Stop Calling It Supremacy: It’s Terrorism - Part 1

In Part 1 of a series, Chisom challenges the term “white supremacy” and proposes a language change: it is white terrorism. She traces the term to its 1824 origins, maps the papal bulls that gave genocide divine authority between 1452 and 1493, and shows how the Doctrine of Discovery is still embedded in U.S. and international law.  Using her Three Clarities Framework, Chisom reveals how white terrorism interlocks with patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and religion to create what bell hooks called “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She handles the academic objections directly, addressing why “terrorism” rather than “racial capitalism” or “settler colonialism,” and acknowledges the lineage of Black freedom thinkers from Du Bois to Bell Hooks who used “white supremacy” descriptively for the system. She closes with the present. In April 2025, France acknowledged the injustice of Haiti’s independence debt and stopped short of reparations. Acknowledgment without restitution is the modern face of white terrorism. The crime is named. The wealth stays. Words shape reality. Let’s stop calling it supremacy. It’s terrorism.

Part II - May 13.
Overnight Wisdom is a weekly podcast, with new episodes every Wednesday.

Transcript

0:06

I have a problem with the word supremacy. Not just any supremacy, but white supremacy. And before you think I'm denying what it is or trying to soften it, understand I'm doing the opposite. I want to call it what it actually is. because supremacy implies excellence, merits, being at the top through achievements. It's aspirational language for systems built on genocide, slavery and land theft. And I'm done with it. I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom, where I bring clarity to the complexity of leadership, power and systems. I am coming for the language we use to describe racial oppression. And I'm proposing we replace white supremacy with a term that captures what the system actually is. white terrorism. not because I want to be provocative, but because terrorism is exactly what it is. It is the systematic use of violence to control populations through fear. And unlike supremacy, terrorism cannot be romanticized. no one aspires to be a terrorist. Plenty of people throughout history and even right now have aspired to be supreme. This is part one of a series. Today, we look at the history and the language. In future episodes, I will go deeper into specific threads, Africa specifically. We're going to look at the doctrine of discovery in present day law. We're going to look at settler colonialism as a structure of the present. We're going to look at Christianity as an institution of conquest. And today we're essentially just going to lay the foundation. So let me show you where the term white supremacy came from and how the Catholic church gave this terrorism religious authority in 1493. How it operates through colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy. and religion as interlocking systems and why the language change matters and how we can begin to dismantle it. So let's jump in. So I wanna start by looking at where white supremacy came from and why the word itself is a problem. So the term according to the Oxford dictionary, uh the earliest documented use of white supremacy was in 1824 in the writing of T.S. Winn For 200 years, we have been calling the system supremacy. Supreme means highest in rank. It means greatest. It means best. It means most excellent, superior in quality. So you see why I have a problem with this. The word itself legitimizes the claim. It suggests that white people achieved dominance through merit, through being better, through being smarter, through some natural superiority. When in reality, the system was built through genocide, slavery, land theft, rape as a weapon of war, legal dehumanization and systemic violence. This is not supremacy. That is terrorism. So let's look at what terrorism actually means. Terrorism is the systemic use of violence and intimidation to achieve political aims, especially to control populations through fear. I want to say that again. Terrorism is a systematic use of violence and intimidation to control populations through fear. Does that describe what white colonizers have done globally for hundreds of years? Absolutely. Does that describe supremacy? No. So a quick note for the scholars listening to this. I know how scholars define terrorism. A lot of my friends are academics. I value the insights that they bring to this discourse. Most academic tradition apply the term, I think, too narrowly to politically motivated violence by non-state actors. So things like bombings and hijackings or targeted attacks. There is no universal definition of terrorism. The United Nations has tried for decades and failed, but the academic narrowing is also real. And someone who's listening will object that I'm stretching words past its scholarly use. So I want to state it clearly that I am, and I am doing this deliberately. I am reclaiming it. because the moral weight of the word is precisely what is needed. Chomsky has spent his career arguing for state terror as a category. Edward Herman and Richard Falk have shown that institutional violence on this scale is no less terrorism for being systemic. It's even so actually. The word terrorism is currently reserved for violence that disrupts the order I am applying it to the violence that builds and maintains the order This is not me being imprecise. So this is not imprecision. This is precisely my point. I also want to say something quickly for the lineage. I'm not the first person to name this system. Dubois used uh white supremacy. So did Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, uh Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, a century of Black freedom thinkers used this term to describe the system against the system in the language that they had. They named it accurately for their time and in many ways for now. What I am proposing is that we sharpen it. that we sharpen what they have given to us. Not to correct it, just to sharpen it. The language has to keep evolving because the system keeps adapting. So why do I think terrorism is the right word as opposed to another term? And before someone asks why this word specifically and not another existing word or one of the already existing words to describe it, I know the literature, right? So, Robinson named racial capitalism Patrick, Wolf named settler colonialism, Aime Césaire named colonialism as barbarism, Fanon named the violence as the heart of the colonial relation. All of those terms are essential. All are precise. But academic terms have analytical precision and very little popular moral weight. Racial capitalism will not move the average listener. Settler colonialism requires a seminar. Terrorism carries a public moral change that those terms do not. And that charge is what we need to dismantle a system that has spent 500 years masquerading itself and dressing itself as civilization. So when I say white terrorism, I am not replacing academic frameworks. I am giving the system the name it has earned in plain language, in this case, English. now that I've addressed that, let's talk about the religious foundation and how the church gave terrorism essentially divine authority. So before European colonizers could steal continents, they needed permission, not from the people whose land they were taking. No, they needed it from God. Or more specifically, they needed it from the Pope. So let's talk quickly about the Papal Bulls from 1452 to 1493. In 1452, Pope Nicholas issued a purple bull called Dom Diversas authorizing King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate the Saracens and Pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ to reduce their persons to perpetual servitude and to take their belongings including land. Basically in plain English and in plain language, the Pope gave Portugal divine permission to enslave anyone who wasn't Christian. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V doubled down with Romanos Pontifex, granting Portugal a monopoly on trade with Africa and authorizing the enslavement of African peoples. And in 1493 came Inter Caetera. One year after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, Pope Alexander VI, yes, a Borgia. issued the bull that changed the world. It declared that land not inhabited by Christians were available to be discovered, claimed, exploited by Christian rulers. It established a demarcation line and gave Spain exclusive rights to anything west of it. This is called terra nullius, basically empty land. The legal fiction that if Christians did not live there, it is empty regardless of how many people already lived there, regardless of how advanced their civilizations were. the transatlantic slave trade, for the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, for European colonization of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, for the theft of entire continents. And the doctrine they birthed, the doctrine of discovery, is still embedded in US and international law today. In March, 2023, 530 years after Inter Caetera, the Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery. They said the purple bulls had been manipulated for political purposes and that the church rejects the idea that one culture is superior to others. Well, a little too late, the doctrine is embedded in property law. in Supreme Court decisions, in the very structure of how nations claim land rights. In 1823, in Johnson v. Macintosh, US Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the doctrine of discovery was established law. He wrote that the discovery gave titles to the government against all other European governments. So basically you can translate that as planting a flag equals ownership. So you can see an empty land as long as you go there and plant a flag, it's yours. 2005, well within living memory of every adult, I think, that is listening to this, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the doctrine of discovery in the very first footnote of her majority opinion in City of Sherrill versus Oneida, Indian nation. the case denied the Oneida nation the rights to revive sovereignty over land that had been in their reservation, even after they had bought it back on the open market. so hear this, the doctrine that justified the theft was used to deny the return. So when the Vatican says we repudate this, what does that change? On paper, very little. The terrorism is already done. The systems are already built. Religion gave it divine legitimacy and the laws have carried that legitimacy forward footnote by footnote into 2026. So as usual, I'm gonna use my three clarities to talk about how white terrorism operates as an interlocking system. white terrorism does not operate alone. It's not just about race. It's about race and gender and class and religion and colonialism all at once. This is what Bell Hooks called imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy and it is apt. I am choosing to call it white terrorism plus patriarchy plus capitalism plus colonialism plus religion. So let me break this down with my three clarities. So from an identity clarity perspective, we have to ask who does this system serve? White terrorism serves white men specifically, not all white people equally and not all white men equally either. It serves white men with property, ridiculous amounts of wealth and with power because that system interlocks with patriarchy. Gender was a tool of colonialism. The feminist philosopher Maria Lugones has shown how European colonizers enforced rigid gender binaries to control populations. Many indigenous societies had more fluid gender systems, multiple genders, women in leadership roles. Colonizers destroyed those systems and replaced them with European binary. Proper men dominate. proper women submit. Anyone who didn't perform gender correctly was killed, enslaved, or erased. I talked a little bit about this as well in my recent episode where I talked about patriarchy and the women who uphold it from an African perspective. And I recommend listening to that one alongside this one. The short version is this white terrorism required patriarchy to function. Hear me when I say this, it is really difficult to steal land, maybe even impossible to steal land and then slave people. If women have power, if gender is fluid, if societies are egalitarian, you need hierarchy, you need domination, you need control and patriarchy provides that architecture. The system we exist in also serves capitalists. White terrorism is not just ideology. It is economics. The transatlantic slave trade was about free labor. Racism was the story they told to make it acceptable. And over centuries, the story and the systems hardened together until you could no longer pull them apart. gold, silver, cotton, sugar, rubber, diamonds. And capitalism required racism to justify that operation. If you were going to enslave 12 million Africans, you need a story that says they are not fully human. that this is what God wants, this is God's will, and that you were just civilizing them. That is what white terrorism provides, moral cover for economic theft. It also serves Christian institutions. The Catholic Church did not just permit the system, it authorized it. The Papal bulls gave European monarchs divine permission to commit genocide. And it was not only Catholics. Protestants, colonizers, England, the Dutch, they built parallel theological justification. They called it the white man's burden. Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Carlyle Charles Kingsley, they wrote that this is the duty of Europeans to bring civilizations to non-white peoples through beneficent imperialism. Translation was stealing your land for your own good. Religion has become weaponized. So let's talk context clarity. How does this system maintain itself? The system maintains itself through law. The doctrine of discovery is still cited in US court cases. Property law is built on a legal fiction that Europeans discovered land that indigenous people had lived on for thousands of years. This fiction is structural, not historical. Through economics, global capitalism is built on colonial extraction. where do you think the world of Europe and America came from? It came in significant parts from slavery and colonization and extraction and theft. The global South is poor in significant parts because the Global North stole and continues to steal through debt, through trade agreements, through multinational corporations that extract resources and pay pennies. And let me say this clearly, the global south is not a geographic category as we all know. It is a category of plundered economies, some of which seats in the Northern Hemisphere. Geography is not a variable. Plunder is the variable here. And we also have to be honest about the fact we can't just blame the colonizers. The system had accomplices in colonized countries, leaders who are deeply entrenched in coloniality, who benefit from extraction at the expense and peril of their own citizens. Coloniality does not just end when colonizers leave. It is a relationship and that relationship needs both sides to maintain them. It happens through education. mean, we teach that Columbus discovered America. We teach that colonization was exploration. We teach that slavery was a labor system instead of mass terrorism stretched out over centuries. We sanitize genocide. And when people try to teach the truth, like critical race theory, the political right screams that it is divisive because the system depends on you not knowing how it works. From a context perspective, we can also see that the system maintains itself through violence. When legal systems fail to maintain white terrorism, violence tends to fill the gaps. So we see things like lynchings or police brutality or mass incarceration. The school to prison pipeline that essentially funnels Black and Brown children into cages. the genocide of indigenous people that continues through stolen land, broken treaties and the highest documented rates of violence against indigenous women anywhere in the Americas. This is not past tense. This is happening right now as I'm recording this episode and whenever you're going to listen to it. from a power clarity perspective, we have to ask who benefits and who pays. Some white people benefit, especially white men, with wealth through accumulated generational wealth stolen from enslaved people and colonized nations. Capitalists benefit through extraction economies that continue to exploit the Global South. Religious institutions benefit through moral authority and wealth accumulated during colonization. Governments benefit through land resources and geopolitical power built on colonialism. And as I said moments ago, the leaders in colonized countries who are entrenched in coloniality, they also benefit from the extraction at the expense of their own people. So who pays? Black people through slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police violence, stolen wealth and dehumanization, Indigenous people also pay through stolen land, through cultural erasure, through genocide, through broken treaties and the highest rates of violence and poverty in the hemisphere. People of color globally through colonization, ongoing extraction of resources, debt and the climate catastrophe caused by industrialization is built on stolen labor. Women, specifically through the intersection of racism and sexism, sexual violence used as weapons of war, and exploitation in global labor markets. women in general also pay because even white terrorism subjugates women everywhere, including white women. And all of us pay through a world built on violence and extraction and the lie that some humans are worth less than others. and the bills keep coming due. 2025 marked 200 years since France imposed independence debt on Haiti. 150 million gold francs to compensate former enslavers for the loss of their human property. Haiti paid that debt with interest until 1947. The wealth extracted shaped Haiti's poverty for the next century and half. In April of 2025, on the 200th anniversary, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the injustice. He created a joint commission of historians. He stopped shorts of reparation. So acknowledgements without restitution is the modern face of white terrorism. The crime is named the wealth stays. So here's why the language change matters. Words shape reality. When we call the system white supremacy, we adopt a frame that says white people are supreme. Even when we critique it, we speak the frame. When we call it white terrorism, we name what it does. Terrorism is a crime, recognized globally as a crime, understood globally as a crime, and the moral weight of the word forces a response that supremacy never has. like a debate. Like, do white people deserve to be on top? is a moral outrage, a system to be dismantled. Now someone will push back here, they will say, people have been naming the systems accurately for 200 years and it still operates. Will renaming it actually help? And my hot honest answer is yes. Naming is necessary and it is not sufficient. Renaming will not by itself dismantle anything But continuing to use the language of the oppressor, language that frames domination as excellence as supreme is one of the small concessions that keep the systems fluent in itself. Naming is the floor It's the bare, bare, bare minimum to call it exactly what it is. The dismantling is what we must continue to build on top of it. And I know that that work is happening across the world and we must continue to do that dismantling. So how do we begin to dismantle it? Six things. Number one, change the language. Stop saying white supremacy. Start saying white terrorism in your writing, in your teaching, in your organizing every time. Name it accurately. Number two, teach the history. The Papal bulls, the doctrine of discovery, the terra nullius, how religion authorized genocide, how capitalism required slavery, how patriarchy and white terrorism interlock. This is not Asian history. It is the foundation of current law. as charity, as restitution for theft. Slavery was unpaid labor. Colonization was resource extraction. The wealth that was taken still circulates in institutions, in inheritances, in national accounts. The argument for reparations is not that the wealth is sitting in a vault waiting to be returned. The argument is that the theft compounds and the repair has to compound with it. Four, dismantle the legal structures. The doctrine of discovery is still in the U.S. property law. Ginsburg cited it in 2005. Indigenous land rights are still denied based on Papal bulls from 1493. Repudiate it. in law not just in statements. Five. Reject the interlocking system. You cannot dismantle white terrorism without dismantling patriarchy because gender hierarchy enables racial hierarchy. You cannot dismantle it without dismantling capitalism. because exploitation requires dehumanization. You cannot dismantle it without confronting the religious institutions that authorized it, which means a reckoning, not a press release. The systems work together. They have to be dismantled together. And six, we have to build something different. This is not just about tearing down. There are indigenous and pre-colonial models of governance, of land relations, of economic exchange that did not require domination. We can learn from them, not to romanticize them, just to learn. of those models existed before the conquerors arrived. Some have survived in spite of the conquerors and the colonizers. They show us that the system we live is one option, not the only one. The world we have is not the world we have to keep. We can build something better. So here's what I know, white supremacy is the wrong word. It legitimizes the claim. It makes terrorism sound like excellence. So I'm calling it what it is, white terrorism. The systemic use of violence to control populations through fear, authorized by the Catholic Church in 1493, embedded in law, in economics, in education, and violence. Interlocking with patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and religion. And it's still operating in 2026. You cannot dismantle what you will not name. So let's stop pretending the system is about supremacy. It is not supreme, but it is definitely terror. So let's call it terrorism. And let's begin the long work of dismantling it. This was part one of a series. Future episodes will go deeper. The Berlin Conference of 1884 and what white terrorism did specifically to the African continent I was born on. The doctrine of discovery and how it is still shaping property law in 2026. tense structure. Reparations as a serious economic question, not a moral gesture. Christianity as an institution of conquest and what its reckoning would actually require. And I hope you will join me for these conversations. If this episode challenged you, if it makes you rethink the language you use, the history you were taught, the systems you're embedded in. share it with someone who needs to hear it. And also I'd love to hear from you. I'm always open for a healthy, nuanced, respectful debate, even if you disagree. I believe that the words we use matter. That white supremacy is wrapped in aspirational language. What we're actually describing when we talk about it is terrorism. And we have the power to name it, teach it and dismantle it. Subscribe to Overnight Wisdom wherever you get your podcasts. Join The Weekly Clarity newsletter at chisomudeze.com where I bring the same structural analysis to leadership, power and systems every week. And if you or your organization is ready to interrogate its systems, not just polish them, reach out. Let's chat. Until next week, we have to name things and then we have to continue to dismantle it. I'm Chisom. Thanks for being here.