ABSTRACT
The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization and are therefore civilization's guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. In the context of hermeneutics of race, outlines some of the history of contested meanings and struggles over the authority to interpret texts, human nature, and social relations. The fetish character of whiteness, manifest in the disavowal of the social and material conditions necessary for the development of subjectivity, practices of freedom, and the social-normative order from which subjectivity can emerge and freedom be enabled, generates a dialectical antagonism and an epistemology of ignorance. The first benefit of whiteness is private dominium or ownership, which concerns property right, while the second is public dominium or self-determination, which concerns sovereignty.
