Organization or Publication
American University Library
White supremacy describes structural hierarchies in society that translate the subjective meanings attached to various races and groups into differential relations of power. These relations of power are organized around the idea of white superiority, or the perception of whiteness as the norm and standard against which other races and ethnicities are defined. It is maintained through legal, social, political, and cultural systems enforcing racial dominance through the unequal distribution of power across society. White supremacy works through and exacerbates inequalities around other social constructs such as class, gender, sexuality, and geography. For instance, while identity groups such as white women or white LGBTQ+ persons can enjoy a degree of the privileges and benefits that come with belonging in the white majority group, they also face degrees of violence and exclusion for their respective differences from the white heterosexual man of property who is held as the default norm of whiteness. Another example is how white supremacy historically led to the class-based impoverishment of white workers and laborers in the United States, who accepted unequal distribution of economic privileges in exchange for the racial privilege of being considered white in opposition to black slaves (Roediger 13).
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://subjectguides.library.american.edu/c.php?g=1025915&p=7749719
Source Type: Study guide
Country: USA
Tags: Educational
Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
White supremacy is a term used to characterize various belief systems central to which are one or more of the following key tenets: 1) whites should have dominance over people of other backgrounds, especially where they may co-exist; 2) whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society; 3) white people have their own “culture” that is superior to other cultures; 4) white people are genetically superior to other people. As a full-fledged ideology, white supremacy is far more encompassing than simple racism or bigotry. Most white supremacists today further believe that the white race is in danger of extinction due to a rising “flood” of non-whites, who are controlled and manipulated by Jews, and that imminent action is need to “save” the white race.
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://extremismterms.adl.org/glossary/white-supremacy
Source Type: Reference
Country: USA
Tags: Educational | Advocacy | Nonprofit
Australia Focus Guide
White supremacy, in its most basic definition, refers to the belief that white people are superior to those of all other racial backgrounds, which can manifest in various forms, from overt acts of racism to more subtle, systemic inequalities. In Australia, the legacy of white supremacy is deeply embedded in the nation’s history, particularly in the treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Colonization in the late 18th century marked the beginning of a long struggle for Indigenous Australians, whose cultures have existed for tens of thousands of years. The arrival of British settlers led to widespread dispossession, violence, and the implementation of policies aimed at erasing Indigenous identities. This history is not merely an artifact of the past; it continues to shape contemporary social dynamics, influencing everything from government policy to everyday interactions in communities across Australia.
Source Title: “Me and White Supremacy: Confronting Australia’s Hidden Histories”
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://australiafocusguide.com/blog/me-and-white-supremacy-australia/
Source Type: Blog post
Country: Australia
Year: 2025
Tags: Educational
Columbia Journalism Review
Demonstrations over the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in violence and death were described in news reports in different ways. Some called one group of demonstrators “white nationalists.” Others call that same group “white supremacists.” Some used both terms in the same article.
Those terms mean two different things, though they are in the same family.
A “supremacist” believes a particular race (or sex, or other genetic or cultural characteristic) is naturally superior to others. Because you must know what the characteristic is that is believed to be “supreme,” an adjective has to be attached. Thus there are “white supremacists,” “Muslim supremacists,” “male supremacists” (also sometimes known as “misogynists”), etc. Racial and cultural groups can also have their own internal divisions, as in Sunnis who believe themselves “supreme” in relation to Shiites, and vice versa.
A “nationalist,” though, is at heart merely someone who strongly believes in the interest of one’s own nation, however “nation” might be defined. President Trump is a “nationalist,” as are most liberals, populists, and everyone to the right and left.
But adding an adjective to indicate what “their” nation is can turn “nationalism” into a polarizing term. A “white nationalist” generally wants a nation of white people. Whether that means creating a separate nation of just white people or pushing those who are not white out of their current nation depends on which branch of “white nationalism” is talking.
While many “white nationalists” are also “white supremacists” because they believe white people are inherently superior to other races, the terms are really not interchangeable.
Individual Author(s): Perlman, Merrill
Source Title: “The key difference between ‘nationalists’ and ‘supremacists’”
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/nationalist-supremacist.php
Source Type: Web article
Country: USA
Year: 2017
Tags: Scholarly
EBSCO Research Starters
White nationalism is a political and ideological movement advocating for the preservation of a white national majority within historically white nations. It promotes the belief that white people constitute a distinct race deserving of national pride and superiority, often opposing immigration, multiculturalism, and racial integration. Central to this ideology is the fear of a so-called “white genocide,” a conspiracy theory suggesting that non-white immigration and demographic shifts will lead to the extinction of the white race. White nationalism shares similarities with white supremacism and white separatism but integrates elements of both, embracing ideas from Nazism and social Darwinism.
Historically, white nationalism in the United States traces back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with organizations like the Ku Klux Klan playing a significant role in promoting racist ideologies. Over time, these beliefs have persisted, adapting to contemporary contexts and sometimes manifesting in violent incidents associated with far-right politics. The movement has gained visibility through the internet, particularly via the alt-right, which disseminates white nationalist ideas using memes and online cultures. Many adherents express a sense of victimhood, perceiving threats to their racial identity from non-white communities and mainstream societal values. Antisemitism also features prominently in some factions of the movement, with conspiracy theories attributing various societal issues to Jewish influence.
Individual Author(s): Caffrey, Cait
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/political-science/white-nationalism
Source Type: Study guide
Country: USA
Year: 2023
Tags: Educational
The Economist
The phenomenon is hard to define because of its ideological and geographical fractiousness. Broadly, white nationalists want to achieve an ethno-state of, and for, whites. Some do their best to avoid overtly claiming that any race is inferior, arguing that each should have its own ethno-state. The majority, however, are white supremacists, who also believe that races form a normative hierarchy with whiteness at the top. They demand policies ranging from stricter controls on immigration to wholesale ethnic cleansing, or even genocide. All this is often tied to the fear of “white genocide”, or white “replacement”, ie, the notion that the “white race” is being squeezed out of existence through its own low birth rate, miscegenation and more prolific reproduction by non-white people.
Modern white nationalism, which has spread across the world, first emerged in America after the civil war. With the end of slavery, states took action to preserve the privileged position of American Protestants of western European heritage, including “Jim Crow” laws that enforced segregation. Others took to paramilitary violence and lynchings. The fixation with being white grew with increased immigration, especially of Chinese people, Irish Catholics, southern Europeans and Jews. New immigration acts were designed to restrict the number of new arrivals. Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race”, published in 1916, melded nativist sentiment with eugenics to produce a theory of white supremacy and “race suicide”. Adolf Hitler reportedly wrote to Grant, stating that the book was “his bible”.
Though discredited by the war against Nazism and later by the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s, white nationalism experienced a resurgence towards the end of the 20th century, leading to a number of violent attacks in America and Europe.
In 1988 David Lane wrote “The White Genocide Manifesto”, giving a new name to Grant’s theory of “race suicide”. This text introduced the world to white nationalism’s rallying cry: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”, a phrase canonised by white nationalists as “the 14 words”. Beyond a core belief in white superiority, white nationalists vary widely in their views. Some share the deep suspicion of the federal government found in militia groups; some embrace a revisionist history of the civil war that glorifies the Confederacy; some believe in anti-Semitic conspiracies about global Jewish control, including the theory that an internationalist Jewish elite is responsible for encouraging immigration. “The Turner Diaries”, a white-nationalist dystopic fantasy published in 1978 by William Luther Pierce, told the story of an armed insurrection against the federal government by defenders of the white race. It influenced both Lane and Timothy McVeigh, a disenchanted army veteran and gun-rights enthusiast who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168 people in 1995.
White nationalism evolved rapidly with the advent of the internet. It has picked up the irony-tinged discourse of the darker corners of cyberspace to couch political views in a humour that never reveals whether the writer is serious or not. This allows white nationalists to use non-believers, just in it “for the lulz [laughs]”, to spread their message to a wider audience. In Europe, meanwhile, white nationalists agonised about a supposed Islamic invasion, particularly after 9/11 and the rise of global jihadism. In “The Great Replacement”, Renaud Camus claimed true Frenchmen were being supplanted by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, encouraged by a “replacist” elite. American white nationalists have incorporated Muslims into their taxonomy of invading races but remain mostly focused on Latinos, blacks and Jews.
Source Title: “What is ‘White Nationalism’?”
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2019/08/14/what-is-white-nationalism
Source Type: Web article
Country: UK
Year: 2018
Tags: Educational | Media
Merriam-Webster
1: the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races
2: the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20supremacy
Source Type: Reference
Country: USA
Tags: Educational
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology
White supremacy is a racial order that relies on a presumed “natural” superiority of whiteness and assigns to all groups racialized as non-white biological or cultural characteristics of inferiority. Despite decades of scientific studies refuting these claims, beliefs in racial difference continue to rely on ideas of innate or genetic differences between groups. Scholars now widely agree that race is a social, cultural, and political distinction that was and continues to be forged through relations of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. A focus on white supremacy does not limit scholars to the study of white supremacists, that is, those individuals and groups that outwardly espouse a racial order that privileges whiteness and white people and frequently endorse physical violence to maintain this order. Under white supremacy, societies privilege whiteness even in the absence of explicit laws and sometimes while promoting ideologies of racial inclusion and equality. Contexts of white supremacy feature the consolidation of white power and wealth at the expense of people of color—an arrangement that is maintained through racial capitalism, settler colonialism, anti-blackness, imperial conquest, Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism, and xenophobic or anti-immigrant sentiment. Widespread awareness of linguistic difference can be mobilized to support these pillars of white supremacy through a range of official language policies and overt acts of linguistic suppression, as well as more covert or subtle language practices and ideologies. While the term “white supremacy” has gained broader circulation in the 21st century, these topics have been studied by linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists for decades under the more familiar headings of “race and language,” “racism and language,” and “raciolinguistics.” This scholarship examines how racial domination is consolidated, maintained, and justified through attention paid to language, but also the ways that marginalized speakers take up a broad range of linguistic practices to challenge assumptions about the superiority of whiteness and emphasize non-white racial pride, community ties, and cultural and linguistic heritage and traditions.
Individual Author(s): Roth-Gordon, Jennifer
Source Title: “Language and White Supremacy”
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.591
Source Type: Book chapter
Country: UK
Year: 2023
Tags: Scholarly
Women of Color Advancing Peace & Security (WCAPS)
White supremacy is a social and systemic manifestation of the belief that white people hold a level of superiority over other races, thus granting them the right to exert dominion over people of other racial groups, by use of both social and systemic structures. This may result in the perpetuation of this ideology, by use of violence, passive, or covert acts with these exertions being exhibited exclusively or in unison with other such actions. (p. 6)
Individual Author(s): April S. Love, Esq.
Source Title: Recognizing, Understanding, and Defining Systemic and Individual White Supremacy
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://issuu.com/wcapsnet/docs/recognizing_understanding_and_eradicating_system
Source Type: Report
Country: USA
Year: 2022
Tags: Advocacy | Nonprofit
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