Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 12: The Accurate Name

In Chapter 12, the final episode of this part of the series, Chisom returns to Chapter 1 and settles the word. She traces white supremacy to a defeated colonist of Saint-Domingue who in 1802 called it an axiom while the enslaved were beating France, and to the indemnity France then imposed on Haiti, paid for a hundred and twenty-two years. She shows what the word does: it flatters, it turns a crime into an opinion, and it lets you believe the thing is receding while the beneficiaries are alive and being paid. Then she holds the record against the statutes the accused wrote themselves, element by element, and finds it meets the definition of terrorism, with the one failing element, illegality, failing only because the perpetrators wrote the code. She defends white as the name of the design, since the operators are no longer only white and Europe never left, refuses the retreat to greed, and keeps the promise made in Chapter 4 with a reparations section built from the archives, because reparations have already been paid, repeatedly, to the wrong people. It closes where Chapter 1 closed. You cannot dismantle what you will not name.

Transcript

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Episode one of this series began with a problem I had with a word. I said that white supremacy, specifically the word supremacy, implies excellence, merit, arrival at the top through achievement. And this is aspirational language or system built on genocide, slavery, and land theft. I said the accurate word is terrorism, which is the systematic use of violence to control a population through fear. Then I proved it chapter by chapter, one system at a time. The Bulls and the doctrine of discovery. Berlin and the borders. The settler structure, the operating system, the compound, the 400 years in the United States from 1619 to the man at the fields in Angola, still this year. Then we looked at the church, the lab, the water at Lampedusa. And the buddies indisonoran. The ranking that stayed behind after the flags came down through coloniality and what you owe yourself in response. This episode is where the argument is gathered and the word is settled. I'm Chisamudeze and this is Overnight's Wisdom. If you've come here first, you need to know one sentence before the rest will hold. white terrorism does not mean that white people are terrorists. It names a structure built by white Europeans over five centuries which used organized violence and fear to take a world and keep it. And this episode argues that terrorism described that structure accurately and supremacy does not. Let's start with where the word came from In episode one of this series, I gave you the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest documented English use in 1824 in the writing of T. S. Wing. The formulation is older than that though. It arrives in French and the circumstances of its arrival tells you exactly what the word is for. in eighteen two, a former colonist of Saint Domingue named Jean Felix Cateau published a book in Bordeaux about the events that had ruined the French portion of the island, Writing about the revolution of the enslaved that was in the process of defeating France and that would produce Haiti two years later, Cateau set down as an axiom what he called the unalterable supremacy of the white species, a preeminence he described as the safeguard of his own kind. The Abbe Henry Gregoire, quoting him a few years later, Noted that Cateau blamed the ruin of Saint Domingue on the pride and premature pretensions of people of colour, Rather than the pride and immoderate pretensions of white people. So let's get back to the timing. The phrase was not coined by a scholar describing a system from the outside. it was coined by a defeated slaveholder at the exact moment the enslaved were beating him. as an explanation for why the beating should not be happening. He wrote it in an axiom, a thing not requiring proof, a law of nature that the facts on the ground were in the process of disproving. And the same country supplies the sequel, which episode one of this series already put in front of you. In 1825, 23 years after Cateau, France sent warships into the harbor of the nation those revolutionaries had built and demanded 150 million gold francs in compensation to the former enslavers for the loss of their property. Haiti paid with interest. For one hundred and twenty two years until nineteen forty seven. So the word and the bill come from the same event, just two decades apart. The word was invented to explain why the enslaved would not have won. The bill was imposed to make certain that winning cost them everything anyway. That is the lineage of the term this series is retiring. Now what the word does, which is three things, all of them useful to the men it came from. Number one, it flatters. Supremacy comes from the Latin supremus, highest, and entered English in the fifteen forties, meaning the occupation of the highest station of power Or authority. The word describes a summit. A summit implies a climb and a climb implies that whoever stands at the top has some quality that puts him there. Every use of the term hands the structure a compliment it did not earn because the position was not achieved. It was taken and it was taken by pushing other people down so that white men could be described as high. It was taken with brutal violence that was state sanctioned. it relocates the crime. Look up white supremacy in any dictionary and you will find it defined as a belief. The belief that white people are superior. A supremacist is a man who thinks something. That puts the whole matter in the head. where it becomes a question of opinion and opinions can be debated, deplored, or educated away. Everything the series has documented the books, the ships, the schools, the brothers, the laboratories, the algorithms dissolves into an unpleasant attitude held by unpleasant people. And third, it lets you believe this thing is receding. This is the most comfortable error I want to be exact about. When the system is described as a belief, the natural next thought is that the believers are a fringe, a diminishing number of angry men and the time is carrying them away. but look at what is actually true. The people who hold the positions this structure created hold them now. And they hold an extraordinary amount of power. And they are using it to organize a present. the wealth that was taken is still where it was taken to. the institutions built to administer the extractions are the institutions that set the terms of trade, the terms of debt, and the terms of movement in 2026. Nothing in the eleven episodes that I have covered is in remission. A belief can recede a structure with living beneficiaries. Does not recede without calculated strategic work over long periods of time because the beneficiaries are alive and they are still being paid. Now the word I am asking for. In chapter one of this series, I made a concession and I want to revisit it now because the evidence has changed my view of it. I said there that I knew the academic literature applies terrorism narrowly to politically motivated violence by non state actors. that someone would object, I was stretching the word past its scholarly use. That was honest about the scholarship. It was too generous about the law. There are statutory definitions of terrorism. They were written by the same state, this series indicts, which makes them the most conservative possible test to apply. And they are broader than the academic convention. United States federal law at Title VIII, Section 2331, defines terrorism. As activities involving acts dangerous to human life that violate criminal law, which appear intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping. British law goes further. The Terrorism Act of 2000 defines terrorism as the use or threat of serious violence against a person, serious damage to property, endangering life or creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public. Where the use or threat is designed to influence a government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public and where it is done for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause. The Act specifies that the government in question may be the government of a country Other than the United Kingdom, and that the public in question may be the public of any country other than the United Kingdom. Britain wrote a definition of terrorism that reaches violence committed abroad against foreign populations in service of a racial cause. Now let us apply it by each element to the record of this series. First Act dangerous to human life. We have eleven episodes of this detail. The middle passage, the rubber quotas, the famine administered as policy. the school grounds now being exhumed with ground penetrating radar, the surgery performed on black women held down without anesthesia, The desert selected as a wall because of what it does to a body. to intimidate or coerce a civilian population. This is the element the record answers most completely because the violence was rarely only violence. It was communicative. A lynching was not a private killing, it was a public one with a crowd and a photographer. And the photograph was sold as a postcard because it was meant to reach every black person who could hear of it. And when the British sent a naval force into the kingdom of Benin in february eighteen ninety seven, they called it a punitive expedition, which is one word the Empire used for a raid whose purpose was meant as an instruction. They burned Benin City, killed the uncounted number of its people, looted the obas palace of thousands of brass casting and carved ivories, And they distributed them among the officers by rank and auctioned the rest to pay for the expedition. The killing punished one kingdom. The manner of it though instructed every other kingdom watching. And episode nine of this series documented the same logic operating now in a border policy that selects little ground on the purpose so that the that will be known. Which the state doing it calls it deterrence, and which is the word coercion. by fear actually wears when the state's enforcing it is wealthy. Now let's look at the bit around for the purpose of advancing a racial cause. Episode 8 of the series settled this. Race was not a context in which the extraction happened to occur. Race was manufactured to license it, ranked and published and taught as science, so that the taking of the world and the enslavement and genocide of black Brown and indigenous peoples will look lawful. There is no cleric case of violence in service of a racial cause than one where the cause was invented for the violence. The other element of this definition is designed to influence a government or affect its conduct. Episode four described that machinery. The colonial states did not need to be influenced from outside because fear was its method of administration, and whole populations were governed by a demonstrated understanding of what would happen if they did not comply. So, four elements. four findings On the plain reading of two Western statutes applied to the evidence in this series. this structure meets the definition of terrorism. the stretch I considered in episode one was a stretch of the scholarship, not of the law. I do want to make a note that one element in the definition does not fit, and I want to stop and speak on it briefly. The American statute requires that the act violates criminal law. Most of what this series described was not illegal. It was law. It was sanctioned by states. The slave codes were statutes. The Indian Removal Act was legislation. Apartheid was A body of law with a parliament behind it. The residential schools were funded policy. The bulls that authorized the taking of the world and everything in it were absorbed into legal doctrines and as episode one showed, the version of that doctrine was cited by a Supreme Court justice in 2005. When the perpetrator writes the criminal code, the code does not criminalize him. A definition of terrorism that requires illegality would therefore always reach the weak and always miss the powerful. It is the reason the word has been used to define a young man with a bomb and not used for an empire with a navy. Which brings me to a question underneath this chapter. If the structure meets the definition, why has the name never been used? Because naming is power. And this series has spent 11 chapters describing who holds it. The Mau Mau were terrorists, and the camps the British ran in Kenya was an emergency. The African National Congress was a prescribed terrorist organization. and its leader remained on a US watch list until two thousand and eight, while apartheid was a policy and its architects were heads of government that were received in foreign capitals. The words are not applied to acts, they are applied to actors, and the sorting is done by power. Terrorism is reserved with great consistency for violence committed by the poor, the colonized, and people not racialized as white. While identical or greater violence committed by states that fits within the structure of whiteness with flags and treasuries is called order. or policy or defense, or the cost of progress. The naming apparatus is not a neutral instrument that happened to miss the case. It is part of the same machine performing the same function, which is to make the violence of those who stole and retained power look like something other than violence. So this is not a request for a stronger word. It is a request for the accurate one. And the accuracy has been withheld for reasons that are themselves evidence. Now I want to talk quickly about the other part of the name. So why keep white? When episode ten showed the machine running through the hands that are not white, and when the operators today include the Emirati states buying the gold, the Chinese firms holding the cobalt, the Russian companies taking the concessions, And the African elite banking the proceeds in London. It's important to keep the word white because white was never just a claim about the skin of the originator and operator. in episode three, I named this simply as the architect builds the system and the operators have multiplied. the architects were specific institutions in specific European capitals across specific centuries. The originators are whites and the operators are more mixed now than they have ever been. And none of that touches the design. Notice also what the objection requires you to accept. It requires you to believe the operators are no longer white. Let's be clear, they are white. They are no longer only white, Which is a different sentence with a different meaning, and that difference is a core of the conversation as well. Europe did not withdraw. Episode 10 followed the Sudanese gold past Dubai, into Swiss refineries, the Congolese cobalt into European plants and European and US terms, and the stolen African money into London property and Geneva accounts. The white operator is still at the table. There are simply more chairs than there were before. And the expansion is not evidence that the frame has expired. It is the evidence that the structure is working exactly as designed. A system that still requires its builders in the room would be a fragile thing that fell when they left. This one does not fall, at least not easily. It has become the ordinary condition of the world and it recruits its operators from every population on Earth, including the population it was built to consume, and they work it completely because it was designed to be workable by anyone who accepts its terms. This is the plainest way I can say what the series has been describing. It is not a fringe occurrence. And it is not a historical period that ended. It is the water we are all swimming in. Episode 10 described coloniality as the water of the formerly colonized, the ranking left inside the mind after the occupation ended. This is a larger body of water that one sits inside. It is the arrangement of the entire world, the borders and the depths, and the prices, and the passports, and the hierarchy of who may move and who may be believed. And everyone alive is inside it, the beneficiaries and the ranked together, which is precisely why it is hard to see. You do not notice the medium you live it. You notice a disturbance in it. If we strip the word white out of the name, let's look at what lives with it. You lose the fact that this structure was built by white Europeans in named cities over documented centuries. which is to say you lose the possibility of holding anyone responsible for it. You lose what I discussed in episode eight and the invention of race as the instrument that made the taking feel lawful to the takers. You lose the reason the extraction fell along color lines, which is that white men engineered it too. What remains is imperial or colonial or extractive, and each of those words describes the shape of the thing while concealing the mechanism that drives it. This is what every alternative loses, It the race that was built into the design on purpose. And with it, the answer to the question of who did this and who is still being paid for it. there's also one retreat left and it is perhaps the one that sounds most respectable. It is the suggestion that all of it is religious greed, that people take what they can when they can, and this is a constant of the species, and that dressing an ordinary vice in the language of race makes a moral drama out of an economic ordinariness. Greed is real and greed is universal. And greed is the fuel here. It is not the engine. Every society in history has produced people who wanted more than their share and took it when they could. White Europeans over five centuries built a planetary system that ranked the whole of humanity in order to license that taking. They wrote the ranking into its science and into its scriptures and its laws and constructed the machinery to move the proceeds continuously from one set of continents to another. Greed explains the thief. And the theft. It does not explain a filing system. It does not explain the Berlin Conference or the doctrine of discovery or a racial hierarchy published in scientific journals or a currency arrangement that outlives the empire that made it. And also notice what the grid arguments accomplishes. Whoever makes it, and however sincerely, It converts a designed thing into a natural one. It takes a structure with authors and dates and documents and signatures and reclassifies it as a feature of the human condition. You cannot indict a feature of the human condition. you cannot ask it for anything back. Which is exactly where this argument has been heading. And it is the reason the name matters in practice, not only in principle. Episode four promised you that the question of what is old would come once the harm had been named in its racial form and in its compound form as well. And it has been. So here is the question, and I am going to answer it with, you know, the only evidence that actually settles it. and here I am talking about reparations. The standard objection to reparation is that they are impossible. Like too long ago, too complicated, too many descendants. Too hard to value, no way to identify who pays and who receives, and no states could bear the cost. Every part of that objection has already been refuted in the archives of the states now making it because reparations for slavery and colonization has already been paid repeatedly at scale, promptly and with enthusiasm. They were simply paid to the wrong people. Britain paid the slave owners. when Parliament abolished slavery in eighteen thirty three, it voted twenty million pounds in compensation. Roughly 40% of the Treasury's annual budget and about 5% of national output distributed to some 46,000 claimants for the loss of what the law called their property, essentially people who have been enslaved. 800,000 enslaved people received nothing, not a cent, and were then required to fund part of that settlement themselves, held in a system called apprenticeship, and made to go on working unpaid for years after the legislation that supposedly freed them, because the 20 million did not cover the assessed value of their bodies and the balance. came out of their continued labor. Consider what that operation required. The valuation of 800,000 human beings. The processing of forty six thousand claims. national loan, one of the largest in British history, administered by the Bank of England, which now holds the ledgers in its own archives. And the servicing of that debt across two centuries So that the Treasury was able to state in twenty eighteen that British taxpayers had finished paying it off only in twenty fifteen. Hear this. Until 2015, every taxpayer in Britain was contributing to the debt incurred to compensate slave owners, and that includes black British descendants of the people who were enslaved. They were made to help pay the compensation awarded for the theft of their own ancestors. Let that sink in. In the United States, slave owners were also paid. On sixteenth April 1862, Lincoln signed the District of Columbia's Compensated Emancipation Act, Which freed some 3,000 enslaved people in the capital and paid their owners up to $300 for each. each freed person on one condition that they leave the country. the owners were paid to keep what they had built. The freed were offered money only to disappear. another example is the Netherlands that also paid slave owners. When Dutch slavery formally ended in eighteen sixty three, the state's compensated owners at three hundred guilders by enslaved person from a fund of nearly ten million guildas. Much of it flowing to slaveholders living comfortably in the Netherlands, while the people freed in Suriname were compelled to continue working under state supervision for another ten years until eighteen seventy three. Let's talk about France. France charged the victims. Haiti as episode one set out and as this episode began paid its own enslavers for 122 years. In April 2025, on the 200th anniversary. President Macron acknowledged the injustice and appointed a commission of historians and stopped short of a restitution. Listen, acknowledgement without restitution, is the modern face of this system of white terrorism. The crime is named The Wealth Stays. now let's go back to the Netherlands, within living memory, it actually charged the victims too. At the round table conference in The Hague in nineteen forty-nine, the Dutch made independence conditional on payments. they opened by demanding six and a half billion guildas and settled at four point three billion of Dutch East Indies debt, which the new Indonesian state had to assume as a price of its own sovereignty. Indonesian negotiators pointed out that because the debt ran to nineteen forty nine rather than nineteen forty two, they were being required to pay for the Dutch military campaigns waged against Indonesia itself. They paid anyway, until Indonesia repudiated the arrangements in nineteen fifty six. While this was happening, the Netherlands was receiving more than a billion dollars in American martial aids to rebuild. And the charging has never stopped. The CFA Franc was created in 1945, and under it, France required its African colonies to keep half of their foreign reserves in the French Treasury. The eight West African states were released from that requirement only in reforms agreed in 2019 and ratified in 2020. The six Central African states still deposit half of their reserves with the French Treasury today. Fourteen countries remain pegged to the Euro under a French convertibility guarantee. Their banknotes are still printed in France And the promised independence currency has not arrived. In episode 9, I talked about this where I named Sahelian hunters could expel French soldiers and could not reach past the French frank. So the practical objection of reparations being impossible is that nobody in eighteen thirty three said the accounting was too complex or descendants too hard to identify or the sums too large for a state to bear. Now with all the gadgets we have, it should be even quicker. listen, the machinery for valuing, adjudicating, financing, and dispersing reparations for slavery was built and operated at enormous scale. By exactly the government who say now that it cannot be done. And it worked. And the money moved. And in Central Africa, some of it is still moving. The question was never whether reparations are possible. The question was only ever who counts as a person to whom something can be owed. it is also not true that reparations are only ever paid to the dead and the untraceable. West Germany signed the Luxembourg Agreement with the State of Israel in nineteen fifty-two, committing three billion Dutch marks to the Israeli state And a further four hundred and fifty million to the Claims Conference, a sum amounting to roughly one ninth of West Germany's federal budget, paid over more than a decade. another case in this direction is the United States passed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 and paid $20,000 to each surviving Japanese American interne, more than one and a half billion dollars to over 82,000 people, alongside a formal apology. for the violence and brutality they endured during World War two. Neither government found the accountant impossible, neither found the beneficiary impossible to identify. What those two cases share, and what the Caribbean and African claims do not have yet is a perpetrator state that accepted it was a perpetrator. And we're asking that question again right now, in July. And the answer is being given in both directions. In July 2026, after Caribbean leaders met in St. Lucia to advance the reparation case, A British parliamentarian proposed that the former colonies should be repaying Britain. the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Muttley, called the suggestion asinine, and rightfully so. She said that she could not believe that in 2026 the descendants of the enslaved were being asked to pay for the machinery that oppressed them. And that the Caribbean owes Britain nothing. For slavery, for colonial extraction, or for laws that treated African people as property and chattel slaves. She is right. And the archives are on her side because the descendants of the enslaved have already paid for that machinery. through the British Treasury until twenty fifteen. So let me be specific about what is owed and to whom, because I don't want to be vague here because that would be evasive and I'm not about that. Reparations are owed by the states and the institutions that built and profited from this structure. And they are owed to nations that were colonized and to the descendants of the people who were enslaved. reparations must also come and not as charity, which preserves the hierarchy by making the return of stolen property look like generosity reparations must come as restitution, which is what the law calls giving back what was taken, and which is the same instrument Britain used in eighteen thirty three when the claimants were whites. And the forms are not mysterious because the precedents exist and some are already in motion. We can look at debt cancellation since a great deal of debt was engineered at independence to make the extraction survive the flag. The end of currency arrangements that still run through a European treasury. The return of stolen property, which is not abstract. The Benin Bros is taken in 1897 sits in more than a hundred and sixty museums. Germany transferred ownership of over a thousand of them in 2022. The Netherlands returned a hundred and nineteen unconditionally, and the British Museum still holds a share behind a law that forbids it to give them back. And yes, that is absolutely ridiculous. Reparations also means the return of land where the title is traceable, which it frequently is. It also requires direct transfers to states and to communities structured over time. Prime Minister Matley has made the point herself that No one expects a single payment and that a repair which took centuries to make can be made over a long horizon in the way the extraction was. And the amounts are not unknowable either. They are contested, which is a completely different thing. Caribbean governments and researchers have produced figures in the trillions. Economists, of course, will argue them. The argument will be legitimate, and a dispute about quantum is not a defense against a debt. Britain valued 800,000. people in a matter of months when the claimant was a slave owner. So here is why this conversation belongs in this episode about a name rather than a chapter of its own. Listen, if this system is supremacy, so an unpleasant belief held by some people, then nothing is owed, because beliefs do not owe. There is no claimant and no perpetrator, only opinions of varying quality. If it is terrorism, then it is a crime, and crimes have victims and beneficiaries and evidence and restitution. And the question stopped being whether anything is owed and becomes the ordinary legal question of how much, to whom and over what period. And this is exactly what naming it is for. We have to name it exactly what it is, because that was precisely what it is: terrorism. A name is not a remedy. I believe. Calling this thing the right name is literally the floor, not the building, and that remains true. what an accurate naming does is that it lets you see the whole thing. Called supremacy. This structure appears as a doctrine, and doctrines can be argued with. And arguing with a doctrine feels like doing something. Called terrorism, it appears as what it is. An organized and continuing project with a design and a history and set of beneficiaries who are alive and who are still being paid. And once you see that, you can't unsee it. Every other question in this series becomes answerable. What is owed? By whom? To whom? What you are laundering and what you will refuse. Episode one ended with a sentence I'm going to give back to you now that you have hopefully eleven episodes worth of evidence for. You cannot dismantle what you will not name. You have the name. Supremacy is what the man who lost Saint Domingue called it while he was losing. Terrorism is what it does, which is what it did in Benin City and Kingston and Koweresi and the Sonoran and the straits between Svaisk and Lampedusa and what it is doing this year. White is not a polemic part of the phrase, it is the analytical part because white men engineered the ranking, and the ranking is the whole of how it works. Call it white terrorism. Then look again at the world you live in, which is running on the design, and see how much of it you were previously unable to see. Name it accurately, see it accurately. Everything else follows from that. This is where I'll leave this one and where I will leave this part of the series. Twelve chapters to arrive at one word that I have been saying every single episode. I think it is so important that we retire the word supremacy. It flatters the thing. It turns a crime into an opinion, And it was the slaveholder's own word before it was ever anybody's analysis. Etch white terrorism in your language, in your work, because that is what it is, and the statutes agree. So when you name it accurately you can finally see this thing accurately. And once you see it, you can see what is owed and who is still being paid and what it is asking you to launder. That is the whole of what I wanted. Nothing here is finished. But hopefully by now you have the name and we cannot dismantle what we will not name. So as usual, sit with it, argue with it, this is what it is for. this is the end of this part, not the end of this work. There's a great deal still left to discuss and I will be coming back to it in the parts ahead. So stay tuned because I have provoking topics planned next week and weeks after. As usual, if this is the kind of thinking you fancy, I write a newsletter called The Weekly Clarity, where I basically take one idea and turn it on the systems we actually live inside. When I talk about clarity, I really mean it as accountability. So I'm not here to shake the tree, though I don't mind to shake the tree. But really, it's about accountability, seeing things as they are, naming them as they are, and finding just solutions for a way forward. You can read more about the work in the show notes and also subscribe to the newsletter. If this episode gave you something, send it to somebody who might love to have a listen, spread it widely, And of course, follow overnight wisdom wherever you listen to your podcasts. So the next episode. finds you. I am Chisom Udaise. This is Overnight Wisdom. Thank you so much for being here.