Fascism and Bad Faith

Race Science, Slavery, And The Unreality Of White Supremacy

The unreality that justifies white supremacy has shape shifted

Before slick TV ads flavored with a sprinkling of half-truths, before tech oligarchs' brain-breaking algorithms, and before AI videos weaponized against non-native internet users, there was a different sort of unreality created to legitimize and validate the monstrous politics of human subjugation.

A lot of my writing here at Bad Faith Times is about how and why the American right – in concert with foreign parts of the international fascist movement – creates what's known as "unreality."

Their hope is that this version of reality that they need to exist will overpower Actual Reality and serve as the foundation for their preferred policies and the way American society is shaped. Generating unreality and forcing it upon the larger public – those outside the brain-rot right-wing media ecosystem – is perhaps the most important step in achieving their lurid goals. A politically-convenient version of reality is the One Weird Trick in advancing the right's project.

-The right needs white students in public schools to be the victims of systemic discrimination so they can eliminate diversity efforts in every American school district.

-The right needs white men to the victims of systemic discrimination in order to stop businesses from promoting diversity in hiring.

-The right needs foreign aid programs to be corrupt and criminal in nature if they are to eliminate them and cut off food supplies and medicine and basic goods to people they see as subhuman.

-The right needs abortion care to be dangerous, or to constitute murder, so they can criminalize the procedure and those who provide it.

-The right needs gender non-conforming people to be dangers to America's children and the future of the human race if they are to enact laws and policies that oppress those who don't identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

-The right needs COVID vaccines to be deadly so they can limit their availability or outright ban them as part of the larger MAHA eugenics project.

Think of it this way: Everyone is the protagonist in their own story. If you're going to remain the protagonist – if you are to avoid the antagonist label you deserve – you're going to have to bend the Shape Of Things (reality) so you can remain the good guy. Otherwise you might have to interrogate your worldview; for many, nothing can be more painful.

First you create a justification for your awful politics and your aims for dominance over those you see as undeserving or less-than-human, then you pursue those goals. That this unreality is rejected again and again in the courts speaks to the resilience of (some) of our democratic institutions and why it's never easy to turn a republic into an authoritarian state overnight.

Hey look. The right's unreality lost again in court. www.axios.com/2026/06/01/t...

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— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) June 1, 2026 at 4:06 PM

Jurists who are even partially faithful to the U.S. Constitution take one look at the unreality-based legal cases brought by the president's personal vengeance machine (DOJ) and say, what the fuck is this. The judges usually chastise the vengeance machines lawyers and throw the case out. Sometimes these cases then snake their way to the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority that winks and nods at the right wing's unreality – all in bad faith, naturally.

The Wretched Roots of Slavery's Unreality

I was reminded the other day that creating new and inventive realities in which the wretched politics of white supremacy become legitimized is not new. It's taken different and more sophisticated forms in our current authoritarian moment, but it's been around for a long time – a ghost that haunts human dignity and progress, a ghost the shape shifts to fit the era.

Slavers and their political allies and those who profited from chattel slavery in the Americas and in Europe did their own unreality creation in the 17th and 18th centuries, crafting new realities out of nothing so they would have a mandate from God himself to subjugate and exploit the Black human beings they kidnapped and forced into captivity. They needed, after all, to remain the protagonists.

Slavery in all its horror, in all its blood and torment and pain, depended on unreality. This justification for white supremacy lives on today and takes the form of black-pilled social media posts from official U.S. government accounts.

Ontological Branding, a fascinating book from Bonard Ivan Molina Garcia on "power, privilege, and white supremacy in a colorblind world," goes deep into how the slave trade came to be accepted by governments and politicians and regular white folks. The effort to normalize the enslavement of humans in a purely capitalist scheme started, as Molina Garcia writes, with the invention of race.

Black people had to be branded as not fully human and their basic rights had to be carefully extracted from the Enlightenment's supposed commitment to universal human equality. Anyone who was not considered white – and this definition has changed rather dramatically over the centuries – had to be reduced to "resources to be exploited," like trees and coal and oil and, yes, animals.

"The West," Molina Garcia writes, "needed ... the technology of race to transform the raw material of non-European humanity into resources to be exploited – all without threatening the integrity" on the Enlightenment.

The non-human world was a vast reserve of resources to be conquered, mastered, and exploited. This meant that when non-European humanity was excluded from full participation in personhood, it was by the same stroke relegated to that universe of things available to be conquered, mastered, and exploited. The brand of race thus permitted Western colonialism to advance secure in its white supremacist foundation, all while maintaining an evolving facade of universal human freedom and equality.

Developing this unreality in which humans with white skin were the only real humans worthy of rights and dignity required race science, which proved invaluable in convincing those with power and poor white people alike that those with Black skin were not human at all, that God had put them on earth to be mastered and conquered and exploited.

A scientific justification, however flawed and predetermined, was the key in pulling off this terrible trick – "dividing humanity into those who counted as true persons and those who did not," as Molina Garcia writes in Ontological Branding. The "newly enlightened West" would require reasons for why they could (or should) enslave Black people and use them as they would use cows or horses or pigs or chickens. Non-whiteness would need to be scientifically proven to be a "natural sign of a person's subordinate status in the chain of human being," Molina Garcia writes.

Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills in his book, The Racial Contract, laid it out plainly:

The whole point of establishing a moral hierarchy and juridically partitioning the polity according to race is to secure and legitimate the privileging of those designated as white/persons and the exploitation of those designated as nonwhite/subpersons.

The unreality of race did not exist the way we know it today during the Enlightenment. Therefore race had to be created through pseudo-scientific means if slavers were going to make money and gain power and make the enslavement of Black people normal – even necessary – in the eyes of white people and the governments whose cooperation they would require.

In this way, deep inside this unreality, the phrase "all men are created equal" was not a lie.

The Unreality of Slavery Returns

The story of the tortured unreality of chattel slavery didn't end when enslaved people were freed – only to be enslaved once again by other capitalist means – or when Black Americans fought for and secured the most basic of constitutional rights.

The unreality that underpinned slavery in the United States may have broken apart in the 20th century, losing its power over actual reality, but it would not stay shattered forever. The story is a long one – too long for a blog post, I think. Flash forward to the third decade of the 21st century and you have radicalized white men who spend too much time in the computer doing whatever they can to jam race science back into the American mainstream as a means of justifying the rollback of the 20th century.

We have the vice president of the United States making fast friends with the internet's most outrageously racist political thinkers and so-called scientists. Watch as the vice president's administration freely and happily shares federal government data on Black children with researchers determined to twist that data into formalized assessments of why those children are inferior to their white peers, for they understand the importance of alternative reality in their quest for domination, just as race scientists of the 19th century understood this.

"The great epistemic triumph of scientific racism was the normalization of whiteness," Molina Garcia writes. Race science has always been meant to establish whiteness as normal and non-whiteness as deviant, as a threat to normality.

Watch today as this vice president launches a stochastic terror campaign against Haitians in Ohio. Watch as he smuggles conspiracy theories from the darkest corners of the neo-nazi internet and injects them into the nation's consciousness. Watch as he smiles at the cameras, knowing exactly what he's doing.

Watch as an explicitly white supremacist regime led by an explicitly racist president winks and nods at these researchers, knowing they will operate in the worst possible faith to create a scientific veneer for 21st century white supremacy.

This is why it very much matters when the powerful interact with and promote those looking for any way to reassemble the unreality that made chattel slavery a largely unquestioned institution for so long. Abolitionists in the 18th and 19th centuries saw right through that hideous unreality and said no, none of this is true, all of this was created to justify your devilish slave trade and the immense wealth it has brought you. Black people are humans, abolitionists said. That is the reality.

And so decent people today are tasked with doing the same, with identifying and rejecting wholesale the unreality of slavery, of genocide, fueled by fear and hatred. No matter how quixotic the task might seem, I think it's our responsibility to raise consciousness around the right's unreality. It's reassembling with frightening quickness.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.