RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 117 )and the Marxist concept of class society, women and the left have been bet-
ter able to intervene in mainstream discussions of justice because they have
also contested the factual picture that has framed these discussions.
My proposal is, then, that African American philosophers and others
working on race, and critical race theorists more generally, should make a
comparable theoretical move: challenge the mainstream liberal “anomaly”
framing of race by developing the concept of white supremacy. Doing so
would have several advantages.
To begin with, just on the conceptual level, this is the term that was tra-
ditionally used to denote white domination, so one would be drawing on a
vocabulary already established and familiar.^12 Feminists had to appropriate
a term (“patriarchy”) with a somewhat different sense and shift its mean-
ing; Marx had to provide an analysis of class society not merely in terms of
rich and poor but, more rigorously, in terms of ownership/ non- ownership
of the means of production. So both are being employed as terms of art.
But in the case of race in the United States, “white supremacy” was the term
standardly used. What would now be necessary, of course, would be to give
it a more detailed theoretical specification than it has hitherto had, map in
detail its various dimensions, and try to work out its typical dynamic.
Second, and more important, the term carries with it the connotation
of systematicity. Unlike the current, more fashionable “white privilege,”
“white supremacy” implies the existence of a system that does not just priv-
ilege whites but is also run by whites for white benefit. As such it is a global
conception, including not just the socio- economic but also the juridical,
political, cultural, and ideational realms. Thus it contests— paradigm versus
paradigm— the liberal individualist framework of analysis that has played,
and continues to play, such an important and pernicious role in obfuscating
the real centrality of race and racial subordination to the polity’s history.
Finally, by shifting the focus from the individual and attitudinal (the dis-
course of “racism”) to the realm of structures and power, the concept of
white supremacy facilitates the highlighting of the most important thing
from the perspective of justice, which is how the white population benefits
illicitly from their social location. Current debates about “racism” are ham-
pered by the fact that the term is now used in such a confusingly diverse
range of ways that it is difficult to find a stable semantic core. Moreover, the
dominant interpretation of white racism in the white population is prob-
ably individual beliefs about innate nonwhite biological inferiority and
individual hostility toward people of color. Given this conception, most
whites think of themselves as non- racist— one positive thing about the
present period is that nobody wants to be called a racist, though this has
also motivated a shift in how the term is defined— while still continuing
to endorse racial, particularly anti- black stereotypes. But in any case, with