The “White Supremacy” Controversy

It’s a few Twitter outrage cycle past, so you probably need a quick refresher. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones wrote a post urging people to reserve the word “white supremacy” for Neo-Nazis and the KKK, and not for the underlying racist structures of which Neo-Nazis and the KKK are merely the most visible parts. Predictably, this misguided post received some pushback, especially from those familiar with the term’s origins.

More curious to me was Conor Friedersdorf’s defense of Kevin Drum:

It is awful to stigmatize people as cringeworthy for failing to speak in the vernacular of a tiny, insular subculture. Neither journalists nor academics speaking to a general audience can insist a term’s only meaning is a contested usage so little known that it confounds a longtime employee of Mother Jones and many residents of the Upper West Side. And it is deeply counterproductive to stigmatize those who use the common meaning of a well-known term with words like “embarrassing,” and “mortifying.”

There is the obvious, uncontroversial point that, all else being equal, people should not be stigmatized for not knowing a word’s meaning. On that I agree. But there is also the quietly controversial point about power and language engineering that Friedersdorf is making, wittingly or not. That, I want to explore more.

Friedersdorf seems to implicitly endorse a majoritarian view about language: a word’s meaning is the one accepted by the majority. So, in this case, the meaning of “white supremacy” is the one familiar to Kevin Drum and residents of the Upper West Side: it’s the stuff that only Neo-Nazis and the KKK are into, whatever those academics say.

As an academic, I don’t doubt that we deserve complaints about our jargons. But it’s worth noting here that the use of “white supremacy” to refer to structural racism is not only a part of privileged academics’ vernacular. Instead, as Chauncey DeVega notes, it goes back to WEB Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and, well, Black Americans developing the language to talk about their experiences. This subculture might too be tiny (compared to the white majority) and insulated (though not by their choice), but they deserve the credit for this vernacular.

Such precision about the subculture, though, is irrelevant to the majoritarian view about language. On this view, no subculture can ask the majority to speak the way that they do. The language is the one spoken by the majority, the vernaculars are spoken by the subcultures — whatever Baldwin says. As such, no subculture can insist on their vernacular meanings of a term. In fact, the meaning of a term accepted by the majority is — by definition!—the common meaning of the term in the language. And so the meaning of “white supremacy” is, and must be, the one familiar to Kevin Drum (who is white) and residents of the Upper West Side (who are very white).

And that is what Friedersdorf seems to be expressing. It is not the obvious, uncontroversial point that, all else being equal, people should not be stigmatized for not knowing a word’s meaning. It is in fact a thesis about who gets to decide a word’s meaning: the subcultures must not insist on their meanings, especially when they conflict with the ones accepted by the dominant culture. As such, it is a view about language that prescribes the recreation and reinforcement of existing power structures in our talks.