There’s a common misunderstanding about white supremacy, that it primarily describes the beliefs and goals of radical hate groups – people that are easily identified as racists. This focuses on the extremes, making it easy to compartmentalize the problem onto a few bad actors. This is a form of distancing that seeks to absolve individuals from responsibility.
The largest vectors of white supremacy are not neo-nazis: it is the institutions we engage with every day. There is a whiteness built into our technology, government, academia, business, and media that persists across generations. The law itself is encoded with white values. White culture propagates itself through the language and mannerisms we enforce in daily interactions. The ubiquity of this whiteness gives it that most powerful status: the default, the normal, the expected.
The police are, if nothing else, enforcers of the status quo. Their obscenities are an accurate reflection of American attitudes and priorities. We can micromanage the details of their job as much as we please – body cameras, bias training, civilian oversight – but they will remain a mirror of our institutions. Eliminating police brutality without addressing white supremacy is not possible.
When we talk about confronting systemic racism, we must understand that this doesn’t mean weeding out individual racists until we’re left with something wholesome, as though they are unexpected outliers. No, it is the system itself that perpetuates oppression, because that is the foundation of our country. We have created elaborate buffers that disguise this discrimination through mountains of bureaucracy and economic segregation. The benefits of privilege are now constant and invisible, encouraging many middle-class whites to believe white supremacy is not relevant to their daily life.
As a white person, I inherited a moral debt from my ancestors. I didn’t create these institutions, but I am nonetheless complicit. Understanding the existence of my privilege is not sufficient: I have a duty to pursue a better way of life for my community. It’s my job to aggressively expand my definition of community to include more than just those who look and sound like me. It’s my responsibility to become intimately acquainted with the struggles of others, so that I can dissolve my hegemonic assumptions about what is best for everyone.