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2019
INTRODUCTION I was invited to deliver the September 2017 Dean's Lecture, on which this essay is based, in March of 2017, shortly after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45 th president of the United States. I had originally planned to present on one of my longstanding research areas, the intersections of contract law and critical race theory, but as the spring wore on, I began to feel an urgency about using my expertise to comment more directly on the increasingly overt but trenchant race, gender, sex, and class inequalities and conflicts that have plagued our nation for centuries. This sense of urgency was stoked by the intense summer of 2017, which brought us, among other things: the white supremacist, torchlight "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville-organized ostensibly to protest the city's plans to remove its Confederate monuments-during which thirty-four people were injured and three died, including 32-year-old Virginian, Heather Heyer (a white counter-protester killed by a Unite the Right marcher who drove his car into a crowd of which she was a part). 1 Additionally, two Virginia state troopers were killed in a helicopter crash
Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 2018
This essay introduces a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric on White Supremacy in the age of Trump. This essay recounts an abbreviated history of racism in the United States of America and myriad instances where white supremacy was a vibrant part of Donald J. Trump's rise to political power. These events demonstrate that racial animus is both a cornerstone of American history and contemporary politics.
I write as the torches of Charlottesville still smolder. I hope that as you read that signifier has not been misplaced by the irrational rapidity and perpetual neurosis of the Trumpian news cycle. Because Charlottesville, like Ferguson and Cleveland, like Charleston and Baltimore, should be consistently evoked, so as not to be pushed aside by the constant drudgery of living under a rhetorically manipulative demagogue and his fatuous proclamations of Heritage, History, and the Rule of Law. I therefore also write against the causes of Charlottesville, the alt-right white nationalism that was born of internet misogyny and irrational fears of globalization. This review essay is not objective, as it stems from a place rational enough to understand that objectivity can never be neutral, especially in a time when protecting the memory of the treasonous Confederacy has become a legitimate and romanticized discourse for covetous American politicians.
Fast Capitalism, 2021
Language provides [fascism] with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation."-Theodor W. Adorno The toxic thrust of white supremacy runs through American culture like an electric current. Without apology, Jim Crow is back suffocating American society in a wave of voter suppression laws, ongoing attempts by right-wing politicians to implement a form of apartheid pedagogy, and the resurgence of a right-wing cultural politics organized around the legacy of white nationalism and white supremacy. The emergence of white supremacy to the centers of power is also evident in the reign of police violence against Black people that came into full view with the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer and the ensuing mass protest against racist police brutality across the globe. White supremacy works not only through the force of state repression and violence but also in the colonizing of subjectivity, manufactured ignorance, and the power of a reactionary culture with its relentless pedagogies of repression. The cult of manufactured ignorance now works through disimagination machines engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. Its politics of cruelty now cloaks itself in the false claims of "patriotism." The spectacle of Trumpism and its brew of white supremacist ideology and disdain for the truth undergirds the further collapse of democratic visions in higher education and in broader public spheres, made all the more obvious by the obsession with methodologies and the reign of instrumental reason, which has returned on the educational front with a vengeance. Education as a vehicle for white supremacy now moves between the reactionary policies of Republican legislators that now use the law to turn their states into white nationalist factories and a right-wing social media machine that uses the Internet and other online services to spread racial hatred. As William Barber II, Liz Theoharis, Timothy B. Tyson, and Cornel West have argued, white supremacy has once again turned deadly and has put democracy on trial. They write: Even now, the ancient lie of white supremacy remains lethal. It has left millions of African-American children impoverished in resegregated and deindustrialized cities. It embraces high-poverty, racially isolated schools that imperil our children-and our future. It shoots first and dodges questions later. "Not everything that is faced can be changed," James Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced."i In what follows, I want to examine the totality of white supremacy as an educational force by connecting its threads through the rise of voter suppression, the attacks on education via critical race theory, and the culture of police violence.
History News Network, 2016
Available at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163049 This article provides a detailed perspective on the white, working-class, and its historical relationship with racial resentment, anti-intellectualism, economic mobility, and government policy. Through numerous examples dating back to the Virginia slave codes, Indian Removal, the development of mass political parties, and the American Civil war, I show how wealthier whites successfully employed a “divide and conquer” strategy that brought together whites of all social classes under a common racial identity. The consequences, which prevented the formation of interracial class-based alliances, were profound. Poor whites benefited from government policy in multiple ways that accumulated over time, contributing to the long-standing paradigm that freedom for some segments of the population came at the expense of others. As the Democratic Party began to embrace the modern civil rights movement in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Republican Party capitalized on the racial anxieties of the white, working-class. But whereas racial resentment may have been subtle under the Nixon and Reagan presidencies, it has become painfully and irredeemably toxic under the bombastic authoritarian, Donald Trump. Meanwhile, neoliberal policies supported by Republicans and corporate Democrats have left today’s working-class with many legitimate grievances, but a comprehensive understanding of American history suggests that they have more often been beneficiaries of the state, and not victims. In addition to citing multiple academic studies, this article engages the recent work of many prominent commentators, including Thomas Frank, Emmett Rensin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Amanda Taub. Deeply researched, trenchant, and clearly written, this article contains important implications and context for the upcoming November elections and promises to be an enriching story .
Review Essay: White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race by Matthew W. Hughey Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility by Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo D. Torres Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action by Jennifer L. Pierce
Common Reader, 2018
Nancy Isenberg's well-timed book, White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, seeks to insert economic caste into the historiography of whiteness and politics, understand the rift between these two groups, outline the struggle that defines that fracture, and appreciate the diversity and experiences of poor whites while recasting them as important historical actors.
Journal of Pastoral Theology, 2017
In the immediate aftermath of the Ferguson uprising of August , Carol Anderson penned an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, "Ferguson isn't about black rage against cops. It's white rage against progress." In it, she confronted the popular condemnation of protests and particular incidents of looting with the broader reality of systemic white suppression of black social and economic progress. Focusing upon the anger expressed by protestors obfuscates how oppressive social policies are also manifestations of ragethat of white people. Such policies evade identification as rage due to their more suffusive nature and the social and political power that bolsters and legitimates them. White rage "doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislators and governors, who cast its efforts as noble." In White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Anderson develops the thesis of her op-ed through a historical survey of concentrated political and legal efforts to reverse or minimize black American gains in the struggle toward equity. Synthesizing a range of historical research on successive eras of US history, Anderson leads the reader with efficiency and clarity from the Reconstruction period, through the Great Migration, Brown v. Board of Education and Jim Crow, the "war on drugs" and mass incarceration, up to contemporary voter suppression efforts in the wake of Barack Obama's election to the presidency. Thoroughly documented while remaining accessible to those outside the academy, White Rage provides a necessary corrective to popular narratives of sustained US progress in the realm of racial justice, while also serving as a primer on the nature of structural racism itself. Additionallyand crucially for the current political context-Anderson highlights recurring rhetorical strategies employed by white people to minimize the nature and effects of racial oppression and legitimize white discomfort at the "overreach" of progress toward equality and thus justify regressive policies. By documenting the policies and court decisions designed to preserve white supremacy in the face of progress, as well as the consistent rhetorical moves used to defend such practices, White Rage places the most recent iterations of white backlash within a clarifying historical context. It thus serves as a valuable resource for justice-minded communities strategizing how to best advance the struggle for equity. Anderson begins with an account of "Reconstructing Reconstruction," explaining how the early promise of full recognition of African-American citizenship in the wake of the Civil War was betrayed in favor of an overriding concern for reintegrating Confederate states into the Union. After noting Lincoln's lack of clarity and resolve regarding the cause of the war and the need to prioritize equality for formerly enslaved people, Anderson turns her attention to the actions of President Andrew Johnson to pardon Confederate leaders, rescind the Freedmen's Bureau order
2020
Plenty has changed since the first COPAS issue was published twenty years ago. Yet we believe that despite or maybe because of these changes the journal remains true to its original goals of providing a platform for early career scholars to present and discuss their research, allowing for a critical while cooperative exchange among peers and beyond. Taking inventory of COPAS on the occasion of its twentieth year of existence, we have decided to address the issue of white supremacy as the topic of our anniversary thematic issue and introduce a very visible change to COPAS as well. In doing so, we hope to express the very spirit of the journal, which, as we understand it, is marked by critical self-reflection and the desire to make room for new voices and ideas.
Perspectives on Politics, 2021
Today we see signs across the political spectrum that make a conventional political compass seem inadequate" (p. 155). This quote, from Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, perfectly captures why this book is so important and timely. Its authors, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes, explore how changes in the contemporary economic and political environment in the United States beg for a rewriting of our understanding of race in America. To that end, many of the ideas in the book are centered around the idea of racial transposition, which occurs when traditional characterizations of racial groups shift over time; for example, when stereotypes and rhetoric traditionally centered on one racial/ethnic group begin to be applied to other groups. HoSang and Lowndes use racial transposition to explain how once-rigid racial lines in the United States have become blurred. The first part of the book focuses on how racist tropes around "producers" and "parasites" have been extended from communities of color to also include public service sector unions and poor whites. With respect to the unions, the first substantive chapter of the book explores how public service employees are portrayed as manipulating the system to gain advantages that private workers do not have. The authors argue that characterizations of public employees as being taken care of without working hard were in the past largely limited to Black and Latinx welfare recipients. These racist tropes were subsequently extended to galvanize support for policies that limited the power of public unions. Although I find much of the book's argument persuasive, I am skeptical of the authors' conclusions in this chapter. Instead of the producer/parasite stereotype being transposed from Blacks to public service union employees, it seems to me that this paradigm was merely extended from welfare recipients to public service workers. In
2017
THIS COLLECTION ESPOUSES a rhetorical lens for employing theories and methods of whiteness studies to analyze twenty-first-century texts and contexts; as such, it argues for the continued relevancy of whiteness studies in the twenty-first century. In particular, this collection identifies new sites for analyses of racialized whiteness, such as digitized representations of whiteness on the web and implicit representations of racialized whiteness in educational policies and politics. In the process, this collection exposes how seemingly progressive gains made in representing nonwhites in various cultural sites often reify a normative, racialized whiteness. Our attempt to revivify whiteness studies from its demise during the first decade of the twenty-first century is necessary because, in the words of one anonymous reviewer of this manuscript, whiteness studies had become "exhausted. Stagnant. Its momentum stalled in the wake of post-racial self-congratulations. Tedious. .. Critical Race Theory in whiteface. Insular and self-congratulatory. Mattering mostly only in the academy with little impact on or a relationship to social policy or to those outside of the academy." To counter such a demise, our collection offers broadly engaging analyses that inform academic readers interested in rhetoric, social media, whiteness studies, cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, communication studies, and critical race theory in both upper division and graduate classes as well as general readers interested in social media, film, school testing, and technology. Provocative in tone and argument, our collection invites these audiences into further discussions and actions that interrupt racialized whiteness in twenty-first-century culture; as such, our collection promotes rhetorical analyses as a productive means of fostering such discussions and actions. We three coeditors of Rhetorics of Whiteness also coedited a 2004 special edition of Rhetoric Review that focused on whiteness studies as an important site for developing antiracist and antiwhiteness tactics. But our scholarly call resulted in only a few scholarly projects, such as Jennifer Trainor's Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School. One result of our collaboration, however, is that we periodically chat about the state of whiteness in U.S. culture. Recently we noted two seemingly contradictory cultural trends that intrigue us: the momentum of whiteness studies as an active research field has waned during the past decade even as the two elections of President Barack Obama have rendered white an operative term in mainstream discourses. Given this emergence of white in mainstream discourses, the need for whiteness studies as a means for theorizing, analyzing, interpreting, and challenging racialized whiteness seems more urgent than ever. So we decided to create this edited collection, Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in
Perspectives on Politics, 2018
At the last American Political Science Association annual meeting I attended, Charles Mills was on the lips of nearly everyone I saw speak. This is as it should be. His work on racial liberalism is key not only to understanding this political moment-a moment in which white nationalism has become more visible, virulent, and accepted-but also to opening eyes to the continuity of white supremacy in the United States. His critical engagements with ideal theory and the white episteme help us understand why whites' eyes in particular have been closed to the centrality of racial domination in US democracy, liberal theory and practice, and modernity itself. And his positive assessment of the possibilities of liberalism stands as an encouraging counterpoint to the views of racial pessimists and skeptics, while his ideas about reconstructing liberal theory in the direction of a black radical liberalism point a way forward. Black Rights/White Wrongs brings various threads of Mills' past arguments together, updating when appropriate and elaborating on them as necessary. At the heart of the book is the following claim: while there is now broad recognition of the poisonous effect of classism and sexism on liberal practice and theory, academics and the public continue to lag when it comes to seeing how racism has deeply infected liberalism. Why? White ignorance (see Ch. 4)-a powerful cognitive tendency to perceive and interpret the world in ways that filter out evidence of racial domination-perpetuates romantic ideas about liberal societies and theory. Such ignorance feeds and is fed by a variety of social dynamics and intellectual currents. Mills, particularly concerned with philosophy, highlights the mystification of central figures in the liberal tradition (like Kant-see Ch. 6) and the occlusion of racial domination by the privileging of certain philosophical approaches and methods (see his criticism of Rawls in Ch. 5 and Part 2). In both practice and theory, liberalism has been as deeply shaped by racism as it has been shaped by patriarchal capitalism. What we have in contemporary U.S. society, Mills argues, is 'racial liberalism': a regime that only recognizes the moral equality of, and thus only benefits, whites (see Chs. 1-3). This reality requires a
Southeastern Geographer, 2018
Critical Sociology, 2008
It is a truth universally acknowledged that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once articulated for the masses, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. If this is so, it seems important to take the pulse of civil society from time to time, to verify and validate progress along this path, rather than merely trust in the inevitability hoped for, struggled towards, and promised by King and his interlocutors past and present, including the former U.S. President Barack Obama. Popular cultures can be a useful projection for humanists and social scientists alike of how sociocultural norms, politics, and aesthetics are variously formulated, interpreted and policed at large scales. This paper seeks to explore the race-based cultural policing efforts made around two recent events, the “Old Town Road” controversy of 2019 and the “Kendrick Lamar n-word” controversy of 2018, as well as the “metaproblematic” backlash to these efforts, which I argue expose and put pressure on many of the (increasing) contradictions within 21st century American liberalism as it relates to race and popular (public) cultures. I argue that metaproblematics – the problematizing of things construed themselves as problems, as well as those entities doing the initial problematizing – is a mode of counterhegemonic critique that is predicated on ontological (or perceptual) authenticity and epistemological (or conceptual) clarity, including the questioning/challenging of sincerity and “rigid” designations like [calling someone a] racist, in the face of apparent ethical, political and/or aesthetic contradictions. I also reflect on recent cases of false claims of racism at Oberlin College and “n-word” passes at a Maryland high school to introduce the possibility of what I call hypersincerity, which can be absurd and destructive even if/when intentions are pure, and can serve as a metaproblematic trigger, as well as on the case of comedian Dave Chappelle, The Chappelle Show and his “Black White Supremacist” sketch which embody the metaproblematic ethos by rendering racism(s) as absurd, worthy of laughter, via a fearless if inherently controversial authenticity. I conclude by contextualizing these feelings of departure within the much broader arena of freedom and the inevitability of diaspora, not merely of human bodies but of their cultural competencies/artifacts as well.
DePaul Journal for Social Justice, 2018
Recent events have upended this "post-racial" narrative. In the wake of the racially charged election of Donald J. Trump and the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, race generally and white supremacy specifically are again taking center stage. 4 For many, the reemergence of the kind of overt manifestations of white supremacy that were unveiled in Charlottesville was particularly jarring. It forced many people to grapple with the reality that white supremacy, a phenomenon that many believed had been relegated to a historical footnote, still exists and is stronger than ever. Yet those such as myself who examine race critically have long been aware that the fissures caused by race generally and white supremacy specifically, never went anywhere, notwithstanding the election of the country's first self-identified African-American president. 5 Race generally and white supremacy specifically are embedded into the framework of most American social institutions. As a result, now more than ever, it is imperative that we critically examine all forms and manifestations of white supremacy. This paper focuses on a very important part of white supremacy-the legal foundations of white supremacy. The central thesis of this paper is that American law has historically played a vital 2
Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2021
Social Justice and Social Work is a foundational course required for all social work students in the master’s of social work program at Portland State University. Although the course has long focused on interrupting oppressions including White supremacy, teaching the course during the fall of 2020 required a nimble dance between our familiar modes of teaching and the need for spontaneous adaptation and creativity. The unique landscape for this course included teaching the course remotely (Zoom), inside a university embattled around the arming of its security force (that killed a Black man in 2018), in a city targeted by an armed federal response to the racial uprising led by Black Lives Matter, in a state with a long history of White supremacy and Black exclusion, and under a federal administration explicitly aligned with White supremacy. This paper offers a reflection of our teaching about and against White supremacy during this unique moment in time. We position our writing at the...
To understand and contextualize Donald Trump's election as President of the United States, we must place his election in the context of a white counter-revolutionary politics that emerge from the specific geographic configurations of the US racial state. While academics and political commentators have correctly located the election of Trump in the context of white supremacy, I argue we need to coordinate our understanding of white supremacy and the electoral politics that fueled Trump's rise in the context of anti-Black racism by examining how the US racial state turns to whiteness to prevent change. Throughout the development of the United States, whiteness has long stood as a bulwark against progressive and revolutionary change so much so that when the US racial state is in economic and political crisis, bourgeoisie capitalism appeals to the white middle and working classes to address that crisis. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump descended the gilded tower of Trump headquarters to a crowd of adoring fans. Accustomed to seeing him on his reality television show The Apprentice his appearance had all the trappings of modern, US celebrity-obsessed culture. As the escalator slowly propelled him to what many called the most improbable presidential run in US history, few could have guessed the way he was to launch his campaign. Framing his campaign as a time to " Make America Great Again, " Trump assailed the danger of
Open Political Science, 2021
The Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the United States, at its foundation has been faced with the contradiction of initially supporting chattel slavery --- a form of slavery that treated black slaves from Africa purely as a commercial commodity. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had some discomfort with slavery, were slaveholders who both utilized slaves as a commodity. Article 1 of our Constitution initially treated black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representation in order to increase Southern representation in Congress. So initially the Constitution’s commitment to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” did not include the enslaved black population. This essay contends that the residue of this initial dilemma...
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