There Is Nothing Supreme About Being White

Probably white? Yeah. Supreme? Hardly    chart from 23andMe

I have been thinking lately about the term “white supremacy,” and what it means to me, a white male, with an ancestor whose claim to fame, in part, is due to his being at Jamestown in 1609, and on the Mayflower in 1620. Looking over my genealogical path, I note the presence of some fascinating men and women: an abolitionist and operator on the Underground Railroad; an inventor of a great steam engine; lawyers, doctors, screenwriters, poets, pilots, soldiers, farmers, merchants, and more. From Braintree, Massachusetts to Palestine, Tennessee, from New Orleans to Peewee Valley, Kentucky, the lines of my ancestors include Huguenots and Creoles, Irishmen and Englishmen and Scots, Protestants and Catholics and agnostics.

These various genealogical fibers are the chemically-identified warp and weft of my life—a not atypically blended DNA fabric for an average white American of mostly European descent (as my 23andMe DNA pie chart, at 97% Northeastern European, so clearly portrays). And I leave it at that, satisfied that I meet some present-in-America-since-the-beginning criteria, but only through sheer luck of the draw. I did not earn my ancestry; it does not endow me with a mantle of supremacy; it was thrust upon me with no expectations for what I would do with it.

But, suppose I twisted my origin story and boasted that my deep white roots entitled me to call out all “others” who got here later than my family did.

In that boast would be the suggestion of divinely endowed primacy, of ownership of history as my ancestors wrote it, of racial privilege, topping by first-claim the stories of other arrivals of non-Northern European descent who followed over the ensuing 400 years. That would be the ultimate claim to white supremacy, justifying by my whiteness the genocide of indigenous peoples up and down the Eastern Seaboard and then pursuing, killing, and isolating them across the continent. To lay claim to such white supremacy would explain “manifest destiny” and the wholesale taking of lands belonging to the ancients.

To revel in my birthright of supreme whiteness would surely absolve me of the sin of human trafficking in the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, South and Central America. The irony of my first-white perfection would reveal itself in the hateful ways I treated my Irish and German brethren who made the mistake of not getting here when I did, and of how I turned away from the Poles and Czechs and Italians whose Eastern European and Southern European whiteness did not reflect the purity of my own fair skin. Oh, and how my whiteness would manifest itself in the anti-Asian policies that considered anyone of Pacific Rim origins to be merely sufficient to build my railroads and do my laundry, and then, once their work was done, banish them to West Coast enclaves or bar them completely from the American continent they and others stitched together rail-by-rail, grave-by-grave. (I would later add to their de-humanization by “interning” them in barbed wire enclosures.)

On and on, over the decades and centuries would my whiteness clash on both sides of an enormous national divide: slavery. A great Civil War would be fought to protect, or relieve me of, the vast accumulation of slaves whose labors and degradation underpinned the economic success of the slaveholding branch of my white line. While the Civil War may have decided the slavery issue for historical purposes, it did nothing to change my mind about the supreme meanness of my whiteness—that I could transform myself into white carpetbaggers who descended on the South to deliver ruinous economic and social ends for white Southerners in the guise of “reform” from the Northern whites.

But, supremely white Southerners were quick to their battle cry, “The South shall rise again,” and for the next 100 years, they fought back against their supremely white, educated, elite Northern clan, which was busy building steel and rail and shipping empires on the backs of non-supreme whites and immigrants. Ah…what a great time whites were having. From D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, to the 1920s New England white cabal’s “America First” eugenics campaigns—masterfully covered by Daniel Okrent in his The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, to the follow-on America-Firsters of the 1930s and 1940s, it seemed as if the manifest destiny of whites was within reach.

All of the foregoing would fuel and justify my motivation for the xenophobic attitudes directed toward, and heinous crimes against, non-whites, I suppose, but only if I distorted the facts of my white origin story out of a sense of fear of losing the threads that bind me ineluctably to centuries of presence in America.

If my fear of becoming only “one out of many” overwhelmed me, and the majority of the many did not look like me, I might share my distorted version of my white origin story with other similarly fearful whites in America. Misery loves company, you know. Perhaps if these fantasies were elevated by like-thinking and like-looking national leadership and injected into the daily dialogue via television and social media, these alternate stories would seep into the dark corners of our society where lurk those hate-laden whites who wait for the call to action from equally hate-laden commanders.

Reduced to its basic components, white supremacy as practiced by the shooter in El Paso or the marchers in Charlottesville, white supremacy as embraced by a non-violent portion of our population, and white supremacy as preached by too many local, state, and nationally-elected leaders, is constructed of a convenient mythological retelling of the history of whites on this continent. In a nation built on myth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, supreme whiteness in America. Not by birth, not by achievement, not by timing of arrival, not by Congressional act or executive fiat. Even the Founders ultimately rejected the idea of crowning George Washington king.

The history of our country is replete with stories of whites who failed to rise to greatness, whites who devoured the land and crushed whole nations of indigenous people, whites who trafficked in other human beings, whites whose arrogance got us into terrible wars, whites whose hubris nearly destroyed our economy several times over, whites whose segregationist and cherry-picked misanthropic ideologies corrupted the educations, and soiled the minds, of tens of millions of children, cheating entire generations of a chance to help steer America toward a better shore.

There is nothing supreme about such deeds and thoughts.

There is nothing supreme about leaders who perpetuate the myth of white supremacy.

There is nothing supreme about being white.