Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to racially motivated hate crimes and other forms of oppression based on race, gender, and class.

One theme that links all of the essays in Killing Rage: Ending Racism is identifying and challenging white supremacy. hooks uses the term white supremacy instead of racism to indicate the systemic oppression of Black people, rather than the individual acts of overt racism. She argues that “[t]he enemy was not white people. It was white supremacy” (196), suggesting that the problem is with institutions, such as white-dominated universities and media, not individuals.

Her titular rage is against systemic white supremacy and the systems of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonization that are interconnected with it. She notes that “part of that colonizing process has been teaching us to repress our rage” (14), claiming that Black people surrender their rage against systemic white supremacy when they view themselves as victims and/or pursue capitalistic goals, such as gaining power over others. To overcome oppression, the truth that “many folks benefit greatly from dominating others and are not suffering a wound that is in any way similar to the condition of the exploited and oppressed” must be recognized (152). She argues that, after desegregation, white supremacy became harder to recognize, noting how, when she was writing in the 1990s, “we have not sufficiently challenged representations of blackness that are not obviously negative even though they act to reinforce white supremacy” (115).