ABSTRACT
Th e term white supremacy is provocative and brutal, conjuring images of a colonial, imperialist past of genocide, slavery, and segregation or of closed-minded, racist, militant hate-mongers in the present era. Many writers of critical race theory modify the rhetoric, referring to white privilege and institutionalized racism or distinguishing between covert and overt acts of racism and describing prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviors. bell hooks says white supremacy is “the most useful term” to express, for her, the ongoing “exploitation of black people and other people of color in this society.”1 In the academy and other areas of intellectual life, hooks says the term white supremacy became not only useful, but “necessary” to clarify the central thrust of her work on racism as distinguished from the work of white feminists who “wished to exercise control over [black feminists’] bodies and thoughts as their racist ancestors had” and “fellow white English professors who want very much to have ‘a’ black person in ‘their’ department, as long as that person acts and thinks like them.”2
