White is the color taken up by the old nobility, counter-revolutionary nationalists, and other conservative forces during the 19th and 20th century. White terror is therefore the rule-by-terror (police raids, executions, and so on) of this group during a counter-revolutionary period. In revolutionary terms, white is the color of reaction and reactionaries. It was the color of the Bourbon kings in France and was taken up by monarchists across Europe.
In the U.S., White Terror is also literally an expression of white supremacy and serves to reinforce it through police action, right-wing militias, and so forth. White is the color of the reactionary movement by a kind of metaphorical coincidence: here, the White Terror doesn’t represent the terror of monarchs and their nobility revenging themselves on the working people. We’ve never had formal nobility. Here, the White Terror is the terror of the settler-garrisons, the constant fear the ruling classes want to exert on the oppressed nations that they might be surveilled, arrested, questioned, jailed, or murdered at any moment. The police are the agents of the White Terror. It is what they’re paid to make, more so even than the arrests and “crime-stopping” power of prosecution, they exist to terrify and subdue. They are an alien, occupying army, encamped in the heart of every community.
