White Supremacy Undermines the Universal Human Rights Agenda, Study Finds

A new study argues that white supremacy is not merely a fringe ideology but a structural force that actively sabotages the universal human rights agenda that the international community has spent eight decades building. Writing in the open-access journal Discover Global Society, author Nsama Jonathan Simuziya examines the foundations of white supremacism and traces how its power asymmetries are counterproductive to cooperative global initiatives, from the United Nations Charter to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The analysis is built on the premise that Article 1 of the UN Charter establishes the sovereign equality of all states, regardless of population, geography, economic power or military prowess, while Article 1 of the Universal Declaration proclaims that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Supremacist thinking, the study contends, is fundamentally incompatible with these commitments, because it equates whiteness with legitimacy and civilization while stigmatizing anything that originates outside the West.

The research distinguishes carefully between individual prejudice and structural racism, drawing on work by psychologists and sociologists who have mapped how discrimination becomes embedded in institutions. Individual prejudice typically occurs face to face, through microaggressions, hate speech or overt hostility. Structural racism, by contrast, is a web of interconnected elements embedded in legislation, policies and institutional practices that perpetually disadvantage racial minorities, even when individuals working within those systems hold no personal racist beliefs. The study cites evidence that structural racism manifests notoriously in housing, employment and the justice system, and it argues that supremacist attitudes also hide behind distancing strategies such as claims of color-blindness, whereby many white people detach themselves from responsibility and avoid discussing racism altogether. Philosopher Charles Mills describes this as a self-shielding tactic, in which pretending not to know functions as a channel that dismisses the oppressive realities of white supremacism.

Recent survey data underscore the scale of the gap between perception and reality. A 2025 Pew Research Centre survey of more than 5,000 respondents in the United States found that optimism about racial reform, which stood at 52 percent of US adults after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, had dwindled to 27 percent by 2025. Among Black respondents, 67 percent believed that meaningful reform remained a pipe dream. Ironically, 58 percent of white Americans believed racial equality had been restored. The study also points to a Gallup finding that 64 percent of US citizens consider racism against Black people to be widespread, and to research by the German Centre for Integration and Migration, which found in 2022 that 90 percent of respondents in Germany believed racism existed there. United Nations expert reports on the United Kingdom have concluded that discrimination against people of African descent is structural, institutional and systemic, while the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has reported that four out of ten Black people in Europe are stopped by police allegedly because of their skin color.

Central to the study is a genealogy of how racial ideology has adapted across economic eras, from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, imperialism and contemporary neoliberal globalization. Race, the author emphasizes, has no biological cogency: humans share roughly 99 percent of their DNA, and modern scholarship treats racial categories as political inventions created to grant power to white people and legitimize the subjugation of people of color. Racial hierarchies emerged historically around the fifteenth century and gained momentum alongside the transatlantic slave trade, colonial expansion and capitalist accumulation. The study documents how religion, culture, pseudo-science and economics were each mobilized to justify racial classification, from cherry-picked Christian doctrines that framed Black people as a cursed race, to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to distortions of Darwinian evolution that recast imperial domination as ‘survival of the fittest.’ Legal instruments such as the Jim Crow laws and South Africa’s apartheid pass laws then entrenched segregation long after slavery’s formal abolition.

One of the study’s most detailed case studies concerns education and academic publishing, arenas the author describes as supposed champions of open inquiry that have themselves been captured by supremacist gatekeeping. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration proclaims that education shall strengthen respect for human rights and promote tolerance and friendship among racial groups, yet the study argues that Western curricula continue to elevate whiteness at the expense of other races, teaching slavery and colonialism in sanitized versions while concealing colonial atrocities such as German genocide in Namibia and British torture of Kenyan freedom fighters. In publishing, the author describes subtle gatekeeping coded in routine rejection reasons, including demands to tone down criticism of imperialism, reduce word counts that would otherwise cut off criticism, or conform to Western-prescribed methodology. Empirical studies corroborate the pattern: research on geoscience found that only about 30 percent of papers on African topics were written by African authors, while studies during the COVID-19 pandemic and in global oncology documented persistent under-representation of sub-Saharan African authorship.

The study links these knowledge hierarchies to global capitalism, arguing that supremacism sustains a Western hegemonic system in which might is treated as right. Through trade ploys described as colonial-based commodity racism, including control of plants and seeds, and through raced markets, capitalism is said to manufacture poverty in the Global South while marginalizing it in economic relations. The author invokes Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, in which radical disparities in wealth distribution are purposely reproduced as small doses of death in the daily lives of subaltern populations. Trade frameworks such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act are criticized for tying market access to US-defined benchmarks of liberal governance, and the funding dependence of African institutions, with the African Union receiving nearly 70 percent of its operational funding from Europe, is presented as a mechanism of quiet capture that erodes institutional independence.

International human rights law offers little shelter from these dynamics, the study finds, because laws enacted in good faith are subverted by institutional practice. The United Kingdom’s Equality Act 2010 and the Treaty of Lisbon, which made the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union legally binding, are cited as milestone legislation that nonetheless coexists with pervasive, well-documented racism. The now-defunct Rwanda Asylum Plan, struck down by four separate courts as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations, is presented as an example of how governments persist with policies widely denounced as racist even after legal defeat. The paradox, the author argues, is devastating for the credibility of universal rights: it seems implausible that universal rights can be attained in environments that condone supremacism, prejudice and racial stereotyping, and many in the Global South consequently view the human rights agenda as an extension of disguised colonialism.

The study also engages critically with psychological theories of racism’s origins, including Frances Welsing’s Cress theory of color-confrontation, which posits that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation in a world where most people are non-white. The author reviews objections from scholars such as Bernard De Montellano, who found the albinism claim scientifically baseless, and from critics who argue the theory distracts from the political economy of racism, exemplified by historian Barbara Fields’s warning that slavery’s chief business was the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco rather than white supremacy. The study concludes that the real drivers of supremacism are historical capitalist economic factors, profit accumulation through cheap labor and the fear of losing unearned imperial and neocolonial privileges, rather than genetics.

Resistance, the study insists, must come from both sides of the racial divide, because complicity sustains the system. Philosopher Iris Marion Young’s social connection model holds that people are responsible for structural discrimination by virtue of participating in the institutions they condemn, through employment, volunteering or funding. The author cites Steve Biko’s call for Black people to reclaim agency and Nelson Mandela’s reminder that no one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, since racism is a taught behavior. At the same time, the study argues that white complicity persists through color-blindness, white fragility and tokenism, the perfunctory hiring of minority members to create a false impression of inclusiveness while denying them real influence over policy. Emerging counter-currents, including South-South cooperation through BRICS and the decolonial drive toward delinking from the colonial matrix, are flagged as signs that the cycle of coloniality may be nearing its end.

The study’s conclusion is blunt: universal human rights and global justice cannot be attained when certain groups believe themselves above the structures of international governance, and the greatest threat to international peace and security may not be armed conflict but white supremacism itself, which fuels conflict through capitalism’s profit-maximizing contempt for African lives. Unless there is a proactive policy shift, the author warns, polarization between the West and Africa will deepen, making sustainable global security harder to achieve. Invoking an African proverb that when you shoot a zebra in the black stripe, the white stripe dies too, the study frames racism as a self-defeating scheme in a world where all human beings are enmeshed in the same social fabric, sharing 99 percent of their DNA and, by the terms of every major human rights covenant, the same equal and inalienable rights.

Subject of Research: How white supremacism undermines the universal human rights agenda through structural racism and global capitalism

Article Title: How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda

Article References: Simuziya, N. J. (2026). How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Keywords: white supremacy, human rights, UN Charter, structural racism, capitalism, Global South, colonialism, academic publishing, racial discrimination, institutional racism, necropolitics, decoloniality