Definitions of terms

My friend Scot Nakagawa writes a new Substack, We Fight the Right, which I find wise. For years, he has dropped mini-essays, which I think of as dives into understanding the context of ongoing progressive struggle, on Facebook. This seems a better medium for his particular insights.

Here are some tidbits in which he's shares how he thinks about and distinguishes between "white supremacy," "structural racism," and "white nationalism."

• As an ideology, white supremacy is the belief that white people are, by dint of race, culturally and/or biologically superior to all other people and should, therefore be the dominant group in a multiracial society. White supremacy as ideology was invented to justify the establishment of explicitly racist codes and institutions that protect white dominance and rationalize race-slavery, Native American dispossession, the subjugation of women, and immigration limitation and control in the context of a liberal democratic state. ...

• The contemporary legacy of legal white supremacy today is structural racism. Structural racism refers to the contemporary system of racially inequitable social and political relations resulting from historic practices of legally sanctioned racial exploitation and exclusion. ... Importantly, because structural racism is a historic construct, it can be reproduced without explicit racist intent. It keeps on when we just go along, making its seeming permanence a further rational for its perpetuation. But while just going along with it, even unconsciously may be enough to perpetuate it, none of us were the original architects of structural racism, making blame a dry well when it comes to achieving justice. ...

• White nationalism is a radical ideology with revolutionary implications as it proposes not to just subjugate people of color within a white supremacist state, but to exclude people of color altogether, with some factions aiming to achieve this end through taking over government and mounting genocidal campaigns of racial cleansing. ... White supremacy is still relevant to the white nationalists as an ideological system. In other words, their belief in white supremacy is what justifies their white nationalist political agenda.

Go read it all. Scot can help us know what we're talking about and struggling to defang.