Stephen Kantrowitz writes about how
White Supremacy Has Always Been Mainstream 07/23/2018. Among other things, he says this about the origin of the term "white supremacy":
White supremacy connotes many grim and terrifying things, including inequality, exclusion, injustice, and state and vigilante violence. Like whiteness itself, white supremacy arose from the world of Atlantic slavery but survived its demise. Yet while the structures are old, the term “white supremacy” is not. Although it first appeared in British abolitionist critiques and U.S. proslavery defenses in the first half of the nineteenth century, it only became commonplace — and notably not as a pejorative—in U.S. whites’ post-emancipation calls for a racial order that would reinstitute slavery’s political and economic guarantees. [my emphasis]
And he notes how the more recent version has been facilitated by the laziness of the corporate media - and even PBS:
Consider how long Pat "Blood and Soil" Buchanan served as a respectable voice of the political and journalistic right, winning four states in the 1996 Republican primaries and later playing Rachel Maddow’s curmudgeonly uncle on MSNBC — all in spite of his longstanding support for white ethnonationalism. Or remember the PBS NewsHour profile of Trump supporter Grace Tilly that failed to note her neo-Nazi tattoos. The network’s post-backlash editor’s note treated Tilly’s claim that her tattoos were religious, not racist, as worthy of debate, as though an enormous “88” — code for “Heil Hitler”—paired with a bullseye cross, another white supremacy symbol, left room for uncertainty. The myth that white supremacy is a marginal political phenomenon has proved so durable that many people find it easier to deny its overt expression than confront a more troubling reality: “very fine people” — and not just fathers, husbands, and sons, but mothers, wives, and daughters as well — have always been central to the work of advancing white supremacist causes. [my emphasis]
This is one of the article featured in
Boston Review's
reading list on white supremacy.
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