America’s White Supremacy Crisis

Stephan A. Schwartz
Sep 1, 2018 · 17 min read

When I look at trends what I care about is objectively verifiable data; unfiltered by religious or political considerations. And one of the major trends I have followed and have been actively involved in has been racial equality. What I care about and what I write about when I speak about race is the presence or absence of wellbeing both individually, and socially. Not only is it a matter of fairness, history shows racial equality correlates strongly with social wellbeing. Not only is it a matter of fairness, history shows racial equality is crucial to social wellbeing. This issue has been one of the major threads of my life. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the Civil Rights movement; in the 1970s, as the Special Assistant to Admiral Elmo Zumalt, I was part of the small group that changed the American military from the elitist conscription model of all previous 20th century wars, into an all-volunteer meritocracy in which gender, race, and religion were not determinants. Colin Powell is the exemplar of what was intended.

For the last 25 years I have been doing social outcome research on racial trends in the process becoming increasingly convinced that the way to conceptualize these trends is not politically, but on the basis of objectively verifiable social outcome data, with wellbeing as the calibration. Showing how individuals and small groups can change the arc of history in a more life-affirming direction.

Those years of work and research have taught me that in American history one of the major social disruptors throughout the centuries is White Supremacy. Race issues in the United States are almost always discussed from the perspective of people of color, Black, Brown, Yellow, or Red; however, on the basis of data, it is clear that the fundamental issue in all these instances is White Supremacy. Whenever that cauldron reaches a certain boiling point, it causes pain, violence, and death. Yet, it is such an uncomfortable issue for most people that it is rarely discussed in those terms, and I am sure just writing this essay will upset some. Perhaps that is why it has been allowed to grow to its present alarming prominence in America’s national politics, affecting everything from climate change to pre-natal healthcare.

The core of White Supremacy is the belief that the White race has been responsible for most of the good things in human history: the great art, great science, and great thinking, and that Whites are inherently superior. Only the crassest advocates, people like David Duke and Richard Spencer, state it that boldly, but it is the foundation of alt-right or identitarian politics, however, cloaked in bonhomie.

As I read the current social outcome data, the fever of white Supremacy has emerged once again in American society like a long-dormant social disease. This eruption, however, is different than the Civil Rights era. Before the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the institutions of the State were in many ways formally racist. The collective intention of Civil Rights was couched in the Black experience, and focused on changing the laws, and through them the corporate culture of the government itself. Considering where we started, to a large degree we have been successful. Consider that in 1965 before the U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving v Virginia, which decided that it was unconstitutional for states to ban interracial marriage, a Gallup Organization survey found that 72% of Southern Whites and 42% of Non-Southern Whites approved of the ban, and 19 states had laws prohibiting such marriages, and including all the states formerly making up the Confederacy.1

Things have changed, and for a large percentage of Americans racial equality under law is a given, although as a society we still remain quite segregated socially. But the good news is that it is changing, as you can see in television advertisements, and even more clearly, in series on Netflix, Starz, and HBO, where interracial romance and sex are featured. Research shows the majority of White Millennials now find racial equality normal.

But not all agree. As of March 2017, the Gallup Organization found that 42% of Americans “worry a great deal” about race relations, compared to only 17% three years earlier in 2014.2

Unlike the Civil Rights movement of the past, which was a movement led by African-Americans and based on nonviolent change and hope, this time the White Supremacy outburst is being fuelled by White fear and anger and is disposed to authoritarianism and violence. What is driving this?.

Study after study suggests it springs principally from a sense of aggrievement and humiliation. What sociologist Michael Kimmel, Director of the Stony Brook University’s Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, calls “aggrieved entitlement.” Kimmel says, “In my interviews with extremists, both ‘actives’ and ‘formers,’ I have found time and time again that they have experienced that sense of humiliation and shame.”3 What is behind this?

For the first time in 500 years, since the beginning of the Age of Exploration in the 15th century, being born White is not conferring automatic privilege. In the United States this trend is strongly exacerbated by the fact that an historical White majority country is becoming very quickly a majority–minority population. The U.S. Census Bureau in 2015 released the most detailed assessment of this trend in their study, Projections of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population 2014–2060. In it they reported4:

“The U.S. population is expected to grow more slowly in future decades than it did in the previous century. Nonetheless, the total population of 319 million in 2014 is projected to reach the 400 million threshold in 2051 and 417 million in 2060.4

“Around the time the 2020 Census is conducted, more than half of the nation’s children are expected to be part of a minority race or ethnic group. This proportion is expected to continue to grow so that by 2060, just 36 percent of all children (people under age 18) will be single-race non-Hispanic white, compared with 52 percent today.

“The U.S. population as a whole is expected to follow a similar trend, becoming majority–minority in 2044. The minority population is projected to rise to 56 percent of the total in 2060, compared with 38 percent in 2014, and a significant percentage will be immigrants.

“By 2060, the nation’s foreign-born population would reach nearly 19 percent of the total population, up from 13 percent in 2014.”4

Further increasing fear and anger, an even more ancient meme is concurrently also vanishing quickly: being born male, particularly a White male, is no longer automatically bestowing social dominance.

These are not just local issues culturally specific to America, this is a geopolitical trend whose effects are being felt around the world; albeit it is most pronounced in the United States.

Further complicating matters, as almost any research institute will tell you as indeed they do in their papers and reports, Western European and North American cultural values, which is to say White values are no longer going to be the pre-eminent cultural definers as to how the world of humans operates. China and India, for instance, have their own perspective arising from a very different cultural history. To a large number of White people, particularly White men, all of these shifts are producing disorientation, fear, and anger. And neuroscience research is beginning to explain why this is happening.

Although issues such as White Supremacy are usually discussed in a political or cultural terms, a growing body of research suggests that much of this fear fugue can be explained by neuroscience.

Political psychologist John Hibbing, Foundation Regents University Professor at the University of Nebraska — Lincoln, along with Kevin Smith and John Alford also in the Political Science Department, set out to explore this issue in depth from that perspective and concluded, “Difference in negativity bias underlie variation in political ideology” which they published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

“[W]e argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them…. Politics might not be in our souls, but it probably is in our DNA.”5

Much of the research centers on a small almond sized component in the brain, the amygdala. In every species that has an amygdala it has the same function: it is evoked when the options are perceived as “fight or flight”. The new research refines and strengthens this role, and shows how other parts of the brain are involved.

I think the research is telling us that there are five social aspects to the matrix of consciousness we know as White Supremacy.

The White supremacy matrix of consciousness:

  • A fear response activating the amygdala derived from a sense of aggrievement over what is perceived as an unfair loss.
  • A fear fugue centering on an “other,” a person of different race, religion or ethnicity.
  • An international team of researchers led by Y. Liu at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University “examined the neural basis of disgust perception in racial prejudice using a passive viewing task and functional magnetic resonance imaging.”6
  • They found that “increased amygdala and insular engagement, positive coupling of the insula with amygdala-based emotional system, and negative coupling of the insula with anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)-based regulatory system.”3
  • Through the use of machine learning algorithms they discovered that racial prejudice could be predicted in an individual “by functional couplings of the insula with both the amygdala and the ACC, which suggests that the insula is largely involved in racially biased disgust perception through two distinct neural circuits.”3
  • A strong correlation with conservative religious beliefs as well as conservative political views.
  • Ryota Kanai at the University of Sussex led a team of colleagues who were joined by Geraint Rees at University College London; they carried out research on this exact issue, and they found,
  • “Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring and recognition of emotional faces by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.”7
  • A strong bias for authoritarianism.
  • It is easy to see this in the White Supremacist Christian Militias. Previously this was a fringe presence in post–Civil War America, they were brought to robust life with the election of Barrack Obama, and became far more mainstream than they had been since Reconstruction. In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center, “the US’s most prominent civil rights group focused on hate organisations, said in a report that extremist ‘patriot’ groups ‘came roaring back to life’ last year as their number jumped nearly 250% to more than 500 with deepening ties to conservative mainstream politics.”8
  • This has an often unconsidered consequence: the infiltration of law enforcement agencies by White Supremacist oriented individuals who seek the authority and access of law enforcement jobs, plus you get to carry a gun.
  • As reported in The Intercept, “in a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from April 2015… which details the process by which the FBI enters individuals on a terrorism watchlist, the Known or Suspected Terrorist File, notes that ‘domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers,’ and explains in some detail how bureau policies have been crafted to take this infiltration into account.”9
  • A proclivity for violence above normal social levels.

Jonathon Morgan writing in The Washington Post, makes this point very clearly,

“Although the similarities are not immediately obvious, white, working-class communities also have become ostracized, disempowered and angry in the United States — making them vulnerable to radicalization. Described eloquently by author J.D. Vance in his lauded new book ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ these communities are at the center of a growing social and cultural crisis. They’ve been rocked by a dramatic uptick in divorce, rampant drug overdoses, rising rural death rates and a suicide epidemic. All this against a backdrop of increasing political irrelevance resulting from rural population decline and outright contempt from the wealthy.10

In 2014, VICE News, which has been covering the White Supremacist militia movement and its association with identitarian politics since its inception as a news organization, revealing it as an echo of the Hitler era in Germany did research that explored how the Klan is recruiting veterans, men who know how to use fire arms in combat.

VICE quotes, Steve Howard, the Imperial Wizard for the Mississippi KKK in 2014, who makes the obvious comparison explicit, “In some ways we can relate to Islamic extremists, just like we are Christian extremists, because they’re fighting a holy war and so are we.”11

Most importantly there has been a growing incidence of violence. Does the Wisconsin Sikh Temple Massacre mean anything? On August 5, 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page used a semiautomatic weapon to murder six people during an attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page’s connection to the white supremacist movement was well-documented,” Alex Henderson reported in The Raw Story.12

Or maybe the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church? White Supremacist Jim David Adkisson, walked into the Church’s auditorium where a children’s play was going on and killed two and wounded seven others firing at random.

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The British Newspaper the Mail dug into the data on this comparison and reported this. Let me pause for a moment though and consider this is what America looks like to the British and European media. The data showed that “from 2002, militias have killed more people in the United States than jihadis have.”13

Newsweek corroborated this finding, publishing data from the research institute New America, which showed that “Islamists launched nine attacks that murdered 45, while the right-wing extremists struck 18 times, leaving 48 dead, reports.”14

The Mail report also cites a “survey of 382 law enforcement agencies by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, which found that: ‘Law enforcement agencies in the United States consider anti-government violent extremists, not radicalized Muslims, to be the most severe threat of political violence that they face.’”

Alexis Okeowo looked at this violence and its relationship to the 2016 election. He found, “Since Donald Trump won the Presidential election, there has been a dramatic uptick in incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment across the country.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that there were four hundred and thirty-seven incidents of intimidation between the election, on November 8th, and November 14th, targeting blacks and other people of color, Muslims, immigrants, the L.G.B.T. community, and women. One woman in Colorado told the S.P.L.C. that her twelve-year-old daughter was approached by a boy who said, “Now that Trump is President, I’m going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find.” At a school in Washington State, students chanted “build a wall” in a cafeteria.15

So this is where we are it seems:

Proposition One

We have a growing Identitarian political movement with a loose network of violent often militarily trained armed men, who regularly act out. Their behaviour and attitudes cannot be changed by factual correction. Daniel Kahan at Yale has led teams that have studied why people do not respond to factual correction. They have been particularly focused on climate change, because the disparity between the non-fact based claims and the scientific evidence seems to be unreconciliable. What they discovered has implications for issues far beyond climate change. They found:

“Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.”16

This fear-based divorce from factual reality has very powerful real world consequences.

Nearly two-thirds of America’s gun owners voted for Trump, the Washington Post reported last month, citing several national surveys that found 49 percent of gun owners were Republican, 32 percent were Independent and 23 percent were Democrats. “The strength and reliability of association between owning a gun and voting Republican is impressive,” the report said. “Across 11 presidential contests, gun ownership was more strongly linked to vote choice than such well-known predictors as gender, age and education.”

“Meanwhile, other research has shown that it’s women and non-whites who are most deeply hurt by gun violence, reflecting the unsavory reality that the GOP’s white male-dominated obsession with defending guns doesn’t end up harming people like them nearly as much as it does women and children.”17

Proposition Two

With the further loosening of gun laws, and the growing number of states that permit licensed or even in some cases unlicensed concealed carry, combined with a growing White Supremacist community, civil violence in terrorist form independent of normal crime events will increase.

This is what that means to living human beings. Presently, ninety two people a day, 33,000 a year die from gun wounds. If that were not enough, there is no other developed nation in the world that has child gun death figures like the United States. A study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2017 presented this data: on average 5790 children in the U.S. each year get ER treatment for a gun wound.18

The study also found that an average of 1297 children die annually from these wounds. This makes gun deaths the third-leading cause of death for children in America.

And the distribution of death events correlates strongly with Red value states, which tells us that this behaviour pattern is partially culturally mediated.

Proposition Three

To a much greater degree than was previously thought the White Supremacist fear response is based more on neuroscience than political science.

Proposition Four

The fear fugue that is at the root of this disorder is heightened by a nonlocal consciousness dynamic whose impact we can only approximate but which may be an enormous factor. We know from laboratory research that individuals process information before they are cognitively aware of it, including reacting before the event occurs.

We see this in individual studies in labs, and there are now several dozen of them, where people react to something in an objectively measurable way. Dean Radin, Senior Scientist at The Institute of Noetic Sciences, designed what in my view is a very elegant protocol in which people looked at a television monitor and randomly an image would appear. To a significant degree the viewers’ irises dilated before the actual stimulus of the image occurred.19 It’s called a presentiment effect. The stimulus here being a picture on a monitor screen. Actually, a very mundane experience.

How much greater then must be the presentiment of civilization-threatening climate change and sea rise? What is its effect on individuals with overlarge right amygdalas?

Conclusion

Given those four propositions, how do we create social policies that support wellbeing? That I think should have been part of our healthcare conversation in the current ongoing political struggle over healthcare. That it was not is a great tragedy. In the short term we must as a society muster the courage to do something about the extraordinary wealth inequality that leaves large cohorts of the population, particularly the White male population, feeling they are getting the nasty end of the stick.

We must alleviate their sense that they have lost power, lost status, and are lost in a society whose values they no longer recognize or understand. In the long term the solution to White militias, the race struggle, and the violence it engenders is healthy, secure, well-balanced, curiosity satisfying childhoods for people of all races. If America is to thrive we have got to change the perspective with which we view healthcare, and recognize that all life is interconnected and interdependent, and that underlying all, as Max Planck the father of Quantum Mechanics told us in 1931, is consciousness. It is the fundamental. To make that transition we must make wellbeing at every level, from the individual to the planetary, our first priority.

References

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  2. Swift A. Americans’ Worries About Race Relations at Record High. The Gallup Organization. Available at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/206057/americans-worry-race-relations-record-high.aspx; March 15, 2017.
  3. Conroy J. ‘Angry white men’: the sociologist who studied Trump’s base before Trump. The Guardian. Monday, February 27, 2017, 07.00 EST. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/27/michael-kimmel-masculinity-far-right-angry-white-men.
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  5. Hibbing, J., Smith, K., and Alford, J. Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology. Behav Brain Sci. 2014; 37: 297–350
  6. Liu, Y., Lin, W., Xu, P., Zhang, D., and Luo, Y. Neural basis of disgust perception in racial prejudice.(Epub September 29, 2015. Accessed June 21, 2017)Hum Brain Mapp. 2015; 36: 5275–5286https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.23010
  7. Kanai, R., Feildden, T., Firth, Colin, and Rees, G. Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults (PDF). (Accessed June 21, 2017)Curr Biol. 2011; 21: 677–680
  8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51033605_Political_Orientations_Are_Correlated_with_Brain_Structure_in_Young_Adults
  9. MCGreal C. US facing surge in rightwing extremists and militias. The Guardian. Thursday, March 4, 2010, 17.18 GMT. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/04/us-surge-rightwing-extremist-groups.
  10. Speri A. The FBI has quietly investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement. The Intercept. Available at: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-investigated-white-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/
  11. Morgan J. These charts show exactly how racist and radical the alt-right has gotten this year. The Washington Post. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/09/26/these-charts-show-exactly-how-racist-and-radical-the-alt-right-has-gotten-this-year/ September 26, 2016.
  12. The Ku Klux Klan is boosting its numbers by recruiting veterans. VICE. December 17, 2014, 10:31 am. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-kkk-and-american-veterans-part-1-666 .
  13. Henderson A. Here are 10 of the worst domestic terror attacks by extreme Christians and right-wing white men. The Raw Story. June 18, 2015 at 03:39 ET. Available at: http://www.schwartzreport.net/wp-admin/post.php?post=20424&action=edit
  14. Webb S. White supremacists and extremist militias are ‘greater threat to US thanISIS’. Mirror. 16:46, February, 4 2016. Available at: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/white-supremacists-extremist-militias-greater-7310236
  15. Gidda M. Most terrorists in the U.S. are right wing, not muslim. Available at: http://www.newsweek.com/right-wing-extremism-islamist-terrorism-donald-trump-steve-bannon-628381
  16. Okeowo A. Hate on the rise after Trump’s election. The New Yorker. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hate-on-the-rise-after-trumps-election November 17, 2016.
  17. Kahan, D., Peters, E., Wittlin, M. et al. The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nat Climate Change. 2012; 2: 732–735https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1547
  18. Rosenfeld S. Response by many republicans and right-wing media to Virginia shooter strongly underscores their white supremacist, misogynist values. Alternet. June 19, 2017, 2:19 PM GMT.
  19. Fowler K, Dahlberg L, Halleyesus T, Gutierrez C, Bacon S. Childhood Firearm Injuries in the United States. Pediatrics. 2017;140(1). pii: e20163486. http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-3486.
  20. Radin, D. Electrodermal presentiments of future emotions. J Sci Explor. 2004; 18: 253–273
Stephan A. Schwartz

Written by

Scientist, futurist, and award winning author Stephan A. Schwartz is the columnist for the journal Explore, and editor of the daily Schwartzreport.net.

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