White Supremacy

This past week conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, spoke at the University of California, Berkeley. He was required to pay a hefty security fee to speak at the campus and the school even restricted his audience size for "security reasons". Protests were present throughout the day, and the overall message was that UC Berkeley students were "standing up against (his) white supremacist BS." Due to the fears of these protests becoming violent, the school spent over $600,000 in preparation for Shapiro's visit. But what many of the protesters (and the most liberal Americans) don't know is that Ben Shapiro isn't a white supremacist at all. In fact, Ben Shapiro openly condemns white supremacy quite frequently. He even received an award last year for being the most targeted individual by white supremacists on social media. Yet regardless of these facts he was still met with anti white supremacist protests. This event clearly shows that many individuals don't know what white supremacy really is, so let's explore.

What It Is

White supremacy is believing that whites are better than all other races. It's believing that other races are not deserving of the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if that definition doesn't work for you, Merriam Webster's dictionary defines White Supremacy as the following:

"The belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially the black race, and should therefore dominate society."

According to an article from Ryan Struyk at CNN, White supremacist groups only make up a mere 10% of all the hate groups in America and that number has been on a steady decline since 2011. In addition, the number of hate crimes by white supremacists has been on a steady decline since 1996. So why has white supremacy become this gigantic issue in the past few months?

What It Isn't

While the issue of white supremacy does need to be acknowledged, it is not this gigantic widespread issue spreading extreme chaos across the country. White supremacy is also not conservatism. Being a conservative or even Republican for that matter is not being white supremacist. The ideology of Republicans and conservatives is strongly against all hate groups. Many individuals like to assume that being conservative automatically makes you white supremacist. This assumption is used by many that simply just oppose the viewpoints of conservatives. They label all views that they don't agree with as "racist" in order to discredit their opponents without engaging in meaningful debate. In recent days, the twitter hashtag #trumpsawhitesupremacist has been trending. But when has the president ever declared that whites are the superior race? White supremacy is not when President Trump does something that you don't agree with. It is pretty safe to say that no president would ever want to be a white supremacist and deprive minorities of their rights. Any President that would stupid enough to even attempt such an absurd move would be impeached immediately and would never see a job in politics ever again. No president is ever going to go out of their way to infringe upon minority rights or keep minorities from success.

What We Should Do (It Isn't Protest)

White supremacy is not the massive issue it is made out to be. White supremacists are just an astonishingly small number of self loathing people that attempt to shift their self hate onto others through the false justification of skin color in order to feel better about themselves. They are pathetic individuals that are literally begging for attention. By giving them these massive amounts of media coverage we are only giving them what they want. The more that we pay attention to these disgusting people, the more their movement grows. If we simply don't give them the attention they they are constantly grasping for, their movement will have no purpose and will die off over time.