The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture (a series)

The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture, per the work of Dr. Tema Okun, Kenneth Jones, and other scholars of dismantlingracism.org.

I challenge you to approach this with an open mind.

Your default reflex to seeing this will be DEFENSIVENESS.

What do these characteristics have to do with white supremacy?

I feel attacked.

These are just “good traits of a decent, functioning society,” right?These traits are measures of “professionalism, success, and morale.”

How dare they be linked to white supremacy?

That reaction right there, is white supremacy culture. Why? Because white supremacy culture is a culture that placed whiteness, and anything that protects it, on a pedestal. Whiteness must never be questioned. It must not be touched. It is superior. It is supreme. A society that was built on the foundations of brutal oppression with the justification of manifest destiny must never be questioned. We are taught early on to never question that status quo, the authority, or the rules, even when we see the terror it’s causing. Since our society’s rules have always been to protect whiteness, challenging the rules = challenging whiteness. Thus, defensiveness becomes a key trait of white supremacy.

Starting to see the connections?

Each of these characteristics can be traced back to the foundations and development of white supremacy to the society and culture we live in today. These traits have emerged from the development of white supremacy. They are the result of it.

Does it mean that these traits don’t exist outside of white supremacy? Not at all.

However, within our Western society, these traits have become dominant, normalized, and protected because of white supremacy, and they work to keep white supremacy in its “proper place.”

I’ll be doing some deep dives into some of these characteristics in some upcoming articles as a white supremacy culture characteristic series. We will unpack most of these characteristics and discuss what they are, the traits they possess, what they look like in everyday life, how they impact your sense of self, and how they uphold white supremacy by protecting and perpetuating the superiority of whiteness.

My book, We’ll All Be Free, takes the work of Dr. Okun and Mr. Jones, among many other scholars, and concludes that white supremacy culture is why we, as a collective society, battle with self-worth. It’s all connected. And as someone who once believed she would never be good enough to continue walking this earth, I am dedicated to this work of helping as many people as I can get free from this bondage of white supremacy. White supremacy harms us all, and none of us are exempt from its damage.

The good news? We can free ourselves from it and work toward slowly freeing the world from its bondage as well.