Being-in-America White Supremacy and the American Self

This book describes the devastating impact of white supremacy and its co-dependent style of individual autonomy on African Americans and on American culture and society. It reveals the hidden workings of white supremacy in the American psyche, its destructive effects in the family, and its profoundly dangerous threat to American democracy.

White supremacy and American-style individual autonomy are mutually supportive and co-dependent. Attacking white racism will not dislodge white supremacy, which the author contends is the greatest danger facing America. That can only be accomplished by making concurrent and significant modifications in American individualism. Yet, white supremacist thinking, feeling, and acting and American individualism are protected by what the author describes as The White Supremacist Collective Unconscious, a culturally determined mental construct that Americans assimilate as they grow into adulthood, which endows all Americans, regardless of race, with a white supremacist mental orientation to one degree or another. Drawing on his personal experiences as an African American growing up in the United States, and on his research, the author details the development and workings of that unconscious, and the impact of white supremacy on the national character.

In this provocative, personal, and engaging volume, so timely in its intervention, Ronald Richardson gives us a new way of looking at ourselves, how we came to be, and the inescapable role white supremacy has played in the unfolding.

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

This is a brave and candid book centered on the psychology and vexed history of race and the white ascendency in the United States. The gaze is unblinking, the analysis rigorous, and the conclusions judicious. Professor Richardson has composed a most impressive study, drawing on the provocative ideas of varied thinkers—among whom Fanon, Jung, Kierkegaard, Kakuzo Okakura—and his own experience, stretching from childhood to youth to distinguished scholar.

—David Mayers is Professor, History Department, Political Science Department, Boston University