BACKGROUND
Article 1 (1), (2), and (3), and Article 2(1) of Chapter 1 of the United Nations (UN) Charter stipulate that all states (and their people) are sovereign, regardless of the country’s population size, geographical size, location, economic power, and military prowess. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) explicitly states that, all human beings across the globe are born free and equal in dignity and rights…they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Lesotho, for example, a small state in Southern Africa, is as sovereign as the US and the UK. Under the UN Charter, the principle of sovereignty takes precedence in how states interact with one another. Sovereignty in this context represents a bedrock of international customary practice which holds that states are equal and have full control over their territories.
Crucially, Article 1, Part 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) [46] forbids any form of discrimination, exclusion and marginalization of people based on race or ethnicity. Thus, supremacist tendencies in the matrix of international relations continue to undermine the aims, purposes and principles of the UN Charter. It has been 80 years since the establishment of the UN, and although many human rights achievements have been made, the issue of white supremacist attitudes has not changed. For instance, a recent UN Working Group of Experts Report of 2023 on racism in the United Kingdom found that ‘racism in the UK is institutional, structural, and systematic against people of colour, especially people of African descent’. Similar findings are contained in other UN Expert Reports which have all condemned the entrenched racial inequalities and discrimination practices against minorities. Further, several annual reports on racism across Europe by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (Fundamental Rights Agency) (FRA) also provide grim hope in the elimination of supremacist attitudes.
For instance, several annual reports from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights have found, in part, that widespread racism continues to plague Europe, noting that discriminatory racial profiling remains a major concern. Patterns of discriminatory tendencies, suggesting that bigotry, often combined with hate speech and racism, continues to pester today’s Western society, affecting everyone who is seen as different
Given that this research aims to analyze the foundational basis of white supremacism, and how it undermines the universal human rights agenda, the research questions that it seeks to answer are:
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Why has white supremacism persisted despite the existence of various national laws including many UN human rights conventions that explicitly forbid acts of discrimination and racism?
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How do white people express their understanding of whiteness and white privilege?
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What practices maintain white supremacism?
Racism Is a global power system created by those who see themselves as white—a system informed by discriminatory patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, and thought covering the social, cultural, economic and political life of people. Racism is a political construction concocted to create divisions among people with the sole purpose of granting power to White people and to legitimize the subjugation of people of colour. This construction is also found - for example - in the Manifest Destiny theory in America, which asserts that it was the God-given destiny of white Americans to dominate non-whites. This agenda of demeaning people of colour has been peddled for centuries through Western pseudo-science (including the eugenics theory), and through religion, slavery, colonialism and imperialism. The purported idea, for instance, that poverty in the Global South is caused by genetic inferiority is a notion that an average European has been made to believe when, in fact, the real cause of widespread poverty today is rooted in capitalist imperialist and racist agendas. Supremacism as a system of domination has primarily been at the centre of maintaining a Western capitalist system that continues to systematically marginalize Global South populations through trade ploys such as colonial-based commodity racism (including plant and seed control), thereby normalizing raced markets.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE PROBLEM OF WHITE SUPREMACY
While the topic of white supremacism has been researched widely by various scholars in its historical, institutional, and ideological contexts, this study leans more towards exposing the structural and more subtle aspects of racism that are often concealed within institutions. Structural racism manifests covertly because it is a web of interconnected and sustained elements embedded in legislation, policies and institutional practices that perpetually disadvantage racial minorities.
Structural racism manifests notoriously in housing, employment and in the justice system. It is purposely designed to create a cycle of biased results against minorities even though certain individuals working within it may not have any racist dispositions. Often, supremacism is ‘hidden’ in discriminatory legislation, such as in education and in commerce and trade. Such laws stifle the teaching and learning about the role of racism in Western history. Another area where supremacism ‘hides’ is in distancing strategies, whereby many white people (despite evidence of the pervasiveness of racism) detach themselves from responsibility or avoid discussing the topic altogether by claiming that they are colour blind. In this way, the realities of the prevalence of racism are concealed. Through avoidance strategies, many White people, to date, refuse to accept that racism exists, and in many Western institutions, the topic is not even acknowledged. But here is an instructive observation: that through denial (on the part of many White people) and on the part of Black people, through fear of speaking out candidly against the vice, everyone now becomes complicit and hence participates in sustaining structural racism wittingly or unwittingly. Thus, denial and neglect work as the main functional characteristics that entrench structural racism.
White complicity in sustaining racism happens through acts such as colour-blindness and other acts presented as ‘good intentions’ which on face value, may appear to be morally right actions, when in fact they are not. But White people need to be cognisant of the fact that such distancing strategies are part of the reason racism remains pervasive. For instance, when proof of racist conduct is presented, many White people elect to either deny or shift the topic, and often brand racism as a ‘past phenomenon’ which is immaterial to current dialogues. In this way, a misleading perception is created in society that hiring and recognition today is based only on talent and effort, and that race no longer influences people’s opportunities. Whiteness is connected to economic power and benefits, and is thus, least understood by those it privileges. While most people of colour are aware of this discriminatory challenge, many White people seem blind to it because most White people are socialized not to see their privileged position. If we refuse to see this ‘white blindness’, we cannot engage meaningfully in discussions that can disassemble it. As such, ‘white ignorance’ of racism is not the innocent unawareness of facts, but a self-shielding tactic from any discussion on racial discrimination.
Thus, the idea of pretending not to know, works as a channel that dismisses the oppressive realities of white supremacism. In this context, ‘white ignorance’ is the methodical and intentional way of refusing to accept that racism exists, a situation that allows the vice to continue to privilege White people. Complicity also manifests in passive and window-dressing institutional policies aimed at creating a false impression of inclusiveness. These tokenism practices include the appointment of Black people (but who have no voice), in institutions for show purposes only. Tokenism as a perfunctory practice of hiring a member of a minority group just to create a perception to unsuspecting ordinary people that institutions treat all people fairly, when in fact they do not.
Because of the illusion of inclusiveness that tokenism creates, the institutional authorities avoid the social and legal scrutiny for a long time. In this way, tokenism itself becomes part of a subtle system that perpetuates discrimination.