TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE STRUCTURE OF WHITE SUPREMACY

The history of white supremacy in the United States is not something I have studied in great detail. I hope with these few notes to simply indicate the direction of my own study as I try to get an overview of the white supremacy machine or white supremacy structure.

For one thing it is a structure or set of structures rooted in history, in historical experience and the historical oppression of different groups which were designated nonwhite and inferior. Native Americans are the dispossessed people, African Americans are the enslaved people, Mexicans or Hispanics are sometimes dispossessed sometimes economic migrants, Asians were once exploited for labor and then expelled . Whatever the differences in the historical oppression of these groups and subgroups by white society there is a real and still important history of such domination especially since it largely continues today and white supremacy is the driving force behind the new nativist movement.

Also there is largely a parallel development of white supremacy and the struggles against it with the struggles of the native americans being completely divorced from the struggles of anyone else on the continent except, perhaps, other native americans. Then the african slaves have a unique history of oppression and struggle as slaves in the colonies and the united states for something like four centuries. Most of us are somewhat familiar with the civil rights movement, the black liberation movement and the the struggle for integration and against Jim Crow. We are less informed about other groups and their struggles and the Mexican or Hispanic Americans have reminded me that there are things going on that I have not really understood. All these groups exist culturally in a sort of parallel universe and each universe interacts with white society in its own largely independent and unique way. White domination remains the common result. This goes for some Asian groups as well and we should not forget that many individuals in all these groups are very successful in United States society today.

So the segregated nature, the compartmentalized nature of white supremacy is an important
characteristic which reflects national or quasi-national histories of oppression and liberation struggle.

Various campaigns have been conducted against all of these oppressed nationalities. Expulsion from this or that community or expulsion from the nation is one sanction that has
been utilized at one time or another against oppressed nationalities int he United States.