White Supremacy is no more a Fringe ideology

The masked white supremacy in America

by Aslam Abdullah

The Buffalo shooter was not a lone individual whose mental imbalance led him to a mall to kill 11 black and two white Americans in the age group of 20 to 86. Instead, he is the product of an ideology and culture that America has long ignored. It’s a mindset that believes that the White race is superior and other racial groups are inferior. Therefore, white supremacy is a divinely bestowed status, and America exists to serve this divine cause. Of the 917 hate groups, 450 (roughly 50 percent) are white supremacist organizations in the country.

That number includes 100 white nationalist groups, 78 racist skinheads, 99 neo-Nazis, 43 neo-confederate, and 130 Ku Klux Klan chapters. No accurate estimate of white supremacists in America exists, but experts believe that 450 white nationalist groups have a membership of one million people. The number of sympathizers and hidden supporters runs over 25 million. Montana and Florida top the list of states with the highest number of white supremacists.

The idea of white supremacy has its roots in Christianity and Europe.

In the four-volume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–55; Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), the French writer and diplomat Arthur de Gobineau wrote about the superiority of the white race. He claimed that Aryans (Germanic peoples) represented the highest level of human development. On the other hand, British writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Carlyle, and others believed that white people must civilize the world o bring civilization to nonwhite peoples through beneficent imperialism.

In the era of slavery and during the subsequent Jim Crow period of legal racial segregation in the U.S., white supremacy was a popular political ideology. It began to decline as the civil rights movement gained momentum. But the known racists still exist in almost every part of the country, even in 2022. The Buffalo shooter is not an individual, but a way of life sustained by families and churches and the members of the Grand Old Party, GOP.

The ideology permeates all aspects of life. No church and political party are immune from it. No one knows when a white nationalist would emerge from any neighborhood to kill nonwhites and whites who believe in human equality.

Laws exist, but their implementation is selective. Public officials exert their influence in helping the violators, and the judiciary often represents white interests.