From the town square, to the edge of town, to the prison cell and the ghetto...

The spacial arrangements and social psychology 

of white supremacy

  

Across the three systems of control (slavery, Jim Crow/segregation, and criminalization), the way that white denial has evolved is connected both to spacial arrangements and to the social psychology of how each racial system of control views the humanity of black people.

Under slavery the racial order allowed whites to live closely with blacks and commit open acts of terror and torture because the dominant order classed blacks (and by extension other communities considered "black" by the white power structure) as non-human property. 

 

Under segregation the racial order pushed blacks (and by extension other communities considered "black" by the white power structure) to the margins both physically and psychologically in the white mind. Blacks were seen as human, but as inferior and therefore deserving of being locked by segregation into a sub-caste status. Whites policed the borders of white and black spaces. Attempts made by blacks to challenge the physical nature of segregation and thus the psychological order of inferiority were met with racial violence.  

Today we have a racial order that ascribes criminality to blackness and at the same time insists that we live in a post-racial color blind space. The dominant discourse is that we are equal, but the racial order ascribes criminality to blackness and by extension to other people of color. In order for whites to believe this racial narrative, the violence of the racial social order is even further removed from white consciousness in ghetto spaces and behind prison walls. This allows for the psychology of white denial. If we are actually all "equal", whites must either hide the new form of racial violence (behind prison walls) or justify it based on the perceived "criminality" of blackness (ie, they did it to themselves) or code words for blackness.

When I use the term "racial order", I mean the social narrative which has created white supremacy through history. With this in mind, my basic observation was that as the oppressed have been more "humanized" on paper on the one hand, white supremacist thinking and continuing structural racism has pushed racial violence further and further into hidden spaces and at the same time created different psychological spaces that allows whites to "blame" structural violence on deficiency in black people (from non-human, to inferior human, to criminal human).   

Each system uses white supremacy to frame the racial order in a slightly different way and therefore where the violence takes place is different (from the town square, to the edge of town, to the prison cell and the ghetto). Each system justifies racial violence and a racialized social order, but does it in a slightly different way which alters where it takes place. It also creates different forms of white denial.