“White supremacy is built into every part of our country.”
Shouldn’t the term be “White supremacism”? Calling it “supremacism” instead of “supremacy” clarifies that it is an ideology - a flawed, stupid, evil one - and not a state of being, i.e. implying that whites ARE in fact supreme.
I feel like calling it white supremacism would do more to undermine the ideology, on a subconscious level. But maybe that’s just unrealistic.
But they can still carry connotations, although I think the difference in this particular phrase is too small to matter. For your example, the term homophobia implies fear even if everyone is aware that it doesn’t, which may make people more likely to think of homophobes as being afraid than if someone used another term.
The slam dunk example of this is the formerly-widespread “inclusive he”, where instead of saying “one does” or “he or she does”, some people claimed that simply saying “he” covers both genders. A study, not that it needed to be made, showed that people are more likely to think of someone performing an action as male when the inclusive he is used, even though it was a phrase that had long been used to refer to both genders collectively.
For the term “white privilege” for instance, people claim that it does not mean that those society has deemed to be “white” are basking in hot tubs of unearned wealth. But when the college bribery scandal came out there were lot of people who jumped up and said “See! Privilege in action!” Which shows that those people trying to point out hypocrisy were instead pointing out that they did reflexively think of people who are not as hurt by prejudice as others could as a rule afford six-figure bribes to get their kids into college.
I remember a thread a few weeks ago that said “look at the PC brigade that wants to stop all references to ‘black’ as a metaphor for bad things!” To my surprise there was general agreement that the idea that using something like “black day” would reinforce the idea that black = bad was ludicrous. It seems pretty likely to me that if you use white = good and black = bad in some contexts, it subtly reinforces that belief in other contexts.
I didn’t use to think this. I can see how other people might disagree on it.
Historically, however, “white supremacy” has been as much a “state of being” as an ideology. The phrase came into currency when white Southerners began using it to describe the system of African American disenfranchisement that they imposed beginning in the 1890’s.
For example, the chairman of the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention described the mission of the convention as being “to establish white supremacy in this State”. He meant “supremacy” in the sense of exclusive political power.
Conversely, the voter registration drives of the Civil Rights movement were “challenging white supremacy”, not so much by challenging the belief that white people were better (although the Civil Rights movement certainly did that as well), but by changing the facts on the ground to rectify the power imbalance.
Today we don’t have “white supremacy” in the sense of Alabama in 1901, but obviously, there are still power imbalances, and to call them “white supremacy” doesn’t imply that white people are better, but only that they still exercise disproportionate political, social, and economic power.
I disagree. When I think of “white supremacy” I think of the segregated South and apartheid South Africa. I was born in 1951, and that’s the only meaning it has to me. But there’s little resemblance to those conditions today. Using the same word for both is just disingenuous. It’s used precisely to inflame the situation as if they really are the same thing and shut down discussion.
That’s the exact same reason the detention facilities on the southern border were being called “concentration camps”. In my lifetime that’s ALWAYS and ONLY meant the Nazi death camps. People who tell me to study the history of the phrase for its “real” meaning are trying to nullify the objection and at the same time maintaining the inflammatory association.