I began to use the phrase in my work, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue. But for me, the use of that particular jargonistic phrase was a way, a sort of short-cut way of saying, all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives. And that if I really want to understand what's happening to me right now at this moment in my life as a black female of a certain age group, I won't be able to understand it if I'm only looking through the lens of race. I won't be able to understand it if I'm only looking through the lens of gender.
I won't be able to understand it if I'm only looking at how white people see me. To me, an important breakthrough I felt in my work and that of others was the call to use the term white supremacy over racism because racism in and of itself did not really allow for A discourse of colonization and decolonization, the recognition of the internalized racism within people of color, and it was always, in a sense, keeping things at the level at which whiteness and white people remained at the center of the discussion. In my classroom, I might say to students, you know, that when we use the term white supremacy, it doesn't just evoke white people.
It evokes a political world that we can all frame ourselves in relationship to. And I think that I was able to do that because I grew up, again, in racial apartheid, where there was a color caste system. So that obviously I knew that through my own experiential reality, you know, that it wasn't just what white people do to black people. that was wounding and damaging to our lives.
I knew that when we went over to my grandmother's house, who looked white, who lived in a white neighborhood, and she called my sister blackie because she was dark and her hair was nappy and my sister would sit in the corner and cry or not want to go over there, I knew that there is some system here that is hurting this little girl that is not directly the direct hit from the white person. And white supremacy was that. That term that allowed one to acknowledge our collusion with the forces of racism and imperialism. And so for me, those words were very much about the constant reminder, one of institutional constructs, that we're not talking about personal constructs in the sense of how do you feel about me as a woman or how do you feel about me as a black person, but they really seem to me to evoke a larger apparatus. And I don't know why those terms have become so mocked by people, because in fact, far from simplifying the issues, I think they actually, when you merge them together, really complicate the questions of freedom and justice globally, because it means then that we have to look at what black people are doing to each other in Rwanda, and we can't just say racism.
what have you, we have to problematize nationalism beyond race, in all kinds of ways that I think there's a tremendous reluctance, particularly in the United States, to do to have a more complex accounting of identity.