In his inaugural speech as the new US president, Joe Biden described ‘white supremacy’ as a security threat. Ever since the 9/11 episode in 2001, the inaugural speeches of the three presidents who preceded Biden, pointed out Islamic extremism as the leading threat. Biden too spoke of religious extremism, but his emphasis was more on the spectre of white supremacy haunting American society. 

Till Donald Trump ascended as president in 2016, the American political and security establishments largely understood the idea and manifestations of white supremacy as an eccentric nuisance. This, despite the fact that incidents of racially motivated violence against non-white communities had witnessed a spike during the two-term presidency of the country’s first black president, Barack Obama (2008-2016).

To most commentators at the time, the spike was a reaction in some white segments of the society to the election of a black man as president. According to this narrative, Obama’s victory threatened to usurp the sense of privilege that is inherent in the psyche of the country’s white majority.

The same narrative then evolved to suggest that this reaction swelled into a mainstream movement that helped propel Trump’s campaign in 2016. Trump’s presidency emboldened various white supremacy groups, whose ideas even found a place in the thinking and emotions of many non-militant white Americans.

Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, but managed to bag over 74 million votes. Fifty-four percent of white American men eligible to vote, cast their ballots for Trump. Forty-two per cent of white women did the same. 

Is it the paranoia of losing power to them that leads to prejudice and discrimination against minority groups?

Over the decades, many political scientists and historians have spoken about what Pennsylvania State University’s Joshua Inwood calls the ‘US racial state.’ In a July 2018 essay, Inwood writes, “the US racial state turns to whiteness to prevent change.” According to Inwood, slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, but racist ideas and attitudes prevailed. He writes that every time the federal government has attempted to address the issue of white racism, varied economic, political and social sectors of the white polity have grouped together to stall such efforts. 

Only a handful of these may refer to themselves as being white supremacists. But in times of economic and political crises, most have been known to respond affirmatively to alarmist notions such as ‘whites are being turned into a hapless minority.’

Inwood describes racism as a social construct. To him it manifests itself from a position of power when this power feels threatened. However, he is also of the view that this position of power may also be an illusion, embedded in racially dominant homogeneous groups as a way to control them.

The American sociologist W. Du Bois demonstrates, in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, that this illusion helped big businesses to disperse class solidarity between white and black workers, because it made even a poor white American believe he enjoyed privileges because of his colour. Inwood calls it “the psychological wage of whiteness.” 

For over 300 years, racism has often been associated with Caucasians exhibiting prejudice and discrimination towards non-white people, believing them to be inferior. Interestingly though, this understanding of racism was not present before the 18th century. According to Bernard Lewis, in the anthology Racism: A Global Read, one of the first demonstrations of racism was perhaps the coinage of the word ‘barbarians’ by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) to describe non-Greeks.

However, some historians believe that racism was practised even earlier in South Asia when, from 1300 BCE, ‘fair-skinned’ tribes from Central Asia began to settle in this region. 

According to an essay in 1978’s Pro­ceedings of the Indian History Congress, over the course of time, the Central Asian tribes began to label the dark-skinned indigenous people as ‘Sudra’ or the untouchables. The Sudra were forced to do menial chores because they were said to be inferior. This eventually led to the creation of a caste system that became a contentious part of Hinduism. 

According to Lewis, Middle-Eastern Arabs looked down upon black Africans. In the 14th century, he claimed, the Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun explained them as savages. But in the 2003 issue of the journal History and Theory, the anthropologist Professor Majid Hannoum disputed this by writing that Khaldun’s views in this regard were often the result of “mistranslations of his writings by French orientalists.” 

The French philosopher Michel Foucault saw racism as a product of 18th and 19th century ideas of nationalism, through which ‘nations’ began to emerge on the basis of ethnicity, formed through largely manufactured myths. Ethnic groups began to be explained as races by a body of pseudo-sciences such as eugenics, and the convoluted theories of some biologists who tried to demonstrate that ‘white races’ were superior to non-white ones.

These theories produced what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called ‘popular racism’ and which, in turn, aided Caucasian colonial powers and nations to justify their violent and discriminatory subjugation of non-white groups. 

The dynamics of this form of racism have remained more or less intact. But they are not just restricted to the ‘white races.’ Take for example the idea of ‘Birthism.’ The American Constitution does not allow a US citizen who wasn’t born in the US to contest the presidential elections. This law was originally enacted to keep black slaves — brought from Africa and settled in the US — away from achieving any political office. In many Muslim-majority countries today, including Pakistan, a non-Muslim cannot run for prime minister or president, even if he or she is a Pakistani citizen. 

There is often a surge in racially motivated violence against non-whites in the US and Europe whenever there is any progress in the status of non-white communities. The threat of these communities usurping white dominance is the trigger.

On the other hand, in ‘brown’ India, the government is intensifying ridiculous fearmongering that its Muslim minority community would overturn the country’s Hindu majority, leading to violence against Muslims. According to the German anthropologist, Markus Daechsel, this fear is rooted in the nascent apprehensions of the fringe Hindu nationalist groups that first emerged in the early 20th century. Now the fear has gone mainstream. 

In Pakistan, a Sunni-Muslim-majority country, the fact that certain non-Sunni communities were flourishing in various important government and state institutions, contributed to the constitutional ouster of one such group as being ‘heretical’, while other non-Sunni groups have often faced violence and discrimination (along with non-Muslim communities).

Any legislation to improve their condition is almost always met with hostile responses from various Sunni outfits. This often sees the federal government rapidly backtrack, thus conceding even more ground to forces that derive their power from prejudice and paranoia. 

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 31st, 2021