White Supremacy Social systems defined
The concept of whiteness has been a metaphor for melanin deficiency. The lack of melanin has been associated with purity or whiteness and the presence of melanin has been associated with contamination/contagion or color. These ideas that categorize and define the human family as being able to be "only one thing" is a factor and facet of European, capitalist, industrial society. This stems from a binary approach to reality. It is either this or that, us or them, you or me, black or white.
This binary approach then contributes to a low context view of reality. It allows for abstracting experience from their context. We see this reflected in ideas such as "externalities" in economics or "collateral damage" in war. We also see it manifest in the dehumanization of the African personality in the european imagination.
For the author of the American Declaration of Independence to assert that "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" while at the same time alienating African people from those rights required an "othering" that is reflected in the black/white race-based binary view of reality. It also reflects the low context view that allows for compartmentalization and othering. Both the binary and low context views are products of the much hallowed "enlightenment area." But to use this aspect of the enlightenment to demonize it is to acquiesce to the dominant narrative that you can only be one thing. It has its strengths and its weaknesses.
If the factor, indeed the major factor, is this enlightenment era approach to reality that is based on binary categorization (purity) and low context characterization (othering), then the facets of white supremacy culture are:
1. melanin deficient dominated (the melanin deficient higher on human hierarchy than melanin enhanced)
2. Obsessed with european cultural standard (the "right" way is based on euro-standards)
3. melanin deficient (white) identified esthetic (melanin deficiency considered desirable and standard)
4. melanin deficient (white) centered perspectives (perspectives that support/promote the interest of the melanin deficient are the focus)
These factors and facets are combined to both condition individual behavior and to create institutional behavior:
Social system (institutional) > path of least resistance > Individual (personal experience) > make systems happen > social systems.
