Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 12: The Accurate Name

In Chapter 12, the final episode of this part of the series, Chisom returns to Chapter 1 and settles the word. She traces white supremacy to a defeated colonist of Saint-Domingue who in 1802 called it an axiom while the enslaved were beating France, and to the indemnity France then imposed on Haiti, paid for a hundred and twenty-two years. She shows what the word does: it flatters, it turns a crime into an opinion, and it lets you believe the thing is receding while the beneficiaries are alive and being paid. Then she holds the record against the statutes the accused wrote themselves, element by element, and finds it meets the definition of terrorism, with the one failing element, illegality, failing only because the perpetrators wrote the code. She defends white as the name of the design, since the operators are no longer only white and Europe never left, refuses the retreat to greed, and keeps the promise made in Chapter 4 with a reparations section built from the archives, because reparations have already been paid, repeatedly, to the wrong people. It closes where Chapter 1 closed. You cannot dismantle what you will not name.