White Supremacy and Antiblackness: Theory and Lived Experience

Abstract

Our goal in understanding white supremacy should be theory building, viewed as instrumental in providing explanation and prediction as a foundation for activism. As humanists and social scientists, and more particularly as anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists, we should take to heart not only anthropology’s mandate to be holistic, comparative, and historical but also the tradition of anthropological theorizing. Lived experience is the substance of the, perhaps temporarily, ineffable structure of feeling, shaping, and structuring what we should desperately want theory to account for, including our pain, resentments, hatreds, longing, and joy—even the air we breathe and the rivers flowing among the United States, which are shaped by—fused with—white supremacy and antiblackness. White supremacy seeks to be totalitarian, even as it is contained by and/or co‐constructed by not only ancillary systems such as gender‐, class‐, and sexuality‐based ones but also larger systems such as capitalism, purposeful violence, and the state’s quest for hegemony. In this writing’s search for a deeper and broader comprehension of white supremacy, discussions are presented on underdiscussed themes in white supremacy, such as the “whitening” power of language, and additionally two key issues: (1) the change currently underway in the United States'white‐supremacist racial system from a race‐primary system toward a skin‐color primary system, accompanying a likely change in the basic principle for defining whiteness and (2) the necessity to understand that white supremacy is a key element in the degradation and exploitation of, not only labor of color but also white labor—to a lesser extent, and the looming possibility going forward of the United States’ decline domestically and internationally.