Is White Supremacy The Root Cause?

Certainly, the focus at the moment in the US and around the world, is with the various agencies involved in the enforcement of laws and their abuse of their authority, and in particular how they interact with people of color.

The frustration felt by the oppressed, the poor, and people of color toward the police is totally understandable and in most cases properly targeted. But I think we are only looking at one arm of a very large octopus. The police are an obvious target because (a) they are very visible to everyone in our society almost all the time and (b) given their assignment or their perception thereof, they are in fact overstepping their authority in many instances.

To try to address the problems of racism and discrimination, we need to look, both higher on the organization chart, and inward at ourselves, our beliefs, and our actions, and in some cases complacency. We have to review our fallacies about the white supremacy that has become embedded in our culture. To do that, we have to look at how we got here.

The "white man" has ruled over this world for a very long time in most cases. Without turning this into a history class, and I shouldn't have to if we've been paying attention, we white people have ruled most of this planet for centuries. Naturally, in China, Japan, the Koreas, and all of Asia, after the Europeans tried mightily to rule that part of the world, and succeeded for a number of centuries, most of Asia wrested back their autonomy from the Europeans.

In other words, thanks primarily to the Europeans and the birth of navigation around the world, we established the notion of white supremacy worldwide, and I should point out that while we didn't call it racism, but rather colonization, the dominance of much of the world was white male supremacy in action.

​Whether it was Columbus and the Spaniards (primarily, although the French, Portuguese  and English were major players) wiping out millions of indigenous peoples in the New World, or doing the same type of things in Africa and Asia, we white people did take over the world for a very long time and imposed our will, our language, and our culture and governance on the world.

Wherever this was happening, there were undoubtedly some white and people of color who were repulsed by white domination and the cruelty that often accompanied it. From Catholic Priests in the New World to natives in countries around the world, there were people who argued and fought against white domination and in some cases, had success, but more often paid the ultimate price for resisting. For the most part, the caucasians held the power, both politically and economically and forced their will on much of the world, and to a large extent that is still true today.

Until quite recently, the power and the leadership in most western countries was dominated by white males. That would include most of Western Europe, the United States and Canada as well as some parts of South America. To some extent, this is true in Russia, although Russia is almost a study by itself.

Let's talk for a moment about how we are like our chimpanzee cousins, and this applies to people no matter their color. Once we achieve a level of power and influence, or wealth, which very often accompanies power, we are very reluctant to let go of that; no one likes being demoted.

The alpha male, and the alpha female of a chimpanzee troop will fight to keep their position in the troop, as will the dominant males and females a many species of animals and insects, so we can probably conclude that wanting to be at the top of the organization chart is not unique to humans.

To a large extent, while animals continue to engage in some bizarre rituals and behaviors to exert their dominance, occasionally with some blood letting, we humans have evolved a system that seldom requires a physical throw-down between two individuals vying for control.

That doesn't alter the fact that those in charge, predominantly white people in the Western world, do not want to lose power and will stoop to almost anything to hang on to that power. This is just as true in Asia where Asians are in power, but my discussion relates to white people and specifically what is happening in the US today.

Which brings us back to the present. Having overrun the indigenous peoples of most of the continents the Europeans had invaded, they still had millions of these natives on their hands, almost none of whom were white. Add to that, the importation of people of color, primarily from Africa as slaves, we had yet another group of non-whites to deal with and to subjugate. In the US, we also had brown people, millions of them, just south of our borders, people we saw as helpful in terms of cheap labor to build our nation, but people of color nonetheless.

As we colonized all these places around the world, we forced the vanquished to adopt our religions and to learn our language; that meant that we had to educate them to some degree. As that education process took hold, the non-whites began to realize they were being socially ostracized as well as powerless, and because their instincts to be in control were just as strong as the white people, this presented another threat to the notion of white supremacy.

Religion, again almost totally dominated by anglos, saw the indigenous people as heathens and non-believers that certainly disqualified them from any position of authority and in some minds, questioned if they were even human. Religion and government worked together to maintain control and the white supremacy.

In the US, and I suspect around the world, ​those in power also wrote controlling documents like their constitutions and enacted laws to rule their world. They formed various government agencies to operate their society. Whether it was always a conscious intent or more subconscious, those controlling documents were designed to ensure that those in power, stayed in power. They became manifestos to white male supremacy.

Our own Constitution, as great a document as that is, proclaiming that "all men are equal," was written by Europeans who did not consider women or slaves to be their equals. We have tried to expand our definition of equal through a series of amendments, but we are still short of perfection.

We formed policing agencies and various branches of the military, all of which were under the control of the white people. This insidious growth of white supremacy creeped into every corner of governance and became not only the norm, but almost a religion in itself. Because one of the ways of holding onto white power was to diminish people of color, and women, we all were taught and came to believe that something terrible would happen if either of those groups were to ascend to positions of power and influence. Biblical references were often used to bolster these arguments.

As time went on, these agencies grew and evolved. One white person, almost always male, was replaced by another white male who had been indoctrinated in the notion that white people were natural leaders and more capable of that task than either people of color or women. For some, this may or may not have been an evil act; it may have been simple logic or doctrine to them. Either way, it became the norm as it was seen and preached as the way things should be, and sometimes even suggested it was God's will that the world run this way.

Our education system, run by white people, and the school text books, written and edited by white people and taught to generations of young Americans ignored many of the truths about how our nation was founded and run over time. I'm not stating this so much as a criticism as simply a fact of life in a country dominated by the white culture. I have no doubt that the governmental powers in Mexico, China, Russian, anywhere in the world, have done the same thing. They want people to have pride in our country and history and that would be difficult if they were honest in teaching about the discrimination and even genocides that have occurred in virtually every nation on earth.

In summary, as we seem to finally be awakening from this orchestrated nightmare of white male dominance that has produced events like the death of George Floyd, we have to look at the bigger picture. We've been hearing about "systemic racism"; I think we have to get a little higher and look at this whole business from thirty-thousand feet. We have a system design by and developed to maintain white male supremacy. The police are just one part of that; we have to dig deep to root out white male supremacy wherever it exists.

How many corporations have either a person of color or woman as CEO or even demographically represented on the Board of Directors?  Are we convinced they can't find a qualified candidate that isn't a white male? We have had one president of color in our almost 250 year history, and not one woman, and it won't happen this time around, either.

As we work our way through this, and it is a monumental undertaking, we need to understand that it's not just about Black people, although they have suffered more than most and must be a priority, it is accepting that we have allowed white male supremacy to dominate our society, and reforming that judgment should be our ultimate goal.