What is Supremacy Culture?

Between East and West

One of my earliest memories is of my father teaching me English in the one room we lived in in the family compound in Shanghai. Each evening, he played the audiotape of the first chapters of Newton’s English primer from a clunky stereo set on the dining room table:

“Excuse me, is this your handbag?”      
“No it is not my handbag.”                               
“Is this your umbrella?”
“Yes, it is my umbrella. Thank you!”

In a distinctly British accent, I read along in the book that came with the tape, illustrated with cartoon characters wearing trenchcoats and cabana hats.

The room my family lived in was the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen all in one. It had no air conditioning or heating and barely any electrical outlets. In the winter, we put extra blankets on the bed and wore our jackets inside during the day. In the summer, my mother lit a piece of coiled incense in the middle of the floor to keep the mosquitos away. At night we all slept in the same bed tucked into the corner so that it took up as little space as possible. When we needed a bath, my father rolled a large wooden tub into the middle of the room, hung a plastic curtain from the ceiling, and my mother boiled water on a tiny coal stove in the corner until all the thermoses were filled with hot water.

The house was traditional but it was in a cosmopolitan city at the vanguard of China’s transformation into a modern superpower. Situated at the mouth of the Yantze River, Shanghai was the ideal port for the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and other foreign powers to establish a colony during the 19th century, and the waning Qin dynasty was powerless to stop them. Neoclassical buildings sprang up on the shore of the Wangpu River, their white facades and columned exteriors made the skyline resemble that of a European city. On the weekends, my father would take me to visit my grandfather and aunt who lived in a rowhouse in what used to be the international quarter. I would go up the dark and narrow staircase onto a landing that opened to their living room on the second floor. The high ceiling was lined with decorative molding and the wall to wall shelves filled with English books. A dark oil painting of a ship on a stormy sea hovered over the couch. No other home I knew had a painting like that, which was usually decorated in Chinese motifs of plants, birds, or misty mountains. Years later, when I studied abroad in the UK, the English rowhouses with dark and narrow staircases brought back memories of my grandfather’s house in Shanghai.

In this city, speaking English conferred status and unlocked opportunities. It was simply the unspoken and pervasive assumption that Western culture was superior, and in order to be successful in life, one had to become fluent in it. I learned Pinyin, a phonetic system for transliterating Chinese using the Roman alphabet, before learning to write Chinese characters. Beginning in 3rd grade, English language learning was universal and compulsory in Shanghai. Everyone wanted the prosperity and status signaled by Western culture, while Chinese culture was associated with feudalism and the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Being Chinese was fine if you were working class, but in order to become successful, powerful, and influential, you had to become fluent in Western culture. Western always meant White; Black, Latino, or Jewish were rarely thought of except as anomalies rather than the standard towards which everyone aspired.

My father’s longing to create a better future for himself and his family eventually led him to immigrate to the United States in 1989. As a young man, he had promoted Western ideas of democracy and education during the feedback campaign called “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.” The campaign was promoted as a way for the newly formed Communist government to solicit feedback from the citizenry, but it was actually a way to root out ant-Communists and those with Western sympathies. For that and his bourgeoise background he was denounced as an anti-revolutionary and sentenced to forced labor in the remote province of Xinjiang, where he stayed for twenty years. When he returned, he set his sights on emigrating to America. To him, the West, and particularly the U.S., meant freedom and progress, a place where he could live out his potential and build a better life for his family.

My early life in China was defined by a sense of Western superiority both within my household and in society at large. When my family immigrated to the U.S., my parent’s Anglophile background, combined with their immigrant’s urgency to assimilate, turbocharged the role of white supremacy in my upbringing. Building on the foundation that Western/White was the standard for success, I was only allowed to speak English in school and only given English books to read at home. Like most Asian Americans, I grew up with a strict preoccupation with grades and test scores. Anything less than an A was unacceptable. Sleepovers and birthday parties were verboten. My existence was split between trying to be as American as possible at school while also maintaining Chinese standards of behavior at home.

Growing up as an Asian American means being complicit with the cultural assumption that White was better. I learned early on that being too Chinese made me weird and alien, but teachers were also eager to fetishize my Chineseness and push me into sharing about my culture in class, praising me for my work ethic, or assigning me Chinese subjects to research. I was there to bring diversity to my mostly white classes. By sixth grade, my command of the English language was better than most of my peers, but no matter how fluent I became, people still seemed surprised by my lack of accent. When people ask me, “where are you from?” they mean, “where are you really from?” I learned to hide the parts of myself that do not conform to the dominant culture and adopt the standards and cultural norms deemed necessary for success and belonging. To compensate for this lack of belonging, Asian Americans try harder to be White, mastering the curriculum of White history and White culture, jumping through hoops for admissions to white dominated institutions, and passing the tests of professionalism for the white dominated workplace. The myth of the model minority makes us suitable for tech jobs or supporting roles, but we are routinely passed over for leadership positions, and stereotyped as submissive, nerdy, foreign, and untrustworthy. The power of white supremacy was the power to shape your identity to its mold and make you believe that it is what you want.   

The Cultural Origins of Our Discontent

Culture is a broad and multifaceted concept, but it is generally defined as the set of shared beliefs, values, norms, customs, behaviors, and symbols that a group of people use to define themselves and pass from one generation to the next. It manifests as visible (surface culture) and the invisible (deep culture). The visible culture includes tangible aspects that are easily observed by outsiders. These include 

Artifacts: Food, clothing, architecture, and art
Communication: language, music, and media
Customs: Festivals, rituals, and holiday celebrations,
Values: Beliefs about what is good, right, or important (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism)
Social Norms: Unspoken rules for behavior, such as how to show respect or how to handle conflict
Worldviews: Fundamental assumptions about time, nature, and the meaning of life

Culture manifests and is transmitted through multiple layers of society. Societal culture is the shared identity of a nation or ethnic group; organizational culture contains the values and norms of an organization; and subculture refers to a smaller group within a larger culture that share specific interests or identities (e.g., gaming communities or local art scenes). The key characteristics of culture are that it is learned and acquired through socialization, requires a collective agreement among members of a group, and it is adaptive: culture changes over time in response to new environments, technologies, and social movements.

Supremacy culture is a shared pattern of beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, customs, and symbols premised on the belief that some groups are superior and more deserving than others. Patriarchy is supremacy culture applied to gender oppression, white supremacy is supremacy culture applied to racial hierarchies, and anthropocentrism supremacy culture applied to our assumed superiority over nonhuman beings. These systems always involve creating distinct categories defined as opposite, for example, men vs. women, Black vs. White, native vs. non-native, human vs. nonhuman. One group is usually characterized as positive and the other negative, for example, native born citizens are law abiding and patriotic, while immigrants are criminals and terrorists. The dominant group hoards resources in the form of physical, financial, and social capital while withholding resources from marginalized groups. A system of beliefs, biases, and myths is usually manufactured to justify the inferior treatment of marginalized groups, which is characterized as logical and natural rather than malicious and unjust.

If we live in a Western country, or a non-Western one that has been colonized by a Western country, White supremacy is ingrained in us from birth, through the educational system, workforce, religious, political, and other civic institutions. Whiteness is not just about physical appearance, but the values, norms, customs, and beliefs associated with those educated in the Western intellectual tradition. For example, we may learn that critical thinking or the ability to take direction are praised and rewarded in the school and workplace. High academic performance, based on grades and test scores, may be valued over emotional intelligence or creativity. In other places, being personally appealing and socially dominant are more valued than academic performance. In school and the workplace, we learn the standards of dress, speech, and behavior that are considered professional and projecting competence. Ideas of morality and social relationships are usually derived from a Christian perspective.  

In America, this definition of Whiteness initially only applied to people from Britain and Scandinavia, but later evolved to include Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans. Whiteness is also a signal for the entirety of Western civilization, a tradition continuing from Ancient Greece, Christianity, the Enlightenment, European imperialism, the Industrial Revolution to modernity. In China, being fluent in White culture was a sign of sophistication and status. In America, being White often meant you were perceived as more attractive, smarter, and more trustworthy. This often leads to socio-economic disparities such as earning a higher income, being healthy and longer lived, and greater choice of romantic partners.

Tema Okun, in her 1999 article “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” identified twelve characteristics that are inherent to white supremacy culture, later expanded to seventeen. In this book I have revised those characteristics to ten:

• Hierarchy

• Greed

• Power hoarding

• Gatekeeping

• Individualism

• Urgency

• Perfectionism

• Right to Comfort

• Denial and defensiveness

• Fear  

In this book I use the term “supremacy culture” rather than “white supremacy culture” to refer to the operating logic behind systems of oppression. “White supremacy culture” is a supremacy culture that ascribes superiority to Whiteness, but these characteristics are relevant to all systems of oppression, including those based on gender, class, sexual orientation. Calling these “characteristics of white supremacy culture" creates the impression that they are exclusive to White people, and therefore White people are to blame for racism, sexism, classicism, etc. when the reality is that these characteristics operate in non-White and non-Western cultures as well. Han Chinese culture, for example, which has been extremely oppressive towards women and ethnic Chinese minorities, has many of these characteristics. People of color in Western or Western colonized countries also adopt the values, beliefs, norms, and customs of white supremacy culture because we live in a White dominated society where survival and success often require adherence to the norms and values of White culture. In later versions of her essay, Okun points out that these characteristics are those of the White owning class. Working class White people, Jews, Eastern Europeans may not find them intrinsic to their culture, even though they may identify as White. Therefore, I use the term “supremacy culture” in order to avoid the idea that supremacy culture is only about race or exclusive to White people.

Neither are all these characteristics always inherently awful, but together and when exercised to excess they break down our sense of collective interdependence. For example, perfectionism often contributes to excellence, but when taken to excess, it leads to a feeling of never being good enough. Urgency is necessary when timeliness is important, but too much urgency and we start to neglect rest, relationships, and long-term strategy. These characteristics may be harmful in excess but their opposite in excess are also harmful. For example, too much individualism leads to isolation, selfishness, and power hoarding, but too much collectivism can also be oppressive, where individual freedom is quashed, sometimes brutally, in service of a collective vision (Nazi Germany or Communist China for example). A healthy balance in the proper context is probably what we want most of the time.

Supremacy culture manifests at the individual, institutional, and societal levels to cause harm to ourselves, our relationships, and our societies. At the individual level, it can show up as self-loathing that we don’t fit standards of beauty, acceptability, or success that society presents to us. At the institutional level, it can show up as needing more education and experience for the same job because of one’s race or gender, or being punished for mistakes that others get a free pass for. At the society level it may be being expected to be the primary caretaker because of one’s gender regardless of each partner’s talents or capacity. It is shouldering more responsibilities while getting paid less and given less credit. White supremacy culture is the reason that Black and Latino American households have ten times less wealth than White American households.[1] Supremacy culture manifest as patriarchy manifests as women in America still earning an average of 85 cents for every dollar earned by men.[2] When race is factored into the gender pay gap, Latina women earn only 57 cents for every dollar earned by White men.[3]

Inequities caused by supremacy culture often have life and death consequences. For example, Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women, regardless of income or education level.[4] Moreover, the infant mortality rate for Black babies is 10.4 per 1,000 live births, compared to 4.4 per 1,000 for White babies.[5] Among the general population, life expectancy is consistently lower among Black Americans than White Americans, with Black Americans having an 18% higher mortality rate.[6] During the Covid-19 pandemic, excess mortality among Black, Indigenous, and Latino people over 65 far surpassed excess mortality rates of their non-Hispanic White counterparts.[7]

Not only do marginalized groups suffer from supremacy culture, but dominant groups do too. For example, there have been a slew of articles and books in recent years on the theme of “men are not doing well.” Boys in America are less likely to graduate from high school or college than girls.[8] Men are four times more likely to die by suicide than women in the US.[9] “The fact is, we have an alarming number of lonely, alienated, and disaffected young men in this country,” bemoans a 2024 Vox article, with the implication that such men are more likely to join conspiracy groups, white supremacy groups, and engage in mass gun violence.[10] The culture of “toxic masculinity” shares many characteristics with supremacy culture, such as individualism, objectivity, paternalism, denial and defensiveness, and has been blamed for everything from sexual dysfunction[11] to voting for Donald Trump.[12] The consequence of patriarchy, as with all oppressive social systems, is that we all suffer, whether we occupy the bottom or top of the hierarchy.

Coloniality and Climate Justice

Supremacy culture is relevant to racism, sexism, and other forms of identity-based oppression, but the same framework can be used to examine humanity's relationship with the Earth. When human beings regard themselves as inherently superior to all other living things, mindless destruction, overconsumption of natural resources, and the destruction of indigenous peoples, lands, and cultures are often the result. Indeed, the acceleration of ecological destruction correlated closely with the rise of supremacy cultures around the world. In Europe, as tribal communities became unified first by the Roman Empire and then by Christianity, the destruction of its forests accelerated in step. By 1100, most of Europe had converted from paganism to Christianity, a religion whose hierarchical worldview sanctioned man's domination over the rest of nature. By 1350, forest cover in continental Europe had fallen to roughly 50% of the land area, down from 80% or more before Neolithic farming began, and to as little as 10% in Great Britain. By the time of Christopher Columbus, growing demand for natural resources had become a major incentive for colonizing the Americas, along with the decree that those lands can be claimed and cultivated for the benefit of colonial powers.[13] By 1900, nearly all indigenous communities around the world had been eradicated or colonized by the imperial powers of Europe, the Middle East, China, or Japan.

The colonization of Indigenous lands by European powers did a lot of damage to the ecologies of the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia. However, that damage wasn’t confined to settler colonialism alone, even long after independence has been achieved, the mindset of colonialism continues to engender deep racism and inequality in postcolonial societies. Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano coined the term “coloniality” to refer to the long-standing patterns of destructive power dynamics that continue to define culture, labor, and knowledge production in postcolonial societies long after direct colonial rule has ended.[14] In short, if colonialism is the physical "structure" of the empire, coloniality is the "software" that continues to run the world's hardware even after the empire has left. It explains why social and economic inequalities often remain in postcolonial nations decades after they gain independence.

To understand coloniality, it is helpful to break it down into three primary spheres:

Coloniality of Power: Describes the global system of authority and the hierarchical classification of people. It focuses on how racial and ethnic categories were created to justify economic exploitation and the global capitalist structure.

Coloniality of Knowledge: Refers to the dominance of Western/Eurocentric perspectives as the only "valid" or "universal" form of knowledge. It involves the marginalization or erasure of indigenous, non-Western, and traditional ways of knowing, often labeling them as "superstition" or "myth."

Coloniality of Being: Considers the lived experience of colonized people and how the social hierarchies created by coloniality affect a person’s sense of self, their perceived value in society, and their basic human rights.[15]

If coloniality describes the global system and historical "logic" of power, then supremacy culture describes the specific behaviors, values, and norms that keep that system running on a daily basis. While coloniality and supremacy culture are deeply intertwined, they function like two different lenses looking at the same structure. Coloniality is a global, macro-historical framework that explains how the world was organized into a racial hierarchy starting in the 15th century and the mindset that keeps that hierarchy in place. It focuses on the "software" of the world—how we define what counts as "developed," "civilized," or "valid knowledge." Supremacy culture is more often used as an interpersonal and organizational lens that identifies the specific set of values that help to maintain power systems, whether those oppress women, people of color, or nonhuman beings.

Similar to deforestation, climate change today has become the modern symptom of supremacy culture’s impact on our relationship with the earth’s nonhuman beings. The relationship between climate change and coloniality/supremacy culture is often described through the framework of climate justice, which emerged from the concept of environmental justice. Environmental Justice emerged in the 1980s as a movement that dealt with the unfair distribution of the burden of pollution and environmental harm on people of color and people of the Global South. It argued that environmental problems are not merely ecological, but also a problem of racial injustice. The climate crisis is not just seen a technical failure of carbon emissions, but a predictable outcome of the system of oppression inherent to coloniality and supremacy culture, when wealthy and powerful entities gain from the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels at the expense of marginalized people who bear more of the burdens of climate change. The logic of exploitation is the same. The harm is planetary.

Seen from this lens, environmental racism and climate injustice today are continuations of the harms wrought by centuries of Western colonialism. For centuries, the assumed superiority of White/Western/Christian people by colonial powers meant that they could conquer, kill, rape, enslave, exploit, and displace indigenous, Black, and communities of color with impunity. Today, even though settler colonialism is no longer the dominant form of oppression, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities continue to be relegated to "sacrifice zones," where the land and the people are treated as expendable in the pursuit of profit and protection for wealthy White peoples/countries. With the aid of authoritarian and collaborating governments, former colonial powers continue to ensure that the consequences of environmental destruction, including climate change, continue to be born disproportionately by people of the Global South and people of color in the Global North.

The inequality can be seen by examining the three maps below.[16] The first map, per capita CO2 emissions, shows that the countries which produce the most emissions per capita are wealthy, industrialized nations, with the exception of Saudi Arabia. China, which has a similar emissions profile to Europe, attributes a large portion of its emissions to manufacturing products for Western consumption. The regions with the lowest emissions per capita—Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, are the same regions that were formally colonized by Western countries and predominantly occupied by Black and Brown people.

However, the previous map does not tell the full story. When the size of countries are illustrated in proportion to their historic emissions as shown in the map below, North America and Europe dominate, while South America and Africa are mere blips. Asia is relatively small for its enormous population size. Because the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1700s, the UK, U.S., and other Western countries have contributed a lot more to total global emissions than countries such as China and India, which industrialized in the late twentieth century. Taken in historical perspective, the inequality of who has benefited from contributing to climate change and who has not is even more stark.

If we look at the map of who is most at risk because of climate change, the scenario is reversed. Formally colonized countries in Africa, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and Pacific Islands are the most at risk, while North America, Europe, and Australia, are the least at risk. These countries are also farther away from the equator, which means that higher temperatures won’t be as uncomfortable. They also have a lot more wealth and better infrastructure, which means more capacity to adapt and deal with the challenges of climate change. These maps show that the people least responsible for causing climate change are the ones suffering the most, and they are the same people who have historically suffered from colonialism under White supremacy.

Even though this map shows which countries are more at risk, it obscures inequalities based on race. In an ethnically diverse country like the United States, climate change disproportionally impacts Black and Brown communities, who are more likely to be living in areas prone to climate disasters.[17] For instance, 72% of Black Americans live in U.S. counties that violate federal air pollution standards, compared to 58% of Whites.[18] Seventy percent of Black Americans live in the American South or the Midwest, regions that are expected to experience an increase in extreme precipitation and flood events as climate change worsens.[19] Black Americans are also more likely to live in places with dangerously hot temperatures (above 105 degrees Fahrenheit) and are twice as likely to die from dangerous heat compared with other groups.[20]

In addition to disproportionate impacts, how much wealth and resources people have access to determines their resilience in the face of climate change. In the United States, wealth and economic resources are strongly correlated with race. White American households have ten times more wealth than Black American households and eight times more wealth than Hispanic American households.[21] This economic inequality has strong implications for who has resilience in the face of growing climate change. For example, the wealthy can afford to live in areas that are less prone to floods and high temperatures. They have access to insurance and resources to rebuild in the event that their home or possessions are damaged by a climate disaster. They have access to better healthcare, and they can relocate if needed. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, Black households lose on average $50,000 while White households gain $75,000 (Beeman et al., 2021)[22], presumably because White households have access to better insurance that reimburses them for losses after a climate disaster.

In summary, supremacy culture operates in the following ways to create climate injustice:

1. The Atmosphere as a "Colonized" Space: The worldview which enabled colonialism saw natural resources on unclaimed land as free for the taking and available for extraction by those with power. Historically, this applied to land occupied by Indigenous people. Because they were not seen as being in possession of their land, Western colonizers were deemed free to conquer, settle, and extract from their land however they saw fit. In the context of climate change, this logic has also been applied to the atmosphere. Wealthy, industrialized nations see the atmosphere as a free dumping ground for their carbon waste while the consequences are borne disproportionately by people of the global South.

2. Extractivism and the "Sacrifice Zone": The economic engine of coloniality is extractivism—the removal of raw materials from the Earth for export and profit, often without regard for local ecosystems or inhabitants. Historically colonial powers extracted gold, rubber, and sugar from their colonized territories, using cheap and enslaved labor. This process still happens today for the extraction of fossil fuels: whether it is oil drilling in Ecuador’s rainforests or natural gas in Pennsylvania, large powerful companies (often aided by corrupt governments) extract valuable resources under exploitative terms, leaving behind pollution, toxins, and environmental wreckage that destroy the health of local residents. These sites of extraction create sacrifice zones (often inhabited by Indigenous or marginalized people) that are permanently impaired for the sake of economic progress elsewhere.

3. Disproportionate Vulnerability: Climate change reinforces the colonial hierarchy of which lives are considered valuable and worth protecting. The regions most impacted by climate disasters—rising sea levels in the Pacific, droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa, and extreme weather in Southeast Asia—are often the same regions that were formerly colonized and contributed the least to global emissions. The same applies to people of color in wealthy industrialized countries who are more vulnerable than Whites to climate change.

4. Epistemic Injustice: Climate solutions are often dictated by Western scientific and economic frameworks, which can sideline Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK). Supremacy culture favors large-scale, market-based solutions (like carbon offsets or geoengineering) over traditional land management practices that have sustained ecosystems for millennia. By treating Western science as the only valid "truth," the global community often ignores the very people who have the longest history of living in balance with the specific environments now under threat.

Supremacy Culture and the Environmental Movement

The climate justice framework defines the climate crisis as not merely a technical failure of atmospheric chemistry, but as the inevitable consequence of a worldview that perceives people of color and their natural resources as free for the taking to be exploited for profit. This worldview is driven by a supremacy culture that justifies the existence of sacrifice zones and treating the global atmosphere as a free dumping ground for industrial waste. Addressing the climate crisis requires a fundamental shift from supremacy culture where the hierarchies of race, gender, class and human vs. nonhuman give away to equity and interdependence. To address climate change through the lens of dismantling supremacy culture means moving beyond the narrow goal of reducing CO2 emissions through technocratic solutions that create more power imbalances. Instead, it demands a radical restructuring of the global economy to prioritize climate adaptation and technology transfer to the Global South, the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, and abandonment of infinite growth on a finite planet as a goal. Ultimately, this transformation requires environmental institutions and NGOs to confront their own internal supremacy culture so that they do not impose the very systems of injustice and exploitation they seek to reform.

By applying the framework of supremacy culture at the individual, institutional, and ecological levels, it becomes clear that supremacy culture is not only at the root of the climate crisis, but also inherent in the institutions and movements that are trying to combat it. The latter is insidious in that many of these institutions and movements have good intentions, but because supremacy culture is so deeply embedded and often invisible as an operational driver, they often hamper their own efforts or end up doing more harm than good. If coloniality is the historical structure, supremacy culture provides the daily "operating manual" that makes environmental destruction feel normal or even necessary. The beliefs, values, norms, and standards of supremacy culture make it possible to continue extraction and pollution while also creating structural barriers for those looking to implement solutions.

Seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that the work of recognizing and dismantling supremacy culture isn’t just for your racist uncle, white supremacists, or MAGA Americans. It is for all of us, especially if we are in a profession whose aim is to reduce inequality and serve marginalized communities. In the environmental movement, efforts to integrate racial justice are often met with resistance and defensiveness, with detractors insisting that antiracism work leads to “mission creep” and environmental organizations should "stay in their lane." This is not only a profound misunderstanding of the environmental crisis, but a dangerous one. White supremacy, Western supremacy, and human supremacy are at the heart of the exploitation of both people and nature, and its logic operates in the institutions and movements that try to rectify the problems. Recognizing and combating this culture is especially critical for the environmental and social justice movement because supremacy culture is embedded in their daily operations and foundational assumptions as much as in institutions that are actively contributing to racial inequality or climate change. At best, this internal programming renders them less effective as agents of change; at worst, it causes them to do active harm to their own adherents and the very communities they are trying to lift up.

Below is a summary of the characteristics of supremacy culture and their connection to climate change and the environmental movement.

Characteristic

Connection to Climate Change (The "Logic" of the Crisis)

Connection to the Environmental Movement / Institutions

Objectivity

Asserts human dominance over nature; views the atmosphere and land as "free for the taking" and available for extraction.

Prioritizes logic and data over intuition and stories; "paralysis by analysis" delays necessary action.

Urgency

Prioritizes immediate, short-term profit and resource extraction over the long-term health of the planet.

Creates a perpetual "crisis mode" that discourages inclusive, democratic decision-making and thoughtful strategy.

Binary Thinking

Creates false binaries such as "jobs vs. environment," or “quality of life vs. sustainability” that protect the status quo.

Treats humans and nature as separate entities, which devalues holistic approaches like regenerative agriculture.

Individualism

Shifts the burden of change onto individual consumer choices, shielding corporations and systems from accountability.

Values individual "star power" and effort; fails to account for how privilege and marginalization affect success.

Perfectionism

A “keeping up with the Jones” mentality when it comes to consumption and development.

Holding unrealistic standards and a culture of "calling out" and punishment for mistakes rather than fostering a learning-based environment.

Progress is Bigger/More

Drives the extractivist logic of infinite growth on a finite planet; equates quantity of consumption with success.

Favors large-scale, market-based "solutions" (like carbon offsets) that often overlook unequal, disproportionate impact.

Power Hoarding

Allows wealthy nations and corporations to benefit from fossil fuels while the Global South bears the environmental cost.

Manifests as a fear of open conflict or significant structural change; gatekeeping leadership roles.

Paternalism

Western powers dictating climate policy for the Global South without including their leadership.

Decision-making is concentrated at the top; assumes those with traditional power know best for marginalized communities.

Worship of Written Word

Uses legal "ownership" and paper titles to displace Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands (Terra Nullius).

Values Western academic credentials as the only "valid" truth, often ignoring or erasing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK).

Right to Comfort

Fuels climate denial and defensiveness to avoid the discomfort of systemic changes.

Avoids "difficult" conversations regarding race, equity, and historical responsibility to maintain organizational "politeness."

 The reality is that we all—regardless of our background—think, act, and behave in ways that perpetuate supremacy culture. These behaviors often stem from lifelong habit, societal conditioning, and drive for self-preservation, rather than a conscious desire to inflict harm or perpetuate oppression. The danger lies in essentializing these traits—attributing them to the inherent nature of an individual or a specific group—rather than identifying them as characteristics of the culture itself. Supremacy culture isn’t inherent in White people any more than patriarchy is inherent in men. Both are social constructs that are taught and engrained in us by society from birth, and both can be unlearned. Dismantling supremacy culture or patriarchy isn’t about hating or correcting White people or men, but shining a light on the structures and systems that we are emersed in so that we can begin to make different choices. By shifting the focus from individual moral failure to cultural deconstruction, we create the necessary condition for collective healing and authentic change.

In this book, I will explain the characteristics of supremacy culture and show how they manifest at the personal, institutional, and ecological levels. By mapping these traits across all three dimensions, we begin to see that our individual sense of inadequacy, the barriers to equity and inclusion in our institutions, and the literal warming of our planet are not isolated problems, but symptoms of the same cultural underpinnings. We will explore how domination logic—the belief that some are born to rule and others to be used—serves as the psychological underpinning for both social hierarchy and environmental exploitation. Furthermore, I will investigate how characteristics such as individualism, urgency, paternalism, and power hoarding inflict harm on the people doing justice-oriented work and the communities they are trying to help, reinforcing the inequities that created the crises in the first place. By deconstructing these connections, we move beyond treating the symptoms of burnout and pollution to address the underlying cultural "operating system" that dictates who survives and who is sacrificed in the face of a changing climate. The concluding chapter will present a few alternative worldviews and operating principles that could serve as antidotes to supremacy culture and the medicine for healing ourselves and the planet.

[1]U.S. Census Bureau. (2024, April 23). Wealth by race of householder. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/04/wealth-by-race.html

[2] Aragão, C. (2025, March 4). Gender pay gap in U.S. has narrowed slightly over 2 decades. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/gender-pay-gap-in-us-has-narrowed-slightly-over-2-decades/

[3] De La Espriella, S. (2025, March 11). A persistent pay gap: Latinas earn 58 cents for every dollar paid to white men. University Press. https://www.upressonline.com/2025/03/a-persistent-pay-gap-latinas-earn-58-cents-for-every-dollar-paid-to-white-men/

[4] Racial and ethnic disparities in infant mortality [Article]. (n.d.). PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5915910/

[5] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Infant mortality. https://www.cdc.gov/maternal-infant-health/infant-mortality/index.html

[6] KFF. (n.d.). What is driving widening racial disparities in life expectancy? https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/what-is-driving-widening-racial-disparities-in-life-expectancy/; Harvard Gazette. (2025, April). Mortality rates between Black, White Americans narrow, except in case of infants. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/04/mortality-rates-between-black-white-americans-narrow-except-in-case-of-infants/

[7] U.S. Census Bureau. (2024, March). Excess mortality during COVID-19. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/03/excess-mortality-during-covid-19.html

[8] Associated Press. (n.d.). High school graduation rate: Boys. https://apnews.com/article/high-school-graduation-rate-boys-c7b8dff33221e0ded2d1369397d96455; Klein, E. (2023, March 10); [Ezra Klein podcast with Richard Reeves]. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-richard-reeves.html; Reeves, R. V. (2022). Of boys and men. Brookings Institution Press. https://www.brookings.edu/books/of-boys-and-men/; Szalai, J. (2025, June 1). What is wrong with men? [Review of the book What is wrong with men?, by J. Crispin]. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/books/review/what-is-wrong-with-men-jessa-crispin.html

[9] American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. (n.d.). Suicide statistics. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/

[10] Kahloon, I. (2024, March 11). The "manhood" movement is more than just Andrew Tate. Vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/2024/3/11/24091560/manhood-movement-andrew-tate-josh-hawley-richard-reeves

[11] International Society for Sexual Medicine. (n.d.). What is toxic masculinity and how might it impact sexual functioning? https://www.issm.info/sexual-health-qa/what-is-toxic-masculinity-and-how-might-it-impact-sexual-functioning

[12] Cohn, N. (2024, August 24). [Trump polls and young men]. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/24/upshot/trump-polls-young-men.html

[13] The doctrine of discovery is a legal and religious framework, rooted in 15th-century papal bulls, that European Christian powers used to claim sovereignty and title over lands inhabited by non-Christian, Indigenous peoples simply by "discovering" them, on the theory that non-Christian nations lacked the same rights to land and self-governance as Christian ones. It was formally imported into United States law by Chief Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), which held that Indigenous nations retained only a right of occupancy, while the discovering European power (and its successor, the U.S. government) held ultimate title to the land, and this precedent went on to shape U.S. federal Indian law and property doctrine for the following two centuries (Miller, Robert J. et al., Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies, Oxford University Press, 2010).

[14] Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.

[15] Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270.

[16] Williams, J. (2021). Climate change is racist: Race, privilege and the struggle for environmental justice. Icon Books. Chapters 1-2.

[17] Cox, B. (2018, March 13). Environmental racism has left black Americans three times more likely to die from pollution. Quartz. https://qz.com/december-jobs-report-wage-growth-unemployment-down-1849958010;
Morello-Frosch, R., Pastor, M., Sadd, J., & Shonkoff, S. (2009). The climate gap: Inequalities in how climate change hurts Americans & how to close the gap. University of Southern California. http://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/ClimateGapReport_full_report_web.pdf;
Patnaik, A., Son, J., Feng, A., & Ade, C. (2020, August 15). Racial disparities and climate change. Princeton Student Climate Initiative. https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/8/15/racial-disparities-and-climate-change;
Tessum, C. W., Paolella, D. A., Chambliss, S. E., Apte, J. S., Hill, J. D., & Marshall, J. D. (2021). PM2.5 polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States. Science Advances, 7(18). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf4491

[18] Lyon, L., & Madrid, B. (2011). The state of environmental justice in America. Environmental Justice Resource Center.

[19] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2021). Climate Change and Social Vulnerability in the United States: A Focus on Six Impacts. EPA 430-R-21-003.

[20] Morello-Frosch, R., Pastor, M., Sadd, J., & Shonkoff, S. (2009). The climate gap: Inequalities in how climate change hurts Americans & how to close the gap. University of Southern California. http://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/ClimateGapReport_full_report_web.pdf

[21] Kochhar, R., & Cilluffo, A. (2017, November 1). How wealth inequality has changed in the U.S. since the Great Recession, by race, ethnicity and income. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/11/01/how-wealth-inequality-has-changed-in-the-u-s-since-the-great-recession-by-race-ethnicity-and-income/

[22] Howell, J., & Elliott, J. R. (2018). As disaster costs rise, so does inequality. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 4, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118816795