There is no better way to track social democrats (liberals) than the usage of the term “white supremacy.” No class-struggle Marxist or conservative would be caught dead using this description to characterize the West or the history of the US. (See the anticapitalist analysis here: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/racecraft-racism-barbara-karen-fields). And yet the phrase “white supremacy” has tremendous currency on the so-called Left, owing to its coalition with liberals during the New Deal. https://clarespark.com/2015/04/17/the-ongoing-appeal-of-the-leftist-dominated-popular-front-against-fascism/.
I have been ploughing through Eric Foner’s prize-winning book RECONSTRUCTION (1988) and noted his constant usage of the term “white supremacy,” which was repeated by earlier textbook-writing liberal historians influenced by the 1960s movements. This bears some unpacking, as it recalls the shift from class politics to an emphasis on black nationalism, particularly on the increasing acceptance of Malcolm X’s use of “white devils” on the liberal “Left.”
And yet Foner condemns the “Gilded Age” for its turning the freedmen (ex-slaves) into wage slaves. Similarly he ignores the New Left emphasis on Southern and Western Populism because it is so lily-white (not because it scapegoated banks and finance capital). Foner’s confusion surely is derived from Pop-Front politics that could not fuse liberal anticommunism with class-struggle politics.
But even more significant than the move toward explicitly racial politics, is this Foner’s deployment of “slavery” and the (failed) Reconstruction to the cause of present-mindedness, i.e., reading current values into the past, which violates the conscientious historian’s task of reconstructing the context of whatever period s/her writes about. Surely Foner is correct in his emphasis on slavery and Reconstruction for explaining the rise of the 19th Century Republican Party, the American Civil War and the persistence of Jim Crow into the present.
Still, conservatives rightly protest the term “white supremacy” because it assumes that all white people share the same interests. But we do better to see how the term distorts the popular understanding of US history, including the more recent move toward black nationalism/multiculturalism by social democrats ( “liberals”) https://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/.
The Clare Spark Blog 
[…] links are available to interested readers: :https://clarespark.com/2013/08/05/evil-puritans/; https://clarespark.com/2018/01/20/white-supremacy/; https://clarespark.com/2011/08/01/alexander-hamiltons-rational-voice-of-the-people/; […]
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