Calling out the culture of ‘white superiority’
Chicago professor headlines ‘Race & Freedom’ program at Heinz History Center
Near the end of her talk at the Heinz History Center Saturday, Chicago sociologist Jacqueline Battalora was asked why so many young black men are dying at the hands of American police, from Baltimore to Ferguson, Mo.
She said there are many factors, including too much time training police officers how to handle weapons and not enough in how to improve their emotional maturity. But the overriding reason, she said, is the culture of white superiority that saturates American society.
“It is impossible to be a product of U.S. culture and not have ideas about the supremacy of white people — not consciously perhaps — but to assume that white people are superior,” said Ms. Battalora, the speaker at a “Race & Freedom” event sponsored by the Episcopal Church and the African-American Program at the history center. “Think of how we all have been shaped by these messages. Think of how they’ve shaped who we want our children to play with, where we are comfortable living, and who seems to be legitimate material for marriage.”
“Now put those beliefs in the hands of [police] who have legal authority to use lethal force. It’s really easy to come out of events in Baltimore and Ferguson and think that there’s something exclusively wrong with the police. In fact, there is something wrong with you and me, and it’s called white supremacy and we just happen to see it more vividly when someone is in a paramilitary force.”
Ms. Battalora, an assistant professor at St. Xavier University in Chicago and a onetime Chicago police officer, is the author of the 2013 book “Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today.”
Based on research she did on marriage laws in America’s colonial period, she learned that the term “white people” did not legally exist until the late 1600s, and was first formalized in a 1681 anti-miscegenation law in Maryland, prohibiting white men and women from marrying blacks or other nonwhites.
In the first half of the 1600s, black slaves and white indentured servants in the tobacco-dominated colonies of Maryland and Virginia lived, ate and slept together, she said, and it was not uncommon for free black men to marry white women, own property and even own slaves of their own.
But white elite landowners began to push back, first with a 1664 Maryland law that prohibited whites from marrying nonwhites, and then with the stronger 1681 law that was accompanied by statutes that barred blacks from owning weapons, serving in public office or testifying against whites in the courts.
The tipping point toward these harsher laws, she said, was a 1676 uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion. Led by colonist Nathaniel Bacon, both black and white laborers attacked Indian tribes and the ruling government, and it took British soldiers years to stamp out all resistance. Because of the armed rebellion, elite plantation owners followed a “divide and conquer” strategy that created anti-black laws, she said.
The laws “created a whole new bottom to American society” made up of poor blacks, and “united white laborers with elites through a shared veil of superiority called ‘white.’ ”
The economic and legal divide created by these laws can still be seen today, Ms. Battalora said.
“Lots of white people today feel a greater affinity to Paris Hilton than they do to Freddie Gray,” the Baltimore man who died in police custody, “even though their economic experience is far closer to Freddie Gray’s than Paris Hilton’s.”
Her research has taught her that “most of us grow up believing there is a genetic foundation to these racial categories — and there isn’t. Race is a fiction, and the same people it most served in the 17th century are the same people it most serves today.
“Is that my fault or the fault of any white person in this room? Of course not. Our founding laws institutionalized white supremacy. Yet even if I can’t take responsibility as a white person for that, I can take responsibility for the unearned advantages I still enjoy today.”