By Eboo Patel, Image by Arne Bellstorf, The New York Times, May 10, 2022
I first heard the phrase “white supremacy” in my introductory sociology course at the University of Illinois in 1993. The image of men wearing white sheets and burning crosses came to mind, and I figured my professor was referring to ancient history. But I remember her continuing: “White supremacy is the assumption that the cultural patterns associated with white people — from clothes to language to aesthetic preferences to family structure — are normal, and the patterns associated with people of color are inferior.”
Wait, didn’t that basically describe my entire life? Feeling strange about my Indian grandmother’s clothes, about my grandmother’s cooking, about the fact that my grandmother even lived with us.
I learned that there was a whole language for this, with concepts like “institutionalized racism” and “structures of oppression.” There were influential theories, indeed entire academic fields, built on those ideas. And however bad it was for South Asian immigrants like me, white supremacy and institutionalized racism operated in the lives of other groups, including Black people, Native Americans and Latinos, in specific and often more challenging ways.
I could not get enough. I read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire. Understanding white supremacy helped me see my life in a different light.
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