Seeing White Supremacy Everywhere

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

 

Back in the olden times, on the long-forgotten show Saturday Night Live, which I presume was canceled decades ago — no, I won’t check — comedian Dana Carvey had a recurring character, the Church Lady. The character, an uptight talk-show host and moral busybody, was hilarious, in part because she projected her consuming and lascivious obsessions with sin and lust on her guests. “Some of us do our thinking below the Bible Belt,” Church Lady sighed. And then she would land on the same monocausal explanation for every wicked thing: “Could it beeeee . . . Satan?!”

 

But the derangement of one obsession is not just for pitiable televangelists. Freudianism, economics, Marxist theories of history’s inevitable turns, all have become the single-cause explanation of every wicked deed or act. But lately another obsession is taking over our intellectual class. It explains every inequity in our society, and every unjust act. It’s white supremacy.

 

Jennifer Ho, who has somehow overcome this omnipotent force of oppression to become a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, explains that even anti-Asian hatred is rooted in white supremacy, and that white supremacy is to blame for attacks on Asians, even attacks by non-whites.

 

The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.

 

A black man attacks an Asian person. Could it be white supremacy? Or the Latino man in Texas accused of stabbing a Burmese family in March 2020, claiming he did so because they were Chinese and bringing the coronavirus into the U.S. Could that be white supremacy? Yes it is.

 

Ho blames white supremacy for “a nearly 150% surge in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020” a figure reported by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. That sounds like an unbelievable wave of hate and violence. But when you look at the numbers, you see why the percentage is cited. In Los Angeles the number of anti-Asian hate crimes reported rose from seven to 15. In New York, from three to 28. In a city where tens of thousands died from COVID-19, made up of millions of people, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes seems relatively small. By contrast, in the previous year, 2019, over 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in New York City.

 

It’s true that COVID-19 has brought anti-Asian sentiments and bigotries to the fore. But it’s not a “white supremacist idea” to blame China for the coronavirus. It’s also a Chinese idea. Taiwan still calls COVID-19 the “Wuhan pneumonia,” and its leaders remain angry that Chinese influence in the World Health Organization was used to exclude Taiwanese scientists from giving their input during the early crucial stages of the pandemic. This does not mean that Taiwan is in thrall to American’s history of “yellow peril” fear mongering.

 

The theory becomes non-falsifiable. When a white person commits an act of violence against a non-white person, it is white supremacy. When reports are corrected and the perpetrator turns out to be a person of color, the motive is still white supremacy. This obliterates not just the agency of black and Hispanic criminals — recasting them as helpless automatons, moved by a system that victimized them first — but much of the human experience.

 

Ho says that white supremacy is the belief that non-whites are less than human. That seems like a perfectly serviceable definition. But Ho’s own belief in the mesmerizing influence of white supremacy robs non-whites of their humanity as well. Ignorance, bigotry, fear, hatred, and rage are all part of the human condition, and so too is our responsibility for our actions. The members of the Black Hebrew Israelites who killed three Jews in a grocery story in Jersey City in 2019 were not white supremacists, were not acting on behalf of white supremacy — and saying so insults not only the victims but the perpetrators.

 

This obsession becomes something like a political Manichaeism, an ancient Christian heresy. Mani believed in a kind of equality between Evil, which was associated with matter, and Good, which was spirit and light. By casting Evil as undefeatable, and essentially inescapable, the task of religion becomes a mere intellectual exercise. To be a Manichaean was to understand this private mystery about the world. Mani was the first “woke.” And his doctrine, which feeds both despair and intellectual arrogance, appealed to exactly the class of people who wish to appear worldly and wise without making sacrifices. It created a sophisticated religious system which, like Marxism or modern political woke-ism, appeals to people precisely because knowledge separates them not just from the hoi polloi, but is the best one can hope for against moral pollution. Manichaeans produced a literate and sophisticated religious system around the one mystery that substituted as an explanation for everything.

 

This political Manichaeism around white supremacy has many fathers, but its great recent popularizer was Ta-Nehisi Coates. In his book, Between the World and Me, Coates makes white supremacy the great shaper of the world and proves his faith in it the same way Jennifer Ho does, by casting it as the prime motivating force in an act of violence of one black police officer, on another young black man. The book recasts the acceptance of the inescapable nature of white supremacy as its own form of rebellion.

 

But this is an inert faith. It cultivates contempt even for the people it claims to wish to liberate. Ultimately, it is a form of despair.