Global White Supremacy and Anti-Trafficking

Abstract

Despite ostensive concerns with gender and racial justice, this chapter proposes that anti-trafficking discourses and politics are inadequate for addressing contemporary forms of severe economic exploitation. This chapter proposes that dominant discourses on human trafficking are sites to secure subjective investments in whiteness. The author argues for basing analysis of trafficking on race and racism and as a project based in global white supremacy. The aim is to provoke questions about the contemporary anti-trafficking movement, its genealogy, and the gender-, class- and race-based interests that inform it. The chapter suggests that groups of people with the most limited means for material and cultural survival are disadvantaged in approaches that prioritize carceral and militarized approaches to social justice.