“There Can Be No Loser”: White Supremacy and the Cruelty of Compromise

Abstract

This essay explores the subject of political compromise and its centrality to the politics of race in the United States, arguing that what I call “racial compromise” has been a crucial form of white supremacy in American history. In efforts to establish unity, racial compromise has provided reconciliation by securing the inferior status of black Americans. A unique kind of injustice surfaces: when matters of political importance are shelved for the sake of mutual agreement, the lived experiences of whole populations of people are displaced and exploited. The American tradition of white supremacy is vast, and many of its practices are well mined in historical and theoretical scholarship. Racial compromise should be situated among them. Against the prevailing view that it is a political art, an antidote to the conflicts of pluralism and the irrationality of fanaticism, racial compromise reproduces white supremacy, cloaked in the thin disguise of liberal principles.