For as long as I can remember writing about race and gender politics, there has been wrangling over terminology. Regardless of what we’re trying to define here, terms are simply abstract conventions of what is a far richer (or poorer as the case is) lived experience.
There’s been a lot of discussion on what the appropriate term is for a nation of people that voted in a bigoted autocrat. Finding existing terms largely triggering if not uninspired, I decided to put on my sociologist hat and give it a go in what began as a series of tweets. This is not meant to detract from the impact of white supremacy but to delineate something ubiquitous.
Across the gradient of prejudice and bigotry, there is at least one unifying (I use unifying paradoxically) theme. Supremacy. What differs today is the application of such assumed supremacy. Where the British Raj had used white supremacy to terrible ends, justifying the starved deaths of over 20 million Indians and the labor exploitation of a subcontinent (known as the Victorian Holocaust), today supremacy need no longer imply whiteness, death nor exploitation.
It is here that many of us are trapped emotionally on both sides, all too often seen with the euphemism, “Well, I had nothing to do with slavery.” This would of course be true and I’d like to congratulate you on not exploiting others which would be true if you perhaps manufactured your clothes, generated your own fuel and so on. But let’s keep the topic of how free markets, famines and Malthusian economics contributed to modern capitalism for another day.
Maybe alt-supremacy is a broad and unoffensive enough of a term to be applied to very very many people, from both sides of the political spectrum, on the coasts and the interior, and of many origins.
Many alt-supremacists are actually decent people, they’ve been my friends, co-workers and even lovers. Alt-supremacy connotes two things, that the people exhibit or believe in an inherent superiority and that they’re intentions are not necessarily violent or exploitative.
Alt-supremacy is when my redhead ex said to me after being confronted about an affair, “Wouldn’t you have slept with a tall Nord?”
Alt-supremacy is when a boss says, “You can get a bunch of Indians to do that!”
Alt-supremacy is when your elementary schoolmates ask on your first day, “Do you speak English?” but you win every class spelling bee.
Alt-supremacy is even when your mom tells you, “Stay out of the sun, you don’t want to get dark.”
Alt-supremacy is everywhere. It’s you, it’s us. It’s our neighbors, our families, our coworkers, our partners. Recognize it, reach out and say…you’re an alt-supremacist, and that’s OK.
Unless of course you killed or hurt someone, in which case you’re just terrible.
