White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and often relies on pseudoscientific arguments, and was a key justification for Colonialism. It underlies a spectrum of contemporary movements including neo-Confederates and neo-Nazism.
Different forms of white supremacism put forth different conceptions of who is considered white (though the exemplar is generally light-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, traits most common in northern Europe), and groups of white supremacists identify various racial and ethnic enemies, most commonly those of African ancestry, indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and Jews.
The term is also used to describe the development of this belief into a political ideology that imposes and maintains social, political, historical, or institutional domination by white people. This ideology has been put into effect through socioeconomic and legal structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow laws in the United States, the White Australia policies from the 1890s to the mid-1970s, and apartheid in South Africa.
In academic usage, particularly in critical race theory or intersectionality, "white supremacy" can also refer to a social system in which white people enjoy structural advantages (privilege) over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level, despite formal legal equality.
