To view the world through a supremacist lens is to live in the complicity of false equivalences, to willfully color malice as virtue.
Before America formed the democratic state, its grand project was the cultivation of white supremacy—a cunning, ravenous invention pillared by social divisions. In his essay “On Being White … and Other Lies,” James Baldwin referred to whiteness as a “genocidal lie,” writing how white supremacy “is a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes or leaves totally out of account.” In this way, it became a kind of sight, a gaze through which to view one’s version of the world. To view the world through a white supremacist lens is to exist as an antithesis to progress. It is to live in the complicity of false equivalences, to shroud your scope in dangerous fabrications like “alt-left,” and to willfully color malice as virtue (days ago protesters heinously chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil” during the rally, the latter of which the Anti-Defamation League classifies as hate speech). With brute intention, white supremacy lives surrounded by lies. And aren’t lies nothing if not intoxicating instruments to brandish in times of inconvenience?
