In this book, I identify a fault line in American politics that is being played out on the local and national level. This fracture has to do with fundamental differences between liberals and radicals in their approaches to racism, class, capitalism, and social movement tactics that impact their ability to create significant social change in the areas they claim to care about most. Such divides were continually exemplified in divisions between more liberal Democratic presidential candidates, such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and more radical candidates, such as Bernie Sanders. These four key differences are also at the center of disagreements between Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. Unlike Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez more forcefully centers working-class issues, racism, and problems with capitalism.

Omar and Tlaib have openly criticized the Democratic Party for using women of color to present the illusion of diversity.¹ Likewise, I argue that liberals in communities throughout the United States use their support of candidates of color to deny their own personal racism. In this sense, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, ironically, serve the same psychological purpose for European American liberals. They simplify the world of racists into easy-to-compartmentalize, dichotomous groups of good and bad people. By loving Barack Obama and hating Donald Trump, liberals can prove that they belong on the good, nonracist side.²

Trump’s persistent refusal to play along with liberal rhetoric of color-blindness and unity was a rude awakening for many progressives who were in a “post-racial” slumber during the presidency of Barack Obama. Many liberals became outraged and depressed after Trump’s election and started forming organizations to deal with their frustrations.³ In my own liberal community, nearly every street had a “Hate Has No Home Here” lawn sign to communicate liberal protest against Trump’s anti-immigrant, racist policies. The problem with these liberals is that while they appear to care about racism, they fail to deal with their own prejudice against working-class people. Classist remarks about Trump voters as “deplorable,” racist, and “rednecks” have become not only acceptable discourse but a signifier of how truly progressive one is. This classist behavior is an outgrowth of what I call “liberal white supremacy,” the tendency of liberal European Americans to constantly place themselves in the superior moral position in a way that reinforces white supremacy and social injustice. To assert their moral superiority, they juxtapose themselves against “bad whites,” who are usually working class and/or radically oriented but more recently have also included other middle-class European American liberals. Because critiques of color-blindness and white fragility are now in vogue, liberal European Americans will openly criticize other liberal European Americans whom they see as less intelligent or less “woke.”⁴ The purpose of this is not to become more “woke” themselves, but to remain superior vis-à-vis other European Americans.

Lawn signs, corporate and university statements supporting the Movement for Black Lives, and diversity committees present the facade that liberals care about racism without having to significantly alter the racial and economic status quo that privileges them. As Roderick Bush argues in The End of World White Supremacy, American liberalism “is torn between its egalitarian principles . . . and its desire for stability and social order.”⁵ At the same time, popular books such as White Fragility have inadvertently given permission to European American liberals to engage in the very behaviors these books warn against. It has made white fragile behavior acceptable. For instance, in one academic department, I observed a chairperson state that, according to the book, European Americans in the department would cry and become defensive in discussions on racism. Thus, he interpreted White Fragility as a guide for predicting and excusing how European American liberals were going to behave rather than as an analysis of what is wrong with white fragile behaviors and why these behaviors must stop. Ranita Ray has also found this phenomenon in what she calls “race-conscious racism,” where European Americans will say something racist and then blame it on their implicit bias. Ray cautions her readers about the ways anti-racist training can be used to excuse racist behaviors.⁶

Progressives perceive these problems and divides between liberals and radicals, but few people have laid out, conceptually, what this split involves. I analyze two case studies that help clarify what these differences are and why they matter. This analysis will be useful, not only to academics, but to progressive organizations plagued by these divisions. In what follows, I address the scholarship relevant to my study and the concepts I develop.

Theories of Race and Racism

Systemic racism theory, particularly as conceptualized by Joe R. Feagin, is integral to understanding how modern-day racism works. Feagin’s Racist America: Roots, Current Realities and Future Reparations; Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression; The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing; and several of his other works challenge common understandings of racism as an individual-level problem. Systemic racism theory posits that racism is embedded within institutional practices that have historically marginalized people of color and can be reproduced without any intention of racial bigotry. Just as people of color face cumulative disadvantages from centuries of racial oppression, whether overt or covert, European Americans of all social classes accumulate privileges from whiteness, even if they hold no personal racial animus.

Noel A. Cazenave’s Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language corrects conceptual problems in systemic racism theory that is sometimes too abstract and lacking in an any analysis of human agency. Cazenave distinguishes between different levels and manifestations of racism and addresses ideologies of denial as “the hegemonic glue that holds systemic racism together.”⁷ His examination of Linguistic Racial Accommodation versus Linguistic Racial Confrontation and racism-evasiveness informs my analysis of how liberal and radical methods differ and the central role of ideology in upholding racism. Cazenave’s problematization of “race,” along with the in-depth historical analyses offered by Audrey Smedley, Theodore Allen, Noel Ignatiev, and David Roediger influence my understanding of the racial categories of “white” and “black.”

Carter Wilson’s important work Racism: From Slavery to Advanced Capitalism puts forth a systemic theory of racism that does not minimize the role of human actions in maintaining it. According to Wilson, economic and political elites, who benefit from an oppressive economic structure, actively create a racist culture to sustain racial and economic oppression. As a historical materialist, he conceptualizes different manifestations of racism that developed in different time periods, depending on the mode of production in place. For example, the system of slavery manifested dominative racism, which allowed for the total control of African Americans, whereas the era of de jure segregation manifested aversive racism.

Theories that focus on ideologies, such as color-blindness, are also important to understanding how modern-day racism is expressed, particularly by people who believe themselves to be progressive or nonracist. Works such as David Wellman’s Portraits of White Racism and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s White Supremacy and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era and Racism without Racists expose the rhetorical strategies highly educated European Americans use to deny racism without making overtly racist comments. Bonilla-Silva has characterized this manifestation of racism as “racism-lite.”⁸ Wellman challenges notions that racism is simply irrational and argues that contemporary racism serves the rational self-interests of European Americans. That is, contemporary racist ideologies allow European Americans to deny they are racist while at the same time supporting policies that benefit them and marginalize people of color. More recently, Nancy DiTomaso has made a similar argument, adding to Oliver C. Cox’s critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma as well as Lawrence Bobo and Ryan Smith’s. Bobo and Smith argue that overt Jim Crow racism was merely replaced with a subtler “laissez-faire” racism that viewed African Americans as culturally rather than biologically inferior. DiTomaso argues that European Americans have not faced the moral dilemma Myrdal believed they would, because they do not see their actions as racist. This body of work, which shows how expressions of racism shift in different historical and political eras, is important to my own conceptualization of racism-evasiveness and liberal white supremacy as strategic practices and ideologies that uphold systemic racism.

Black Feminist Thought

In 1892 Anna Julia Cooper wrote A Voice from the South, which argued that African American women were overlooked because they did not fit neatly into one category.⁹ Their marginalization was reflected in the national dialogue on voting rights, which was framed as a pressing issue for either African American men or European American women, leaving women of color completely out of the equation.¹⁰ Cooper put forth a basic tenet of Black feminist thought: identities and status positions intersect and cannot be neatly separated. In 1972, Joyce Ladner published an important sociological study on the lives of multiply positioned African American adolescent girls living in St. Louis, Missouri, and, among other issues, how they navigated ideas of social class.¹¹ In 1977, the Combahee River Collective put forth a statement calling for an “integrated analysis,” one that understood systems of oppression as interlocking.¹² Black feminist theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw conceptualized this process as intersectionality, showing how privilege and disadvantage overlap and why it is important to center women of color, particularly Black women, who continue to be marginalized politically, representationally, and structurally.¹³

The field of intersectional studies has grown with several important works addressing the experiences of people of color who are multiply positioned.¹⁴ Patricia Hill Collins has examined intersecting oppressions within a “matrix of domination.” Collins demonstrates that where there is domination, there is also resistance. Important to Black feminist thought is a commitment to social justice. Indeed, a central purpose of this book is to understand and fight against practices, ideologies, and behaviors that reproduce inequality. I address how European American liberals misapply intersectionality through racism-evasiveness. In chapter 5, I draw on Black feminist thought and intersectionality to advance action-oriented and racism-centered intersectional approaches to social justice.

Theories of Class Oppression

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that society was “splitting up into two great hostile camps . . . bourgeoisie and proletariat.”¹⁵ The bourgeoisie, or capitalist upper class, owned the means of production (which is what Marx meant by private property), while the proletariat, or working class, was exploited.¹⁶ The working class is propertyless; they do not own or control the means or relations of production and have only their labor to sell. Marx and Engels tied human freedom to labor. Freedom was the ability to work for more than mere survival but also for the means to express one’s creative potential.¹⁷ This human need for creativity was denied to the working class, who were required to produce ever more for the capitalist class and in the process became ever more alienated from their work, themselves, and each other.¹⁸ Marxist analysis typically relegates racism to class oppression. Enslaved African Americans, in Marx’s view, would be viewed as part of the working class, the solution to their oppression being a unification of all the proletariat.

In The Distribution of Power within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party, Max Weber defined social class as propertied workers versus non-propertied workers but emphasized additional dimensions of status or prestige and power.¹⁹ According to Weber’s theories one can have social class in the form of money, but not status and power. These dimensions intersect such that one does not have to be among the power elite, which in the U.S. context C. Wright Mills defined as including the president and the cabinet, top-ranking CEOs, and top-ranking military officials, to have prestige and exert authority over others. Status competition and status anxiety can occur among people of very similar incomes. For example, people with higher levels of education may make similar incomes as those with less education but view themselves as superior based on the status they gain from their occupations or degrees. Influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois, Weber’s analysis addressed people of color as an excluded status group.

Oliver C. Cox, probably one of the most well-known contemporary Marxist theorists, contributed to theories on class oppression that included people of color in his books Caste, Class, and Race (1948) and Race Relations (1976). Cox was among the first scholars to distinguish between caste and racial systems of endogamy. He was concerned that fashionable comparisons of caste systems in India oversimplified race relations in the United States and were merely “distractions” to understanding inequality.²⁰ Although Cox used historical examples to illustrate the socially constructed nature of “race,” his analysis remained largely class centered rather than racism centered. Like Marx, he believed that the key to overcoming racial injustice was a unification of the working class.

Erik Olin Wright, also a contemporary Marxist theorist, produced several highly regarded works on social class, including Class, Crisis and the State; Class Structure and Income Determination; Classes; The Debate on Classes; Class Counts; and Approaches to Class Analysis. One of Wright’s main contributions was his analysis of contradictory class locations, such that one could have common class interests with both capitalist employers and with exploited workers. For example, managers, who are themselves controlled by capitalist owners, supervise workers beneath them and impose the class interests of the capitalist class upon them. This work is important to understanding the position of the middle class today.

These theoretical frameworks inform my conceptualizations of liberal color-blind ideology, racism-evasiveness, racial oppression, class oppression, and elitism and how these produce liberal white supremacy within a system of racism. Having discussed the relevant literatures, I now define my central argument and key concepts.

Key Argument and Concepts

My main argument is that white supremacy is maintained, not only by right-wing conservatives or stereotypically uneducated and/or working-class racial bigots, but by highly educated progressives who operate from a liberal ideology of color-blindness, racism-evasiveness, and class elitism. By explicating the differences between liberal and radical approaches to racism, class oppression, capitalism, and social movement tactics, I show how progressives continue to be limited by liberal ideology and perpetuate rather than dismantle white supremacy, all while claiming to be antiracist. To clarify this argument, I present my key concepts.

LIBERAL COLOR-BLIND IDEOLOGY AND RACISM-EVASIVENESS

John Locke is often referred to as the father of classical liberalism based on the ideas he developed in The Two Treatises of Government (1689). Locke believed that people in any society had natural rights to “life, liberty, and estate” and that government intervention should be limited, as it interfered with such rights.²¹ Locke’s writings influenced the work of other philosophers, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, and informed Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence. He and other philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, wrote about a social contract, which involved an agreement among the people to relinquish some of their freedoms to a powerful state in the interest of everyone’s comfort and safety. In 1997, Charles W. Mills argued that the social contract was inherently racist and that the writers purporting such ideas were essentially justifying European control and dominance over people of color and other subordinated groups. Mills stated, “European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human.”²² This is a key point at which liberal and color-blind ideology converge. Liberal-informed color-blind ideology is a belief system that rests on a seemingly positive and humanist notion that people do not and should not see or make judgments about differences in skin color. Achieving color-blindness is then seen as the key to equality. However, claiming that one does not see skin color produces the negative action of racism-evasiveness—refusing to see racism and strategically downplaying it or avoiding it. In this way, liberal color-blind ideology can only uphold humanism and equality for people of European descent, as Mills argues. No actions are put forward to challenge racism so long as people can claim they are color-blind. This only works to further harm people of color, whose experiences with racism are easily dismissed by color-blind falsehoods and racism-evasive maneuvers.

CLASS OPPRESSION AND ELITISM

Class oppression involves the dominance of the power elite and social upper classes over the working class that is simultaneously exploited for their labor and alienated from it. Class elitism can occur among people of roughly the same social class but who enjoy different levels of status, prestige, social capital, and cultural capital. The middle class is defined as people who make between $39,800 to $119,400 in a three-person family.²³ This income range is broad and includes people who have very different occupations, educational backgrounds, and lifestyles. People who identify as “middle class” can make class elitist and status distinctions among themselves. For example, administrative assistants may make less than plumbers or construction workers but view themselves as more sophisticated and enlightened due to the professional setting of their workplaces. They may define themselves as “middle class” and not “working class.” Although anyone can engage in class elitism, and I reference examples of class elitism by people of color, the central focus of my book is on class elitism among middle class, professional European American liberals, which they exert over working-class people, particularly those with less formal education. This class elitism and disregard for working-class people helps sustain class oppression.

CLASS OPPRESSION, ELITISM, AND LIBERAL WHITE SUPREMACY

Liberal European American middle-class elitism toward other European Americans is class supremacist behavior, but it also reinforces white supremacy. Whiteness is not about skin color but is a social and political construction that reaffirms dominance and maintenance of the status quo. As Charles Mills argues, “Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.”²⁴ Historically, there was a hierarchy of whiteness with some European Americans denigrated beneath others.²⁵ To gain the social and political advantages of whiteness, European Americans had to show their support for the racial and economic status quo by distancing themselves from blackness and expressing their political support for the system in place (e.g., Irish Americans supporting the U.S. system of slavery).²⁶ When European American liberals assert their superiority over other European Americans as the better “white”²⁷ people, they are constructing a hierarchy of whiteness, not one based on biology but on morality, where they are the most superior. They do this to shift blame for perpetuating racism onto another group. Thus, because they identify as liberal and “white,” support a hierarchy of whiteness (intentional or not), and assert supremacy over others, they embody liberal white supremacy.

RACIAL OPPRESSION

Racial oppression is the continued dehumanization, devaluation, harassment, and marginalization of people of color at every class level. Racial oppression is sustained through the interaction of an oppressive economic structure, the actions of political elites, and a racist culture that includes ideologies, controlling images, and discriminatory practices, policies, and laws.²⁸ It is based on the inherently dehumanizing idea of “race,” a concept developed with the intended purpose of ranking and dividing human beings, whose common interests posed a threat to political elites.²⁹ Right-wing conservative European Americans who openly discriminate against people of color perpetuate racial oppression, but so do liberal, antiracist European Americans who act paternalistically toward people of color. When liberal European Americans talk down to or speak for people of color, use them as sounding boards for their white fragility, or befriend them to gain legitimacy as antiracists, they uphold liberal white supremacy.

LIBERAL WHITE SUPREMACY

I define liberal white supremacy as a set of beliefs and practices progressive European Americans engage in to assert their moral superiority over other European Americans and people of color they see as less intelligent or sophisticated in their understanding of racism and injustice. These beliefs and practices help European Americans maintain control of the discourse and retain their dominant positions, as people of color make progress toward social justice. These liberals privilege their perspectives and methods as the best suited for challenging inequality, but, ultimately, they reproduce it. Liberal white supremacy is sustained by liberal ideology, which informs color-blind approaches and racism-evasiveness, and supports racial and class oppression.

The Plan of the Book

In chapter 1, I distinguish between different manifestations of racism and further develop my concept of liberal white supremacy. Past research has shown that liberal discussions on racism often reproduce racist behaviors, even as they attempt to combat them.³⁰ These problematic talk-centered discussions are tied to a key weakness in liberal organizing: nonconfrontational behavior and aversion to discomfort. Historically, liberals have preferred a conflict-averse and color-blind focus on unity and harmony.³¹ I show how this liberal approach to racism interacts with class bias to uphold liberal white supremacy.

In chapter 2, I review the history and conditions that led to the division between liberals and radicals and present my model, which illustrates key differences in discourse and tactics. In general, liberals tend to emphasize civil discourse over direct action and disruptive tactics. Radicals, on the other hand, favor action-centered and more confrontational approaches. Liberals emphasize talking about racism; radicals emphasize working-class solidarity.

Chapter 3 examines a radical group’s confrontation of questionable educational policies and the role of nonconfrontational tactics and liberal ideology in stifling dissent. Their unwillingness to be confrontational, their tendency toward comfort, and their alliance with established power ultimately prevented liberal activists from achieving social justice. Not only did liberals fail to express anger when needed, but they chastised radicals for directly calling out corruption and attempted to silence them. When the confrontational methods of the radical group worked in ridding the school district of a corrupt superintendent, liberals attempted to claim credit for their success.

Chapter 4 addresses racism-evasiveness in an interracial nonprofit group. As with the preceding case study, this group faced a political machine that portrayed radical activists as troublemakers. However, in the second case, fighting racial injustice was more explicitly part of the organization’s mission. Despite this fact, activists were hesitant to explicitly discuss racism, opting instead to emphasize interracial class solidarity. I address this tactic as a kind of strategic racism-evasiveness that was influenced by an action-centered organizational culture and that was a response to dominant liberal discourse and racial ideologies that emphasize civility and color-blindness. Therefore, this second case study helps illustrate the class-over-racism perspective and action-centered approach of radicals compared to liberals, as well as the limitations external liberal ideology impose on more radical organizations.

Finally, in chapter 5, I conclude with an analysis of how liberal white supremacy continues to limit community organizing, national politics, and interracial alliances. Here I discuss my experiences with self-identified progressive academics. I have interacted with faculty who engage in all the behaviors of white fragility while simultaneously vilifying liberal European Americans who engage in those very same behaviors. It is a very troubling paradox that often leads me to question the role of liberal European Americans in the movement against racism and prompted one prominent African American philosopher to ask, “Should I give up on white people?”³² For people of color engaged in antiracist work to not give up on progressive “white” people, the latter must be willing to forgo their need to be validated as antiracist heroes. Instead they must be motivated by a deep sense of social justice and feel obligated to do the work whether or not they receive any credit for it. They have to constantly examine the way their own internalized white superiority and privilege affect their work with people of color. They have to realize what Becky Thompson called “a promise and a way of life.”³³ European Americans who cannot move away from their need to be validated by people of color as “good white people” are ultimately barriers to social justice.³⁴ They continue to emotionally drain and infuriate people of color, whom they constantly seek out for validation. Addressing these issues in this final chapter, I call for a move toward action-oriented and racism-centered intersectional approaches, which I find exemplified in the Movement for Black Lives.

A Note on Terminology

Following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, scholars and journalists began questioning whether the term “Black” should be written with a capital letter.³⁵ A debate on whether to capitalize “white” soon followed.³⁶ For several years, I have addressed the complexities of these terms in my teaching and writing. In my academic writing, I have consistently used the pan-ethnic terms “European American,” “African American,” and “people of African descent,” while placing the terms “white” and “Black” in quotation marks when referring to people. When I refer to institutions, I use the term “white” without quotation marks, as in “predominantly white institutions.” Here, the term “white” is not referring to a socially constructed category of people, but a pervasive ideology of whiteness that permeates institutional culture and practices. The category of “white” was created intentionally by economic elites to divide English indentured servants and African slaves, who were constantly rebelling under a common class identity.³⁷ The ruling elite used a system of rewards and punishments to coerce working-class European Americans to identify with a “white race.” Interracial fraternizing and marriages were punished severely, and whiteness was deemed superior by law, attached to property and citizenship rights, as well as public deference and respect denied to people identified as “Black.”³⁸ This system of racial classification did not immediately make sense to those we now view as “Black” and “white,” because it was peculiar to a population, who did not naturally identify by such racial categories. Nor was this system built without objection. The Virginia General Assembly had to justify new laws based on skin color to officials in England tasked with evaluating them, and such laws were not immediately accepted.³⁹ Irish and Italian Americans, who were a type of “in-between peoples,” engaged in performances of blackface minstrelsy to assert a “white” identity. They had to work toward whiteness.⁴⁰ Given this history, I encourage my European American students to question their “white” identities. They are not just “white,” and uncritically identifying in this way can normalize whiteness. I ask them to consider why we generally prefer the terms “indigenous” and “Asian Americans” to the terms “reds” or “yellows.”

There are also problematic ways to use the term “European American.” Some European Americans use the term to sound politically correct or to express what Mary C. Waters calls an “optional ethnicity” that often denies the existence of white privilege.⁴¹ I do not use the term for these purposes but rather to show that whiteness is not biologically real and that European Americans also have a stake in dismantling racism. As Noel A. Cazenave states, “race should be problematized and ultimately relinquished not only because it is confusing . . . but because it is erroneous, and most importantly because it is injurious.”⁴² Johnny Eric Williams also problematizes the concepts of “white” and “Black” and often uses the term “self-identified ‘white’ people” or “people who think they are white.”⁴³ I argue that whiteness is, among other things, imbued in places, spaces, and ideology. Whiteness is not a human being, although people can embody whiteness in all sorts of harmful ways. As such, people of color can also uphold whiteness as superior. If European Americans and people of color understand this history, they may begin to comprehend how racial categories rob them of their own humanity. By uncritically accepting a “white” identity, we contribute to the maintenance of white supremacy.

I recognize that the term “African American” is also problematic because it is not inclusive of people who do not identify with this group. This term does not include all people of African descent who are affected by white supremacy around the world. For example, I see the Movement for Black Lives as combatting police violence and social control across the globe, not just in the United States. Furthermore, we could argue that there is a difference between the term “Black,” capitalized, and “white” or “White.” When activists use the term “Black,” they are referring to a positive political identity. To say that one is “unapologetically Black” is an empowering response to a system of white supremacy that has subordinated people of African descent for centuries. This system created and perpetuated an internalized oppression among people of African descent that kept them silent and compliant. Those embracing a “Black” identity are reclaiming this term to counter that history and the self-hatred it built. As I suggest to my students, the term “Black” has been used by people of many different ethnic backgrounds to assert a shared political identity against oppression, as can be seen in African-Caribbean movements and youth movements in Britain, where people of Asian descent identified politically as “Black.”⁴⁴ The term “White” (capitalized) is also a political identity, but rather than uniting people to fight against systemic racial oppression, it is used by white supremacists to reinforce the superiority of “white” identity and continued division. Whiteness is “politically . . . the willingness to seek a comfortable place within the system of race privilege.”⁴⁵ Thus, white nationalists make an inaccurate comparison when they try to compare “white pride” to “black pride.” To say that one is proud of being “white” is to say that one is proud of racist segregation that allows only those with a so-called pure “white” identity to accumulate privilege. Whiteness is about exclusion. As Melanie E. L. Bush states, “If race was constructed as a tool to dominate and subordinate, how can we render it (white identity) positive?”⁴⁶ This is not the same as being proud of one’s ethnic heritage—Irish, Italian, Scottish, and so forth. White nationalists often conflate these two ideas.

In sum, there is no perfect term, because racial categories were socially constructed within a system of white supremacy. Up to this point, I have placed the terms “white” and “Black” in quotation marks when talking about people to signify that these terms are problematic and we have much more thinking to do on the matter. Having explained these issues, I will now refrain from using the quotation marks, to assist with readability, and use European American, African American, and Black where appropriate. When I am speaking about Black Lives Matter or the Movement for Black Lives, I capitalize the “B” without quotations, as it represents a movement against white supremacy.

In my case studies and examples, where possible, I use the terms individuals use to self-identify. For example, if I know a person to self-identify as Latino instead of Latinx or Hispanic, I use the term “Latino.” The term “Latinx” was developed to offer a gender-neutral alternative to the terms “Latino” or “Latina.” However, the Pew Research Center reports that “most Latino adults have not heard of the term Latinx,” few use it, and college-educated people are most likely to have heard of it.⁴⁷ Some have argued that Latinx is also problematic because it does not conform to the Spanish language and is an example of “linguistic imperialism,” and that the term “Latine” is more consistent with the language.⁴⁸ Following this argument, I use the term “Latine” when referring to these groups, in general. The need for continued thinking on terminology can be better understood by addressing the origins and development of “race” and racism. I turn now to a discussion of this history to promote this understanding and to further explain the concept of liberal white supremacy.