Anti-Catholicism
Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards Catholics or opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy and its adherents. At various points after the Reformation, some majority Protestant states, including England and Scotland made anti-Catholicism and opposition to the Pope and Catholic rituals major political themes, with anti-Catholic sentiment at times leading to religious discrimination against Catholic individuals. Historian John Wolffe identifies four types of anti-Catholicism: constitutional-national, theological and socio-cultural. Catholics in Protestant countries were suspected of conspiring against the state in furtherance of papal interests. Support for the alien pope led to allegations challenging loyalty to the state. In majority Protestant countries with large scale immigration, such as the United States and Australia, suspicion or discrimination of Catholic immigrants overlapped or were conflated with nativism and ethnocentric or racist sentiments. In the Early modern period, the Catholic Church struggled to maintain its traditional religious and political role in the face of rising secular powers in Catholic countries.
As a result of these struggles, there arose a hostile attitude towards the considerable political, social and religious power of the Pope and the clergy in the form of anti-clericalism. The Inquisition was a favorite target of attack. Anti-clerical forces gained strength after 1789 in some Catholic nations, such as France and Mexico. Political parties formed that expressed a hostile attitude towards the considerable political, social and religious power of Catholic Church in the form of anti-clericalism, attacks on the power of the pope to name bishops, international orders the Jesuits. Protestant Reformers, including John Wycliffe, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, John Thomas, John Knox, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, John Wesley, as well as most Protestants of the 16th-18th centuries, identified the Papacy with the Antichrist; the Centuriators of Magdeburg, a group of Lutheran scholars in Magdeburg headed by Matthias Flacius, wrote the 12-volume Magdeburg Centuries to discredit the Papacy and lead other Christians to recognize the Pope as the Antichrist.
The fifth round of talks in the Lutheran–Catholic dialogue notes, In calling the pope the "Antichrist", the early Lutherans stood in a tradition that reached back into the eleventh century. Not only dissidents and heretics but saints had called the bishop of Rome the "Antichrist" when they wished to castigate his abuse of power. What Lutherans incorrectly understood as a papal claim to unlimited authority over everything and everyone reminded them of the Apocalyptic imagery of Daniel 11, a passage, applied to the pope as the Antichrist of the last days prior to the Reformation. Doctrinal works of literature published by the Lutherans, the Reformed churches, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Anabaptists, the Methodists contain references to the Pope as the Antichrist, including the Smalcald Articles, Article 4, the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, the Westminster Confession, Article 25.6, the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, Article 26.4. In 1754, John Wesley published his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, an official Doctrinal Standard of the United Methodist Church.
In his notes on the Book of Revelation, he commented: "The whole succession of Popes from Gregory VII are undoubtedly Antichrists. Yet this hinders not, but that the last Pope in this succession will be more eminently the Antichrist, the Man of Sin, adding to that of his predecessors a peculiar degree of wickedness from the bottomless pit."Referring to the Book of Revelation, Edward Gibbon stated that "The advantage of turning those mysterious prophecies against the See of Rome, inspired the Protestants with uncommon veneration for so useful an ally." Protestants condemned the Catholic policy of mandatory celibacy for priests. During the Enlightenment Era, which spanned the 17th and 18th centuries, with its strong emphasis on the need for religious toleration, the Inquisition was a favorite target of attack for intellectuals. Institutional anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland began with the English Reformation under Henry VIII; the Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the English crown to be'the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England' in place of the pope.
Any act of allegiance to the latter was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers. It was under this act that saints Thomas More and John Fisher were executed and became martyrs to the Catholic faith. Queen Mary, Henry's daughter, was a devout Catholic and during her five years as queen she tried to reverse the Reformation, she executed Protestant leaders. Protestants reviled her as "Bloody Mary". Anti-Catholicism among many of the English was grounded in their fear that the pope sought to reimpose not just religio-spiritual authority over England but secular power in alliance with their arch-enemy France or Spain. In 1570, Pope Pius V sought to depose Elizabeth with the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which declared her a heretic and purported to dissolve the duty of all Elizabeth's subjects of their allegiance to her; this rendered Elizabeth's subjects who persisted in their allegiance to the Catholic Church politically suspect, made the position of her Catholic subjects untenable if they tried to maintain both all
Speciesism
Speciesism is a form of discrimination based on species membership. It involves treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species when their interests are equivalent. More speciesism is the failure to consider interests of equal strength to an equal extent because of the species of which the individuals are a member; the term is used by animal rights advocates, who argue that speciesism is a prejudice similar to racism or sexism, in that the treatment of individuals is predicated on group membership and morally irrelevant physical differences. Their claim is, it is thought that speciesism plays a role in inspiring or justifying cruelty to trillions of animals per year, in the forms of factory farming, the use of animals for entertainment such as in bullfighting and rodeos, the taking of animals' fur and skin, experimentation on animals, more. An example of a speciesist belief would be the following: Suppose that both a dog and a cow need their tails removed for medical reasons.
Suppose someone believes that the dog and the cow have equivalent interests, but insists that the dog receive pain relief for the operation, but is fine with the cow’s tail being docked without pain relief, remarking, “it’s just a cow.” This belief is speciesist because the cow’s species is being used as an excuse for not taking her interest in not suffering intense pain into account. It is possible to give more consideration to members of one species than to members of another species without being speciesist. For example, consider the belief that a typical human has an interest in voting but that a typical gorilla does not; this belief can involve starting with a premise that a certain feature of a being—such as being able to understand and participate in a political system in which one has a political representative—is relevant no matter the being's species. For someone holding this belief, a test for whether the belief is speciesist would be whether they would believe a gorilla who could understand and participate in a political system in which she had a political representative would have an interest in voting.
There are a few common speciesist paradigms. Considering humans superior to other animals; this is called human supremacism—the exclusion of all nonhuman animals from the rights and protections afforded to humans. Considering certain nonhuman animals to be superior to others because of an arbitrary similarity, familiarity, or usefulness to humans. For example, what could be called "human-chimpanzee speciesism" would involve human beings favoring rights for chimpanzees over rights for dolphins, because of happenstance similarities chimpanzees have to humans that dolphins do not; the common practice of humans treating dogs much better than cattle may have to do with the fact that many humans live in closer proximity to dogs and/or find the cattle easier to use for their own gain. Considering some species superior to others. For example, treating pigs as though their well-being is unimportant, but treating horses as though their well-being is important with the belief that their mental capacities are similar.
The term speciesism, the argument that it is a prejudice, first appeared in 1970 in a printed pamphlet written by British psychologist Richard D. Ryder. Ryder was a member of a group of academics in Oxford, the nascent animal rights community, now known as the Oxford Group. One of the group's activities was distributing pamphlets about areas of concern. Ryder argued in the pamphlet that "ince Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no'magical' essential difference between humans and other animals, biologically-speaking. Why do we make an total distinction morally? If all organisms are on one physical continuum we should be on the same moral continuum." He wrote that, at that time in the UK, 5,000,000 animals were being used each year in experiments, that attempting to gain benefits for our own species through the mistreatment of others was "just'speciesism' and as such it is a selfish emotional argument rather than a reasoned one". Ryder used the term again in an essay, "Experiments on Animals", in Animals and Morals, a collection of essays on animal rights edited by philosophy graduate students Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris, who were members of the Oxford Group.
Ryder wrote: In as much as both "race" and "species" are vague terms used in the classification of living creatures according to physical appearance, an analogy can be made between them. Discrimination on grounds of race, although most universally condoned two centuries ago, is now condemned, it may come to pass that enlightened minds may one day abhor "speciesism" as much as they now detest "racism." The illogicality in both forms of prejudice is of an identical sort. If it is accepted as morally wrong to deliberately inflict suffering upon innocent human creatures it is only logical to regard it as wrong to inflict suffering on innocent individuals of other species.... The time has come to act upon this logic; those who claim that speciesism is unfair to non-human species have argued their case by invoking mammals and chickens in the context of research or farming. However, there is not yet a clear definition or line agreed upon by a significant segment of the movement as to which species are to be treated with humans or in some ways additionally protected: mammals, reptiles, insects, etc.
The term was popularized by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation. Singer h
Misogyny
Misogyny is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. Misogyny manifests in numerous ways, including social exclusion, sex discrimination, androcentrism, male privilege, belittling of women, disenfranchisement of women, violence against women, sexual objectification. Misogyny can be found within sacred texts of religions and Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy; the inverse is misandry. According to sociologist Allan G. Johnson, "misogyny is a cultural attitude of hatred for females because they are female". Johnson argues that: Misogyny.... is a central part of sexist prejudice and ideology and, as such, is an important basis for the oppression of females in male-dominated societies. Misogyny is manifested in many different ways, from jokes to pornography to violence to the self-contempt women may be taught to feel toward their own bodies. Sociologist Michael Flood at the University of Wollongong defines misogyny as the hatred of women, notes: Though most common in men, misogyny exists in and is practiced by women against other women or themselves.
Misogyny functions as an ideology or belief system that has accompanied patriarchal, or male-dominated societies for thousands of years and continues to place women in subordinate positions with limited access to power and decision making. Aristotle contended that women exist as natural deformities or imperfect males Ever since, women in Western cultures have internalised their role as societal scapegoats, influenced in the twenty-first century by multimedia objectification of women with its culturally sanctioned self-loathing and fixations on plastic surgery and bulimia. Dictionaries define misogyny as "hatred of women" and as "hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women". In 2012 in response to events occurring in the Australian Parliament, the Macquarie Dictionary expanded the definition to include not only hatred of women but "entrenched prejudices against women"; the counterpart of misogyny is the hatred or dislike of men. Misogynous or misogynist can be used as adjectival forms of the word.
In his book City of Sokrates: An Introduction to Classical Athens, J. W. Roberts argues that older than tragedy and comedy was a misogynistic tradition in Greek literature, reaching back at least as far as Hesiod; the term misogyny itself comes directly into English from the Ancient Greek word misogunia, which survives in several passages. The earlier and more complete passage comes from a moral tract known as On Marriage by the stoic philosopher Antipater of Tarsus. Antipater argues that marriage is the foundation of the state, considers it to be based on divine decree, he uses misogunia to describe the sort of writing the tragedian Euripides eschews, stating that he "reject the hatred of women in his writing". He offers an example of this, quoting from a lost play of Euripides in which the merits of a dutiful wife are praised; the other surviving use of the original Greek word is by Chrysippus, in a fragment from On affections, quoted by Galen in Hippocrates on Affections. Here, misogyny is the first in a short list of three "disaffections"—women and humanity.
Chrysippus' point is more abstract than Antipater's, Galen quotes the passage as an example of an opinion contrary to his own. What is clear, however, is that he groups hatred of women with hatred of humanity and hatred of wine. "It was the prevailing medical opinion of his day that wine strengthens body and soul alike." So Chrysippus, like his fellow stoic Antipater, views misogyny negatively, as a disease. It is this issue of conflicted or alternating emotions, philosophically contentious to the ancient writers. Ricardo Salles suggests that the general stoic view was that " man may not only alternate between philogyny and misogyny and misanthropy, but be prompted to each by the other."Aristotle has been accused of being a misogynist. According to Cynthia Freeland: Aristotle says that the courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman's lies in obeying; the Timaeus warns men. The Republic contains a number of comments in the same spirit, evidence of nothing so much as of contempt toward women. Socrates' words for his bold new proposal about marriage... suggest that the women are to be "held in common" by men.
He never says that the men might be held in common by the women... We have to acknowledge Socrates' insistence that men surpass women at any task that both sexes attempt, his remark in Book 8 that one sign of democracy's moral failure is the sexual equality it promotes. Misogyni
Persecution of Christians
The persecution of Christians can be traced from the first century of the Christian era to the present day. Early Christians were persecuted for their faith at the hands of both the Jews from whose religion Christianity arose and the Romans who controlled many of the lands across which early Christianity was spread. Early in the fourth century, a form of the religion was legalized by the Edict of Milan, it became the State church of the Roman Empire. Christian missionaries as well as converts to Christianity have been the target of persecution since the emergence of Christianity, sometimes to the point of being martyred for their faith; the schisms of the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation, sometimes provoked severe conflicts between Christian denominations to the point of persecuting each other. In the 20th century, Christians were persecuted by various governments including the Islamic Ottoman Empire in the form of the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide and the Greek Genocide, as well as by atheistic states such as the Soviet Union and North Korea.
Early Christianity began as a sect among Second Temple Jews, according to the New Testament account, including Paul of Tarsus prior to his conversion to Christianity, persecuted early Christians. The early Christians preached the second coming of a Messiah which did not conform to their religious teachings. However, feeling that their beliefs were supported by Jewish scripture, Christians had been hopeful that their countrymen would accept their faith. Despite individual conversions, the vast majority of Judean Jews did not become Christians. Claudia Setzer asserts that, "Jews did not see Christians as separate from their own community until at least the middle of the second century." Thus, acts of Jewish persecution of Christians fall within the boundaries of synagogue discipline and were so perceived by Jews acting and thinking as the established community. The Christians, on the other hand, saw themselves as persecuted rather than "disciplined." Inter-communal dissension began immediately with the teachings of Stephen at Jerusalem, considered an apostate.
According to the Acts of the Apostles, a year after the Crucifixion of Jesus, Stephen was stoned for his alleged transgression of the faith, with Saul looking on. In 41 AD, when Agrippa I, who possessed the territory of Antipas and Phillip, obtained the title of King of the Jews, in a sense re-forming the Kingdom of Herod, he was eager to endear himself to his Jewish subjects and continued the persecution in which James the Greater lost his life, Peter narrowly escaped and the rest of the apostles took flight. After Agrippa's death, the Roman procuratorship began and those leaders maintained a neutral peace, until the procurator Festus died and the high priest Annas II took advantage of the power vacuum to attack the Church and executed James the Just leader of Jerusalem's Christians; the New Testament states that Paul was himself imprisoned on several occasions by Roman authorities, stoned by Pharisees and left for dead on one occasion, was taken as a prisoner to Rome. Peter and other early Christians were imprisoned and harassed.
The great Jewish revolt, spurred by the Roman killing of 3,000 Jews, led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the end of Second Temple Judaism, the disempowering of the Jewish persecutors. According to an old church tradition, doubted by historians, the early Christian community had fled Jerusalem beforehand, to the pacified region of Pella. Luke T. Johnson nuances the harsh portrayal of the Jews in the Gospels by contextualizing the polemics within the rhetoric of contemporaneous philosophical debate, showing how rival schools of thought insulted and slandered their opponents; these attacks were formulaic and stereotyped, crafted to define, the enemy in the debates, but not used with the expectation that their insults and accusations would be taken as they would be centuries resulting in millennia of Christian antisemitism. By the 4th century, John Chrysostom argued that the Pharisees alone, not the Romans, were responsible for the murder of Jesus. However, according to Walter Laqueur, "Absolving Pilate from guilt may have been connected with the missionary activities of early Christianity in Rome and the desire not to antagonize those they want to convert."
The first documented case of imperially supervised persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire begins with Nero. In 64 AD, a great fire broke out in Rome, destroying portions of the city and economically devastating the Roman population; some people suspected that Nero himself was the arsonist, as Suetonius reported, claiming that he played the lyre and sang the'Sack of Ilium' during the fires. In his Annals, stated that "to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace". Suetonius to the period, does not mention any persecution after the fire, but in a previous paragraph unrelated to the fire, mentions punishments inflicted on Christians, defined as men following a new and malefic superstition. Suetonius, does not specify the reasons for the punishment, he just lists the fact together with other abuses put down by Nero. In the first two centuries Christianity was a small sect, not a significant concern of the Emperor.
The Church was not in a struggle for i
Stereotypes of East Asians in the United States
Stereotypes of East Asians are ethnic stereotypes found in American society about first-generation immigrants, American-born citizens whose family members immigrated to the United States, from East Asian countries, such as China, South Korea, Taiwan. Stereotypes of East Asians, like other ethnic stereotypes, are portrayed in the mainstream media, literature and other forms of creative expression in American society; these stereotypes have been and collectively internalized by society and have negative repercussions for Americans of East Asian descent and East Asian immigrants in daily interactions, current events, government legislation. Media portrayals of East Asians reflect an Americentric perception rather than realistic and authentic depictions of true cultures and behaviors. In the past, East Asian Americans have experienced discrimination and have been victims of hate crimes related to their ethnic stereotypes, as it has been used to reinforce xenophobic sentiments; the term "Yellow Peril" refers to white apprehension, peaking in the late 19th-century, that the European inhabitants of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States would be displaced by a massive influx of East Asians.
The term has referred to the belief and fear that East Asian societies would invade and attack Western societies, wage war with them and lead to their eventual destruction and eradication. During this time, numerous anti-Asian sentiments were expressed by politicians and writers on the West Coast, with headlines like "The'Yellow Peril'" and "Conference Endorses Chinese Exclusion" and the Japanese Exclusion Act; the American Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of Asians because they were considered an "undesirable" race. Australia had similar fears and introduced a White Australia policy, restricting immigration between 1901 and 1973, with some elements of the policies persisting up until the 1980s. On February 12, 2002, Helen Clark prime minister of New Zealand apologized "to those Chinese people who had paid the poll tax and suffered other discrimination, to their descendants", she stated that Cabinet had authorized her and the Minister for Ethnic Affairs to pursue with representatives of the families of the early settlers a form of reconciliation which would be appropriate to and of benefit to the Chinese community.
Canada had in place a head tax on Chinese immigrants to Canada in the early 20th century. There is a widespread perception that East Asians are not considered genuine Americans but are instead "perpetual foreigners". Asian Americans report being asked the question, "Where are you from?" by other Americans, regardless of how long they or their ancestors have lived in United States and been a part of its society. East Asian Americans have been perceived and portrayed by many in American society as "perpetual" foreigners who are unable to be assimilated and inherently foreign regardless of citizenship or duration of residence in the United States. A similar view has been advanced by Ling-chi Wang, professor emeritus of Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Wang asserts that mainstream media coverage of Asian communities in the United States has always been "miserable", he states, "In policymakers' eyes, Asian Americans don't exist. They are not on their radar... and it's the same for politics."
I. Y. Yunioshi from Blake Edwards' 1961 American romantic-comedy Breakfast at Tiffany's is one such example, broadly criticized by mainstream publications. In 1961, The New York Times review said that "Mickey Rooney's bucktoothed, myopic Japanese is broadly exotic." In 1990, The Boston Globe criticized Rooney's portrayal as "an irascible bucktoothed nerd and an offensive ethnic caricature". Critics note that the character of Mr. Yunioshi reinforced anti-Japanese wartime propaganda to further exclude Japanese Americans from being treated as normal citizens, rather than hated caricatures. A study by UCLA researchers for the Asian American Justice Center, Asian Pacific Americans in Prime Time, found that Asian-American actors were under represented on network TV. While Asian-Americans make up 5 percent of the US population, the report found only 2.6 percent were primetime TV regulars. Shows set in cities with large Asian populations, like New York and Los Angeles, had few Asian roles. East Asians in the United States have been stereotyped as a "model minority".
However, some East Asian Americans believe the model minority stereotype to be damaging and inaccurate, are acting to dispel this stereotype. Some may acknowledged that model minority is seen as a "denial of racial reality", one of the eight themes in racial microaggression. Many scholars and most major American news sources have started to oppose this stereotype, calling it a misconception that exaggerates the socioeconomic success of East Asian Americans. According to those trying to debunk this belief, the model minority stereotype alienates other Asian American subgroups such as South and So
Anti-intellectualism
Anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of intellect and intellectualism expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy, the dismissal of art and science as impractical and contemptible human pursuits. Anti-intellectuals present themselves and are perceived as champions of common folk—populists against political and academic elitism—and tend to see educated people as a status class detached from the concerns of most people, feel that intellectuals dominate political discourse and control higher education. Totalitarian governments apply anti-intellectualism to repress political dissent. During the Spanish Civil War and the following fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, the reactionary repression of the White Terror was notably anti-intellectual, with most of the 200,000 civilians killed being the Spanish intelligentsia, the politically active teachers and academics and writers of the deposed Second Spanish Republic. In the communist state of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge régime of Pol Pot condemned all of the non-communist intelligentsia to death in the Killing Fields.
In the 20th century, societies have systematically removed intellectuals from power, to expediently end public political dissent. During the Cold War, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic ostracized the philosopher Václav Havel as a politically-unreliable man unworthy of ordinary Czechs' trust. Ideologically-extreme dictatorships who mean to recreate a society such as the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia pre-emptively killed potential political opponents the educated middle-class and the intelligentsia. To realize the Year Zero of Cambodian history, Khmer Rouge social engineering restructured the economy by de-industrialization and assassinated non-communist Cambodians suspected of "involvement in free-market activities" such as the urban professionals of society and people with political connections to foreign governments; the doctrine of Pol Pot identified the farmers as the true proletariat of Cambodia and the true representatives of the working class entitled to hold government power, hence the anti-intellectual purges.
In 1966, the anti-communist Argentine military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía intervened at the University of Buenos Aires with the Night of the Long Batons to physically dislodge politically-dangerous academics from five university faculties. That expulsion to exile of the academic intelligentsia became a national brain drain upon the society and economy of Argentina. In support of the military repression of free speech, biochemist César Milstein said: "Our country would be put in order, as soon as all the intellectuals who were meddling in the region were expelled". However, anti-intellectualism is not always violent. Any social group can act anti-intellectually by discounting the humanist value to their society of intellect and higher education. In The Campus Wars, the philosopher John Searle said, he two most salient traits of the radical movement are its anti-intellectualism and its hostility to the university as an institution.... Intellectuals, by definition, are people who take ideas for their own sake.
Whether or not a theory is true or false is important to them, independently of any practical applications it may have. Have, as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, an attitude to ideas, at once playful and pious. But, in the radical movement, the intellectual ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rejected. Knowledge is seen as valuable only as a basis for action, it is not very valuable there. Far more important than what one knows is. In Social Sciences as Sorcery, the sociologist Stanislav Andreski advised laymen to distrust the intellectuals' appeals to authority when they make questionable claims about resolving the problems of their society: "Do not be impressed by the imprint of a famous publishing house, or the volume of an author's publications.... Remember that the publishers want to keep the printing presses busy, do not object to nonsense if it can be sold."In Science and Relativism: Some Key Controversies in the Philosophy of Science, the epistemologist Larry Laudan said that the prevailing type of philosophy taught at university in the U.
S. is anti-intellectual, because "the displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter, by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is—second only to American political campaigns—the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time." In the U. S. the American conservative economist Thomas Sowell argued for distinctions between unreasonable and reasonable wariness of intellectuals in their influence upon the institutions of a society. In defining intellectuals as "people whose occupations deal with ideas", they are different from people whose work is the practical application of ideas; that cause for layman mistrust lies in the intellectuals' incompetence outside their fields of expertise. Although possessed of great working knowledge in their specialist fields, when compared to other professions and occupations, the intellectuals of a society face little discouragement against speaking authoritatively beyond their field of formal expertise, thus are unlikely to face responsibility for the social and practical consequences of their errors.
Hence, a physician is judged competent by the effective treatment of the sickness of a patient, yet mi
White supremacy
White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them. White supremacy has roots in scientific racism, it relies on pseudoscientific arguments. Like most similar movements such as neo-Nazism, white supremacists oppose members of other races as well as Jews; the term is typically used to describe a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, historical, or institutional domination by white people. Different forms of white supremacism put forth different conceptions of, considered white, different groups of white supremacists identify various racial and cultural groups as their primary enemy. In academic usage in usage which draws on critical race theory or intersectionality, the term "white supremacy" can refer to a political or socioeconomic system, in which white people enjoy a structural advantage over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level. White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 17th-century scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that helped shape international relations and racial policy from the latter part of the Age of Enlightenment until the late 20th century.
White supremacy was dominant in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, it persisted for decades after the Reconstruction Era. In the antebellum South, this included the holding of African Americans in chattel slavery, in which four million of them were denied freedom; the outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy being cited as a cause for state secession and the formation of the Confederate States of America. In an editorial about Native Americans in 1890, author L. Frank Baum wrote: "The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white were disenfranchised, barred from government office, prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Professor Leland T. Saito of the University of Southern California writes: "Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social and political exclusion."
The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U. S. citizenship to whites only. The denial of social and political freedom to minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the civil rights movement. Sociologist Stephen Klineberg has stated that U. S. immigration laws prior to 1965 declared "that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race". The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened entry to the U. S. to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, altered the demographic mix in the U. S as a result. Many U. S. states banned interracial marriage through anti-miscegenation laws until 1967, when these laws were invalidated by the Supreme Court of the United States' decision in Loving v. Virginia; these mid-century gains had a major impact on white Americans' political views. For sociologist Howard Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States. After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology to the American far-right.
According to Kathleen Belew, a historian of race and racism in the United States, white militancy shifted after the Vietnam War from supporting the existing racial order to a more radical position—self-described as "white power" or "white nationalism"—committed to overthrowing the United States government and establishing a white homeland. Such anti-government militia organizations are one of three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States, with white supremacist groups and a religious fundamentalist movement being the other two. Howard Winant writes that, "On the far right the cornerstone of white identity is belief in an ineluctable, unalterable racialized difference between whites and nonwhites." In the view of philosopher Jason Stanley, white supremacy in the United States is an example of the fascist politics of hierarchy, in that it "demands and implies a perpetual hierarchy" in which whites dominate and control non-whites. Some academics argue that outcomes from the 2016 United States Presidential Election reflect ongoing challenges with white supremacy.
Psychologist Janet Helms suggested that the normalizing behaviors of social institutions of education and healthcare are organized around the "birthright of...the power to control society's resources and determine the rules for ". Educators, literary theorists, other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority. White supremacism has been depicted in music videos, feature films, journal entries, on social media; the 1915 silent drama film The Birth
