Neo White Supremacy is Not a Racial Ideology
Have you ever had one of those days when writing, and your ideas inexplicably take you somewhere you didn’t expect? Today was such a day for me while editing and tweaking a book section titled The Promise of 1808. Students of early American history may recall that 1808 was the year the congressional ban on legislating against the “importation of Negroes” into the country as slaves was lifted. You may also recall that southern state delegates at the Philadelphia Convention stonewalled approval of the Constitution until they won a major concession—a 20-year continuation of the Transatlantic slave trade. It is important to understand that this extorted prohibition was not self-executing; it simply allowed Congress to act if it so chose.
I reviewed another section of my book that explains our Founding Fathers’ complicity in spreading common lies about the inherent racial supremacy of white Europeans during the colonial, revolutionary, and constitutional periods of American history. Thomas Jefferson, in particular, was known to have made crass, unsubstantiated claims about the inferiority of Africans compared to Europeans, based solely on his limited knowledge of Africans. We know that Jefferson had sexual encounters with one of his teenage slaves, Sally Hemings, who bore him several children. We also know the ultimate outcome of propagating such lies about racial superiority—the dissolution of the Union, followed by a bloody civil war that ultimately abolished the trafficking of human slaves who were treated as property by their owners.
I began writing about the post-Civil War era of the early 20th century when my discussion of white supremacy took on a nuanced tone that initially unnerved me. I felt as if I were being led to a choice of words that might be difficult to adequately validate. It started with, “The Tulsa Massacre was not about white supremacy….” I thought, “Really?” But my brain was processing thoughts more quickly than I could consciously access them, so I stopped and patiently waited to see where they were leading. Here is my final draft of the relevant paragraph, with my troubling sentence in bold.
In 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and in 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black communities achieved what the dominant class claimed to prize: self-determination, shared governance, entrepreneurship, and prosperity. But when Black people’s success began to translate into economic and political power, white people reacted with deadly violence, which state authorities tacitly or expressly consented to.
The Tulsa Massacre was not an act of white supremacy. It had nothing to do with racial ideology or superiority. Nor was it driven by conscious, informed thought. By this time, white supremacy had already been distilled from the Southern Confederacy’s legacy of white shame and insecurity. It was readily absorbed after being condensed into a phenotype all its own, heavily inflected with their English Cavalier aristocratic privileges and emanating a smoldering hatred for anyone who doesn’t look or act like them. And when those embers of hatred were fanned by the slightest breeze of economic or political power not of their own making, they erupted into a fiery, all-consuming whirlwind of jealous rage.
The ensuing events in Tulsa were instinctive, knee-jerk reactions by white people, rooted in racial shame, insecurity, self-loathing, and rage vented on Black people for succeeding despite centuries of oppression and enslavement. From May 31 to June 1, 1921, the complete destruction of Black-owned businesses in a section of Tulsa known as Black Wall Street because of its economic success was the violent response to the painful question white people asked themselves: “How can they be more successful than we are?” It was implied that they had obviously cheated. So the white vigilantes donned their virtual “white hoods” of self-righteousness and assumed the roles of police, judge, jury, and executioner.
At the time, the events were reported as riots and civil disturbances. In reality, they were strategic acts of economic annihilation and murder. They targeted Black wealth precisely because wealth is power. In the wake of the deaths of between 30 and 300 Black people,1 survivors were not only traumatized; they were re-enslaved economically and stripped of the material foundation that made freedom possible. Refusal to hold the perpetrators accountable under the law revealed the government’s tacit approval of these destroyers of economic freedom.
Tell me what you think. Am I spot on, out of my depth, or somewhere in between?
I am not suggesting we empathize with or tiptoe around card-carrying neo-white supremacists. We simply need to be smart, quietly acknowledge their ignorance stemming from poor upbringings, and soldier on as they extinguish themselves as a genetically inferior subspecies incapable of evolving.
1. Accurate estimates of the death toll are made difficult due to the lack of forensic evidence normally collected by law enforcement authorities who refused to report it at the time.
