Rx Reparations
Reparations challenge White supremacy: Understanding racism
Makini Chisolm-Straker
The United States is a social, geopolitical construct built on Native land using the uncompensated labor of Native and Black peoples. The violent actions perpetuated via settler-colonialism and White supremacy, and enabled via capitalism, constitute gross human rights violations against Native nations and Black relatives in the U.S. Based on the United Nations’ definition of genocide, the U.S. is guilty of genocidal acts against these populations which were and are harmed as part of the foundation and continuation of this settler nation. More importantly, the U.S. has violated and continues to violate the moral good in an effort to accumulate, maintain, and extend exclusive power of one group: some White relatives. Reparations to First Nations and U.S. Blacks will necessitate and signal a new North Star and meaningful character change. To better explicate why reparations to these groups challenge White supremacy, this edition will function as a basic explainer of racism as a multi-layered concept.
White supremacy is one manifestation of racism. Racism is “an organized social system…based on an ideology of inferiority in which…[one group] categorizes and ranks people into social groups called ‘races’ and uses its [manufactured] power to devalue, disempower, and differently allocate valued society resources and opportunities to groups…[labelled] as inferior.” Though “race” is not a scientific reality this does not negate racialized experiences. Rather, the socially constructed nature of race exposes the foundation of racism as rooted in the domineering group’s power-hoarding efforts. Further, in this definition, no specific groups are named as inferior or empowered. Racism can and does exist beyond the White-of color paradigm. There are also multiple forms of racism, real (internalized, interpersonal, institutional, systemic, structural) and imagined (reverse). To understand how reparations to U.S. Blacks and Native nations challenge White supremacy, let’s examine interpersonal and structural racism.
To better grasp the reality of the above definition, people in the U.S. can look to the Hindu caste system. In this hierarchical system, Brahmins (the highest caste), Kshatryas, Vaishyas, and Shudras comprise the 4 castes; outside of these are Dalits, a diverse group of people who at various times have been called “untouchables,” “Harijans” or “scheduled castes.” While the castes supposedly dictated the social and religious lives of Hindus (e.g., marriage, occupation, residence) and privileged “upper” castes while oppressing “lower” castes, historians have long argued that British eagerness for colonial rule solidified these separations and repressed existing social mobility in India. In “The Truth About Us,” academic and author Sanjoy Chakravorty describes how the colonizing British chose to elevate Brahminism in the mid-late 1800s to simplify British efforts to control Indian peoples. To help explicate interpersonal and structural racism as concepts, let’s examine manifestation examples in the British-fortified Hindu caste system.
Interpersonal racism manifests when a member of the privileged and empowered group negatively discriminates against a member of the oppressed, disempowered group. This may manifest via violence, as demonstrated in multiple cases of anti-lower caste violent crimes in India. For example, in 2019 a young Dalit man called Jitrendra was beaten to death, allegedly for eating in front of upper-caste relatives. The attackers are suspected to have felt threatened by a potential disruption of norms that protected their elevated status. Allegedly, to assert their social position the assailants beat Jitrendra to death. In interpersonal racism, one actor or group has experienced empowerment and privilege that (wrongly) legitimizes their harmful treatment of another actor or group, but the privileged are not (necessarily) acting on behalf of or in accordance with a governmental structure or policy.
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Structural racism can be defined as the
“historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain…[one group’s dominance] by segregating racial and ethnic communities from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult to secure high-quality education, jobs, housing, health care, and equal treatment in the criminal…[legal] system.”
In February 2016, wells in an Indian village dried up due to drought so the village council supplied water but only to non-Dalit neighborhoods. Despite repeated requests for water supply, the Dalit neighborhood was left to fend for itself and a 10-year-old girl, Rajashree Kamble, died while fetching water away from home. In this example, the governing structure — the village council — prevented or segregated Dalit access to water, endangering those in the affected neighborhood and contributing to the death of a child.
In the U.S. racism is manifested interpersonally and structurally such that White relatives benefit or are privileged over other groups. While it is critical to communal abundance work to avoid oppression competition, it is useful to understand which group much of structural White supremacy targets and why. Policies of White supremacy — explicit or implicit — historically and contemporarily target Black relatives. In previous editions of Rx Reparations, multiple examples of structural racism against U.S. Blacks are described. Those that significantly contribute to the Black-White wealth gap fall into the categories of de jure residential segregation, tax law, and the criminal legal system. These policies function as “badges of slavery,” a term coined by SCOTUS; these badges function to subordinate the status of Blacks in the U.S. regardless of the method or time of arrival to these Native lands.
Native nations and U.S. Blacks are harmed by the creation and perpetuation of the U.S. but structural White supremacy has targeted Black relatives differently than Native nations. White supremacy complements and includes settler-colonialism seeking the erasure of First Nations to complete land and resource theft. But the generation of many White supremacist policies has been for the subordination and exploitation of Black people. False anti-Black narratives propagated over centuries by U.S. government leaders, the media, “educators,” and clinicians have fueled White conceptualizations of “Black as other” and “Black as bad,” and fed White fears of and biases against Black relatives. White supremacist generated anti-Black ideologies invade populations and are used to leverage communities of color and White kin against each other, to divide and diminish anti-oppression coalition work.
Underlying these implanted fears are a belief in scarcity or a scarcity mentality: If there isn’t enough (e.g., land, jobs, schooling, healthcare resources) for everyone (there is), White supremacy is the lie to justify hoarding, exclusion, and exploitation of others to protect the supposedly threatened survival of White relatives. This fabricated narrative of scarcity relies on a false framework of competition for survival as human nature. Millenia of world history demonstrate interdependence and cooperation as our collective first ways. White supremacy purports Whiteness as a natural but endangered reality but White supremacy is a manufactured and untrue ideology. That the Irish, Italians, and Greek (for example), have been able to “become” White — i.e., benefit from White privilege — is evidence of the synthetic nature of Whiteness as a concept. The experience of Whiteness is real, but the ideology of racial superiority is a baseless fallacy and the concept of who is White has shifted with political utility.
Whiteness is a tool used to perpetuate an unrealistic, ahistorical, fact-free fear of imagined scarcity to control populations that are of color and White. White supremacist leaders prop up wealthy supporters (until they clash) and continually seek to exclude racialized “others” to amass ever-increasing power, even to the detriment of the impoverished 66 million relatives they also call “White.”
Special thanks to historical sociologist Mishal Khan, PhD for guidance with the Indian history aspect of this edition.
Please subscribe to and share Rx Reparations. In coming editions, I offer how reparations — including land back — challenge structural White supremacy and in the long term can diminish interpersonal White supremacist racism. Message me to host a bespoke reparations workshop for your circle. Together, let’s repair, create, and experience liberatory joy.
