‘White supremacy’ takes on new meaning

Many feel softer words inaccurate descriptors of today’s racial realities

As July Fourth and its barbecues arrived this year, activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick declared, “We reject your celebration of white supremacy.”

The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of New York City’s most prestigious museums, acknowledged this summer that his institution was grounded in white supremacy, while four blocks uptown, the curatorial staff of the Guggenheim decried a work culture suffused in it.

In England, the British National Library’s Decolonising Working Group cautioned employees that a belief in “colorblindness” or the view that “mankind is one human family” are examples of “covert white supremacy.”

In a time of plague and protest, two words — “white supremacy” — have poured into the rhetorical bloodstream with force and power. With President Donald Trump’s overt use of racist rhetoric, a spate of police killings of Black people and the rise of far-right extremist groups, many see the phrase as a more accurate way to describe today’s racial realities, with older descriptions like “bigotry” or “prejudice” considered too tame for such a raw moment.

News aggregators show a vast increase in the use of the term “white supremacy” (or “white supremacist”) compared with 10 years ago. The New York Times itself used the term fewer than 75 times in 2010 but nearly 700 times since the first of this year alone.

The meaning of the words has expanded, too. Ten years ago, white supremacy frequently described the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, the neoNazi politician from Louisiana. Now it cuts a swath through the culture, describing an array of subjects: mortgage lending policies of banks, a university’s reliance on SAT scores as a factor for admissions decisions, and a police department’s enforcement policies.

Yet the phrase is deeply contentious. Influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor, have embraced it, seeing in white supremacy an explanatory power that cuts through layers of euphemism to the core of American history and culture. It speaks to the reality, they say, of a nation built on slavery.

But some Black scholars, businessmen and activists balk at the phrase.

“It comes from anger and hopelessness and alienates rather than converts,” Orlando Patterson, a sociology professor at Harvard University, said.

JUAN ARREDONDO/NEW YORK TIMES Protesters gathered in Brooklyn, N.Y., in June to denounce the death of George Floyd while in police custody. The phrase ‘white supremacy’ has become more widespread, as organizations from the NFL to museums are accused of perpetuating it.