Use Racism to Justify Oppression and White Supremacy
While it is difficult to date the beginning of white supremacist racial ideology, modern racism exploded with the early development of capitalism in Western Europe in the 16th century as a means of justifying two pillars of the new economic system: imperialism and slavery. Racism was used to justify imperialist acts of genocide against aboriginal peoples and the enslavement of Africans for plantation labor.
Establish a Global System of Wealth Inequality
A recent report by anti-poverty charity, Oxfam, determined that the richest 1 percent of the world’s population currently controls 48 percent of the world’s total wealth and predicts the rich is getting rich so fast that by next year there will be more wealth in the one percent’s hands than 99 percent of the world’s population. The wealth of the top 1 percent of the population of the United States averages over $18 million per household. The astoundingly high concentration of wealth is the direct result of hundreds of years of exploitation of poor, working- and middle-class people by the rich, and of people of color by white people, as written by Paul Kivel in his book, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice.
