No One is Free Under White Supremacy
I almost didn’t publish this article.
I have been dealing with a raging internal I’m-not-good-enough battle lately and, let’s just say, I’m not exactly winning that battle. My work is centered around uncovering the societal and cultural conditioning that leads most of us within American society to feel as though we are never good enough, and yet, the more I pursue this work, the more arduous my own battle with enoughness and worthiness becomes. My research has taught me exactly why these thoughts are plaguing me. I know that I am holding myself to the standards and expectations of our society that do not honor humanity, but rather condition us to feel ashamed of our humanity. And, I know that I am operating within a society that does not favor me, was not built for me, and intentionally places barriers in front of me so that I, as a Black woman, have a much harder time succeeding, as defined by society, than my white counterparts.
Not to mention, my work involves talking about the most necessary, yet controversial topic within our society that, I believe, is the root of all of the challenges that I just mentioned: white supremacy. Ha, it makes me laugh thinking about the irony. I’m a Black woman talking about white supremacy in a society that hates talking about white supremacy because white supremacy is so culturally conditioned within us, that it has become our identity. No wonder I have a lot of haters. (I have to laugh to keep from crying at this point.)
Of course, I still feel like I’ll never be good enough even though my work uncovers and combats the very reason we feel like we are never good enough. I am trying to swim upstream in the most rapid, violent current that has disguised itself as normal. And as I swim upstream, gasping for every bit of air I can, I know damn good and well that if I just turned around and allowed the current to carry me, (in order words, play the game of white supremacy), things would feel and appear so much easier. Yet, I still can’t help but think to myself, “But I should be enough. I should be better and more successful. What’s wrong with me?”
Ah. That’s white supremacy.
White supremacy. Most of us shudder at the mention of this term. Shoot, if all we did was shudder, my job would be much easier. We don’t just shudder. We yell. We scream. We get defensive. We get angry. We place blame. We do anything but confront white supremacy. White supremacy has become almost as controversial as the devil himself. By the reactions I receive on social media for even mentioning white supremacy, you would think that I am personally calling every single human the devil to their face. I’m not, I promise. I am simply calling the thing the thing — we get nowhere by avoiding the truth. White supremacy is a system, structure, belief, and cultural norm that has harmed us all in more ways than we can count. All of us. No matter your societal identity. This is not a me vs. you problem or a white vs. Black problem. This is an us vs. white supremacy problem. We are on the same team.
We are on the same team, but most people refuse to see it that way. Most people are still operating from the belief that an attack on white supremacy is equivalent to an attack on them, their personhood, and their identity. This often brings about complacency, anger, avoidance, or defensiveness when the term is merely mentioned. This response closes ears and eyes and prevents one from learning a simple truth that could set them free: white supremacy is harming you, too.
It may sound like I’m just talking to white people when I say that white supremacy is harming you, too. And, I often am speaking to mostly white people when I include the “too” in that phrase. Most people who exist in a marginalized identity know firsthand the trauma that white supremacy causes. Even so, I believe all of us are just starting to fully grasp the magnitude of the harm of white supremacy. I didn’t have a comprehensive understanding of white supremacy until just a few years ago. As a Black woman, I had a subconscious awareness of it, but I didn’t have a name for it and I didn’t fully apprehend the vastness and depth of it. Marginalized and non-marginalized identities alike are just beginning to see not only the ills of white supremacy in our disadvantaged communities, but how our entire society and culture is white supremacy, and just how our every thought, belief, and action is subconsciously informed by white supremacy. Regardless of identity, white supremacy is the sole reason why the “land of the free” has never been free for any of us.
Disclaimer: the land of the free has obviously been at-least-a-little-bit free for the white population it was built for and not-even-a-little-bit-free for the Indigenous, Black, and brown populations it has oppressed. Let’s be clear: white supremacy exists to protect, serve, and idolize whiteness and white people. However, oppression always ends up catching up with the oppressor. Always.
Let’s continue.
It is when we fully accept that white supremacy is the enemy of our entire society and every single inhabitant of our society, without taking it personally or fearing the removal of privilege that destroying white supremacy will cause, that we will finally have an all-hands-on-deck effective, collaborative, and humanity-centered effort to dismantle white supremacy for good. Right now, we are still too afraid to lose the benefits that perpetuating white supremacy affords, even though there is infinitely more harm it causes us all. We have been conditioned to believe that living in this society is only to our benefit — even those of us who exist in marginalized bodies — that the thought of doing the work of dismantling mainly results in turning in the other direction. Long story short, no one wants to talk about that, let alone do something about it. We’d rather continue pretending that we’re all okay and that the fact that we’re all falling apart at the seams, is just a weird coincidence.
But, it’s not. It’s not a weird coincidence.
We’re falling apart as a society because white supremacy has finally caught up with itself.
White supremacy has all of us in captivity. To understand this, we must understand the purpose of white supremacy as a system and make the connection to how the system became our culture. The system of white supremacy exists to ensure the ease of keeping white people and whiteness in power in every facet of society. Beginning, of course, with the genocide of Indigenous peoples and chattel slavery, and continuing today with systems that reinforce the racial and economic caste system our nation was founded upon. It has done this by criminalizing, demoralizing, and dehumanizing Blackness and anything in proximity to it. Every system, rule, tactic, and more has been structured to prevent anything that resembles even a touch of Blackness from having access to the safety, security, success, and equality that society automatically affords white people.
But, here’s the thing: these very systems ended up doing almost just as much harm to those they were built to protect as those they were built to harm.
Keyword: almost.
Our society’s desperation to keep whiteness and white people in power has not come without a grave cost to everyone who inhabits this society. That means you. And that means me. It is because of white supremacy that we have built a society that refuses more help to its citizens than any other developed nation in this world. It is because of white supremacy that we have withheld the human rights to safety, security, education, health care, public resources, child care, and more. It is white supremacy that wrote the very American narrative that even your most basic human rights must be deserved and earned.
You may be wondering, how? How does white supremacy affect any of this? Connect the dots for me, because I am lost.
See, this nation had every opportunity to become the land of freedom and opportunity that it promised it would be in the Constitution. Now, we know that those ideals were only ever written for the white population. This is nothing new. However, it was when marginalized communities, namely the Black community, began demanding that we had the right to those same freedoms, that America decided that no one would be free if that meant Black Americans had access to that freedom.
White leaders decided for the entire white population that they would rather go without support, assistance, resources, etc. than dare share those liberties with Black people. It was believed that, since Black people were the very definition of indolent, we should not be afforded anything that white people “worked so hard to earn.” That narrative of white (false) meritocracy became the primary narrative of justified racism, economic separation, and the withdrawal of government support involvement in civilian life. To make sure that whiteness is supreme in this land, America freely gave wealth and opportunity to its white constituents by primarily stealing wealth and labor from Black, Indigenous, and brown constituents to be able to give it to white people. What was freely given was then chalked up to merit, though it had very little, if anything, to do with it.
Now, most of what the leaders of this nation once believed should be given to the population when that population was mostly white has all but disappeared. Housing assistance, education assistance, quality health care, a living wage…these were all priorities for our nation when white supremacy legally allowed these basic human rights to be withheld from Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. The moment legalized systemic racism was declared unconstitutional, basic human rights that were available to the public became privatized to keep those rights away from Black and brown communities and continue to uphold white supremacy without outwardly admitting to doing so. The narrative shifted from a racist belief of biological inferiority to a racist belief of cultural inferiority. “See, it’s not our fault they aren’t successful. They’re allowed to do everything we can now. It’s their fault they’re unsuccessful. Everything we believed about them was true.”
Except, when you quietly privatize everything and then utilize the wealth and privilege that was handed to you to ensure your access, that’s not real success. But, I digress…
The privatization and restricted access to basic human rights for all American citizens, coupled with economic decisions that protected the wealthy that were also a response to the end of legal segregation, has left us with a society that is fighting for its humanity on all fronts. How? The narrative shifted yet again. The removal of those basic human rights means that now we are all fighting, hustling, grinding, and panting to earn access to those rights. These are basic rights that we need as humans to be able to achieve a basic level of living, functionality, and success in society. Without access to them, the human right to a decent quality of life with basic needs that are cared for becomes a luxury. As this culture has developed, we have fallen for the belief that one shoud prove themselves worthy of access to the rights and life that we were always meant to freely inhabit.
We no longer believe that those human rights are even rights anymore — they have all become privileges that are only afforded to those who are either granted elite access by being a part of the narrowing default privileged population or those who burn themselves out chasing that privilege. The leaders of our society used the individual responsibility narrative that was fueled by the end of legalized segregation to withhold as much from us as possible to maintain white supremacy. Now, we take that individual responsibility to heart and feel there is something wrong with us when we can’t achieve society’s very narrow, nearly impossible standards without the help that most humans would need to achieve them. Not only have racial disparities vastly widened since the end of legalized racism, but now, the average American lives paycheck-to-paycheck, burning the candle at multiple ends with declining mental and physical health that begins as early as childhood. The average American now spends their lives so engrossed in hustling and chasing and the need to fix oneself because we have been taught that anything we lack is our fault and our fault alone.
Wellness, education, quality work, a living wage…these are things that most of the non-Western world believes every human deserves. Here? They are luxuries that have become status symbols and markers of worthiness in society. And rather than actual merit as a qualifier, privilege, access to wealth, scandal, greed, and more have become what is necessary to access all of the above. And if you aren’t perfect in every way? Oh, society will let you know — and loudly. You will find yourself wondering, “What is wrong with me? Why am I not good enough?”
Nothing is wrong with you. You are trying to swim upstream in a society that wasn’t built for your success, but rather built to profit off of our belief that you are a failure of a human who needs to prove themselves worthy. All because we couldn’t just allow everyone to be free.
As Heather McGee so eloquently states in her book, The Sum of Us, “racism drained the pool.” Racism quite literally drained the public pools, and racism also drained the metaphorical pool: the pool of freedom we could all be swimming in if society hadn’t been so determined to maintain white supremacy at all costs.
And, yes, white supremacy will always cause exponentially more harm to the communities of color it was built to oppress, but that oppression has caught up with itself, and now we’re all swimming upstream. However, if we decide to stop swimming and ride the wave, while that might seem easier at first, that stream will eventually lead to a waterfall. And you will get hit with bumpy rocks along the way. No matter how you spin it, or what direction you’re swimming in, white supremacy is harming us all. None of us are free. We will not be free until we finally decide to collectively knock white supremacy down, heal from the damage it has caused, and start anew.
It may feel impossible, but I refuse to give in. I refuse to lose hope. For hope is the very essence of humanity. And humanity is always worth fighting for.
Every single humam deserves to be released from the bondage of white supremacy.
- Caroline J. Sumlin, We’ll All Be Free
