When people hear the words white supremacy or white-body supremacy, they often think of neo-Nazis and other extremists with hateful and violent agendas. That is certainly one extreme type of white-body supremacy. But mainstream American culture is infused with a more subtle and less overt variety.
This is a major theme of the book. It consistently challenges the notion that white supremacy is an extremist ideology easily recognizable when you see it. The counterargument offered is that white supremacy is instead much more pervasive and a far more sinister presence in everyday interactions even of people who can rightly defend themselves against all charges of explicitly racist thinking. White supremacy is not always characterized by what people think, but can be subtly conveyed through how they behave. In fact, even behavior that is usually expressly associated as anti-racist can be viewed as a manifestation of vestige of instinctually reflexive white supremacist ideology.
Race is a myth—something made up in the seventeenth century that has been carried forward, day by day and century after century, into the present…It’s a classic example of what therapists call gaslighting: getting people to override their own experience and perceptions by repeating a lie over and over, and then “proving” it with still more lies, denials, and misdirection. Eventually, if the gaslighting is successful, the lies are widely accepted as truth—or even as essential facts of life, like birth, death, and gravity.
The assertion that race is a myth may come as a shock to many people, but there is no other word for it. Race is commonly—even today—widely misunderstood to have its roots in genetics and biology. The determination and division of races did not grow naturally out of medical research, however. Its origins can be directly traced back to divisions made solely for the basis of social and economic purposes. Separating blacks and whites into two separate racially distinct groups arose—as these things often do—as a response to containing power within a minority by seeking a way to creative division among the majority comprising the underclass; a majority made up of both black and white people. The creation of the peasant class in New World in which its benefits would be extended only to white and denied to blacks serviced this desire among the rich minority quite effectively and set in motion the entire mythic idea of the existence of biological division of races that still persists today.
White-body supremacy is always functioning in our bodies. It operates in our thinking brains, in our assumptions, expectations, and mental shortcuts. It operates in our muscles and nervous systems, where it routinely creates constriction. But it operates most powerfully in our lizard brains. Our lizard brain cannot think. It is reflexively protective, and it is strong. It loves whatever it feels will keep us safe, and it fears and hates whatever it feels will do us harm.
By “lizard brain” is meant that part of the brain responsible for the lowest-level functioning on instinctive reasoning: whether to flee or fight in order to survive another day. This concept of reflexive thinking at an instinctual level is central to the author’s thesis. He forwards the argument that behavior which is undeniably racist is not always necessarily the result of a rational process of decision-making which arrives at a racist conclusion. Much racist behavior is not intended as such and sometimes it may even specifically be intended as anti-racist, but nevertheless becomes a manifestation of racial tension that lies deep-seated within the learned subconscious. This is the sort of thinking which explains how a person who sincerely rejects an accusation of racism—and has the history to back it up—can still be shown actual evidence of unconscious acts of prejudice and be genuinely oblivious to the underlying racial overtones in that display of prejudicial behavior.
