The White Supremacist Collective Unconscious and the Autonomous Self

White supremacy is a fundamental and unavoidable structural dynamic of the American self. White supremacy is not an unfortunate flaw in the otherwise sound practice of American freedom and individual liberty, to be removed through mitigating policies—or even by the end of discrimination. Rather, white supremacy plays a fundamental ontological function in America by structuring the concept and practice of individual autonomy. While it exists in intensified form in white Americans, white supremacist mentality is not limited to them. In varying degrees, all Americans are endowed with a virtually unalienable white supremacist unconscious that supports and is supported by autonomous individualism. Our endowment is not the work of Jefferson's Supreme Being. It is the historical and ongoing consequence of acquiring and sustaining the American-style individual autonomy that is embedded in American culture and society. Individual autonomy is the nation's highest value, set above life itself. From birth into adulthood, by example and precept, each of us is taught to aspire to individual autonomy above all other pursuits. Autonomous individualism and white supremacy are inseparable, mutually defining and sustaining ontological dynamics of human being in America. Therefore, white supremacy cannot be rooted out without making fundamental changes to our practice and concept of personhood. Efforts and policies that avoid this difficult task, as well meaning

as they may be, are futile; and, when they originate within white American institutions they are directed, consciously, or by what I will describe as the white supremacist collective unconscious (WSCU) to preventing such changes.

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For over fifty years historians, have argued, in varying degrees, that white American racism developed as a justification for the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement and continued oppression of black people. "Time and again," Ibram X. Kendi asserts, "racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era's racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people." Racism and white supremacy certainly rose hand in hand with Indian removal, slavery, and the slave trade and supplied powerful rationales for those developments. However, viewing white supremacy as a rationale for slavery begs an important question. Why was there suddenly a need to justify taking land from its possessors and enslaving people? Wars of conquest have occurred since antiquity, and slavery was a nearly universal and normal practice. As David Brion Davis has shown, neither needed justification other than the prerogative of the stronger, until very recent times.

White supremacy emerged in European countries such as Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, and Holland, which, with the exception of Portugal and Spain, had negligible black populations, but all of them were engaged in empire building in the Americas and Asia and slave trading in Africa. Only an extremely small number of their subjects came into direct contact with Africans, Asians or Native Americans, either at home or abroad, but that does not mean they were not exposed to images of black people. As Winthrop Jordan argued in the 1960s, stereotypical images of blacks and "savages" can be found in Elizabethan England. Audiences and readers of Shakespeare's plays would have encountered them in Othello, Titus Andronicus and The Tempest. Travel literature, too, which became popular in early modern Europe in consequence of European voyages of discovery, introduced Europeans to images and descriptions of colored others. Early on these depictions could be favorable, but they "darkened" as European technological and military power waxed.

Yet, as Bernard Porter has demonstrated in the case of England, popular awareness of empire was limited to a tiny handful before the era of high imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, white supremacist ideas emerged in Western Europe and were embedded in the evangelical and popular abolitionist movements as early as the late seventeenth century. Thus, white supremacy was transcultural and trans-national, serving multiple purposes across different regions. It did not have the same origin or intentions...