On Friday, Memphis police released body- and street-cam video of five officers beating Tyre Nichols, an unarmed civilian who later died of his injuries. Unlike many recent notorious examples of police brutality, in this instance the victim and perpetrators were all Black, leading to confusion and distress. The basketball star LeBron James tweeted, “WE ARE OUR OWN WORSE ENEMY!” This kind of self-directed criticism is familiar to anyone who has had their hair trimmed in a Black barbershop. What is novel today is the amount of anger and the specific form of critique that James’s tweet, for one prominent example, engendered. One of the more polite and reprintable responses: “i’d say white supremacy was our worse enemy but okay lebron.”
White supremacy used to refer to the belief, encoded in both custom and law, that white people sit at the top of a biological racial hierarchy and that they must remain there. But in the past decade or so, it has become a much vaguer and more totalizing concept, denoting invisible structures, latent beliefs, and even innocuous practices, such as punctuality, that supposedly maintain the comparative advantage of white people at the expense of everyone else. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the period of racial reckoning that followed, all manner of experience was probed for evidence of “white supremacy.” Some on the left have adopted the term as a sort of shorthand for the invisible hand of all American social and political life.
This understanding of white supremacy has led progressive journalists and activists to bring attention to (some might say obsess over) racial background in lethal encounters involving white and nonwhite people. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, was a white Hispanic. Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, was not merely an agent of the state but specifically a white police officer. Derek Chauvin, a white man in a multiracial group of officers responding to the scene, was…
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