Actual white supremacists don’t identify as white supremacists

Samantha Suppiah
8 min readOct 13, 2024

It’s a frequent lament I hear from privileged white people, particularly actual one-percenters and wannabe one-percenters, sometimes while sitting in their luxurious homes, planning to open a bottle of red immediately after our meeting:

“It is so abusive and hurtful to be repeatedly called a white supremacist.”

From the article “5 Executive Retreat Ideas Your Boss Will Love, Kiff & Culture, 23 February 2022 (don’t miss the acknowledgement of country in the website footer)

We live in a colonial world order where white supremacists receive validation every waking moment for perpetuating and benefitting from white supremacy. This is what makes a white supremacist’s life comfortable.

A white supremacist’s life is already quite comfortable relative to the economic class they sit within. But this comfort is vastly increased — and validated by — a narcissistic tendency to pity themself and excuse themself for systems of privilege that benefit white supremacists.

To be clear, white supremacists are themselves diverse. One does not need to be white or privileged to be a white supremacist. Anyone can become a white supremacist in our colonial world order. You don’t have to let the colour of your skin hold you back in climbing the colonial ladder. Today, it’s increasingly common and even expected to have rainbow executive teams and advisory boards of every gender, race and creed who…

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Samantha Suppiah

Southeast Asian trickster. Design strategist for decolonial sustainability & regeneration. www.possiblefutures.earth/crew#samantha