ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on white supremacy as social structure. It suggests that the best strategy is to draw on popular usage while revising it where necessary in the light of a more socio-politically informed understanding of the history of race. In the United States in particular one also needs to take into account the role of white race riots and lynchings in terrorizing the black population, where in a sense the white citizenry as a group are authorized to take up a parastatal capacity to maintain racial order. And across the colonial world, of course, armies, militias, national guards, and a politicized police force were formally delegated with the task of suppressing indigenous resistance."Whiteness" would eventually become not merely a set of political and socioeconomic power-relationships, but a kind of ontological and epistemic state imbued with its own worldview-shaping power, a carrier of epistemic violence, a "racial frame" for understanding social reality.
