White Supremacy

White Supremacy

Also described as white supremacist, white supremacy is a concept used to refer or describe the racist beliefs held by some white people that they are superior to other races; hence they should dominate over them. White supremacists are known for their opposition to people that belong to other races, including the Jews. The term may also refer to the political philosophies that perpetuate and uphold institutional, social, chronological, or political supremacy by whites. Additionally, white supremacy may also describe socioeconomic or political systems in which whites enjoy certain structural advantages over people belonging to other ethnic groups. This essay will describe how the concept of “white supremacy” works, drawing specific from examples from “Killers of the Flower Moon,” written by David Grann. Other examples will also be drawn from the workings of Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote and Leslie Marmon Silko.

In his book “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Grann (2017) examines the reigns of terror in Osage and the impacts of the terrible suffering in the history of America. Through his exploration, he succeeds in painting a clear picture of how corruption, entitlement, and greed have defined America’s institutions, society, and history. When white supremacists witnessed the prosperity of the Osage community in Oklahoma that resulted from the discovered oil, they became irritated, and they began to harbor feelings of entitlement towards the wealth. White supremacists could not contemplate the site of white servants working for “rich redskins.” They became so worried that the reversed status quo would spread to the whole country.

Throughout his book, he demonstrates the xenophobic and hateful views that white women and men harbored towards Native Americans, especially the Osage tribe. After the American government forcefully ejected the Osage community members from their ancestral lands and settled the hilly, infertile and rocky land, they sought government guarantee that their reservation would include both the land and any minerals below the land. Later, when Americans discovered oil beneath the rocky land occupied by the Osage community, they were not only required to get permission to utilize the land from the community members, but they were also required to pay for utilization. The wealth of the community expanded, and the Americans became outraged, alarmed, and threatened by their prosperity.

White supremacy manifested in the form of racism towards the community as the whites began to be consumed by the desire to dominate and subjugate the tribe. The community members began to be treated as second-class people and their land and livelihoods were placed under the control of the government. Policies were formulated to control their wealth, guardians were assigned to the tribe members, and they were also denied the right to access their bank accounts (Grann 2017:2-33). White supremacists not only denied the Osage people sovereignty over their lives, but they also exploited them. All these suggest the strong influence that white supremacists had had the time and how the manipulated communities they deemed to be inferior.

Exploitation and racism towards the community members are evidenced by Grann’s description of the pursuit of justice following the multiple killings. When Tom White took Hale’s case to trial, he was worried that he would escape justice; Hale had a lot of influence not only on the witnesses but also in Oklahoma.  Other people also had similar fears as White’s. One tribe member, for instance, is noted stating that the judge’s role in Hale’s case was to determine “whether a white man killing an Osage is murder — or merely cruelty to animals” (Grann 2017:10). This clearly shows how white supremacists treated viewed the Osage community members. A journalist also reported that “the attitude of a pioneer cattleman (the former profession of Hale) towards the full-blood Indian… is fairly well recognized” (Grann 2017:10) These sentiments portray the extent to which white Americans hated members of the Osage community that they had to subject them to cruel humiliations, financial theft, murder, and guardianship, all with the intention of having dominion over them because they perceived the Osage people to be inferior.

As explained in the introduction section above, white supremacists perceive people of other races as being inferior, and they always want to come up with ways of dominating and controlling the lives of others. Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is filled with many elements of white supremacy, some of which are described and explained above. It all began with a white American government ejecting the Osage community from their ancestral lands and settling them on infertile and rocky lands. This was followed by wanting to control even the oil that was later discovered beneath their new homes, denying them access to their bank accounts, treating them as animals among other ills. All these are examples of how white supremacists work. Grann (2017) argues in his book that even the foundation of American institutions is on corruption and racism. Through interviews and conversations with the current Osage community members, he manages to reconstruct the happenings of the “Reign of Terror” in a way that makes the reader think he was actually present at the time.

Similar white supremacist notions are also manifested in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. When Tayo suffered from post-traumatic stress after his arrest, we are told that white medicine could not cure him. Instead of putting the blame on the white medicine that had failed to cure him, the white doctors decided to shift the blame to Tayo’s Indian culture.  The white doctors advised him to alienate himself from his community, his heritage, and to avoid the Indian medicine that he was accustomed to (Silko 1986). This scenario paints a picture of how white supremacists detest the cultures of other people by viewing them as being inferior to their own cultures. Similar white supremacists notions are evidenced in Tone-Pah-Hote’s “Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era.” In her book, she explains that the ways in which native people styled their hair or adorned their bodies were questioned by their colonizers (Tone-Pah-Hote 2019:10). Tone-Pah-Hote’s book focuses on how the cultures of the Kiowa community managed to survive throughout the assimilation period.