41 Human Rights Commission White supremacy The origins of white supremacy White supremacy is the presumption of the superiority of whiteness, white culture, and white norms (Mills, 2011). White supremacy assumes that ways of being outside its norms are invalid or abnormal; it also assumes these norms require white control (Reid and Robson, 2007, p. 5). The doctrine of white supremacy ran deep in Western colonisation. For example, Arthur de Gobineau, in the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855), maintained that the ‘white race’ represented the highest level of human development. According to nineteenth century British writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Carlyle, and others, it was the “white man’s burden” to bring civilization to non-white peoples through beneficent imperialism (Jenkins, 2005). This doctrine enjoyed violent support during slavery and the early era of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) in the United States, and the rise of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, overt white supremacy fell into deep disfavour only to re-emerge as a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement and international immigration, including a revived KKK in the United States and the National Front in Britain (Jenkins 2005). Mainstream white society finds the label white supremacy abhorrent. For them, white supremacy represents the far-right fringe of white supremacist violent extremism in the form of white fascist, neo-Nazi, identarian, ultra-nationalist, pan-European far-right political ideologies whose aims are to establish European only enclaves and/ or fight a final conflict against non-whites. From the 1960s onwards, several of these movements have transposed themselves into Aotearoa, for example, the National Front, the Right Wing Resistance, the Western Guard and most recently Action Zealandia. The position that rejects white supremacy mirrors the privilege and fragility that denies racism. In the Indigenous world of colonised peoples, a rising consciousness and sophisticated understanding of racism, born of analysis and experience, has led to an incontrovertible deduction that white supremacy exists along a continuum between mainstream society and farright groups, one covertly violating, one overtly violent (Taonui, 2021). The issues of white privilege and white fragility are addressed later in this chapter. Manifestations of white supremacy White supremacy shows itself in diverse ways. At one level, it comprises what European culture considers ‘normal’ to wear, eat, and talk about (Aikman and Narayanan, 2021). At another level, white supremacy expresses itself in racial abuse and name-calling like ‘nigger,’ ‘black bastard’, ‘lazy Māoris’ and the more recent Aotearoa ‘white far right’ mantra that a ‘greedy self-enriching Maoripean elite is attempting to take over the country’ (Taonui, 2021). White supremacy is also embedded in our institutions as a sometimes invisible “ideological, political, and religious system” of white control (Norris, 2020, p. 6). We see white supremacy in extremist white violence, such as the nineteenth century Crown invasions of Te Urewera (Binney, 2009) and Parihaka (Riseborough, 2002), and the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain in 2019. White privilege and white fragility White privilege is the benefits and opportunities that accrue to white society through colonisation. White privilege rests upon the destitution of Māori. White privilege is legitimated, and colonisation is denied, by statements such as, ‘I worked hard for what I achieved’ and ‘Māori would achieve if only they would get off the dole and do some hard work’ (Halkyard-Harawira, 2021). White fragility is unaddressed guilt about the past, fear of admitting personal prejudice and racism in the present, and trepidation about sharing power with Māori because Māori might do to Pākehā what Pākehā did to Māori. When the topic of racism arises, white fragility centres the white person’s anguish and opinions, silencing Māori so they once again hear earnest promises about doing wonderful things for Māori (Smith, 2021).