term “white supremacy.” By a kind of semantic imperialism, it now names a very large and very indistinct set of attitudes and practices, from old-style racism to policing to far-fetched claims that rationality, English grammar and even arithmetic are “white supremacist.”3 These radically expanded and obviously absurd meanings are taken seriously; it is unfortunate that bell hooks is not here to tell us what she thinks; nor is Derrick Bell (the founder of Critical Race Theory), who made great use of rational argument. That these expanded meanings are taken seriously speaks of the fact that they express sentiments already present, in however inchoate a form, when hooks gave them articulate and credentialed expression.
That the opprobrium rightly attached to the old fashioned formally established "white supremacy" explained by Frederickson could be fully retained even as this semantic expansion occurred is evidence that the hegemonic leftism of the present age hears in hooks and her many followers a conclusion it wants to hear. The hegemonic leftism of our age is deeply convinced of our society’s indelible racism.
Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, our society is not the same as that of George Wallace, let alone as that of Apartheid South Africa. It is an abuse of language to imply that our society places black people in a position of legal inferiority or sets out to reduce them to servitude. That black Americans do badly by many measures of social well being, including wealth, criminality, incarceration, and education, may be quite accurately traced to past racism, but is not evidence of present “white supremacy” in any but this newer, polemically stretched sense.
The loaded and inflammatory term “white supremacy” is obviously not an accurate description of our current situation. One can hardly hope to solve social problems, let alone to help those who suffer their effects, from a false starting point. Nor does the application of the term “white supremacy” to our society today do any honour to the many, King and Mandela among them, who fought the real systems of white supremacy anatomized by Frederickson.
But “white supremacy” as moral denunciation is politically powerful. If it neither informs nor convinces, it does unify and motivate the already convinced, and just as frequently it silences. It wins arguments, and that is what polemical slogans are for. It implies, nay it shouts, that our deeply damaged, morally tainted society needs thorough-going change, revolution from above. The party of “thorough” finds in “white supremacy” justification for sweeping powers, and large amounts of money. We may expect to hear of “white supremacy” as long it remains an effective weapon in the hands of state and hegemonic power.
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, Boston: South End Press, 1984, p. 3, and passim.
Interesting article. I think "white supremacy" in its modern form does have a fairly precise meaning, which is any society which is "structurally white", meaning it has white customs, culture, political structures, (particularly) historical narratives etc. So any attempt to maintain some element of the past is sustaining the society's white supremacy, so must be condemned. It naturally leads to a Year Zero approach.