In 1967 Martin Luther King put Black people’s lives in this country into a mathematical formula: Black people, said Dr. King, were 50% Americans. In all the good things in life Black people had half of what white Americans had; in all the bad things, Black people had double the trouble – twice the unemployment rate of whites; twice the infant mortality rate; twice the proportion of Black people living in substandard housing; twice the proportion of Black people living in poverty as compared with whites.
And now, 56 years later, these statistics remain much the same: unemployment, infant mortality; poverty and substandard housing rates all remain at least double for Black people as compared with white people. Black households today have 1/8 the wealth of white households; Black children are three times as likely to be born into an impoverished household as are white children.
American society today continues to keep Black people at the bottom, as it has for the past four hundred years. In order to keep people on the bottom, against their will, you will need to use violence; you will need a police force which acts as the police in this country act today, and as slave patrols, Klansmen, white mobs, and the police have acted in the past – by targeting Black people for arrests, beatings, and death.
Black men today are more than seven times as likely to go to prison as are white men; and police kill Black people – Tyre Nichols, or George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Sterling Higgins, or 12-year old Tamir Rice, – at more than 2.5 times the rate they kill white people. Of unarmed victims of police killings, Black people are victims at three times the rate of white people.
What we are looking at here is systemic racism – white supremacy. White supremacy is the system by which, year after year for over four centuries, Black people have been kept at the bottom of American society. Rich white people brought Black people to this country to labor and make them richer. And those same rich white people justified their crimes by insisting that Black people were slaves because they were inferior. White society as a whole accepted this definition, poor whites so doing in order to create a buffer for themselves from the very worst brutalities of capitalist society. Well, slavery is gone, and legal segregation is gone, but Black people remain at the bottom of American society. American society, as a whole, continues the slaveholders’ practice of placing the blame on Black people for being at the bottom, more subtly perhaps today than in the past, but with the same purpose.
White supremacy today does not need to wear a Ku Klux Klansman’s robes or openly espouse the doctrine of white superiority. No, white supremacy is the simple, normal, and continuous functioning of most American institutions – health care, housing, education, our federal form of government, the criminal justice system, the economy, and yes, even American Christianity. All these institutions carry the DNA of America’s white supremacist past. Day-in and day-out these institutions continue to produce and reproduce racial inequality. Today’s white supremacy does not require that we, the people who live and function within these institutions, have racial hatred in our hearts. We perpetuate white supremacy when we unquestioningly accept that the institutions in which all of us function are normal and color-blind and are without any racial content. We perpetuate white supremacy when we place whatever little security we have within those institutions above a searching critique of and challenge to the white supremacy ingrained in our institutions.
Take education in American society. For the first 250 years of American society our educational institutions evolved in a society that, in order to justify slavery, had to lie about Africa, and had to lie about Africa’s sons and daughters; had to deny African-Americans the right to read and learn; and had to insist that slavery, the bottom of American society, was the natural and normal condition of African-Americans. Black people and white people were taught all these things, in-school and out of school. 100 years of segregation followed the ending of slavery, but Black people’s place at the bottom of our society continued to need justification, and our educational systems obliged by continuing to lie about Africa and about Africa’s peoples; and by continuing to deny those peoples the schooling by which they could understand themselves and the society in which they lived. And, now, one half century after the ending of segregation, our society today continues to lie about Black people and their history and continues to offer the mass of Black children only the pretense of an education.
Indeed, today, in the state of Tennessee, by laws passed over the last two years, it is illegal to teach in a K-12 school the real history of Black people, which is the real history of America; and it is illegal for a public university in this state to require that all our students learn this true history. By a law passed by both Houses of the Tennessee legislature two weeks back, and signed by Governor Bill Lee last Friday, it will be far easier to brand teachers as teaching “divisive concepts” in any Tennessee college classroom. Tyre Nichols, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor – we may be able to say that such events have happened – but we will face an uncertain future should we say why they have happened, or why they continue to happen.
We can only challenge such laws by attacking white supremacy where it lives – in our institutions. Over the past semester People for Black History, a student group at the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) which I advise, has brought the issue of white supremacy and racism to this campus, and we’ve done so by challenging a part of the school’s institutional leadership. UTM is a PWI (Predominantly White Institution). We first gathered over 1400 signatures on petitions which demanded that the faculty leadership body, our Faculty Senate, condemn what was then Tennessee’s two white supremacist “education” laws. Our Faculty Senate had been silent for two years in the face of these laws, even as these laws affected our graduates, our incoming students, and our own campus. As we gathered signatures we also won the support of the Student Government Association (SGA), which passed a resolution condemning these laws as racist and calling on the Faculty Senate to do the same. The SGA also held a student referendum calling on the Faculty Senate to condemn the state’s “white supremacist ‘education’” laws and we won that referendum overwhelmingly.
In the discussions we had on our campus after People for Black History forced the issue, our Faculty Senators said very little about the first of these two laws – evidently believing that since that law only affected K-12 schools, educators in higher ed were under no obligation to speak out! When, at our prompting, our Faculty Senate president and a few other like-minded Faculty Senators finally did speak out about the 2022 law, they did so principally to reassure our campus that the law did protect freedom of speech and academic freedom, although the law clearly does not and did not do this. To be sure, many other Faculty Senators understood the law more clearly.
Originally People for Black History presented a resolution to the Faculty Senate which condemned Tennessee’s “education” laws as white supremacist. In the Faculty Senate committee we were shuttled into by the Faculty Senate president, a great deal of the discussion centered on our language: if the Faculty Senate condemns these laws as white supremacist, the legislature would retaliate and UT Martin would lose funding. No one in the discussion denied that the laws were white supremacist. That committee’s revision of our resolution substituted the word “racist,” for the term “white supremacist” and that was acceptable to us. But what this discussion revealed most clearly is that institutional racism, white supremacy, shapes how we think about racial issues – that we don’t want to offend the legislature when it passes overtly white supremacist legislation because the legislature has the power to defund our school.
People for Black History will continue its work of wresting our school from the grip of white supremacy by demanding that its institutional leadership take a meaningful stand against Tennessee’s increasingly overt white supremacist education legislation and by demanding that our own campus curriculum – today probably the central component of its institutional racism – become a weapon in the fight against white supremacy – by strengthening the African American Studies minor, turning it into a major, hiring more Black faculty to teach African American Studies courses, and, ultimately, by creating a General Education requirement for the study of African American History and Culture.
The fight against white supremacy is the fight against institutional racism, is the fight to expose the white supremacy of our institutions and is the fight to transform those institutions into weapons against white supremacy. It is long past time that we take up this fight.
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Long ago Malcolm and Stokely (Kwame Ture) told us that white people’s job was to combat racism in the white community. We can take up that challenge on our own white campuses by studying, exposing, and undermining the institutional racism of the campuses on which we work and study. We white people need not wait on Black people to fight racism and white supremacy. Indeed, on a PWI to wait for Black people or people of color to initiate the fight is to continue the white supremacy of our institutions. In any case, Black people have called upon us to take up our responsibilities in carrying out the fight against racism – that this is our job.
Neither do white folks on a PWIs need wait to take up the – usually short lived – battle around some outlandish racial incident or some overtly white supremacist speaker on campus to act against racism and white supremacy. We have an ample target on every PWI campus: the institutional racism of our own colleges and universities. I can think of no good reason why white activists should not commence this work on every PWI in the country, and commence that work at once.
David Barber teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He is the author of a history of SDS: A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed
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