Wake Up, White People: White Supremacy is a Fantasy, but its Reality is Far Worse

There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s fantastic 2018 film BlacKKKlansman that is one of the most chilling and accurate demonstrations of how White Supremacy works. In one mahogany-lined room with drinks, snacks and a full projector setup, a gathering of Ku Klux Klansmen screen The Birth of a Nation. They watch with relish, chomping on popcorn and cheering at the heroism of the fictional white characters, their triumph over the comical and banal evil of the specter of stupid, sexually deviant Black people standing in the way of decent, White Christianity.

Simultaneously, in a smaller but equally crowded room, an elder Civil Rights activist recounts the horrific and real story 1916 lynching of a 17 year-old Black teenager named Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas. The elder, played with heartbreaking grace by Harry Belafonte, is weary ; this is not the first time he’s told this painful story. Both rooms sit in rapt attention, but the moods are vastly different. The stories they hear and see are compelling, certainly — but only one of the narratives is actually true.

White Supremacy is a fantasy, a fairy tale told among people desperate to hold onto power at any cost. A vast cognitive dissonance where literally every tenet is false, but supporters must continue and sustain the lie in order to prevent anyone they deem “less than” from achieving even the most basic rights. Because somehow allowing basic dignity to their so-called “inferiors” would make their own fragile, false superiority crumble to dust.

White Supremacy is a young white man cosplaying as a Shaman (which warrants deeper analysis around cultural appropriation of marginalized peoples as a favorite White Supremacist pastime but I am too tired to go down that road today), replete in furs and horned hat, screaming about freedom, his mouth a giant, glistening maw determined to consume and destroy by any means necessary. His barbaric yawp must be heard, or else. His hairy chest is tattooed with tribal symbols, his abs carefully cultivated to pop beneath his pelt but not so much that his masculinity could be construed as a front for his insecurity.

His face is painted red-white-and-blue a la Braveheart and apparently he led the charge on the Capitol, but I wonder if this man has ever truly experienced any form of oppression ever. His life very well might suck — as it does for a lot of white people — for him to so elaborately present himself as a virile warrior of yore, but he has never had to fear police shooting him on sight, or being hanged in public by a mob where souvenir photographs of his hanging corpse are taken and a festive barbecue is held. He is playing an elaborate dress-up game of Rugged Freedom Fighter in service to Q, but he does not have to fear the consequences of his words and actions, even though they could have truly deadly outcomes for the targets of his fabricated rage.

White Supremacy is an old white man reclining smugly in a chair in the office of the Speaker of the House, who also happens to be a woman, his boot propped up on the desk, smiling in shit-eating satisfaction at his successful melting of Snowflakes, his ultimate ownage of the Libs. He leaves a threat in red marker on a file folder, writes a juvenile, misogynist note as a sort of Kilroy Was Here raspberry, triumphant in his dedication to fighting to uphold fallacies in the name of freedom, and steals an official government document addressed to the Speaker, leaving a quarter behind to cover his ass just in case.

But here’s the thing: these men weren’t successful. They failed at their stated goal. The votes were certified, despite small but vocal objections based on completely incorrect information, accompanied by actual groans from the rest of the legislature. And if that’s not the most obvious and glaring metaphor for White Supremacy at its very core, I don’t know what else could be.

The costume of White Supremacy has changed over the years, from white hoods to red hats, but the implication remains the same. The wearers say, “I am unhappy and I demand the impossible and I will not stop until I get what I want, no matter who I hurt along the way. This costume is a talisman of strength, but I can take it off when I choose to, and pretend it never happened, that I’m just a bystander and a patriot longing for a return to a time when I didn’t have to put any effort into my cultural domination, it just happened naturally.”

The Insurrection is a national and global embarrassment, but we lost credibility as a nation five years ago, when a man cosplaying as a comic-book idea of a successful businessman descended a golden escalator and spewed utter nonsense — and our fellow Americans believed him. He kept lying and we kept paying attention to him for some reason, because he was so ridiculous and absurd, no matter the scale and scope of his lies.

There are a bunch of far more well-versed and knowledgeable scholars, reporters, and experts who can break this all down much more intelligently and succinctly than I can. There are too many factors to even name: the comfort of Internet anonymity as an enabler of lizard-brain behavior; toxic masculinity as camaraderie; unchecked and unfettered capitalism; the very real power of celebrity; hyper-fundamentalist yet deeply hypocritical religious elements (and conspiracy theories!) creeping into all levels of government; occasionally justified but mostly irrational eroded trust in institutions and literal facts if they do not support your warped view of the world; discomfort and resentment at the perceived success of minorities you have oppressed for centuries at your expense. And so on.

At its basest, however, this all comes down to the realization everything these men have ever been told about their automatic superiority and inherent betterness than everyone else has been a lie. It’s a centuries-old dream they don’t want to wake up from, for fear of having to confront their own shortcomings in the face of reality. They can’t let go of the delusion, despite the documented fact that when all people are supported, cared for, and treated with basic decency, things get better for everyone — including them. It’s not hard to understand, but apparently it is hard to swallow.

My deepest hope is that this failed effort is the beginning of the end of White Supremacy, after more than year of indisputable, documented proof that it was and is a foundation of this nation that is supposedly so great we can’t function without systemically destroying entire races and cultures because they dare to ask to be treated like the human beings they are.

I know it will not end, however, until my fellow White folks understand that yes, we’ve been lied to, but it’s through no fault of the people we’ve tried to wipe out in the name of manifest destiny and shining cities on hills. The upper echelons of White Supremacy want you to believe that you are being somehow oppressed so they can exploit your fear and anger for their own gain. The White Supremacists in power will do whatever it takes to stay in power, including lying to other white people to keep them complacent and maintain the status quo at all costs.

Whiteness is a construct, an invention. White Supremacy only further builds on that falsehood to create a narrative built on desperation. And it will only be when white people wake the fuck up from this hideous dream will we be able to really comprehend the nightmare we’ve inflicted on the rest of humanity and be able to truly make progress to correct it and move beyond it.