Nearly 50% of the country (based on polling) is going to vote for Trump..are all those millions of people automatically white supremacists?
I know I'm responding to a banned poster, but... kinda?
White supremacy is a complex thing, and there's a broad spectrum between "sets crosses on fire" and "holds implicit, unquestioned beliefs about the relative status of the majority." Not all Trump supporters are avowed racists who say demonstrably racist things, but being a Trump supporter
does require you to endorse, excuse, or at the very least acknowledge many of the demonstrably racist and white supremacist things he has talked about and prescribed. Even if you're voting Trump to deny Clinton or "for the lulz," you still need to reckon with what he and his campaign represent and the broad support they have garnered from principled white nationalists.
Being called a "white supremacist" is almost a slur in America, and it conjures up white hoods and Odin's crosses and skinheads. But you can be a white supremacist in very mild, very subtle, very insidious ways — such as being made uncomfortable hearing Spanish spoken in the grocery, or thinking that the Obamas don't look as "respectable" as previous first families, or wondering even idly about the woman in the headscarf behind you in the line for airport security. All of those things are founded in white unease, and many of those implicit fears are foisted on us by the society we live in, which is a fundamentally white supremacist one — as a matter of fact.
Because of history, because of culture, white supremacy is the current we swim in. It's hard
not to be a white supremacist. But how much we dwell on that, how much we struggle against it, is up to us.
