Me and White Supremacy
H/t to Layla F. Saad’s pivotal book “Me and White Supremacy” for the article title and her work.
My friends, I want to have a conversation.
This is a conversation that you, reading this, are uniquely positioned to have. I want to start with honoring you so that you know who else is here.
My colleagues and friends from Liberia, Togo, Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Egypt, India and more are here. My international aid worker colleagues and Enspiral friends are here, my tech colleagues in open source and p2p communities. My American non-profit people, Singularity University program alums, my start-up and founder people.
I’m so glad you’re here.
We are at a moment in a process that is way, way overdue.
I’ve been working at writing, but when I edit the next day, the landscape has changed so significantly that it alters what I want to tell you. I've rewritten and rewritten, revising what I want to say.
What some people call racism, I am going to call white supremacy. Racism may be an expression of white supremacy, but white supremacy is the worldview and the root of the problem.
White supremacy is the implicit assumption of whiteness as the norm, justified by the belief that whiteness is superior.
White supremacy is part of the aid industry because the framing of aid draws on its colonial and missionary past, and builds upon a country’s ongoing economic exploitation.
White people, we all have a part in this. Even if you think, "But me? I'm not racist." Yes, I am. You are. We are. All white people are. How else could we be? From here we can examine the true nature and impact of the horrors we have created.
If you’re identifying your bias and racism for the first time, remember that most people could already see it, so don’t be too embarrassed or ashamed to do your work.
I hear people say on Twitter that the United States never had a Truth and Reconciliation process, like Rwanda did after the 1994 genocide, or South Africa founded in 1995 after majority rule and the end of apartheid. We need one, to reckon with our original sins of Native genocide and Black slavery.
To quote Lee Pelton, President of Emerson College:
“I have no words of comfort today because they would be inauthentic. They would absolve so many from coming to terms with their own silent complicity in the world in which we live.
As I wrote to someone today, ‘This is not a Black problem, but a structural issue built on white supremacy and centuries of racism. It’s your problem. And until you understand that, we are doomed to relive this week’s tragic events over and over again. What changes will you make in your own life? Begin with answering that question and maybe, just maybe we will get somewhere.’”
White readers, we need to have a conversation about race.
Who This is For
The rest of this post is for my white readers, especially white aid workers, changemakers, non-profit people, and white founders and entrepreneurs.
The world is watching and counting on us to do our work. What does that mean?
If you are a white aid worker, how many times have you complained about where you are, and made comments about people that you know are racist? You might excuse it, saying you're angry, burned-out, having a bad day, but it is inexcusable.
The conversation is important because I think that when we say our work is helping people, we have a responsibility to look at things and do better.
It doesn't work to ignore white supremacy anymore. Once I saw that police brutality was essentially paramilitary extra-judicial killings of Black people, I could not unsee.
I've been writing this post for well over a week, and was originally writing only to my white readers. And I’m going to center Black people here, but also want to acknowledge Indigenous and People of Color who are also in this struggle.
This part is for my white readers, now. It's long overdue for us to do our anti-racism work.
“But I'm Not a White Supremacist”
If you are white, you might be saying to yourself right about now, “But Elie, I’m not a white supremacist. I’m not racist. I’m not the problem. We don’t need to talk about this. Maybe my brother, and my cousin, but not me.”
I don’t self-identify as a racist or a white supremacist either, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not from a system that is racist and white supremacist. It’s called white exceptionalism to think that we are somehow exempt from the system.
I know these are strong words, so let me explain a little about where I'm coming from and where I am speaking from when I say these things.
When I was three, my family moved to New Delhi, in India, where my mother worked at UNICEF. People would call my mother a word Google says is “often used as a respectful form of address by nonwhites.” Merriam-Webster says the word (I’m not going to repeat it) means, “a white foreign woman of high social status living in India especially: the wife of a British official.”
It was the 1980’s and more than 30 years after India’s independence, that word was still used to address my American mother. The legacy of slavery and colonialism in these countries still cast the lingering shadow of white supremacy. My little sister and I, aged two and three, would be called that same word too, like small minions of white imperialism and empire.
As a little blonde white girl, I felt the power differential acutely. I felt my power. I could see that people treated me differently, because of my blond hair and the color of my skin.
At three years old, it felt like being a princess. I didn’t know the history or the context yet, but I could tell that white people thought we were different and that we expected to be treated differently.
My family later moved to Nairobi, Kenya during the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi. I went to an international school with classmates from all over the world, but still, white culture and white history was the default. We learned white (“western”) history and teaching us Swahili was an afterthought, considered an elective.
When we moved to Cairo, Egypt, Arabic was considered optional there too. At the time, my school didn’t even offer Modern Standard Arabic as a language option for the International Baccalaureate Diploma — in Cairo.
Time and again, white culture was centered and normed, and the people whose country we were guests in were marginalized.
I always thought that white supremacy had nothing to do with me, because I don’t consider myself racist. (Don’t laugh.) But it wasn’t until I started doing anti-racism work that I started to see what white supremacy really means.
When I noticed white supremacy, I used to call it "racism," as if it was an isolated incident or a fringe person. But white supremacy, I am coming to understand, is embedded in the culture of white people. This has been hard for me to see and accept, so it’s okay if it takes time to process.
Layla F. Saad describes white supremacy as, "the historic and modern legislating, societal conditioning, and systemic institutionalizing of the construction of whiteness as inherently superior to people of other races."
Seen in this light, white supremacy isn't just about right-wing militias in the US, but a larger system that informs the global fabric of how white people live, work, and connect together.
It can feel overwhelming to realize that I am part of such a violent, savage, and racist cultural worldview, but my feelings about this are nothing compared to the harm it amplifies. The necessary invitation to white people is to move out of our fragility, and accept the legitimate and long-overdue challenges of anti-racism and change.
If we chose not to confront racist remarks, behavior, or attitudes, we are aiding and abetting the system of white supremacy. Silence is complicity.
Living in Africa, I experienced the special treatment afforded to me by my white skin, a legacy of centuries of imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation. What white person in Africa hasn’t felt their white privilege at one time or another? But how do we respond?
We might be uncomfortable, but eventually the discomfort wears off and we become accustomed to what is effectively felt as white superiority, a feature of white supremacy in action. It’s ugly, but I hope that by spelling this out, we can be brave enough to face and shift it.
If you don’t agree, that’s okay. We’re all at different parts of our journey. What matters is the conversation. And please don’t expect your Black friends to help you unlearn your racism, now that you’re (hopefully, more) aware of it.
Once we recognize that we’re a part of the white supremacy problem, we can become part of the solution. It’s up to us not to shut down, center our fragility, or otherwise disengage.
Layla F. Saad’s work is powerful because she offers white people a language for the conversations ahead. The great Angela Davis said “In a racist society, it is not enough to not be racist. We must be anti-racist.” We need to undo the oppression we have internalized and that, through our ignorance (willful or otherwise), we continue to perpetuate.
Stopping these systems is up to us, together.
It's okay to be where we are, as white people right now. We can’t change the past. What's important is that we are open and humble enough to see ourselves as needing to change moving forward.
When we accept our starting point, change becomes possible very quickly.
“But I'm Not a Racist”
By now, you’ve probably watched the Amy Cooper video of the white woman in Central Park with her dog, endangering the life of a Black man who asked her to follow the park rules. Maybe, like me, you marveled at the ease which she reached for her racism and invoked white supremacist systems to try to win the argument.
Instead of playing “fair” and following the rules, Amy Cooper called on white supremacy to come to her aid. When she said, “I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life,” Amy Cooper knew what invoking Chris Cooper’s Blackness would communicate to the police. She threatened him with it, explicitly putting him in danger for challenging her.
When Amy Cooper amplified her voice at the end, she knew that as white woman alone with a Black man, if she pretended to be attacked, the police would probably believe her.
It’s the ease with which Amy Cooper decides to threaten this man with police violence that resonates so deeply. How she reaches for white supremacy as a power move to get what she wants as a white woman, no matter what the rules say.
I want to pause and recognize for a moment that it’s the system of white supremacy that gives me and other white women the tremendous and terrifying power to co-opt narratives like this and destroy Black people’s lives.
Amy Cooper is not alone. No one reading this thinks that Amy Cooper is the only one who does this.
For some of us, it's easy to see her, condemn her, and think that we would never do anything like that. We're not racist, we tell ourselves.
Others of us might think that the response to Amy Cooper’s behavior has been blown out of proportion. I’ve heard white people say that she shouldn’t have lost her job, had her life ruined, or been so vilified on social media.
My response to that is to think about the countless Black lives cut short because a white person called the police when they felt fragile or challenged. Those precious lives are gone forever. Black lives matter.
Phone calls like Amy Cooper’s far too often end in Black people murdered by police. This is not new, but videos of US police brutality on social media have finally and forever changed the global conversation.
The white supremacy that enabled Amy Cooper and gave her the impunity to act the way she did informs us all.
White people live, breathe and perpetuate this racism within our work, families, households, schools, religious gatherings, and public spaces. There is no such thing as “casual” racism. There is no such thing as a “microaggression.”
Yet for white people around the world, white supremacy in our culture and values can become so normalized, it takes somebody else pointing it out for us to even see it. I apologize for that, because it’s been that way for me too. That’s why I’m here with you, trying to figure this out.
As an aid worker and public health expert, I see constant examples of racism and white supremacy in my work. If you’re a changemaker, I'm sure you do too. And if you’re a white person who’s not sure exactly how white supremacy affects you yet, I hope that you feel compelled to start looking.
It's time to take a hard look at what, as white people, we have allowed to take place around us. At what saying “but I’m not racist,” while racist shit happens around us, really means. At what, with our silence, we have allowed.
White people too often turn away thinking that as bystanders, we aren’t complicit in the system. We cannot be bystanders any longer.
“But This Has Nothing To Do With Me”
Because of the benefits conferred to white people by systemic white supremacy, it's far too easy for white people to hide when we feel threatened. We have safe spaces while Black people do not. Being able to leave and escape is, in and of itself, a form of white privilege.
White people can tell ourselves that what's happening in Black Lives Matter protests and "elsewhere" has nothing to do with us, but I hope that is feeling less and less true for you.
Silence is its own form of agreement, so I hope that whatever you do, you are not staying silent any longer.
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Thanks for reading.