White supremacy in the United States

This chapter argues that the true religion of the United States is white male ethnonationalism, often but not always polished with a Christian veneer (Lundskow, 2020). The essential doctrine of faith is white supremacy, and the essential rite is restorative violence against those perceived as the “Evil Other” – Black people in particular, although others often stand in as well, such as Mexicans and other Latinx, and various Muslim ethnicities. Post-Civil War Reconstruction, and the 20th century labor movement, respectively, offer two sociohistorical moments when the faith of white male ethnonationalism thwarted racial reconciliation and material social progress. My approach uses contemporary empirical research to establish the concept and broad social impact of white male ethnonationalism. Concurrently, the two historical periods represent decisive moments when the social forces of the Civil War and rapid industrialization challenged racial and gender hierarchies. The goal is not to chronicle the periods in question, but to highlight the enduring dominance of white male ethnonationalism and demonstrate how it played the role of religion, over and against material concerns. More specifically, I argue that as wealthy and powerful whites pursue ever more wealth and power, they also need whites of all classes to embrace their acquisition as a legitimate and moral conquest, and that this requires validation that transcends economic interests and exacts willing personal sacrifice from the white ‘servant classes’ (those with minimal to no upward mobility) – in other words, religious validation.

What is American white supremacy? People of white European descent can embrace diverse ethnic heritages, including German, Dutch, French, English, Swedish, and many others. Yet these are particular European heritages, not American white heritage. Immigrants were English, German, and so on, not specifically white. Rather, whiteness developed in the first Thirteen Colonies in America as a justification for enslavement and genocidal annihilation (Allen, 1994), such that initially, only Anglo-Saxon Protestant men of property counted as white (Roediger (2018 [2005])). Many southern, eastern, and Catholic European groups started as denigrated ethnicities and gradually joined the white hegemony – more or less – such as Italians (Guglielmo and Salerno, 2003), Greeks (Kaloudis, 2018), Poles (McCook, 2011), Irish (Ignatiev, 2009 [1995]) and Jews (Ratskoff, 2020), although in the process all of them and many others faced widespread ethnocentric discrimination and exclusion (Lee, 2019).