![\"\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/White-Back-in-White-House.jpg\" "\\"White")
<\/a><\/p>\nThis Saturday, ChangeLab and OneAmerica are hosting an event in Seattle called The Past, Present & Future of Multiracial Solidarity<\/a>. In preparation, I thought I\u2019d offer my take on how white supremacy works, and some thoughts on what solidarity requires of us.<\/p>\n Just to be clear, by white supremacy, I don’t mean the KKK. I mean the set of ideas and beliefs that creates and enforces whiteness as the dominant norm.<\/p>\n No one has taught me more about white supremacy than Andrea Smith. Her scholarship led me to see not a single system of racial oppression, but what she describes as a more complex system made up of \u201cthree pillars.” I’ve come to think of it as a kind of three-legged stool. It has opened my eyes to what solidarity demands of us as people of color: not just to see how we are oppressed, but also how we participate, knowingly or not, in keeping that stool upright.<\/p>\n One leg of the stool is slavery, the idea of black people as property. This logic has been built into the U.S. economy and political system and endures today in the black-white racial hierarchy. It tells us that if we\u2019re not black, we have the chance to rise above the brutality of capitalism. Of course this isn\u2019t true, but that hardly matters. It\u2019s a powerful tool in racial politics, motivating people from across the color line to buy into anti-black racism out of self-interest, consciously or not.<\/p>\n As Scot wrote in a RaceFiles post called, \u201cBlackness is the Fulcrum<\/a>,\u201d there is no hierarchy of oppression, but anti-black racism is what gives white supremacy traction and leverage. Not only are structures like the Constitution and the electoral college rooted in slavery<\/a>; over time, the politics of anti-blackness has led to the shredding of critical safety net programs and to the rise of a massive prison system. It\u2019s also what led whites in the U.S. South to defect from the Democratic Party after WWII \u2013 an opportunity that Republicans seized upon through the Southern Strategy. In popular consciousness, blackness equals the bottom; that’s what makes it such a powerful political tool.<\/p>\n By the way, for anyone who missed The Nation\u2019s<\/a> release late last year of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, a Reagan-era Republican strategist, here\u2019s a lesson in racial codes:<\/p>\n [youtube_sc url=”http:\/\/youtu.be\/X_8E3ENrKrQ” title=”Exclusive:%20Lee%20Atwater%27s%20Infamous%201981%20Interview%20on%20the%20Southern%20Strategy.%20The%20Nation,%20Nov.%2013,%202012″]<\/p>\n Indeed, anti-black racism led to the creation of the model minority myth, which has created particular frictions between blacks and Asians in the United States. It matters little that Asian Americans didn\u2019t create the myth<\/a>, or that it\u2019s just that – a myth, or that it actually fuels anti-Asian violence, or that there\u2019s in fact a legacy of Asian-black solidarity. The myth is effective, and some of us have bought into it<\/a>. It lifts up Asian Americans as successful examples of hardworking immigrants fulfilling the American Dream, implicitly portraying us as living indictments of blackness. This is why, as Asian Americans, one strategic way to attack the myth is to vocally and visibly reject anti-black racism.<\/p>\n Another leg of the stool is genocide, which mandates the disappearance of Native peoples. It\u2019s the thinking that tells us that non-Natives are rightfully entitled to own indigenous lands, because Native people simply don\u2019t exist. This was also a key part of building the U.S. economy, by forcibly removing Native peoples to make way for owning land and exploiting resources for profit. It can be seen today in everything from the shameless naming of towns and sports teams to the massive resource extraction<\/a> projects throughout North America and the Global South.<\/p>\n