Sharing my learning from a recent training with Dr. Heather Hackman about how white privilege and white supremacy interrelate:

White privilege is when people like me look at our lives and think, “I earned all of that because I was just better/smarter/harder working than other people,” without seeing how the wind that was at our backs also pushed *against* people of color because of how race operates in this country.

So then white supremacy is the false or mistaken belief (which can be implicit, a story that we don’t even realize we’re telling ourselves in the back of our minds) that the realities we see around us of unequal outcomes by racial groups are best explained in that same way: “Gee, I know that the reason I got these results is because I earned everything I’ve got by being better/ smarter/ harder working, and I see that the white people around me are by and large getting better results than people of color, so this means white people must in general be better/ smarter/ harder working.”

In other words, we are taking the truth of the symptom, and instead of investigating what disease is causing it, we are mis-identifying the symptom as evidence that there is no disease. And if we believe in the back of our minds that white people are just better, what else would we call that but white supremacy?