Rhetorics of white preservation: racial violence and the Johnson–Reed Act

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, we suggest that the historical legacies of the 1924 Johnson–Reed Act and U.S. Border Patrol highlight the centrality of race and racialization. To do so, we briefly revisit moments of racialized rhetoric from the Johnson–Reed Act as influential in the creation (and violence) of the U.S. Border Patrol. The 100-year-old legacies of the 1924 Johnson–Reed Act, we argue, provide a lens through which we might view the current moment of racialized border violence as emergent from white supremacist ideologies historically connected to racial capitalism in the U.S. Lastly, we suggest that scholars of race and rhetoric ought to attend to racialized violence within its historical continuities in the current rhetoric of the border “crisis.”