The Five Refusals of White Supremacy

• Date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Andrea Gibbons
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12231

The Five Refusals of White Supremacy

By AndreA Gibbons*

AbstrAct. This article draws on the work of Charles Mills to posit white

supremacy as a global political, economic, and cultural system.

Resistance among people of color is, and has always been, wide-

spread. The focus here, however, is on what Mills (1997: 18) describes

as the “epistemology of ignorance” among whites themselves, serving

to preserve a sense of self as decent in the face of privileges depend-

ent upon obvious injustices against (nonwhite) others. Five themes

are identified within a broad and multidisciplinary range of literature,

described here as the “five refusals” of white supremacy. These are

points at which white ignorance must be actively maintained in order

to preserve both a sense of the self and of the wider structures of

white privilege and dominance. There is a refusal of the humanity of

the other—and a willingness to allow violence and exploitation to be

inflicted. There is a refusal to listen to or acknowledge the experience

of the other—resulting in marginalization and active silencing. There

is a refusal not just to confront long and violent histories of white

domination, but to recognize how these continue to shape injustice

into the present. There is a refusal to share space, particularly residen-

tial space, with resulting segregated geographies that perpetuate ine-

quality and insulate white ignorance. Finally there is a refusal to face

structural causes—capitalism as it has intertwined with white suprem-

acy from its earliest beginnings. To undo one requires the undoing of

the others. For each refusal there is a potential affirmation, presented

here in the hope that each might provide an understanding of the

breadth of work required to dismantle white supremacy and of the

multiple points for intervention.a

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, Nos. 3-4 (May-Septe mber, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.122 31

© 2018 American Journal of Econom ics and Sociology, Inc.

*Member of the Sustai nable Housing and Urban Studies Un it (SHUSU), at the

University of Salford, Eng land. Recent publications: City of Segre gation: 100 Years of

Struggle for Housing in Los Angele s (Verso, forthcoming); “Lin king Race, the Value of

Land and the Value of Life.” City 20(6)(2017):863_879. Email: a.r.gibbon s1@salford.ac.uk

730 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Introduct ion

White supremacy has come to inhabit a number of meanings over the

centuries, the most comfortable, common-sense version of it limited

to the extreme racism of those openly preaching hate against others.

Carol Anderson (2016: 100) describes the constant narrowing of its

definitions as “the whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons,”

which excludes ever greater numbers of people from being racist

simply by shifting the definition rather than by any meaningful shift in

practice or belief that leaves deep racial inequalities intact. While they

may encapsulate an aspect of white supremacist violence and hatred,

the existence of individuals and small groups cannot explain racism's

ongoing death-dealing inequalities of wealth and possibility (Gilmore

2002). These facts require a deeper understanding of the workings of

domination and of the ways in which race connects to structural and

systemic, as well as personal and bodily, violence and exploitation.

In the words of critical race theorist, Francis Lee Ansley (1989: 1024):

By “white supremacy” I do not mean to allude on ly to the self-conscious

racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a polit ical, eco-

nomic and cultural system i n which whites overwhelmingly control power

and material resources, conscious and uncon scious ideas of white supe-

riority and entitlement are widespre ad, and relations of white dominance

and non-white subordination are daily re enacted across a broad array of

institutions and soci al settings.

This broader sense of white supremacy as a system of dominance

“daily reenacted” is the star ting point here, understood as a continu-

ously developing, violent h istorical construc tion, built t hrough multi -

ple stages of colonial conquest, genocide and imperialism.

The ongoing need to dismantle such systemic white supremacy has

been an important focus of research, critical thought, and activism. Too

often, however, it has been seen as belonging only to the area of “race

relations” within the academic fields of sociology or ethnic studies, an

object of study set apart from other disciplines (Mills 2003). It is rarely

acknowledged as the institutional framework for them all, the status quo,

the color of the “universal,” the definition of “normal,” the “objective”

viewpoint. As Charles Mills (1997: 1–2) writes in The Racial Contract: