White supremacy is many things. It is heinous, widespread, and extraordinarily difficult to extinguish. It is perverse, pervasive, and persuasive. Historically, it has been the “natural order” of society, of humanity itself. It has been and continues to be law. It is the way things work and the line along which many think. But most of all, it is a complete, utter fantasy. It is based in nothing of substance whatsoever. It is, and forever will be, a lie.
To pass such an enormous lie as an unassailable truth, one must not only dress it up, but one must dress it up within a greater context. The task of the white supremacist, whose job is to defend and promote the indefensible, is to introduce the indefensible into the mainstream. It is to perpetually blur the line between reality and fantasy so that their fantasy might prevail.
We may find a contemporary example of such campaigns in recent suggestions to pardon Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd in 2020. Chauvin, a white man, is serving both a twenty-one-year federal sentence and a twenty-two-and-a-half-year state sentence for killing Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by kneeling on his neck.
The argument for Chauvin’s innocence is indefensible. He deliberately obstructed a man’s breathing for almost nine minutes despite hearing him say over twenty times that he couldn’t breathe. However, there has for years been a conservative-led movement seeking to somehow shift the blame for a white policeman’s murder of an unarmed Black man onto the Black man.
How could such a cut-and-dry case of racially motivated police brutality be up for debate? Simple: Anything goes in the pursuit of white supremacy, and the more ludicrous, the better. This is a timeworn method for acclimating society to the insanity of white supremacy and has been used in cults and authoritarian governments since the onsets of both. The goal is to make you think that it’s the world that’s gone mad, not you.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who has previously embarrassed himself by admitting that he can’t define systemic racism, is among those leading the charge in seeking a presidential pardon for Chauvin. It’s worth noting that while a sitting president does in fact have the power to commute a federal sentence, Chauvin’s state sentence would remain. But this is immaterial—Shapiro and others who have floated the idea of pardoning Chauvin understand that it is a symbolic, not physical, victory they’re after.
To pardon Chauvin would be a statement. It would state that so long as you are Black and without financial or political power, anything can be done to you with impunity. It would state that white supremacy is the only true law of the land.
We may initially consider this campaign to be shameless, but everything done in the pursuit of white supremacy is shameless. What room can be left for shame when, by virtue of your philosophy, your entire life is dedicated to being wrong and proud of it?
Featured image/photo courtesy of Josh Hild on Pexels.