page_title: White supremacy
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: White supremacy / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Ku Klux Klan parade, 9/13/26
context_page_description: White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and often relies on pseudoscientific arguments, and was a key justification for Colonialism. It underlies a spectrum of contemporary movements including neo-Confederates and neo-Nazism.
  Different forms of white supremacism put forth different conceptions of who is considered white, and groups of white supremacists identify various racial and ethnic enemies, most commonly those of African ancestry, indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and Jews.
  The term is also used to describe the development of this belief into a political ideology that imposes and maintains social, political, historical, or institutional domination by white people. This ideology has been put into effect through socioeconomic and legal structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow laws in the United States, the White Australia policies from the 1890s to the mid-1970s, and apartheid in South Africa.
context_section_description: White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 17th-century scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that helped shape international relations and racial policy from the latter part of the Age of Enlightenment until the late 20th century (marked by decolonization and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1991, followed by that country's first multiracial elections in 1994).
caption: Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C. in 1926
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