WHITE SUPREMACY

WHITE SUPREMACY is the belief that members of the Caucasian race are superior in all ways to other groups or races in the world. In the history of the United States, white supremacy has existed as a means of justifying and preserving the nation as a white Christian country. The history of white supremacy is closely tied to the presence of slavery and the emergence, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the theories and categorizations of groups and nations into races. In the United States the presence of slavery and its continuance and growth in the South served as a strong foundation for white supremacy. Also important was immigration, first of the Irish and later of eastern and Mediterranean Europeans, which heightened the belief in the superiority of whiteness, defined as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

The key group representing white supremacy was the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 by Confederate colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest, its aim was to preserve the traditions of the Old South, which for the Klan focused primarily around the suppression of African Americans and the protection of white women. In its evolution during the early twentieth century, the Klan came to stand for "100 percent pure Americanism," a fervent belief in Protestant Christianity, and a staunch opposition to immigration. But still there remained a rock solid belief in the moral, intellectual, and physical superiority of white people. Through the years the Klan fragmented, reemerging at various periods; the largest regrouping occurred after World War I. The Klan arose again in the 1960s and 1970s as the civil rights movement was successfully attaining the desegregation of public accommodations and voting rights for black Americans. In the 1980s and 1990s the Klan once again appeared, but other groups formed in that period which also espoused white supremacy or white power.

A full generation after the successes of the civil rights movement, many white Americans exhibit an increased tolerance of African Americans and a growing acceptance of racial equality. Nonetheless, the ethic of white supremacy is still very strong among some white Americans, namely those belonging or sympathetic to groups formed in the late twentieth century such as Posse Comitatus, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nations, and World Church of the Creator. These groups have tried to recruit young people and have numerous sites on the Internet. They can be violent physically, with most of their attacks directed toward blacks, Jews, and immigrants. Their main goal is to return the nation to white people, root out what they see as a conspiracy between blacks and Jews to eliminate the white race, and regain pride and power for whites.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hamm, Mark S. American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993.

Ridgeway, James. Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture. New York: Thunder Mouth's Press, 1990.

Charles Pete Banner-Haley

See also Ku Klux Klan.