The Importance of Dismantling White Supremacy
The Limitations of Juneteenth
With the passing of the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, not much has changed in regard to police brutality or justice for black communities. Yes, Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck, was convicted. But have the Black Lives Matter protests that roared across the US and the world really shaken the foundations of white supremacy and white privilege? The answer would appear to be a resounding no. While little action has been taken to address white supremacy in the United States, politicians instead look to symbolic actions where there they can claim they are taking actions to support justice for marginalized communities but in fact are simply scoring political points.
Just this past week, US politicians overwhelmingly approved making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Juneteenth was created to commemorate the end of slavery on June 19, 1865 when African Americans were freed in Galveston, Texas. I will admit that the creation of this holiday is a good step in recognizing that the United States was founded upon slavery, suffering, colonization and white supremacy. However, as Rep. Cori Bush recently pointed out, addressing white supremacy in the present will take far more than simply recognizing the end of slavery. Here is her tweet:
Cori Bush powerfully argues that making Juneteenth a federal holiday was more than anything else performative, and that truly radical and emancipatory actions would require the government to address police violence, the war on drugs, housing and education apartheid, and how the history of the United States is taught. Police violence in particular has long been directed at the black community. To look at a historical example of this police violence, I would like to look at the 2021 film, Judas and the Black Messiah.
Judas and the Black Messiah
I will just warn here that this section will contain some spoilers for the film, so skip this section if you do not want to see them. The film follows the life of Bill O’Neal who is coerced into acting as a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant against the Black Panthers in Chicago by getting close to the chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers, Fred Hampton. As Fred Hampton makes clear throughout the film, the goal of the Black Panthers was black liberation and revolution (using various Marxist theory). And the film also makes very clear that the FBI see black liberation as a fundamental threat to everything that the United States stands for. Indeed, with the history of slavery, colonization and entrenchment of white supremacy in the US, it is only natural that those in power would view black liberation as a threat to the white privilege that they felt was their natural right.
One of the most powerful scenes in the film is actually a conversation between the FBI agent, Roy Mitchell (who is assigned as the handler of Bill O’Neal) and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. Hoover asks Mitchell what he would do if his daughter Samantha (who was then an infant) brought home a black man. Mitchell stumbles before saying of course he would never allow it. Hoover then says this is what we’re up against. He believes that the Black Panthers and black liberation represented a fundamental threat to white supremacy and to “their way of life.” The use of this way of life phrase is identical to the way that slaveowners defended slavery before the civil war or the white elite defended Jim Crow in the South. They saw the Black Panthers as such a threat to their way of life that Fred Hampton could not be allowed to live. He ordered the police to raid Hampton’s home where they killed him while he was sleeping.
The murder of Hampton resonates with violence perpetrated by the police today against black communities. While police violence against BLM protesters during the summer of 2020 often did not result in death, the tear gas and water cannons used by police indicate that they certainly felt that the BLM movement was a threat to the status quo of white supremacy. This police violence was targeted against largely peaceful protesters as 93% of protests during the summer of 2020 were peaceful. In the case of the Black Panthers in the film, they did feel that violence was justified in achieving black liberation and resisting white supremacy. However, as the BLM protests showed, police are willing to use violence against people demanding greater rights for black people whether those people use violence or not.
What do BLM and Black Liberation mean?
According to the BLM website, their mission is to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” Certainly, the police response to mostly peaceful BLM protests indicates that, just as was true in 1968 when police murdered Fred Hampton, they are still afraid of any challenges to white supremacy. This fear about challenges to white supremacy not only applies to protests in the street but also to education and history. If students learn that the wealth of the United States was built upon the back of black slaves who were forcibly transported against their will and worked to death, then they might question the idea of American exceptionalism.
In history teaching, this idea of American exceptionalism means that history is taught in such a way as to ignore the unpleasant parts. This revisionism is also present in the idea of manifest destiny in the 19th century. This idea stated that God had bestowed the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the American settlers. What is ignored in this history is that there had been native peoples living on that land for generations and they were displaced, murdered and sent to reservations, so that white settlers could claim the land. When students learn both that US wealth was created through the labor of African slaves and that US expansion was enabled through the murder and displacement of indigenous peoples, then they begin to wonder if the US has always favored white wealth over the lives of black and indigenous communities.
One aspect of Black Liberation, as Cori Bush pointed out, would be teaching this history. For a while now, I have thought that the United States as it stands now could not survive a true reckoning with its history. In some sense, history books hide the past because they are too afraid of what would happen if people understood that the United States has and continues to be a white supremacist country. In fact, something like reparations for slavery would only come with this acknowledgement of the history of slavery, colonization and white supremacy. Until this history is accepted by the US population (and white supremacy is systematically dismantled), then it becomes difficult to see how reparations could be possible.
In a similar vein, people’s lack of knowledge about the history of the US leads them to not understand how housing discrimination against black people is tied into slavery. When all the wealth created through slavery was delivered to white slave-owners in the South and capitalists in the North, this cemented racial wealth inequality all the way to the present day (and also class inequality). A historical reckoning must come to grips with how slavery has directly led to racial wealth gaps in the present. And because of racial wealth disparities, black people are often forced into unofficially segregated housing (or officially segregated housing during Jim Crow). These neighborhoods are then patrolled by police who perpetrate violence upon these communities in a continuation of state-backed violence against black communities that has extended from slavery, to the murder of Fred Hampton, and to the present with BLM protests.
Thus, while Juneteenth is a decent start in recognizing the evils of slavery, it goes nowhere near far enough in terms of Black Liberation. Achieving Black Liberation as Cori Bush defines it will require a fundamental dismantling of the structures of white supremacy. It is certainly possible that the way the current government and legal system are structured means that they are incapable of undermining white supremacy because they are part of the problem. Certainly movements like Defund the Police seek to undermine the racist police structures that have historically perpetrated violence against black communities by instead investing in community and mental health services. Because American exceptionalism and white supremacy are so embedded into American cultural and political life, it will be extremely difficult to dismantle white supremacy. However, this does not mean we should not try. It is crucial that we support movements like BLM whose leaders are well-placed to understand how white supremacy has impacted every aspect of their lives. If a vision of the US as a country where democracy, freedom and human rights are truly respected is to be achieved, then we must prioritize dismantling white supremacy.
