Connecting White supremacy from the local to the global

Blog post by Karim Murji, University of West London, UK and Ipek Demir, University of Leeds, UK

This blog is linked to the Identities Special Issue: The Global Configurations of Whiteness.

How do two recent instances from the UK provide a window into a wider picture of White supremacy?

In late 2025 Robert Jenrick, then the Conservative Shadow Justice Minister (who defected to the Reform Party in 2026) made headlines when he complained of ‘not seeing another White face’ in Handsworth, Birmingham. Handsworth is indeed one of most diverse places in the UK, hosting many ‘postcolonial’ immigrants – data compiled from the Office for National Statistics by Birmingham City Council shows the population as, for example 9% White, 25.1% Pakistani, 23.1% Indian, 10.2% Bangladeshi, Black Caribbean 8.2%, 8.7% White alongside many other ethnic groups.

When challenged Jenrick said he was highlighting a ‘lack of integration’. This claim skates over the fact that racial diversity does not in itself equal a lack of integration. Nor can integration be measured by people’s skin colour. Jenrick’s claim is not really about a lack of integration but rather turns racial diversity itself into a problem and threat which needs urgent attention.

This is how one branch of contemporary Whiteness is constituted when it can present White people as victims of multiculture. The Civil Rights movement in the US reminded us that ‘equality feels like an oppression if you are used to privilege’. Presenting racial diversity as an oppression by those used to dominance is an expression of supremacy.

Whiteness does not though operate in a homogenous manner. Jenrick’s claim of a lack of ‘White faces’ in Handsworth ignores the clear evidence of hostility to ‘White’ migrants such as people of Polish and Romanian origins that were clear in the Brexit campaign. Moreover, the lack of diversity in places such as East Devon (97.4 % White) is never seen as a concern. At the same time urban areas have been reshaped through ‘White flight’, that is some White people (but also sometimes aspirational ethnic minorities) move away from areas they deem as ‘too diverse’. Paradoxically, the appeal of cities such as Birmingham and London is precisely that they are diverse and multicultural.

In March 2026 Nick Timothy, Jenrick’s replacement as Conservative Justice Minister, sparked outrage when he complained on social media about Muslims praying in Trafalgar Square during Ramadan. He said that seeing mass prayer in a public place was ‘an act of domination’ and ‘straight from the Islamist playbook’. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan – who was present at the Ramadan event – criticized Timothy who nonetheless reaffirmed that he found the public expression of a non-Christian faith a ‘challenge’ in a follow up in newspaper column.

These are two instances of the global phenomenon of expressions of White supremacy. Notions of White extinction are promoted through a conflation of ‘lack of White people’ with an ‘act of domination’ by minorities. It is obvious but important to consider how the same comments would be heard or seen if they were made about areas that have a visibly Jewish population, or other public expressions of faith such as Diwali or Hannukah – let alone Easter.

But the issue in these cases is not about logic or consistency. The fallacies of race thinking, or rather of racism, are plain and have been spelt out many times, from classics such as The Mismeasure of Man to the more recent How to Argue with a Racist.

In his new book Chain of Ideas the philosopher Ibram X Kendi starts by analyzing the Great Replacement Theory that claims that White people are at risk of extinction as they are replaced by Black and Brown people. However, as with Timothy, it is mainly Muslims who are seen as the problem. For Kendi, this is more than White nationalism as it has spread from being a national or domestic concern into a transnational or global one.

This is one way in which we can see how the ideas of White supremacy can span boundaries across countries. The title Chain of Ideas makes an important point: ideas about replacement are not just one thing, nor are they recent. In whatever form they are adopted, the appeal of such ideas is that they draw on and connect an inchoate cluster of notions such as that White replacement, the growth of Islam, or just that White people are now victims as racialised minorities get preferential treatment.

In our Introduction to the Special Issue, we stress the need to think of Whiteness globally and intersectionality. While the latter is often taken to mean linking race, class and gender, it should be a basis for thinking across time and space. In this light Whiteness works across identity categories but it also works across national and international boundaries, as well as drawing on history in particular ways. It mounts new and novel types of resistance when its supremacy is questioned. An intersectional approach to Whiteness reveals some of the well-known, but also importantly some lesser known, configurations of Whiteness. Cases from Brazil, Chile, Australia, Poland and Lithuania in the special issue provide rich sample of examples that help us to see and to understand how Whiteness is manifesting in nations across the world.

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Image credit: Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
Demir, I. & Murji, K. (2026). The global configurations of Whiteness. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2026.2641364

Explore the Identities Special Issue: The Global Configurations of Whiteness:
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2026)

Read further in Identities:

Vigilant Whiteness: racism, transphobia and the mainstreaming of far-right politics in Britain   OPEN ACCESS

Off-White: The tensions of Whiteness in Quebec

Police and racial identity formation: thinking the Military police of São Paulo as a site of racial socialization to Whiteness   OPEN ACCESS