What makes whites superior

White societies have been the global top dogs for half a millennium, ever since Chinese civilisation went into decline. With global hegemony, first with Europe and then the US, whites have long commanded respect, as well as arousing fear and resentment, among other races. Being white confers a privilege, a special kind of deference, throughout the world, be it Kingston, Hong Kong, Delhi, Lagos - or even, despite the way it is portrayed in Britain, Harare.

Whites are the only race that never suffers any kind of systemic racism anywhere in the world. And the impact of white racism has been far more profound and baneful than any other: it remains the only racism with global reach. Being top of the pile means that whites are peculiarly and uniquely insensitive to race and racism, and the power relations this involves. We are invariably the beneficiaries, never the victims.

Even when well-meaning, we remain strangely ignorant. The clout enjoyed by whites does not reside simply in an abstraction - western societies - but in the skin of each and every one of us.

Whether we like it or not, in every corner of the planet we enjoy an extraordinary personal power bestowed by our colour. It is something we are largely oblivious of, and consequently take for granted, irrespective of whether we are liberal or reactionary, backpackers, tourists or expatriate businessmen.

The existence of a de facto global racial hierarchy helps to shape the nature of racial prejudice exhibited by other races. Whites are universally respected, even when that respect is combined with strong resentment. A race generally defers to those above it in the hierarchy and is contemptuous of those below it. The Chinese - like the Japanese - widely consider themselves to be number two in the pecking order and look down upon all other races as inferior.

Their respect for whites is also grudging - many Chinese believe that western hegemony is, in effect, held on no more than prolonged leasehold.

Those below the Chinese and the Japanese in the hierarchy are invariably people of colour both Chinese and Japanese often like to see themselves as white, or nearly white. At the bottom of the pile, virtually everywhere it would seem, are those of African descent, the only exception in certain cases being the indigenous peoples.

This highlights the centrality of colour to the global hierarchy. Other factors serve to define and reinforce a race's position in the hierarchy - levels of development, civilisational values, history, religion, physical characteristics and dress - but the most insistent and widespread is colour.

The reason is that colour is instantly recognisable, it defines difference at the glance of an eye. It also happens to have another effect. It makes the global hierarchy seem like the natural order of things: you are born with your colour, it is something nobody can do anything about, it is neither cultural nor social but physical in origin. In the era of globalisation, with mass migration and globalised cultural industries, colour has become the universal calling card of difference.

In interwar Europe, the dominant forms of racism were anti-semitism and racialised nationalisms, today it is colour: at a football match, it is blacks not Jews that get jeered, even in eastern Europe. Liberals like to think that racism is a product of ignorance, of a lack of contact, and that as human mobility increases, so racism will decline. This might be described as the Benetton view of the world.

Pre-Civil War, when poverty captured lots of white folk in its vast net, white privilege was nonetheless a strong force — not because white skin protected against descent into poverty but rather because it ensured white folk would never endure a range of negative experiences inflicted upon only people of color. If he decides to participate in politics, he will never worry about a state legislature trying to stop people who look like him from voting. The issue is not that some white people lack a proper vantage point to see their privilege, but that from their vantage point they have chosen to avert their gaze.

I must confess I believe it to be an unfruitful conversation starter. Consequently, Vance is right — the white privilege conversation features glaring imperfections. And that might push a person to conclude that some portion of the problem is that we talk about privilege in the wrong way.

In the future, wise thinkers might devise more persuasive arguments to convince white people about their privilege. But many will still choose ignorance over knowledge until they resolve to see the world as it is, not how they imagine it to be.

He crawled through a river of books and came out brilliant on the other side. Up Next. Commentary Why do so many white people deny the existence of white privilege? Up Next From Culture. A supporter displays a sign though her window during a protest on Saturday, July 9, in Washington, DC. Christian K. Twitter Facebook Email. Historian Pete Daniel talks about the positive and negative things going on in history. Historian Mary Ellen Curtin explains positions of power and white supremacists.

White Supremacy and Terrorism. Watch Related Video. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A study examined the DNA of nearly 6, people from around the world and found that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages — for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar — none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.

It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism. I f you asked an Englishman in the early part of the 17th century what colour skin he had, he might very well have called it white. But the whiteness of his skin would have suggested no more suitable basis for a collective identity than the roundness of his nose or the baldness of his head.

If you asked him to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman.

If that category proved too narrow — if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans — he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.

That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade — and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. Africans enjoyed no such privilege. By or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.

The plantation owners understood very well that their cruel treatment of indentured Europeans, and their even crueller treatment of enslaved Africans, might lead to thoughts — or worse — of vengeance. Significantly outnumbered, they lived in constant fear of uprisings. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma.

By the s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith? But the latter question, about privileges for Christians, required the colonialists to think in a new way.

No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white. A s late as , a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade.

The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public.

Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality.