The St. Louis American, January 2, 2020: Talking About White Supremacy
Often when Dedrick Asante-Muhammad gives a talk about race and economics, it’s to audiences who might not have a base level of understanding. That was not his audience at the region’s first St. Louis Racial Equity Summit, he said, so he decided to be more clear with his language.
“We say ‘racial inequality,’ but what we’re really trying to talk about is white supremacy and deconstructing white supremacy,” said Asante-Muhammad, of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and an expert in racial economic inequality analysis. “I want to name that.”
Keynote speaker Asante-Muhammad showed the summit’s sold-out audience of more than 500 people on October 11 how he had crossed out “racial inequality” on all his PowerPoint slides and replaced them “white supremacy.”
“That term is often used in a classist way,” he said, “like white supremacists are those poor working-class people in the South or in the Northwest who are Neo-Nazis. But I think it’s important to understand that many of the institutions we work at, the foundations that fund us, the governments we work with are the main purveyors of white supremacy. The foundation of white supremacy is racial economic inequality, and the foundation of racial economic inequality is the racial wealth divide.”
