Foxes and Wolves: The Spectrum of White Supremacy
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September 16, 2025
Updated: May 29, 2026
I’ve spent most of my life in a cultural bubble. I grew up in a community filled with rich culture and diversity. From the restaurants to who you crossed paths with at the grocery store, I saw people from a variety of cultures around me. A community of people who share similar struggles, share similar cultural values, and though our cultural identities were diverse, our common ground created a sense of cultural unity. This felt safe to me. Growing up in a diverse community of marginalized people isn't perfect and we can discuss horizontal oppression and anti-Blackness among POC in another post, but I largely moved through these environments feeling a sense of belonging. There wasn't the layer of domination that is uniquely present in American, white supremacist racism. It was when Life led me outside of that cultural bubble, I was launched across the spectrum that is white supremacy into the vastly different world of Whiteness.
To clarify whiteness speaks less to an ethnic identity and more to a cultural construct. Whiteness is a construct. An agreement made before any of us existed. An agreement to abandon diverse culture in exchange for consolidated power rooted in domination over and extraction from people, animals, and land.
This construct of Whiteness is the foundation for White Supremacy. This is why White Supremacy functions as a spectrum with many different flavors. The flavor of the day: White Liberals.
Note: Before we get into it, understand this has been discussed by many ancestors in many different ways. I am sharing my lived experience with it in modern times but I encourage you to visit the resources linked below to hear profound perspectives and calls to action by leaders from the past.
While many white people like to believe that we live in a racially progressive society because drinking fountains aren't segregated anymore, racism is very much alive. Despite what most liberal white folks would say, it also isn't only present in the form of sun-down towns and Trump supporters.
Sometimes white supremacy is hiding behind a “helping hand” and a smile. White supremacy's more subtle sibling, one of micro-aggressions, niceness, and superiority, is the real nefarious culprit of many of the problems we are encountering today. This friendly prejudice is a major collective shadow being illuminated right now. We are witnessing glaringly obvious contrasts in the public narrative on who deserves empathy, the benefit-of-the-doubt, and second-chances…and who doesn’t (see people posting "but he had a family about Charlie Kirk but unable to acknowledge the same for the hundreds of POC killed by the state).
We have been sold white supremacy as a singular personality type when, like everything else in life, white supremacy is a spectrum. I have experienced this spectrum first hand.
The Personal Impact
I vividly remember racial dynamics growing up in elementary school being sent to schools outside of my community because they had more resources. They also had way less people who look like me or lived in poverty like me. These schools were in affluent and conservative neighborhoods unlike my own. These playgrounds and classrooms were forums for more blatant forms of racism, colorism, and classism.
I recall scchool-wide celebrations of violent colonizers on stolen land while learning my ancestors to be the savages. I remember the disdain in the eyes of white staff at school for being allowed in with a permit and their shock at my intellectual capabilities. Conversely, I also learned the function of my own privilege under white supremacy - being mixed, having light skin, having a fair-skinned mom. This shielded me compared to the treatment my sisters got for darker skin and tighter curls.
Later in life, I once again found myself treading the murky waters of white supremacy. This time I was on the other side of the spectrum. The liberal, more "progressive" side. It started with law school and peaked as I began dating my husband who is mixed with white and had a lot of white peers.
Liberal white supremacy is more subtle. It was an undercurrent I felt when my invitations to many of the bar review pre-games and post-finals afters disappeared when I dared proclaim that Black Lives Matter. I was met with invalidation, being unfollowed online, and eye-rolls in class when I pointed out the racism interwoven into the law we learned.
At work, I was expected to perform twice as hard for little pay and...gratitude. My confidence was met with frustration as it hindered my supervisor’s white saviorship. My boundaries and needs met with pushback while my white counterparts boundaries were treated as practice standards.
It culminated socially. Like most marginalized people, white supremacy in the world at large was par for the course but I could retreat to safety in my social circles. Whiteness infiltrated mine.
I came face to face with the white liberal. It wasn’t a place to be supported. It was a never-ending competition. Who had the hottest take, who’s the most educated, who had the right to speak.
It was everything I hated about academia as a Black and Mexican woman…except it was happening in a gentrified neighborhood with transplants alongside over-priced IPAs.
It was isolating to be the only person in the conversation who actually LIVED the impacts of these political systems yet my perspective felt the least regarded.
I thought maybe the universe was handing me a healing opportunity. A chance to build a cultural bridge by letting me have a more intimate glimpse into this world. I definitely learned a lot but not in the ways I imagined.
It didn't take very long for the bullshit to start. I was almost always the only brown person at any given event. They made sure I knew it too.
It manifested as being called "intimidating" when I was simply existing in a predominantly white space. Sometimes, it was being called aggressive when expressing my feelings or setting a boundary. Being called dramatic when I was being honest about my pain and discomfort. It was touching my hair when I had it braided or big and curly. Assuming I knew how to braid hair (I don't). Assuming I was from the hood (that part is true, but still). It was being physically shoved in white nightclubs like I didn't even exist and when confronting someone about it being told "there's a way to speak." It was watching the way my beautiful, kind brown skinned friends were treated as second class citizens while white women were put on pedestal simply for existing while white. The cherry on top was living out the magical negro trope as multiple white women constantly pulled me aside to trauma dump on me or ask my advice with no regard for my own capacity and never returning the support.
On the more extreme end it manifested as being accused of brain washing my husband like some evil witch temptress when he began calling out covert racism, misogyny and setting boundaries with white peers. Even when acting on his own values he could be the innocent and I was the problem. I could go on with examples for days.
The consequences were (and have continued to be) heavy on my mental health. I found myself leaning on substances to cope with my discomfort and lashing out at my partner before I was able to work out what I was experiencing. It was difficult to discern white supremacy beneath the veneer of friendliness and polite tones. But that's what liberal white supremacy is. It's nice, but not kind. It is the ultimate harm because it feels invisible.
I realized I was beneficial as long as I could play the spicy Latina friend or wise Black sage. The second I took on more dimension as a human being with feelings, opinions, and needs I was greeted with shadow lurking beneath white liberalism. The feelings of superiority toward me and the resentment for me daring to speak up and take up space. My partner eventually met the same ostracization for supporting me, essentially giving up the benefits of his whiteness and complicity in that space. That is the truest sign of someone ACTIVELY moving against white supremacy - you lose the thin protections that whiteness provides.
In any community space it is very challenging as a BIPOC who actually wants liberation, transformation, and right relationship to connect with people like this. You will be invalidated, silenced, demonized and ridiculed - until as always 6 months to a year later they realize what you were talking about all along because someone white finally deems it to be credible (See people finally condemning a very publicized genocide thats been going on for years because some white academics finally said it meets a definition also crafted by white academics).
It takes immense courage to speak truth to power for your people, especially as so many of us carry the generational trauma of genocide, whippings, and other tortures in our blood. Everytime I spoke up, my voice shook. Everytime I named the thing, my body tensed remembering consequences that my ancestors faced for being too loud.
And as I found my voice I also found out where many of the White people who called themselves my friends stood on this spectrum as each of them met my truth, my vulnerability with invalidation and rejection. They were not ready to relinquish their buy-in to Whiteness. I’ve come across many videos lately online of white people commenting on this. They detail how over-identifying with whiteness restricts empathy and true allyship because there is no active effort to unlearn the philosophies of white supremacy.
The keyword is active. Being anti-racist is not a passive act. It doesn't just happen just like White Supremacy and all it's impacts didn't just happen.
Unless you are actively - I repeat ACTIVELY - investigating and reprogramming your biased conditioning it is very likely you’re running on autopilot with white supremacist rooted beliefs.
This conditioning runs deep and while BIPOC having been doing tremendous work to fight against this machine, change will require more than just our communities.
We cannot do the inner work for white people nor do we want to. If white people truly want to be advocates for progress what would really help is for them to start getting really honest with themselves. Not to judge themselves, engage in self hatred or white guilt. For them to get sincerely curious about their beliefs and behaviors. To ask where it’s rooted. To talk to people who don’t share their background and who also aren’t going to be an echo chamber out of fear or a desire for white proximity. Listening to the people they deem too aggressive or too radical or too loud or using the wrong tone. Listening. Not to respond, not to debate. Listening to learn and understand.
We don't have to agree on everything, but exposure is what will help us to start dismantling white supremacy in the first place it really matters - within. Internally is where all outward transformation begins. Internally is where white people have to really contemplate their willingness to give up the benefits that white supremacy affords them. The façade of protection that silence to injustice affords. The upward, capitalistic mobility that the status quo offers. Until those with the most privilege in these systems start taking a close look at how they are contributing to the state of the world, their allyship will only be a roadblock in disguise. Their friendship a ticking time bomb.
“The white conservatives aren't friends of the Negro either, but they at least don't try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling." - Malcolm X
Further Learning:
The Ballot or the Bullet Speech - Malcolm X
Whiteness as Property by Cheryl Harris
Resources for Deprogramming White Supremacy in Community:
Decolonize Your Mind Program by Dra. Rosales Meza
