FROM SNEAKY TO OPEN RACISM: UNDERSTANDING WHITE SUPREMACY IN U.S. POLITICS TODAY (2025) by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

 THE RETREAT OF OPEN RACISM

 Sneaky racism is no longer the order of the day. Under the leadership of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement within the Republican party, white supremacy is rearing its ugly head in the open… once again.

 For almost 75 years, white supremacy was forced to hide and disguise itself. This period of its retreat was compelled by global events. First, there was World War 2, which put the genocidal and insane crimes of Nazi Germany, carried out in the name of racial superiority (in this case Aryanism), on world display. And, second, there was the worldwide resistance of people of color against the open capitalist-imperialism and white supremacist world rule of the “West”. This system of world domination operated under Western European colonialism across Afrika and Asia, and U.S. Jim Crow segregation, and open white violence, including lynchings, mass deportations and imprisonments, and police terror of people of color domestically, and its neo-colonial domination across Latin America and the Caribbean.

 Those Third World struggles were bolstered by the material, political, and moral support of the socialist blocs of China under Mao Zedong and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, against whom Western Europe and Amerika were in an ideological battle for Third World influence, also know as the Cold War.

 This widespread exposure and resistance discredited white supremacy (the main weapon of capitalist-imperialist domination), beating it back and forcing it to repackage itself, to hide its former face of open violence and smug arrogance behind one of reconciliation and innocence, while simultaneously waging a prolonged battle to undermine, discredit and villanize imperialism’s socialist rivals.

 THE BIRTH OF SNEAKY RACISM

 As open white supremacy was beaten back on the U.S. domestic front under the Black, Red and Brown liberation and land reclamation struggles, and the struggles of workers, women, students, prisoners, students and gender non-conforming peoples, and for civil rights for people of color, all of which were growing into an increasingly unified struggle against the imperialist system, Richard Nixon arose as the the architect of its new strategy for survival – namely, sneaky racism.

 Nixon’s immediate aim (which was called the “Southern Strategy”), was to counter the resistance against the system of imperialism and white supremacy in Amerika and to win Southern whites over to this agenda and to the Republican Party. The Republicans took up this cause after the Democrats, under president John F. Kennedy, defected to the side of the Civil Rights Movement in a move to gain control of the domestic struggles.

 The Democrats were initially the Party of open Southern white racism, until it was forced to come out in pretended support of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 in a strategic move to head off and control a planned mass Black siege on Washington, DC that year, that had been organized at the grassroots. This planned siege of hundreds of thousands of Blacks descending on the U.S. capitol to shut down commerce and the government in protest of prevailing racism, poverty and abuse, and refusing to leave, threatened to create a political nightmare for Kennedy and the Democrats who were busy falsely portraying Amerika to the world as a racially just and neutral country in its efforts to win Third World influence.

 The Democrats did succeed in taking control of the planned siege of DC and converting it into the peaceful one-day rally that has since been known as the August 1963 “March on Washington,” led by Martin Luther King Jr, who was then under the control of Kennedy. In his November 1963 statement, “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X criticized this sellout of the planned Black protest in DC and King’s role. King later woke up realizing how he’d been used to subvert the Black struggle by the Democrats and Civil Rights Movement, and broke with the Movement and publicly criticized U.S. capitalism, racism and militarism, denouncing Amerika as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” for which he was assassinated by the U.S. government.

 Nixon’s Southern Strategy, as admitted by his White House advisor, H.R. Haldeman, in his published diaries of his years in the Nixon White House, was to unify and mobilize the Southern white electorate by using sneaky racism against Blacks and Communism, criminalizing Blacks and the Civil Rights protests, and blaming Blacks for all the social ills in Amerika, while pretending to have goodwill towards Blacks and to not target them for discriminatory treatment. Nixon even coopted the “Black Power” slogan and used it to promote a neocolonial agenda of Black capitalism and consumerism.

 WHITE SUPREMACY SURVIVES THROUGH SNEAKY RACISM

 The Southern Strategy proved wildly successful in all of its aims and in winning Nixon’s 1972 presidential bid against liberal Democrat George McGovern. I discuss the deceptive political history and evolution of the Democratic Party, the Southern Strategy and the role of sneaky racism in greater detail in my article, “The Democrats are Not Your Party.” (See, http://rashidmod.com/?p=2756).

 Using the methods of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, sneaky racism became the political strategy of the Republican Party and conservatives. So that, as Blacks and other people of color in Amerika continued to suffer persecution, segregation, marginalization, violent brutality and murder at the hands of police, and denial of economic, political and social equality, it became taboo to openly express racist motives or attitudes when doing so.

 As with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, disguising racist motives and attitudes became a key component of sneaky racism, which enabled the white supremacist status quo to persist, but to be excused as accidental, unintentional, and rationalized away on non-racial grounds. That is, it was racial abuse and discrimination, but under the pretense of being innocent of racist motives.

 SNEAKY RACISM IS LEGALIZED

 Sneaky racism was then legitimized in law, making it legal and normalized as social behavior.

 As with ALL past racist doctrines in Amerika, sneaky racism was legitimized by Amerika’s highest court making it legal and normalized as the political and social status quo.

 Remember, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized and normalized EACH phase of racism in Amerika, from Blacks being deemed property, subhuman, and without citizenship or political rights in Amerika under chattel slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857); to the legalization and normalization of the horrors of Jim Crow segregation, (“separate but equal”, language that Donald Trump is now introducing back into political discourse – during the week of October 12, 2025 he used this term to characterize planned talks that he would mediate between Russia’s and Ukraine’s presidents), in Plessey v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); to giving license to white lynch mobs in the drive to reclaim white dominance across the South after the Civil War in U.S v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)

 With the ascendance of Trump and the MAGA movement, the Supreme Court has been upholding the trend of rolling back concessions made and laws passed during the Civil Rights era that held open racism at bay.

 It was in 1976 that the Court legalized sneaky racism, in the case of Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, where the court established that acts of racial discrimination only violate federal law if the actor ADMITS a racist motive for their actions. Essentially, it was fine to racially abuse a racial ‘minority’ so long as the abuser doesn’t admit his motive to be racial.

 In her 2010 book THE NEW JIM CROW, Black law professor and civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander analyzed and critiqued the effects of this legalized sneaky racism, particularly in the blatant discriminatory treatment of Blacks in the U.S. criminal (in)justice system. Although she didn’t call it sneaky racism (a term I coined) and she didn’t trace its origins to Nixon or Washington v. Davis, she accurately explains its purpose and effects, and how the Supreme Court in rulings related to challenges to racial discrimination in the criminal (in)justice system, has insulated these practices from constitutional challenge by requiring victims to prove that their abusers had intentionally acted with racist motives – a standard that she pointed out it basically impossible to meet, unless the abuser stupidly confessed a racist motive, which she noted almost never occurs.

 Indeed, the very point of the court’s creating this “subjective” or “state of mind” requirement in proving illegal racial discrimination beginning in 1976, was to accommodate Nixon-style sneaky racism, which was by nature of its method of racism denial, exactly as Nixon created it to be to resistance to white supremacy. I discuss the history of race and racism as divisive methods of social control manufactured by the U.S. ruling class beginning in the late 1600s in response to “Bacon’s Rebellion” in 1676, a revolt that united European and Black indentured servants and slaves in a successful revolt in the Virginia slave colony that temporarily overthrew the colonial government, and I go into greater detail on the development and normalization of sneaky racism in U.S. social culture, in my 2016 article, “Radicalization and Incarceration: The Politics of Polarization in Amerika” (see, http://rashidmod.com/?p=2225).

 Consistent with the Supreme Court’s history of legalizating and normalizing racist trends in Amerika, the Court has, since the advent of Trump’s MAGA politics, been rescinding civil rights laws and policies passed in the 1950s and 60s, and as I write this it is considering revoking more key portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, that prevent racial gerrymandering – or the redrawing of lines of voting districts to give electoral control to pro-Republican whites.

 If the court rescinds the parts of the Voting Rights Act under attack in Louisiana v. Callais, it will allow open power grabs by the Republicans and the consolidation of their rabid open white supremacist agenda.

 SNEAKY RACISM USED AS POLITICAL DEFLECTION AND TO REVIVE OPEN RACISM

 But there was another layer to this game that was used to suppress and reverse the struggles and gains of people of color, and is now being used to revive open white supremacy. This was to use the taboo against mentioning race as a motive for actions to suppress victims of racism from discussing race too. When they did, or they invoked racial equality as bases for claiming benefits or asserting rights against discrimination, white supremacists charge them with using race as a motive for seeking and obtaining undeserved advantages, and thus being racist themselves, or reverse racists. Suddenly, white males claimed themselves to be a minority and victims of racial discrimination, and used this to counter anti-discriminatory policies of racial diversity, equality and inclusion (or DEI).

 In this way the very class of people who were and are the proponents and beneficiaries of white supremacy deflected onto their victims the practice of racism, and used it as a political strategy to silence criticisms and challengers of racist abusers, and to deconstruct policies and laws erected decades ago that forced white supremacy into hiding.

THIS is the strategy being used now by Trump and his neo-Nazi MAGA movement, that now dominates the Republican party, against racial and gender diversity, equality and inclusion – their openly expressed anti-DEI politics.

 The very use of their anti-DEI rhetoric is the normalization of blatantly stated opposition to people of color and women having an equal share and stake in Amerikan power and society. It is an even more direct method of expressing racist motives than using racist epithets, since it’s meant not to merely insult but to deny the entitlement to fair and equal treatment of people of color and women on any level. This language now makes it safe to openly utter racist and sexist motives for excluding and abusing people of color and women. This is how sneaky racism is now being used to revive open racism.

 Conservatives are now making no secret of openly attacking and reversing the gains and concessions of the Civil Rights era, mobilizing the white population, police and military forces against communities of color where the propaganda of crime control (criminalizing people of color), migrant invasions, and others slander blaming people of color for all Amerika’s social woes, while they plunder the U.S. economy and federal treasury and gut its workforce. It’s a textbook case of fascists exploiting working and poor people, while inciting them against each other in a Machiavellian game of divide, agitate and rule.

 CREATING A YOUNG BASE OF OVERT RACISTS

 The use of sneaky racism to suppress opposition to the resurgence of open racism has been used in defense of and to popularize the slain neo-Nazi Charlie Kirk and his youth-oriented Turning Point USA group, and to promote him as a slain hero of this open white supremacist revival. Kirk is being portrayed as a martyr of this increasingly emboldened racist movement, to popularize it among a new generation of white youth who don’t have the memories nor historical perspectives from the German Nazi experience and global resistance against the old system of rabid white supremacy.

 In a textbook application of sneaky racism, a frequent response of Kirk loyalists and apologists to criticisms of him as a white supremacist, are claims that he didn’t recognize race at all. Yet Kirk himself called Black women unintelligent, said he was incensed as a youth against integration when he observed Latinx people increasingly attending his school, he opposed the civil and voting rights acts that gave Blacks and other people of color some level of political protection from discrimination and citizenship rights, and he warned white Amerika that there was already a race war going on and they needed to wake up.

 Kirk is being used to galvanize an Amerikan neo-Nazi agenda by conservatives and the Republicans, exactly like Horst Weasel was used in the 1930s and 40s by the German Nazi party to push their movement. Like Kirk, Wessel, who was a member of the Nazi SA (the Brownshirt paramilitary unit of the Nazis), was shot to death by anti-Nazis in 1930. The Nazi Party then memorialized him as a martyr of their movement and used him in Nazi propaganda, just as the Republicans are doing with Kirk. As with Kirk, Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi propaganda, elevated Wessel’s image as one to be emulated by the youth. A song he wrote glorifying Hitler and the Nazi cause was made a co-national anthem of Germany under the Nazi regime. Just as Kirk’s Turning Point USA group is being endorsed by the highest conservative politicians.

 Conservatives, as with Trump and fascists dictators of all times, use blackmail and pull strings to destroy jobs and careers, engage in media assaults and insults and slander, even incitements to violence, to silence and deter anyone who criticizes and exposes Kirk and their white supremacist agenda, while lyingly promoting him out of the other side of their mouths as a champion of the claimed Amerikan values of free speech and public debate. They attack and intimidate anyone who speaks out against white supremacy and what it stands for.

 Folks like Washington Post journalist Karen Attiah who was fired simply for quoting Kirk’s own words that Black women are not intelligent. And Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Representative, who was formally censored in Congress on September 15, 2025 and removed from two Congressional committees for her criticism of Kirk as a racist who manipulated ignorant white youth to draw them into racist views, a Palestine genocide denier, and a transphobe – all of which he was.

 What’s been missing for the victims and opponents of white supremacy is an objective understanding of its source, methods and evolution. Now you know. And knowing is half the struggle. The other half is applying this knowledge to unite and produce the needed results of destroying capitalist-imperialism and its main weapon of divide, agitate and rule, namely white supremacy.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

 All Power to the People!