When It Reigns: White Supremacy in America
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Let me make one thing clear at the outset. I do not hate Americans who identify as white people. To do so would in part be a form of self-hate and socially backwards. I am not a self-hater, preferring to look at social dynamics rooted in economics and politics. On that note, I do think that self-hate is connected with white supremacy, the practice and theory of human inferiority and superiority based on the policies and politics linked to one’s skin color. There’s a lot to unpack here, without question.
Political dissatisfaction and economic dislocation created the conditions for President Trump’s two terms in the Oval Office. As he openly supported white supremacist groups riding the coattails of his MAGA agenda, this movement in part gains strength from scapegoating brown and black people in a bid to normalize skin color animus. Division of the working class, the majority, is the name of this game. Divide and conquer via disunity.
Take the white supremacist group Patriot Front, masked and riding the metro in Washington DC, recently. This is a public show of white supremacy politics, continuing a toxic trend. A month shy of nine years ago a Unite the Right rally occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. It resembled a KKK gathering of yesteryear. The Old Order of white segregationists never ended, borne of a late-stage capitalist growth industry: income and wealth inequality.
In the slow-motion unraveling of American society underway since the end of the Vietnam War (1973-1975) and the postwar economy (1945-1975), there have been dramatic changes of income and wealth distribution, thus in household dynamics. The family wage that enabled males to financially support females to stay home and rear children via unpaid caring labor disappeared.
At the time, and I came of age in the mid-1970s, such changes were beginning, though dramatically under-covered in classrooms and newsrooms. Women flooded into the labor market to compensate for the decline in male wage-income as corporate America outsourced manufacturing abroad. Automation and computerization propelled corporate globalization. As Professor Richard Wolff notes, American workers received loans not raises. The financialization of the economy spread.
Corporations waged class war, successfully, against labor unions. The working day lengthened. Real wages stagnated. Nonunion employment rose. Rent inflation and tuition for higher education grew. The incarcerated population, disproportionately black and brown, mushroomed.
The waning of stay-at-home adult female caregivers entering the labor force to help pay bills meant that children lost nurturing adult guidance. Male and female children alike suffered. For reasons, some more clear than others, male children disproportionately experienced the negative impacts of fathers and other male adults reeling from the loss of status as family breadwinners. Self-hate, blaming one’s self for losing family-wage employment, flows from the corporate restructuring of the U.S. working class.
The attainment of a middle-class lifestyle became more not less difficult. The bipartisan political perpetrators of the disappearing American Dream, building on the backlash against the Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, demonized African Americans as the villains, oppressing and threatening whites. A more recent version is the right wing demonization of migrants, with President Trump showing the way. His characterization of migrants as criminals and miscreants generally was and is intentional. The weakness of his anti-migrant messaging is evident in the rhetorical change to demonizing anarchists and communists as threats to his supporters. Red-baiting characterizes the narrative of Roy Cohn, the president’s mentor.
Apparently, migrants are to blame for the cost-of-living crisis. The 1,000 U.S. billionaires grabbing bigger slices of the national economic pie are blameless. Migrants are visible and politically powerless. Billionaires are politically powerful and mostly invisible.
According to a RAND Corporation report of March 5, 2026: “Since 1975, $79 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1% in the United States. This represents the cumulative cost of lost wages to workers below the 90th percentile due to rising inequality from 1975 through 2023. Average real income in the top 1% grewby 321.6 percent from 1975 through 2018, nearly three times the 118 percent growth of real per capita GDP over the same period.”
Working class division is the foundation of racial polarization. President Nixon’s racial politics of attacking minorities as threats to white Americans paved the way for California Governor Reagan’s election to the White House in 1980, riding his targeting of black, female welfare recipients as scapegoats for white voters’ economic struggles. Black, female welfare queens driving Cadillacs threatened the household budgets of whites, according to this falsification.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party of FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s shifted to a GOP-lite political alternative under President Clinton six decades later. A Democratic president and former Arkansas governor spearheaded this anti-New Deal agenda, which President Obama perpetuated. Misnamed free-trade pacts like the 1994 NAFTA putting American factory workers into job competition with lower paid labor in the Global South took a toll stateside. So did President Obama bailing out the Big Banks that caused the Great Recession instead of working class families evicted from their homes. In brief, U.S. economic restructuring has nurtured growth in the party of non voters, and its evil twin, white supremacy, the political scapegoating of nonwhites.
The politics of resignation, non voting, are connected with the resurgence of white supremacy. Not that voting is a measure of working-class strength. As historian Howard Zinn writes, what working people do outside the voting booth is what matters. The demobilization of the working class, politically speaking, is the soil that nurtures a false ideology of white supremacy.
The ruling class is chuckling all the way to the bank. Elon Musk, a trillionaire, at least on paper, is leading this pack of capitalists. Time for a working-class movement politics?
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