Ask Lemmygrad

White supremacy is a side effect of imperialism. If white europeans hadn't colonized the world they would have less basis for "scientific racism" and less ability to force those ideas into the minds of other people. The reason europeans were so successful in the domination of other nations is just a question of lucky material conditions.

Lucky european material conditions theory: The bubonic plague came at a perfect time for europe to allow for a rejiggering of their politics, economy, and technology. The sudden drop in population meant that they could rehabilitate arable land as they needed it instead of having to constantly make more from scratch. It changed the limiting factor to one of labor instead of food. It allowed them to over produce food for storage and gave them a buffer against crop failures for several generations. Basically the survivors of the black plague had breathing room and practice fighting each other for a few generations with little distractions just in time for intercontinental war to be technologically feasible.

Other parts of the world the population grew as fast as food production would allow with little room to stop and reorganize.

My theory on the cause of racial supremacy in general: 2 people have a fight, 20 generations later their offspring are still fighting and see themselves as superior to the other side because they "know" their ancestors were the morally correct one even if they don't know what the fight was about. (the first book of the Abrahamic bible is this story over and over again.) That moral high ground eventually becomes solidified into a divine right when one side prevails over another. The victors now believe themselves anointed by a higher power. With their age old feud over they find new people to demonize. They dig up old feuds or invent new ones because it has become so ingrained in their society that they are superior and they need someone to be superior to. The bigger their society gets the bigger their enemies become and the reasons for their hatred more ineffable.

White supremacy was and is a way for capital to create and maintain a marginalized vs. privileged group. This benefits capital in many ways, so it is constantly recreated and enforces by individual capitalists, capitalist consortia, and capitalist propaganda. It's important to understand that capitalism did not invent marginalization in general, and so marginalizations that even still exist can predate it, but capital finds use dor many, especially white supremacy.

So, for some context, I would first note that there is not really just one white supremacy, but a constellation of interlinked white supremacies as defined and reinforced by different formations. So, for example, we might describe the overarching currents of US white supremacy on one hand vs. UK-based white supremacy on another vs. German white supremacy, and they will havr their own distinct aspects while fulfilling the same basic function. Race is socially constructed, its rules are built for social purposes and the very specifics originate from local context.

So, when it comes to class analysis, there are of course many classes, but under capitalism the major two are workers and owners, proletarians and bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are the ruling class, the dominant class under capitalism, as stewards of self-perpetuating capital. White supremacy serves many functions for maintaining the oppression of the working class by the ruling class and is therefore created, maintained, and tolerated by the systems of control they maintain. I will list an incomplete set of examples.

• Scapegoating. When capitalists make unpopular decisions, they seek to deflect blame and mollify angry workers. Nowadays capitalists pay top dollar to PR firms to handle this kind of thing for them. White supremacy offers an easy out: "it wasn't me firing you (for profit), it was those brown people stealing your job!" Individual capitalists constantly recreate this aspect of white supremacy and some even believe their own scapegoating, as white supremacy ends up producing its own canon of illogic and fantasy storytelling. The class analysis effect of scapegoating is to keep workers from correctly blaming and organizing against the capitalists picking their pocket.

• The creation of superexploited economic underclasses. Poor working conditions breeds frustration, anger, and pain among workers. One way to disrupt solidarity and empathy between workers is to make the most exploited also be marginalized by other workers. Many OECD countries maintain a superexploited underclass. Usually an immigrant underclass. In the US, of course, the elephant in the room was chattel slavery, which was entirely premised on white supremacy to operate. Chattel slavery was not quite "pure" as a capitalist class relation, as it had a heavy dose of feudal relations, but the function of marginalization was the same and continued after abolition, where thr black economic underclass has been systematically oppressed to this day. The fundamental unit here that benefits the ruling class is to create a locus of precarity and hyperexploitation that is tolerated by the rest of the population. In the US this also applies to undocumented immigrants, where there is little in the way of worjer solidarity due to decades of anti-immigrant and racist (white supremacist) propaganda that teaches other workers to be angry at "illegals" who are "stealing jobs" instead of angry at companies hyperexploiting vulnerable fellow workers. This is another side of the scapegoating point.

• White supremacy also justifies, to the white supremacist public, other forms of violence and propaganda. When capital creates war for profit, it builds a propaganda appararus to make the public tolerate it. White supremacy helps with this as it reflects and reinforces historical colonial lines of exploitation and violence that capital is revisiting, i.e. the resubjugation and redivision of the global south. White supremacy makes the targets of violence by capital "deserving" when there might otherwise be empathy and solidarity. In the US, its other major use of white supremacy was for genocidal conquest, to justify the killing and disposession of indigenous nations. White supremacy made it easier to create bounties as it dehumanized the targets. White supremacy made it easier to steal land because the targets were "undeserving" of the land. This has been a constant theme of capitalist disposession of entire nations and regions and it continues today. The US form I described is settler-colonial and has perfect echoes in Israel, where ethnic supremacists dehumanize their targets to ethnically cleanse them and steal land. They even have the same, "we use the land better so we deserve it" racist talking points to justify disposession. This also happens in non-settler-colonial contexts. For example, destroying the Iraqi and Libyian states was about maintaining US (and to a lesser extent, EU) hegemony, of domination of currency, oil, and imperialist policy in general, against states attempting to build basic sovereignty. These incredibly destructive actions were only tolerated via white supremacy, of the member countries of bombing campaigns' citizens accepting those as worthy targets, as people who are "other". You can see this dynamic in action in Ukraine, where Ukrainians are white-ified in the language used about them and the value of their lives while Russians are given dehumanizing epithets and orientalist canards. Whiteness serves the function of humanizing an in-group and target of marginalization for ruking class interests.

If the police are the boot of the state, white supremacy is the sole of the boot.

They act as the terror unit of the status quo.

After Bacon's Rebellion, they created the concepts of black and white to sow division and prevent another uprising where a unified underclass would threaten the aristocracy

https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/inventing-black-white