White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 18th-century
scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that shaped international relations and racial policy from the latter part of the
Age of Enlightenment until the late 20th century.
United States Early history White supremacy was dominant in the United States both before and after the
American Civil War, and it persisted for decades after the
Reconstruction era. The
Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 socially segregated white colonists from black enslaved persons, making them disparate groups and hindering their ability to unite. Unity of the commoners was a perceived fear of the Virginian
planter gentry, who wished to prevent repeated events such as
Bacon's Rebellion, occurring 29 years prior. Prior to the Civil War, many wealthy white Southerners
owned slaves; they tried to justify their economic exploitation of black people by creating a
"scientific" theory of white superiority and black inferiority. One such slave owner, future president
Thomas Jefferson, wrote in 1785 that blacks were "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind." In the
antebellum South, four million slaves were denied freedom. The outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy being cited as a cause for
state secession and the formation of the
Confederate States of America. '' (1844) sculpture, depicting a triumphant Columbus and a "female savage" (Native woman), which stood outside the
U.S. Capitol . Two of the black victims are still hanging while the third is on the ground.
Lynchings were often public spectacles for the white community to celebrate white supremacy in the U.S., and photos were often sold as postcards. parade in Washington, D.C. in 1926
Native Americans had been dehumanized as "merciless Indian savages" in the
United States Declaration of Independence, and in
Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 book ''
Why We Can't Wait he wrote: "Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race." Two sculptures reflecting the view of the Natives espoused in the declaration were commissioned by the U.S. government and stood outside the U.S. Capitol from 1844 to 1958: The Discovery of America, which depicted a triumphant Columbus and a "female savage" according to the Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan who proposed the sculpture, and The Rescue'', whose sculptor
Horatio Greenough wrote that it was "to convey the idea of the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes". In an 1890 editorial about the Natives and the
American Indian Wars, author
L. Frank Baum wrote: "The Whites, by
law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians." The
Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only. In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white were
disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Professor Leland T. Saito of the
University of Southern California writes: "Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion."
19th century A belief in racial purity and white supremacy were among the reasons for the
anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S, with
Abraham Lincoln stating in an 1858 speech, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to
intermarry with white people. I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race." By the late 1800s, 38
U.S. states had laws banning interracial marriage.
Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white supremacist and the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, gave a speech calling for the lynching of Black men.
20th century A series of U.S politicians continued to advocate and agitate towards White supremacy. An example being an Elected Governor of Mississippi,
James K. Vardaman, who used the term White Supremacy verbatim when he said "If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy."
Eugene Talmadge was a white supremacist who was elected four times as the governor of Georgia. His opponent, Ellis Gibbs Arnall, once noted that nobody could beat Talmadge in what he cynically called the "nigger-hating contest". Both were white supremacists and
anti-black, but Arnall was less crude about it. The denial of social and political freedom to minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the
civil rights movement. The movement was spurred by the lynching of
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy. David Jackson writes it was the image of the "murdered child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism." Sociologist Stephen Klineberg has stated that U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965 clearly "declared that
Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race". The last 16 states in which interracial marriage was banned had such laws in place until 1967 when they were invalidated by the
Supreme Court of the United States' decision in
Loving v. Virginia. These mid-century gains had a major impact on white Americans' political views; segregation and white racial superiority, which had been publicly endorsed in the 1940s, became minority views within the white community by the mid-1970s, and continued to decline in 1990s' polls to a single-digit percentage. For sociologist
Howard Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States. After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology to the
American far-right. According to
Kathleen Belew, a historian of
race and
racism in the United States, white militancy shifted after the
Vietnam War from supporting the existing racial order to a more radical position (self-described as "
white power" or "
white nationalism") committed to overthrowing the
United States government and establishing a white homeland. Such
anti-government militia organizations are one of three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States, with white-supremacist groups (such as the
Ku Klux Klan,
neo-Nazi organizations, and
racist skinheads) and a
religious fundamentalist movement (such as
Christian Identity) being the other two.
21st century The presidential campaign of
Donald Trump led to a surge of interest in white supremacy and
white nationalism in the United States, bringing increased media attention and new members to their movement; his campaign enjoyed their widespread support. Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the
scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.
British Commonwealth There has been debate whether
Winston Churchill, who was voted "the greatest ever Briton" in 2002, was "a racist and white supremacist". British historian
Richard Toye, author of ''Churchill's Empire'', concluded that "Churchill did think that white people were superior."
South Africa A number of Southern African nations experienced severe racial tension and conflict during global
decolonization, particularly as
white Africans of European ancestry fought to protect their preferential social and political status. Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times under the
Dutch Empire. It continued when the British took over the
Cape of Good Hope in 1795.
Apartheid was introduced as an officially structured policy by the
Afrikaner-dominated
National Party after the
general election of 1948. Apartheid's legislation divided inhabitants into four racial groups – "black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian", with coloured divided into several sub-classifications. In 1970, the Afrikaner-run government
abolished non-white political representation, and starting that year
black people were deprived of South African citizenship. South Africa abolished apartheid in 1991.
Rhodesia In
Rhodesia a predominantly white government issued its own
unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 during an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to avoid majority rule. Following the
Rhodesian Bush War which was fought by
African nationalists, Rhodesian prime minister
Ian Smith acceded to biracial political representation in 1978 and the state achieved recognition from the United Kingdom as
Zimbabwe in 1980.
Germany Nazism promoted the idea of a superior
Germanic people or
Aryan race in Germany during the early 20th century. Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority were combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining the belief that white people were members of an Aryan "
master race" that was superior to other races, particularly the Jews, who were described as the "Semitic race",
Slavs, and
Gypsies, who they associated with "cultural sterility".
Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the
ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the "purity" of the Nordic or Germanic race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan or Germanic peoples and Jewish culture. As the
Nazi Party's chief racial theorist,
Alfred Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified
Hitler's racial and ethnic policies. Rosenberg promoted the
Nordic theory, which regarded
Nordics as the "master race", superior to all others, including other Aryans (Indo-Europeans). Rosenberg got the racial term
Untermensch from the title of
Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book
The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version
Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925). Rosenberg was the leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard. An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "
colored" peoples to white civilization, and wrote
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. In establishing a restrictive entry system for Germany in 1925, Hitler wrote of his admiration for America's immigration laws: "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races." German praise for America's institutional racism, previously found in Hitler's
Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s. Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models. To preserve the Aryan or
Nordic race, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, and later between Germans and
Romani and
Slavs. The Nazis used the
Mendelian inheritance theory to argue that social traits were innate, claiming that there was a racial nature associated with certain general traits, such as inventiveness or criminal behavior. According to the 2012 annual report of Germany's interior intelligence service, the
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, at the time there were 26,000 right-wing extremists living in Germany, including 6,000
neo-Nazis.
Australia and New Zealand Fifty-one people died from
two consecutive terrorist attacks at the
Al Noor Mosque and the
Linwood Islamic Centre by an Australian white supremacist carried out on March 15, 2019. The terrorist attacks have been described by Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern as "One of New Zealand's darkest days". On August 27, 2020, the shooter was sentenced to
life without parole. In 2016, there was a rise in debate over the appropriateness of the naming of
Massey University in
Palmerston North after
William Massey, whom many historians and critics have described as a white supremacist. Lecturer Steve Elers was a leading proponent of the idea that Massey was an avowed white supremacist, given Massey "made several anti-Chinese racist statements in the public domain" and intensified the
New Zealand head tax. In 1921, Massey wrote in the
Evening Post: "New Zealanders are probably the purest Anglo-Saxon population in the British Empire. Nature intended New Zealand to be a white man's country, and it must be kept as such. The strain of Polynesian will be no detriment". This is one of many quotes attributed to him regarded as being openly racist. ==Ideologies and movements==