White Supremacy

2 Pages 608 Words

Hooks justifies her use of the term ‘white supremacy’ as opposed to ‘racist’ when describing the institutionalized oppression based on ‘race,’ stating, “…‘white supremacy’ is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force…” (Hooks , 1995). She claims that ‘white supremacy’ is a better phrase than ‘internalized racism’ in describing the absorption by black people of negative attitudes typically held by white people about blackness.
‘White supremacy’ is also useful when referring to how black people are able to exercise ‘white supremacist control’ over one another. Hooks views the emphasis of the struggle against ‘white supremacy’ as helping to form coalitions among peoples of color as a catalyst of dismantling white supremacy, where peoples of color join together in support of that common cause. Early coalitions, generally disregarded in the broad view of history, established by enslaved Africans, free Africans, and Native Americans, helped to combat the Eurocentric stereotypes internalized by Native and African Americans. In attempting to include whites in such a coalition, it would be necessary for whites to give up any privileges granted them by the exercising of white supremacy, as well as necessary for the racially oppressed to “show the way” and “affirm or help in that endeavor” (Hooks, 1995). Hooks states:
There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an
understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to
transform structures…While it is important that individuals work to transform their
consciousness, striving to be antiracist, it is important for us to remember that the struggle to end white supremacy is a struggle to change a system, a structure…For our efforts to…be truly effective, individual struggl...