Unlearning Supremacy — The Inner Work For Every Culture

Fanon opens Black Skin, White Masks with a line that stops you cold: "The Negro is not. Any more than the white man." He means that neither identity exists as a natural fact — both are constructions, produced through relationship, through history, through the violence of colonial encounter. What colonialism created wasn't just economic exploitation; it created a psychological architecture in which one group's humanity became the measure of all humanity.

But Fanon is describing a structure, not a people. The structure is this: when a group holds power over others long enough, they begin to believe — and cause others to believe — that they represent the default human being. Everyone else is a variation. This structure is supremacy. And Fanon's analysis, for all its brilliance, was specifically aimed at the French colonial encounter. The structure he describes predates that encounter by millennia and exists independently of it across the globe.

We need to understand this clearly, because it has implications for the project of human unity that most books on this subject avoid.

The term "white supremacy" is accurate and necessary. But it has created an accidental blind spot: the impression that supremacy is primarily or exclusively a white Western export. Colonialism did spread a particular variant of supremacy globally, and that variant has caused enormous and documented harm. But to treat supremacy as solely a product of Western history is itself a kind of distortion — one that lets every other culture off the hook for examining its own hierarchical inheritances.

East Asian supremacy: The classical Chinese worldview placed China (Zhongguo — "Middle Kingdom") literally at the center of the world, with all other peoples arranged in concentric circles of decreasing civilization. The huaxia (Chinese civilized people) were distinguished from the yi (barbarians) not just geographically but ontologically — the barbarians were understood to lack the cultural and moral refinement that made one fully human in the Confucian sense. This is not a Western import. It is indigenous to Chinese civilization.

Japanese imperial ideology in the early 20th century constructed a theory of Japanese racial and spiritual superiority — yamato damashii (Japanese spirit) — that explicitly positioned Japan above not just Western powers but also other Asian peoples. The violence this ideology produced in Korea, China, and Southeast Asia is well-documented. It was not borrowed from Europe; it ran parallel to European colonialism with its own internal logic.

Arab and ethnic supremacy: Arab cultural supremacy operates across the Middle East and North Africa in ways that are rarely addressed in Western discussions of race. The treatment of Amazigh (Berber) peoples across North Africa, the marginalization of Sudanese and sub-Saharan African peoples in Arab societies, and the documented racism toward South Asian migrant workers in Gulf countries all reflect a hierarchy in which Arabness is the implicit standard of civilization. This is compounded by religious structures in which Islam as practiced by Arab communities is sometimes treated as more authentic than its practice by non-Arab Muslims — a form of cultural supremacy operating within religious identity.

In sub-Saharan Africa, ethnic supremacy has produced some of the most acute violence of the 20th century. The Rwandan genocide was not primarily a product of colonial race science, though Belgian colonialism did weaponize and intensify existing distinctions. It was built on a claim of fundamental hierarchical difference between Hutu and Tutsi — a difference that had been fluid before colonization and became rigid and deadly afterward. The logic, however — that one group is above another in the natural order — is not a colonial invention. It's an ancient human tendency that colonialism exploited.

Caste supremacy in South Asia: The caste system is one of the oldest and most enduring supremacy structures on earth, predating European colonialism by thousands of years. B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit intellectual and architect of the Indian Constitution, argued that caste was not simply social stratification but a graded system of inequality in which each level was taught to despise the levels below it — creating a self-replicating hierarchy that required no central authority to maintain because it was internalized at the individual level. This is supremacy at its most psychologically sophisticated: a structure so thoroughly internalized that those within it enforce it themselves.

What unites all of these — Confucian cosmology, Japanese imperialism, Arab ethnic hierarchy, African ethnic conflict, South Asian caste — with the white supremacy that Baldwin and hooks anatomized? The same psychological structure: the ego's need for elevation.

Terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon) offers one frame: human beings, aware of their mortality and the arbitrariness of their existence, construct cultural worldviews that give life meaning and provide symbolic immortality. When those worldviews are threatened by people who live differently, the response is often aggression, derogation, or dismissal. The "other" is a walking argument against the validity of your cultural worldview — and the easiest way to neutralize that argument is to claim that they are simply less.

Psychoanalytic framing adds another layer. Supremacy, in object relations terms, is a defense against the anxiety of what psychologists call "the uncanny" — the encounter with something that is almost-like-us but not quite. The stranger triggers something that pure otherness doesn't: the recognition of similarity, which then requires active suppression. To prevent the threat of recognizing our sameness, we construct elaborate hierarchies of difference. We don't just say "they are different." We say "they are less." The hierarchy is the defense.

Frantz Fanon described what this does to the colonized: it installs the colonizer's hierarchy inside the colonized person's psyche. The colonized person begins to experience themselves through the colonizer's eyes — seeing their own culture as backward, their own features as ugly, their own language as insufficient. This is what Fanon called the alienation of colonialism: not just political dispossession, but psychological displacement from one's own point of view.

What Fanon didn't fully explore (because it wasn't his subject) is that this same psychological process — the installation of a hierarchy in which one's own culture becomes the inferior term — can operate within cultures that were never colonized in the same way, and can be produced by internal rather than external forces. Casteism does this to Dalits. Arab ethnic hierarchies do this to sub-Saharan Africans in Arab countries. Colorism within Black American culture does this based on proximity to whiteness as a standard.

The structure is portable. It doesn't require Western colonialism as its carrier. It only requires a power differential and enough time for the hierarchy to become naturalized.

bell hooks, in Killing Rage, makes an argument that is harder to hear than most of her work: that liberation cannot happen only at the level of external conditions. The person who has internalized supremacy — whether they are in the dominant or subordinate position — must do interior work to dislodge it. This is not about self-blame. It is about recognizing that the structure lives inside you, and that it will reproduce itself through you unless you actively intervene.

What does that work look like, practically?

1. The Aesthetics Audit

Supremacy lodges itself most quietly in aesthetics — in your instinctive sense of what is beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent, or civilized. Notice when you experience another culture's food, music, architecture, or aesthetic tradition as "interesting but primitive," or "charming but unsophisticated," or "raw but not refined." Notice when you find your own culture's expression of the same values to be the unmarked standard against which others are measured. This is not about pretending to find everything equally beautiful. It is about catching the evaluative hierarchy that sits beneath your aesthetic response and asking where it came from.

2. The Language of Deviation

Listen for the moment when your culture's practices become the grammar by which other cultures are described. When something is described as happening "despite" being non-Western, or "although" being from a traditional culture — the grammar is doing supremacy's work. When children in non-Western educational systems are evaluated on whether they meet Western developmental benchmarks, the benchmark is being universalized. Notice when your internal frame works the same way.

3. The Pity Trap

Pity is supremacy with a soft voice. When encountering cultures that have experienced poverty, political instability, or historical disruption, the supremacist response is not always contempt — sometimes it is a particular kind of charitable sadness, a benevolent "we must help them." The help is real. The hierarchy embedded in the framing — in which your culture's stability is the destination they are trying to reach — is also real. Self-examination here asks: can you hold genuine respect for a culture's wisdom and agency while also caring about its material conditions? Or does care require that they become more like you?

4. The Inheritance Inventory

This is the hardest one. Every culture has elements worth preserving and elements worth examining. Supremacy makes it hard to do this work, because it either requires you to defend everything your culture has ever done (you can't criticize us without proving you think we're inferior) or to condemn your culture wholesale (we must reject everything to prove we're not supremacist). Both are the ego responding to threat. The actual work is sitting with the complexity — being able to say "this tradition carries real wisdom and this other tradition in our culture caused real harm, and both things are true at the same time."

5. The Mirror Moment

This is the practice of noticing when you feel a brief, quiet satisfaction at the failings of another culture — when a news story confirms something you already believed about that group's limitations, or when you feel a certain relief that "they" are struggling with a problem "we" figured out. That moment of satisfaction is worth sitting with. It's small. It's almost invisible. It is also where supremacy does some of its quietest work.

There is a question that sits underneath all of this: Why does it matter? If supremacy is this universal, this deeply embedded in human psychology and culture — if it predates colonialism and exists in every tradition — then isn't it simply part of human nature, and therefore not something to be "unlearned" so much as managed?

Here is the answer: because the world that is coming — a world of climate displacement, mass migration, resource scarcity, and technological disruption — will require unprecedented levels of cross-cultural cooperation to survive. Not cooperation in the soft, multicultural-festival sense, but genuine structural interdependence in which the legitimacy of other cultures' knowledge systems, governance traditions, and ways of organizing life is taken seriously as input to shared problems.

That level of cooperation is categorically impossible if every culture maintains, even unconsciously, the belief that its way is the standard. It produces what we currently have: international institutions built on Western liberal assumptions that other cultures are expected to adopt in order to participate, and resentment from every culture that feels its knowledge and tradition are being dismissed.

The inner work matters because institutions are downstream of individuals. The person who has genuinely done the work of examining their own culture's supremacist patterns — not self-flagellating about it, but honestly examining it — brings something categorically different to cross-cultural interaction than the person who has not. They listen differently. They ask different questions. They are less likely to mistake their discomfort with difference for the other culture's failure to meet a standard.

And at the level of 8 billion people doing that work — or even a meaningful fraction of them — the shape of what's possible changes. Not immediately. Not without continued structural change. But the internal work is not separate from the structural work. It is its foundation.

Exercise 1: The Supremacy Map Take a piece of paper and write your primary cultural identity at the center. Around it, write the cultural groups that you encounter in your life. For each one, write honestly (no one else will see this): what is your instinctive sense of where your culture and theirs rank in terms of sophistication, reliability, intelligence, beauty, or civilization? Now ask: where did that ranking come from? What stories, experiences, or teachings installed it?

Exercise 2: The Deviation Audit For one week, pay attention to the language you use when describing other cultures to yourself or others. Note every time you describe another culture's practices as a deviation from a norm (e.g., "they don't really have a sense of personal space" — a norm which implies your culture's sense of personal space is correct). At the end of the week, look at the pattern. What assumptions about the standard are embedded in your descriptions?

Exercise 3: The Wisdom Interview Identify one cultural tradition significantly different from your own. Spend time learning — through books, documentaries, or direct conversation — about what that culture has figured out that your culture has not. Not what is "interesting" about them, but what is wise. What has that culture solved, understood, or developed that your culture is still struggling with? Write it down. Sit with it. Let it be real.

Exercise 4: The Self-Compassion Bridge When you discover a supremacist pattern in yourself — and you will — notice whether your response is self-flagellation or genuine reflection. Self-flagellation is the ego, still operating in the hierarchy, now punishing itself for violating the rule. Genuine reflection looks different: "I see this in me. I understand where it came from. I am willing to do something different." Practice making that distinction.

References and Sources - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) and Notes of a Native Son (1955) - bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) and Ain't I a Woman (1981) - B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) - Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (1990) - Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski — Terror Management Theory (foundational papers, 1986–2004) - Melanie Klein and object relations theory — foundational psychoanalytic frame on projection and "the other" - Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (2010) — on ethnic supremacy in non-Western contexts - Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001) - Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)