Why White Supremacy Is Never Named in the Venezuela Crisis
Image by Jon Tyson.
Explanations of Venezuela that avoid white supremacy are faithful to the world that made this outcome ordinary.
Across the current debate, there is no shortage of analysis. Commentators invoke imperialism, oil, sanctions, international law, authoritarianism, corruption, diaspora exhaustion and the familiar refrain of “complexity”. These explanations often disagree sharply with one another. Yet across ideological divides, political loyalties and disciplinary boundaries, one shared omission remains: white supremacy, as a system, is almost never named. Here, white supremacy is the global system that ranks nations, people and sovereignties according to proximity to Western power and allocates legitimacy accordingly.
This absence is not accidental. When a concept explains the distribution of legitimacy, violence, and suffering across the global order and yet remains unspeakable, the silence itself becomes diagnostic. What is missing from the Venezuela discourse is not nuance. It is the system that makes the outcomes so predictable.
Much of the existing commentary is not wrong. Oil extraction has shaped Venezuela’s fate. Sanctions have deepened suffering. International law has failed repeatedly. Authoritarian repression is real. Diaspora exhaustion is palpable. But these frames function as descriptions of outcomes rather than explanations of why the same pattern recurs across time, leadership and justification. They describe harm without naming the system that renders it routine.
This is where the preference for terms like colonialism or imperialism becomes revealing. Colonialism remains a valid and necessary concept for describing historical extraction and domination. But it is also a history that can be placed safely behind us—treated as something that happened then, elsewhere or as an external force. Even when framed as “neo-colonial”, it allows contemporary institutions to appear flawed but fundamentally neutral. Imperialism, similarly, can be discussed as a geopolitical strategy or policy choice without destabilizing the legitimacy of the global system that manages it. It is often narrated as ambition rather than structure, as decision rather than governing order.
White supremacy does something different. It does not describe a historical episode or a foreign policy choice. It names an operating system—one that determines whose sovereignty is conditional, whose violence is framed as governance, whose suffering is treated as background and whose crises are allowed to fester until force becomes legible as a “solution”.
Colonialism explains what was taken. White supremacy explains who is permitted to take, intervene, sanction, abandon or “rescue”—and still be recognized as lawful, rational or humanitarian. This distinction matters because Venezuela is not the only place where this script appears. What matters is the pattern it reveals: when sanctions and diplomatic pressure stand in for real political solutions, collapse is normalized. People are worn down, conditions deteriorate and suffering becomes background noise.
Only then does overt force re-enter the conversation—as military threat, exceptional measures or “all options” rhetoric—not as escalation but as correction. White supremacy explains why this sequence is not treated as scandal. It explains why suffering can last for years without response yet only becomes actionable once it spreads beyond borders and exposes failure—and why intervention is then framed as order rather than aggression.
The term is avoided precisely because it collapses the comfort of compartmentalization. Once white supremacy is named, oil can no longer be discussed apart from sacrifice zones. Sanctions can no longer be framed as neutral tools. International law can no longer be treated as evenly applied. Expertise can no longer pretend to stand outside the system it serves. White supremacy is edited out because it turns respectable analysis into participation and converts “neutrality” into complicity. The refusal to name white supremacy is not a failure of analysis. It is a professional survival strategy.
This is not about accusing individuals of bad intent. White supremacy does not require villains. It operates through institutions, professions and legal frameworks that many in the professional class that profits from neutrality inhabit and depend upon. Naming it does not ask who is good or bad; it removes the system’s claim to neutrality. It exposes how “neutral” analysis often functions as management—administering harm while insulating those who authorize it.
That is why the discourse stops where it does. Not because the evidence is unclear but because naming the system would strip too many institutions of their innocence. It is easier to debate outcomes than to interrogate the order that guarantees their repetition. Easier to argue about leadership failures than to confront a hierarchy that renders some nations perpetually expendable. Easier to invoke “complexity” than to admit that the rules are functioning exactly as designed.
When analysis stops at symptoms, repetition is not a mistake—it is inevitable. The refusal to name white supremacy does not make the Venezuela crisis more complicated. It makes it predictable.
Until white supremacy is named as the governing logic that decides whose lives can be treated as expendable, whose sovereignty can be overridden and whose destruction can be narrated as stability, this crisis will not end.
The silence is not accidental. It is how the system protects itself.
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