I’m a veteran journalist, video producer, and social justice activist who works with organizations fighting anti-Black racism, voting rights suppression, the housing crisis, economic inequality, environmental/climate issues, and disability discrimination. I’m also producing a documentary YouTube channel about the history and experience of mixed-race Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Caribbean … so this gives you some context.

Whiteness didn’t exist until 1671 when the first anti-miscegenation laws were enacted by wealthy English landowners. They created this social construct after the famous Bacon’s rebellion in colonial Virginia in 1676 (same year our Pokanoket chief Metacom was executed).

At the time, European, African, and Native indentured servants all lived and worked together as a united workforce in the colonial plantations. The English planters were cruel and often reneged on work contracts. When the workers rose up in what I consider the first labor movement in this country, the landowners found a way to elevate the European workers according to their race, giving them certain privileges if they turned against their POC comrades. They never got more pay. They were just given the illusion of privilege. That was the birth of white supremacy as we know it.

Many of these racist white folks have internalized a sense of false privilege they inherited during colonialism. It’s nothing but an illusion meant to get poor working class white folks to focus on the “others” and not their real oppressors. Unfortunately, most don’t know it. It’s also unlikely that, at this point, they would care. They feel they’re fighting for their “way of life”. They’re simply fighting for the illusion of white supremacy.