Constructing whiteness: the intersections of race and gender in US white supremacist discourse

Abstract

This research explores the intertwined construction of race and gender in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of race. Additionally, I argue that race and gender are inextricably linked. Exploring how meaning works in white supremacist discourse, this research provides an analysis of the construction of racial and gender difference within the framework of the equality versus difference dichotomy. Within this framework, difference requires hierarchy, so that any effort to redress inequality is posited as a threat to difference. The primary project of the white supremacist movement is the construction of white racial and gender identities as naturalized and hierarchized differences.