Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew W. Hughey, ‘The Janus Face of Whiteness: Toward a Cultural Sociology of White Nationalism and White Antiracism’, Sociology Compass 3/6 (2009): 920–936, 10.1111/j.1751‐9020.2009.00244.x Author’s introduction Over the past 20 years, the study of white racial identity has received in‐depth, interdisciplinary attention. Under sociological scrutiny, the study of whiteness has traversed quite a few stages: from understandings of whiteness as a category replete with social privileges, as a mere reflection of non‐racial (often class‐based) dynamics, to its most recent turn that emphasizes the contextual and intersectional heterogeneity of whiteness. Because of the increased attention to context and political disputes, the study of whiteness has never been more amenable to cultural analysis than it is today. Hence, an emphasis on different white racial formations that span a political spectrum – from conservative to liberal and racist to antiracist – is now dominant. In this vein, white nationalists and white antiracists represent the distinct polarities of contemporary inquisitions into white racial identity. Motivated by this academic milieu, this guide offers an overview of the major scholarship that address white nationalism & white antiracism, appropriate online materials, and examples from a sample syllabus. Together, these resources aim to assist in understanding the general processes and contexts that produce ‘whiteness’ and imbue it with meaning, the social relationships and practices in which white racial identity identities become embedded, and how whiteness simultaneously possesses material and symbolic privileges alongside diverse and seemingly antagonistic experiences. Author recommends The complexity of whiteness McDermott, Monica and Frank L. Samson 2005. ‘White Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States.’ Annual Review of Sociology 31 : 245–61. Any contemporary apprentice of the sociological study of white racial identity should read this essay. Monica McDermott and her student Frank Samson combine to provide a robust overview of the literature. They walk the tightrope of balancing both a broad coverage of the literature with the depth that key studies necessitate. In so doing, they put a finger on the key dilemma of studying white racial identity today: ‘Navigating between the long‐term staying power of white privilege and the multifarious manifestations of the experience of whiteness remains the task of the next era of research on white racial and ethnic identity’ (2005: 256). Duster, Troy 2001. ‘The ‘Morphing’ Properties of Whiteness.’ Pp. 113–33 in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness , edited by E. B. Rasmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica and M. Wray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. In this essay – part of a larger volume on whiteness that I also recommend – Duster synthesizes disparate approaches to the study of whiteness. Demonstrating how some scholars understand white racial identity as a contextual and cognitive category (‘fluid’), while some frame whiteness as a structural and fixed category of material privileges (‘frozen’), Duster asks ‘who is right?’ He answers via the metaphor of whiteness‐as‐water. In one moment, whiteness can morph into vapor as a contextual and unstable identity, while the next moment it can instantly transform into a harsh and unyielding form of ice‐like privilege. Duster’s essay is an excellent retort for those who argue that we should move ‘beyond’ race to the utopian realm of color‐blind individualism. Duster demonstrates, although the example of the supposedly egalitarian New Deal, that while race is socially constructed, the legacy of racism remains a historically reproduced and real social fact – denying the existence of race perpetuates racial inequality. Duster closes the chapter with a personal anecdote that grounds the historical example in modern, interactional, and everyday life. Perry, Pamela 2002. Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perry gives us two ethnographic studies in one – that of two northern California high schools: one located in a predominantly white, if economically diverse, suburb, the other situated in a multiracial urban community. Perry persistently and systematically probes the complexities of white racial identity in the practices and discourses of the youth attending these high schools. She finds that whites in the predominantly white, suburban high school do not see themselves as a unique race and take their racial identity for granted – they understand distinctly white practices as normative rather than as constitutive of a subjective worldview. In contrast, the whites at the multiracial, urban high school possess a more critical and comparative view of race and their own place in the racial order. In sum, Perry argues that whiteness is a set of complex, contradictory, and multiple subject positions. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matt Wray brings the tools of cultural sociology viz‐á‐viz ‘symbolic boundaries’ to the interrogation of the moniker White Trash . Wray problematizes this relatively normalized term to question its origins and how it persists. Drawing upon literary texts, folklore, diaries, medical articles, and social scientific analyses from the early 1700s to the turn of the 20th century, Wray documents the multiple meanings that were projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Of particular import, Wray demonstrates how white supremacist ideas about class and region became dominant through public health campaigns and eugenic reformations. Impoverished whites found themselves the targets of officials and activists who framed them as ‘filthy’ or “feebleminded,” and thus a threat to the purity and supremacy of the white race. This text is particularly informative for its demonstration of how white supremacist logic was not only focused on racial ‘otherness’ but used the axes of class and location to directly demarcate and attack those seen as ‘white’ yet somehow racially deficient and unworthy. Winant, Howard 2004. ‘Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary U.S. Racial Politics.’ Pp. 3–16 in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society , edited by Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell and April Burns. New York, NY: Routledge. In applying his now classic approach formulated in concert with Michael Omi ( Racial Formations , 1986), Howard Winant applies the ‘racial projects’ thesis to whites: ‘I think it would be beneficial to attempt to sort out alternative conceptions of whiteness, along with the politics that both flow from and inform these conceptions. … focusing on five key racial projects, which I term, far right, new right, neoconservative, neoliberal, and new abolitionist ’ (2004: 6). Hence, Winant maps a theory of white identity formation onto a bifurcated ‘culture war.’ Labeling this phenomenon ‘racial dualism as politics,’ Winant advances a paradigm in which whiteness is undergoing ‘a profound political crisis.’ Winant’s essay is especially important for those that wish to emphasize the heterogeneity of white racial identity, as he provides Weberian‐like ‘ideal types’ for the comprehension of the racial‐political landscape. Hughey, Matthew W. (forthcoming 2010). ‘Navigating the (Dis)similarities of White Racial Identities: The Conceptual Framework of “Hegemonic Whiteness.”’ Ethnic & Racial Studies. In this work, I build upon many of the aforementioned studies. Like Pamela Perry (2002) I dive into two ethnographic sites, but of much different breed. To interrogate how whiteness might be akin to ‘vapor and ice’ (Duster 2001) and to provide a robust answer to the dilemma of the ‘long‐term staying power of

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Isn’t Every Crime a Hate Crime? The Case for Hate Crime Laws

The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Media and the Law Enable White Supremacist Groups to Recruit and Radicalize Emotionally Vulnerable Individuals

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Does "White" Equal "White Supremacy"? Marcia Noe (bio) What do we think of when we hear the term "White supremacy"? A Grand Dragon in a hood and sheet? A Tiki Torch-bearing neo-Nazi? Britt Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno would like to change that perception. In Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy in the American Midwest, they offer us a new way to conceptualize White supremacy: they argue that it is less an individual mindset or pattern of behavior than it is a part of the systems and structures of power that control resources and lives. Halvorson and Reno's case rests on their analysis of midwestern works of the imagination, as well as accounts from popular media, and the ways in which these works enact a pastoral mythology that constructs the Midwest as White. Further, they maintain that the whiteness of these works enables White supremacy, which, in turn, furthers nationalist and imperialist projects. Undeniably, White supremacy is an egregiously serious problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 733 hate groups in the United States, 47 of which are categorized as White nationalist organizations.1 Many of these are located in the Midwest, and Halvorson and Reno are right to inquire about the region's participation in this heinous social movement and to analyze the ways in which midwestern discourse informs identity and shapes thinking about race. As Jon K. Lauck observes, "regional identities arise from the aspirations, visions, and self-perceptions of those who create and monopolize the discourses about the localities and regions in which they occur."2 Lauck is talking about the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves as Midwesterners. These stories, derived from agrarian principles, portray Midlanders as virtuous, industrious, and self-reliant. Are these White stories? And, if they are, does that whiteness equate to White supremacy? And does this implicate the region in national and global racist endeavors? Halvorson and Reno would answer yes to these questions. [End Page 141] Energized by the attention directed at White working-class heartland voters in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Halvorson and Reno address what they believe is a culturally misplaced emphasis. Trumpism is not a new thing, they point out, showing how, throughout the region's history, midwestern pastoralism has been portrayed on stage and screen, in the visual arts and in popular discourse, as normative virtuousness through which good, elite Whites distance themselves from deplorable, racist Others. They contend that this conceptualization does not address the region's structural racism and its depredations. "We need fresh, new ways of thinking about and seeing what racism is and does in order to begin the multigenerational, hard, and unglamorous work of dismantling white supremacy," they assert (4). Perhaps a useful way to understand this argument is to reflect on second-wave feminism's conceptualization of "woman" compared to that of third-wave feminism. Fifty years ago, second-wave feminists talked about "women" and "women's rights" in an essentialized way that tacitly equated "women" with White, middle-class, cis-gendered heterosexual women, thus eliding women of color, queer women, and working-class women. More recently, third-wave feminists have offered the corrective of intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. This new way of thinking jettisons a generic woman to make way for an inclusive feminism that acknowledges that oppression is experienced differently by women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations.3 Similarly, Halvorson and Reno are arguing that the Midwest has been constructed in just such an essentialized manner that elides ethnic and racial differences. However, the authors stumble when they take their claims one step further. Their argument is grounded in Frances Lee Ansley's definition of White supremacy: "a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily resonated across a broad array of institutions and social settings" (53). This definition is capacious enough to include almost everything White or "coded White" and thus fails to provide an adequate warrant for Halvorson and Reno's claims that "the whiteness of the Midwest...

Through a critical race and anti-colonial lens, social studies education is understood to serve as a hegemonic tool (re)inforcing settler colonialism including the maintenance of whiteness and white supremacy through the perpetuation of nationalist narratives, dominant discourses, and other normalizing logics as well as through ongoing attempts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, histories, and knowledge systems. Within this two-pronged qualitative inquiry, the author considers her identity as a white settler and the ways her nuanced racialized understandings have developed over time. Second, she examines how as a white settler teacher, she contributes to and is implicated in her students’ perceptions of their racializations in both critical and non-critical ways. Insights from this inquiry have the potential to inform the broader work of social studies education as teachers work to unsettle settler colonialism through the dismantling of whiteness and white supremacy and the authentic integration of Indigenous voices, histories, and knowledge systems.

In July 2019, I attended a lecture titled “Independence is a Right, Not a Gift,” by Justice Patrick Robinson, a member of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Prior to his appointment to the court, Justice Robinson was Jamaica's representative to the Sixth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly and was chairman of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He also served as a member of the Haiti Truth and Justice Commission from 1995 to 1996, as a judge for the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1998, and as a member of the International Bio-Ethics Committee of UNESCO from 1996 to 2005. The lecture was hosted by the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies (Mona), and I was eager to hear Justice Robinson bring his long experience to bear on the subject of his talk, the right to self-determination. The talk itself focused on the development and passage in 1960 of Resolution 1514 in the United Nations General Assembly, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Justice Robinson contextualized the local importance of this resolution by reminding the audience that in 1953, the average white person in Jamaica was more than fifty times wealthier than the average white Englishman. He then laid out the parameters through which this resolution addressed the right of peoples to freely determine their political status, stated most clearly in paragraph thirteen, itself a repetition of language that was adopted at the 1955 gathering of African and Asian representatives in Bandung, Indonesia (the conference that officially launched the Non-Aligned Movement), which reads, “The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation.” The resolution outlined its case against gradualism (which had been sanctioned in 1945) and argued against the idea that was circulating at the time that the colonies “were not ready” for independence. It was adopted with eighty-nine General Assembly members voting in favor and none against, but with nine abstentions—eight of which were colonial powers, while the other was the Dominican Republic (an abstention that itself reflects a long and complicated relationship to colonialism and racism). Independence, Justice Robinson concluded, represented “the discharge by the colonizing power of an obligation imposed on it by international law.” It was not, as some would popularly suggest, an act of benevolence. If, as Justice Robinson argued, European imperialism precipitated more death, injury, suffering, and injustice than any other political-economic system, then as a tool of international justice, political self-determination could be understood as comprising a form of reparations. The topic of reparations has reemerged within the US public sphere since the January 2019 introduction of the HR-40 bill in the House of Representatives by Steve Cohen of Tennessee, the chair of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution. This bill would establish a Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans, focusing on the period from 1619 to the present and exploring the role of federal and state governments in supporting the institution of slavery, the forms of discrimination in the public and private sectors against freed slaves and their descendants, and the ongoing effects of slavery and discrimination on contemporary African Americans. A similar bill was introduced in the House by John Conyers during every session of Congress from 1989 through 2017, but it always failed to gain enough votes to carry. The arguments for reparations have also gained speed within the Caribbean, with the University of the West Indies officially establishing a Centre for Reparation Research in 2017, and with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) nations adopting a “Ten Point Action Plan for Reparatory Justice.” The action plan is to form the basis for negotiations for reparations with Denmark, France, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and other European states, a list that will soon include the United States, as well, based on evidence that the United States traded in enslaved Africans to the Caribbean region.1 At the center of the CARICOM plan is a full and formal apology that “accepts responsibility, commits to non-repetition, and pledges to repair the harm caused,” unlike statements of regret, which do not acknowledge or take responsibility for crimes committed. The plan also includes various development programs, including those designed to restore and support Indigenous communities, fund repatriation to Africa, return cultural heritage, support psychological rehabilitation, and provide monetary compensation and debt cancellation. Regarding the latter, they argue that the “debt cycle properly belongs to the governments from the responsible European countries who have made no sustained attempt to deal with debilitating colonial legacies.” Where CARICOM frames reparations not only in relation to slavery but also with respect to colonialism and imperialism, some activists within the United States have argued that the kinds of affirmative action policies that were originally designed to level the playing field for African Americans have primarily benefited other groups, especially immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.2 In this formulation, nationalist ethnocentrism creates fissures within Blackness, fissures that are exacerbated when representatives from organizations like American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) argue that immigrants present a threat to African American lives and livelihoods. Tensions between African Americans and Black immigrants are not new, nor is this line of argumentation regarding reparations. In 2004, a New York Times report on a 2004 meeting of Harvard University's Black alumni noted that celebrations of the increased number of Black undergraduates at elite colleges and universities were tempered by concerns about exactly where these Black students were coming from. At that meeting, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier argued that “the majority of [Harvard's Black undergraduates]—perhaps as many as two-thirds—were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples” (Rimer and Arenson 2004). This meant that only about a third of the students were “from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves,” prompting several professors to question whether affirmative action policies were benefiting those who they felt “were intended as [the] principal beneficiaries.” For these professors and administrators, African Americans whose roots in the United States were generations deep were being “left behind” (Rimer and Arenson 2004). While there is an argument to be made that US policies must address US problems, an argument made most convincingly by economist William “Sandy” Darity,3 it is important to remember that the forces at the root of the persistent racial gaps in education, health, and wealth within the United States also created conditions of structural inequality, hierarchy, and white supremacy across the New World. This means that great swaths of people across the African diaspora, also the descendants of enslaved persons, are unable to realize their goals locally, but must migrate in order to access education and employment, and therefore forms of social mobility and survival. We must, I believe, understand reparations in global, rather than national, terms. Understanding reparations in global terms means that we must recognize slavery and dispossession as critical elements in a global world order inaugurated by the movement of Europeans westward, by the conquest and settling of territories previously tended by Indigenous populations throughout the Americas, by the emergence of mercantile capitalism and the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and by the separation of “Nature” from “Culture” that resulted in a hierarchy of humankind.4 These processes, understood in other terms as modernity, were and continue to be undergirded by the ideological and material conjunctures of white supremacy, the topic of this issue's special section. The papers in this section together provide a powerful case not only for explicitly naming white supremacy as the foundation of knowledge production within anthropology, past and present, but also for transforming the scope of our analyses to encompass a more relational understanding of racializing processes. I have written elsewhere that reparations, while crucial, could never fully redress the injuries wrought by white supremacy, and have advocated a shift to the language of repair, a shift that is similar to the one marked by the move from resistance to refusal.5 Repair, like refusal, is practice-oriented and quotidian; it is noneventful, and deeply historical and relational. Like its nominal counterpart, repair urges us to interrogate the multiple scales of entanglement that have led us to where we are now. But where reparation seeks justice through the naming of names, the exposure of public secrets, and the articulation of chains of causality, repair looks for something else. It demands active listening, mutual recognition, an acknowledgment of complicity at all levels, and a recognition of the limits of justice within the contextual terrain of liberal post-Enlightenment humanism. Repair, like self-determination, should be understood as an obligation, not a gift. We begin this issue with two articles that address infrastructure and the ways they mediate social, phenomenological, atmospheric, and bodily relations. Jerry Zee's “Machine Sky: Social and Terrestrial Engineering in a Chinese Weather System” investigates the relationship between the physical, spatial, and social dimensions of environmental politics in China. He explores two kinds of infrastructures that were developed to facilitate particular interventions: one, an aerial seeding program designed to counter the effects of dust storms, and the other, the increased presence of the Chinese state within international climate discussions. In both cases, atmospheric processes (the wind, for example) and social processes (retraining herders, for example) are considered to be part of the broader infrastructural requirements for China's late socialist bid to weather ecological crises at the national, and ultimately planetary, level. Where Zee is concerned with the connections between social and material infrastructures in relation to climate change, “Infrastructural Incorporations: Toxic Storage, Corporate Indemnity, and Ethical Deferral in Peru's Neoextractive Era,” by Stefanie Graeter, addresses these connections in terms of human exposure to metal leakage. She shows how people living near the mineral storage yards in El Callao, Peru, understand their newly lead-poisoned bodies, as well as how they develop a politics (countering lead exposure) that ultimately provides them access to other infrastructures that were previously unavailable to them, like water and electricity. In this case, what moves through their bodies, and eventually through the port in El Callao, indexes the racialized history of dispossession and value in Peru, but also demonstrates how isolated and individuated strategies for dealing with lead remediation also create a context of what Graeter calls “ethical deferral,” a state in which the contradictions in liberal governance are simultaneously brought to light and obscured. Ann Stahl's “Assembling ‘Effective Archaeologies’ toward Equitable Futures” draws our attention to the politics of anthropological research. An elegant and urgent plea for relevance beyond narrowly constructed formulations of “usefulness,” Stahl's article encourages us to critically examine the archives we construct and mobilize, the forms of knowledge we authorize, and the collaborations we engage. For Stahl, an “effective” archaeology would move beyond institutionally avowed neoliberal standards for utilitarian value (those that are concerned with bottom lines and competitive discovery) and would reach toward a conceptualization of research that brings the past to bear more directly on the broader structural inequalities that form the backdrop for our work and could contribute to the imagination of a freer, more equitable future. With whom are we in conversation, Stahl asks? And in what ways are we accountable to the communities in which we live and work? “Allostasis and Adaptation: Biocultural Processes Integrating Lifestyle, Life History, and Blood Pressure Variation,” by Gary James, is concerned with the relationship between human behavior and physiological adaptation. James reviews recent theoretical and methodological developments in biocultural research on arterial blood pressure response, using this as one (frequently mobilized) example of allostasis—the relationships between physiological functions and environment, lifestyle, and life history. He shows that the current conceptualization of “allostatic load” is not sufficiently attentive to developmental and evolutionary processes and argues for more specific attention to the interactions among heritable, environmental, and cultural differences in this regard. This would, James argues, give us a more precise way to predict cardiovascular disease outcomes. The eight papers that follow constitute this issue's special section on the “Anthropology of White Supremacy.” As Jemima Pierre and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús argue in their introductory essay, this section was designed to explore white supremacy as a global phenomenon that brings to light the racial dimensions of power systems internationally, nationally, regionally, and locally in a variety of locations and within a variety of contexts. The section was also developed in order to explore white supremacy within anthropological theory and practice and to understand the phenomenon of white supremacy as having created the modern infrastructures of politics, economy, society, and knowledge. Pierre and Beliso-De Jesús contend that anthropological acknowledgments of the discursive construction of race are not sufficient. We must, they argue, see global white supremacy as a given within the anthropological knowledge project, and as one that is often reproduced through our methods and through our assumptions about our audience. As a result, this section contributes both to a long-standing concern within the field—articulated by many, but primarily by anthropologists of color—about the ways the Boasian separation of race from culture did not lead to a broader anthropological analysis of structural and historical processes of racialization, and to a number of recent efforts to revisit that early moment within US anthropology. Pierre and Beliso-De Jesús insist that we name whiteness, that we explicitly attend to “the hierarchical categorization of ‘white’ as racially superior,” in order to make the organization of global racial inequalities clear and to draw attention to the power and privilege of whiteness across all institutional and interpersonal dynamics transnationally, including those that structure our field, the work we teach, the people we hire, and the graduate students we admit. An anthropology of white supremacy, they argue, must therefore “develop new strategies for writing, research, and data collection” and must draw from the already existing analytic and theoretical tools of other disciplinary formations, such as “cultural and media studies, women's, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, or ethnic studies,” as well as from scholars living and working outside the disciplinary centers of power, institutionally and geographically. The articles in this section diverge from the more common area-based ethnographic or theoretical sites to examine the global and transnational operations of white supremacy, power, and violence. They attend to levels of scale that have been unusual for anthropological research to tackle processes like settler capitalism (Speed), development (Pierre), theology (Rana), and a variety of institutional settings, such as multicultural advertising (Shankar) and criminal justice and gentrification (Rosa and Díaz), not in terms of how particular practices, events, or moments are experienced “on the ground,” as it were, but in relation to the material and ideological structuring of the processes themselves. The articles also address how racial violence is used as a weapon (Perry), how it is inculcated in police and the military who then come to embody it (Beliso-De Jesús), and how it connects the US criminal justice system and the international security state (Ralph). Together, the articles demand an explicit recognition of our disciplinary myopias, and they call upon us to confront these myopias in meaningful and critically engaged ways. Our World Anthropologies section this issue includes two essays and two commentaries that tackle the issue of language endangerment and the political and ethical questions raised by attempts at salvage. Two film reviews appear in our Multimodal Anthropologies section—Hale County This Morning, This Evening (directed by RaMell Ross), and Welcome to Refugeestan (directed by Anne Poiret). And don't forget to visit our website (www.americananthropologist.org) for a new post in the Public Anthropologies section on the recent political protests in Puerto Rico, as well as our podcast, Anthropological Airwaves. We round out this issue with eight book reviews and an obituary for Deborah Rose Bird by Thom van Dooren.

As I began writing this introduction, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a milestone arriving thirty-eight years after the 1982 deadline for its ratification. Having finally met the two-thirds of the states bar, the ERA could in theory become the twenty-eighth amendment to the United States Constitution (Rankin and Crary 2020). In fact, that is politically unlikely given that the GOP’s current dominance of the Senate and utter unwillingness to sanction their president was made evident when, as I was finishing this introduction, the U.S. Senate acquitted the forty-fifth president of the United States of the impeachment charges brought against him by the House of Representatives (LeBlanc 2020; Spillar 2020). This president is the same man whom more than two dozen women have publicly accused of sexual assault, and who has a long history of bragging about “moving on [women] like a bitch,” “just kiss[ing them],” and “[not] even wait[ing]” for any indication that his desires are reciprocated (Bullock 2016). Moreover, this commander in chief is openly and unabashedly supportive of White nationalist, misogynist, settler colonialist, trans- and homophobic discourses, actors, and policy agendas. He also leads the chorus of global climate change deniers determined to roll back environmental protections in the United States and beyond. Thus, watching contemporaneous media coverage of both the Virginia victory and the president’s acquittal, I had to remind myself that this is just the latest chapter in a long history of often simultaneous progress and regression inherent to the pursuit of social justice in the United States, a fact I have witnessed personally over the course of my fifty-three years.1When I was a child growing up in the 1970s and a young woman coming of age in the 1980s, it was completely normal for men to act publicly and privately toward, and speak about women as the current president did in the above audio-recorded quote. As Rebecca Solnit recounts about her experiences in a recent Guardian piece, for me too “so much of what shaped and scarred my younger self, and made me a solitary feminist, and then much later one among many, was the unspeakability of violence against women and all the denigration, harassment and silencing that went with it” (Solnit 2020). One of the supposed victories of the women’s liberation and feminist movements during my coming of age and young adulthood was not only stigmatizing the misogynist and sexist attitude, discourse, and behavior exemplified by the president—a victory in and of itself—but also shifting the social and political culture toward (we thought) a shared understanding that these ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving are patently wrong and, moreover, legally punishable. Likewise, among the victories of multiple antiracist/antinativist movements was making denigrating discourse verboten, at least in the public sphere and educational settings. And in fact, my first child, a millennial Latina who turns twenty-four this year, has until recently only ever known a society where she can legally access birth control and safely terminate an unwanted pregnancy; where she can expect equal treatment at school, work, and play; where she can freely assert her erotic autonomy and political rights alike; and where she can—and did—organize to replace her college president, a middle-aged White man who failed to address a public instance of discursive racial violence against a woman of color alumna, with a Latina (specifically, Dominican like us) president (Hardcollis and Bidgood 2015; Corasaniti 2017).As importantly, my twenty-two-year-old son and his peers were taught at home and in the community at large that they are not inherently entitled to touch or otherwise interfere in women’s bodily autonomy, and that their female peers were not only entitled to every educational and athletic experience and social sphere that boys were, but that these same female classmates routinely bested them when they competed in arenas that had just a generation before been closed off to girls and women. Yet today, each of those supposedly established girls’ and women’s rights and entitlements—and the restraints to patriarchal and rape culture that make these entitlements possible—is under systematic and concerted attack. Likewise, the small but real reduction in White supremacy’s more overt forms of racist, nativist, and xenophobic violence, as well as legal protections won by civil rights and Black/Brown/Red/Yellow Power movements, are being systematically undone. Shockingly, it is the president of the United States who leads the charge to “make America great again” for racists, misogynists, nationalists, homophobes, greedy capitalists, polluters, and sundry others who apparently feel aggrieved by the minimal advances made in the pursuit of environmental justice and social justice for women, people of color, queer folks, religious minorities, and the most vulnerable workers.Worse yet, the GOP-dominated Senate has aided and abetted the president in manifesting those agendas. From confirming two Supreme Court justices—one of whom was publicly accused of having attempted to rape a high school classmate—and filling nearly one hundred federal judiciary vacancies with radically conservative appointees at the time of this writing (American Bar Association 2020), to abetting over one hundred executive orders that attempt to attack environmental protections, labor rights, and civil and human rights (Association of Federal Government Employees 2020; Bierman and Megerian 2019), to normalizing the forced removal of children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border and housing them in cages (Briggs 2020), our elected officials have put Republican Party interests above the constitutional principles they are sworn to abide by. One could easily lose heart.Until, that is, we remind ourselves that “we were made for these times,” as post-trauma specialist and poet Clarissa Pinkola Estés extols (Pinkola Estés 2003). That long view is an advantage conferred by fifty-three years of observing the necessarily constant struggle for justice that I did not anticipate when I was a child coming of age in the midst of the many social movements happening all around me—American Indian, antiwar, Black Power, civil rights, environmental, poor people’s, Raza, sexual and women’s liberation, among others—in the 1960s and 1970s. I vividly recall media coverage of racial justice uprisings across the country, and of “women’s liberation” activists such as Angela Davis, Billie Jean King, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem, who tirelessly pursued passage not only of the ERA, but of Title IX and Title VII. I also remember the profound sense of foreboding when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, somehow understanding even as an eighth grader that this new regime not only did not care about people like me and mine, but wanted to erase whatever small protections we had secured. And indeed, Reagan was elected into the presidency precisely to put into motion the neoliberal agenda that would devastate domestic labor and global south countries alike. Perhaps not surprisingly, two years into Reagan’s first term (1980–84), ERA proponents failed to meet the 1982 deadline for ratification by thirty-eight states. That same year also ushered in the “debt crisis”—one manufactured by the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, which put into place quintessentially neoliberal “austerity measures” that devastated economies throughout the region, buttressed repressive regimes, and triggered increasing emigration to el norte—initiating what would come to be known as “the lost decade” in Latin America.Coincidentally, 1982 was also the year I celebrated my quinceañera.2 The celebration was a minor miracle since the Aid to Family with Dependent Children and food stamps that my divorced, immigrant Dominican mother relied on were rarely enough to feed, shelter, and clothe our two-person family adequately. Yet, contrary to Reagan’s racist “welfare queen” mythmaking, the resilience and resourcefulness that Mami used to pull off this Latina coming-of-age celebration offered evidence of her boundless work ethic, not its deficiency (Candelario and López 1995; Hancock 2004). In some ways, this was simply the latest chapter in the new life story she began in the fall of 1960 when she became one of just ten thousand exiles who escaped the U.S.-installed and U.S.-supported Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, where she was born. Leaving there as a twenty-two-year-old woman who spoke only Spanish and had no ties to the United States defied all the odds; in that instance and in every other sexist, classist, and racist obstacle she encountered before realizing her aspirations, Mami was determined and unabashed.Thus, over the course of many months leading up to the big day that spring, Mami gathered the necessary materials and sewed my gown herself, down to the skirt hoop; she slowly purchased and stockpiled the makings of a meal for fifty guests; she searched and searched until she found a venue that would not only be appropriate and affordable, but would let her pay their nominal fee over time; she recruited my aunts to help her cook all the food she had purchased over the course of the week leading up to the big day; together, we made the floral decorations, including our corsages and boutonnieres with flowers she had purchased in bulk, and decorated the hall at the American Legion Post 18 in West New York, New Jersey on the day of the event.Pulling off my quinceañera, while living in the belly of the beast3 that fed on the harvest of empire, was one of the happiest of many object lessons I received from my mother about the long history of Dominican transnational feminist resistance to patriarchy, racism, and imperialism. Celebrating my quinceañera in an American Legion hall was an especially exemplary lesson because the Legion’s mission is to promote a kind of nationalist patriotism that denies the facts of United States imperialism, and Mami and I were in the United States because of the country’s long history of intervention in the Dominican Republic. To celebrate a Dominican quinceañera in this particular space—despite the shortage of cash, despite a “welfare” system that Reagan and his supporters wanted desperately to be rid of, and that in the meantime prohibited recipients like us from owning televisions and other typical household items deemed too luxurious for welfare recipients, and despite the disparagement and discrimination Mami routinely faced because of her thick Spanish-accented English and her non-White appearance—exemplified my mother’s brand of Dominican feminism. Mami believed we were entitled to the same beauty, joy, celebration, well-being, and opportunities that “typical American” families with two parents, better jobs, single-family homes, savings and inheritances, unaccented English and White(r) skins had a presumptive right to claim. If the U.S. system didn’t allow for it, she would point out how and why the system was wrong, and then work to make it happen one way or another, for us and also for others like us. Moreover, Mami believed that women’s education was the key to making justice for women happen; as she would often put it, saber es poder—knowledge is power.Two decades later, when I began to research women’s history in the Dominican Republic, I finally realized that rather than being exceptional as I had imagined during my childhood, my mother’s feminism and faith in education and perseverance as the principle vehicle for liberation and freedom were exemplary of a long history of Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American women’s movements and feminisms. Latin American and Caribbean schoolteachers called themselves feministas at the turn of the nineteenth century, decades before women in the United States would do so,4 and they participated actively in national, international, and transnational campaigns to establish democratic civil society cultures in which women were conciudadanas (co-citizens), or alternatively, envisioned revolutionary societies in which women were vanguard leaders (Miller 1991). This is why feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean have long found U.S. feminists’—particularly but not exclusively White/Anglo feminists’—claims to vanguard and presumptive leadership roles in the hemisphere ludicrous (Candelario, Manley, and Mayes 2016).Thus, in keeping with that legacy of autochthonous Latin American and Caribbean feminisms and transnational spirit, this issue of Meridians features essays that take up feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist politics and organizing by African American, Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Chicana, and South American diasporic activists, culture workers, and scholars working in a variety of sectors and institutional contexts. The ground we cover ranges from the postbellum southern United States courtroom to mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rican South Bronx housing projects to the twenty-first-century ivory towers of historically White-serving colleges to Cuban feminists organizing for comprehensive legislation addressing gender-based violence. As our two archival selections from the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World and the Committee on International Action of the National Women’s Party make evident, these sites have long been linked by the social networks and organizing efforts of African American, Hispanic Caribbean, Latina, and Latin American feminists.Leigh-Anne Francis’s essay, “Playing the ‘Lady Sambo’: Poor Black Women’s Legal Strategies in the Post–Civil War South’s Civil Courts,” convincingly argues that Black women plaintiffs routinely used White people’s distorted racist perception against them by behaving in ways that seemingly verified White belief in Black inferiority in order to accomplish goals they could not openly pursue without risk of violence. In the courtroom, Black women hoisted White judges on their own ideological petards by playing to their racist and sexist paternalist sensibilities in order to win favorable judgments against White men with whom the judges shared a commitment to White patriarchal supremacy. Similarly savvy dissemblance is a strategy that Vanessa Rosa’s grandmother, Calixta Rosa (1911–2002), also used in her work as a public housing tenant organizer in Harlem’s appropriately named Ulysses S. Grant Houses. As she details in her testimonio, “Mi casa Is Not su casa: A Research Reflection,” the fraught relationship between light-skinned Calixta and her son Gilbert—“a dark-skinned Puerto Rican boy”—mapped onto the divides between the Spanish Harlem most Puerto Ricans settled in, the Black Harlem the Rosas lived in, and the White city beyond Harlem. Although the bridge called their backs was irreparably stressed by the cost of crossing the divides, Calixta left a proud legacy and archive of activism that together with Gilbert’s legacy of love for the Afro–Puerto Rican Harlem of his childhood is evident in Rosa’s own work as a sociologist of race and urban planning.Moving from a singular to a collective testimonio, professors Sabrina F. Sembiante, Cristóbal Salinas Jr., J. Andrés Ramírez, Maria D. Vásquez-Colina, and Yamilé Silva argue in their essay, “Different When I Opened My Mouth: Experiences, Reflections, and Perspectives of Faculty Members with Foreign English Accents in Higher Education,” that the borders of Latina/o and other immigrant belonging are marked on the tongue as well as the body. This group of non-Hispanic White and White-presenting Latin American immigrants write about how their “English with an accent” marks them as racially other in the context of historically White campuses in the United States. “Differences between the privilege encountered by the White South African participant and the challenges experienced by the Latino/a faculty members point to societal bias toward faculty members’ origin, ethnicity, and ability by way of their accent” (316). In other words, while any “foreign” accents marks one as Other in the United States, a Spanish accent marks one further as racialized non- or off-White. Moving from the racial politics of language to a poetic code-switching, Shana Bulhan’s poem “a language outside” obliquely bemoans the loss of homeland and consequent “bad grammar” Hindi mother tongue, in a new love’s language.That things are not as they first seem is also the argument that Laura Halperin makes in her essay, “Not No Rapunzel: The House on Mango Street’s Revised Ever After.” Here, Halperin deploys José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of Latino dissemblance along with “Third World feminist analysis” to make the case that Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street “engages with the fairy-tale genre while challenging its problematic bases, following and undoing the genre’s trajectory” (325). Similarly, Kristie Soares’s essay “Dominican Futurism: The Speculative Use of Negative Aesthetics in the Work of Rita Indiana” argues that Dominican artist Rita Indiana’s performances and novel enact “negative aesthetics [that] offer a way of staying with the pain and unrest of trauma” that is personal, political, and historical (401). Soares puts Indiana’s body of work within both the Dominican literary legacy of pessimism and United States Black diasporic Afrofuturism, both of which consider that the personal body is as much a site of colonial and decolonial struggle as the body politic. Crossing the Mona Canal to Puerto Rico, “The Making of Viequenses: Militarized Colonialism and Reproductive Rights” by Marie Cruz Soto, tells the story of how women from this island off of Puerto Rico’s eastern coast long occupied by the U.S. Navy were forced to travel to the main island in order to give birth. In addition to being dangerous, costly, and inconvenient, these women’s experiences of pregnancy and “travel birthing”—and the activism of women health workers like Afro–Puerto Rican Susana Centeno, in whose honor the island’s first OB-GYN facility was named—offer new insights into the everyday, gendered, classed, and racialized violence of “militarized colonialism” under U.S. rule (360).Our “In the Trenches” selection for this issue—“Petition for a Comprehensive Law against Gender-Based Violence in Cuba,” translated by Lucía M. Suárez—comes from Cuba, where in November 2019 a group of feminists petitioned the revolutionary government to pass a comprehensive law targeting violence against women. As they explain in their petition, being citizens of a revolutionary state does not protect Cuban women and girls from gender-based violence; indeed, rates of violence against women in Cuba are greater than or on par with those of Chile, Panama, and Peru. Similarly, in his essay “Between Protest and Politics: Black Lives Matter Movement(s) for Black Lives,” Robert J. Patterson argues that the Black Lives Matter movement pursues a much more radical Black liberation project than the agenda of the civil rights movement preferred by Black middle-class and other elites who have become instruments “to enact, enforce, and reinforce an economic order that . . . cement[s] black inequality” (430).Lastly, our cover art by Los Angeles–based Persian-German artist Shiva Tamara, Get It While You Can, alludes to Caribbean palm trees, whose strength derives from their ability to thrive and survive even regularly devastating hurricane seasons, much as the region’s nations have flourished despite ongoing colonial and imperial depredations. In many ways, the palm is a of life in the offer an and and the palm are used to housing and alike. As with the women are often in in midst of these are as to them as the is to the this issue is to two women living in the United States whose life all the in this and her my childhood who with me at my quinceañera, el

This paper will examine the evolution and current state of the concept of patriotism from different angles and perspectives. Questions will be raised regarding the inherent positive and negative characteristics of patriotism in its current form, with particular attention paid to the relationships between patriotism and the concepts of whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy. I suggest that current understandings of patriotism protect and promote the structure of whiteness and white privilege in the United States of America. Lastly, this paper will discuss ways that we can begin to redefine what patriotism is so that the term can become more inclusive of all citizens of our nation as well as become intrinsic in our youth who will lead our country forward.

Substantial research has been put forth calling for the field of social studies education to engage in work dealing with the influence of race and racism within education and society (Branch, 2003; Chandler, 2015; Chandler & Hawley, 2017; Husband, 2010; King & Chandler, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Ooka Pang, Rivera & Gillette, 1998). Previous contributions have examined the presence and influence of race/ism within the field of social studies teaching and research (e.g. Chandler, 2015, Chandler & Hawley, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Woyshner & Bohan, 2012). In order to challenge the presence of racism within social studies, research must attend to the control that whiteness and white supremacy maintain within the field. This edited volume builds from these previous works to take on whiteness and white supremacy directly in social studies education. In Marking the “Invisible”, editors assemble original contributions from scholars working to expose whiteness and disrupt white supremacy in the field of social studies education. We argue for an articulation of whiteness within the field of social studies education in pursuit of directly challenging its influences on teaching, learning, and research. Across 27 chapters, authors call out the strategies deployed by white supremacy and acknowledge the depths by which it is used to control, manipulate, confine, and define identities, communities, citizenships, and historical narratives. This edited volume promotes the reshaping of social studies education to: support the histories, experiences, and lives of Students and Teachers of Color, challenge settler colonialism and color-evasiveness, develop racial literacy, and promote justice-oriented teaching and learning.

Fig. 1: Bated Breath (mirror detail), 2021. Chrome-plated ceramic fish on steel frame with fishing line and mirror. Reproduced courtesy of M. Cope and UQ Art Museum. Photo: Carl Warner. The term monster has its etymological roots in Latin, deriving from monere, meaning to warn, and demonstrate, meaning to show or reveal (Musharbash; Cohen “Hybrids”). Monsters are therefore beings that exhibit behaviours that threaten the familiar, warning others of the dangers of transgressing cultural norms. Online media provides a platform on which many transgressions take place, resulting in acts that could be described as monstrosities. As monsters are imbued with cultural meaning, they serve as conceptual frameworks through which to analyse social systems and structures. In this article we draw on literature from monster studies and monster anthropology, as well as representations of monsters in popular media, as a means through which to discuss online racism. Our article is inspired by the themes explored in Bated Breath (see figs. 1, 2, 3), an artwork by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope (Australia), whose installation embodies the function of a monster. Cope’s art both reveals the prevalence of online racism, which is often directed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, whilst also warning of our susceptibility of contributing or remaining complacent to such harmful behaviour. We begin by discussing what monsters are, how they are portrayed in popular media, and consider the liminal worlds in which they live. The next section highlights the prevalence of online racism, which we assess through the concepts of “clickbait” and “trolling”, reflecting on how this reinforces power imbalances by spreading misinformation, conjecture, and racial abuse. In the final section we look at monsters as mirrors, unpacking the need to reflexively engage with the ramifications of online behaviour. If Indigenous voices and self-determination are overlooked, and the nation refuses to enter a mature dialogue pertaining to its colonial past and present, monstrosities such as those which regularly occur online are doomed to continue to haunt us all in various forms. The Metaphysical Presence of Monsters Social media have an auspicious hold over many people’s lives, becoming not only a medium through which to share and encounter views, opinions, and experiences, but also an agent that shapes and facilitates how people interact with and respond to their surroundings (Petray “Self-writing”). In the digital age known as Web 2.0 (Petray “Protest 2.0”; Corbett et al.), social media both influence and determine behaviour as much as they reflect it. The online world is a cannibalistic monstrous interface where multiple ideas, behaviours and discussions feed off and into one another, creating swirls of activity that can quickly sweep people up and turn them into the objects of collective discourses. It is this cyclonic-like force that is the subject of Bated Breath. Fig. 2: Bated Breath, 2021. Chrome-plated ceramic fish on steel frame with fishing line and mirror. Reproduced courtesy of M. Cope and UQ Art Museum. Photo: Carl Warner. In the artwork, Cope features 1300 ceramic fish that hang from the ceiling, spiralling downward towards a mirrored disc that lies on the floor of the gallery in which it stands. Each fish is painted with a coating that reflects light and its surroundings. Although the work does not directly reference monsters, Cope has nonetheless given body and a physical presence to the overwhelming grasp that social media have over many people’s lives. Her use of light and mirrors project refracted light and shadows throughout the gallery, reminding viewers that by simply being in the presence of Bated Breath they too are susceptible to being sucked into its monster-like vortex. In the label accompanying the work, Cope states: Often baited with racism, social media spaces have become a trap and a divisive tool that sanctions a common form of lateral violence within Aboriginal communities. The mirror symbolically refers to narcissism, involving self-centred, arrogant thinking and behaviour lacking empathy. Caught in such a vortex encourages mob mentality and prohibits autonomy. Like a monster, Cope’s installation has a metaphysical presence that “shows”, “warns”, and speaks to the dangers of social media, particularly for Aboriginal peoples within settler-colonial settings (Carlson and Frazer). Online spaces can be unsafe for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Carlson and Kennedy). It is an environment where colonial sentiments—which emphasise white supremacy whilst simultaneously questioning and denying Indigeneity—are pervasive and widespread (Carlson and Kennedy). A study conducted by Tristan Kennedy found that 62% of the Aboriginal people they surveyed have daily experiences of racism online. While such racism can be overt, aggressive, and threatening, it often takes the more subtle, but equally demoralising, form of paternalistic white benevolence that as Cope highlights “prohibits autonomy”. Monsters have been described as the “fragmentation and recombination” (Cohen “Monster Theory” 11) of parts that formulate a grotesque assembly, much like Frankenstein’s Creature. The fragmentations of social media addressed by Cope are racist online journalism, fake news, and clickbait. These fragments are discussed in the latter half of this article. Before we unpack these further, however, it is first necessary to discuss social media as an environment parallel to the settings in which monsters are often situated, a space we are calling ‘monstrous worlds’. Fig. 3: Bated Breath (fish detail), 2021. Chrome-plated ceramic fish on steel frame with fishing line and mirror. Reproduced courtesy of M. Cope and UQ Art Museum. Photo: Carl Warner. The Internet as a Monstrous World Within the monstrous worlds depicted in popular media, narratives overwhelmingly focus on human struggles, conflictions, and emotions such as fear, greed, desire, revenge, pride, or love (Asma). They explore human conditions, power-dynamics, and conceptions of morality. Jeffrey Cohen observes, however, that despite the repulsive appearance and actions of monsters, it is ultimately humans who come off worse. Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932) and David Lynch’s portrayal of Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980) are both stories that subvert monstrosity by asking who the real ‘freaks’, ‘animals’, or ‘monsters’ are: the subjects of an objectified gaze, or those who humiliatingly gaze upon a so-called ‘other’? Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour are often seen and treated as monsters, as Cohen (“Monster Theory” 12) observes: given that the recorders of the history of the West have been mainly European and male, women (She) and nonwhites (Them!) have found themselves repeatedly transformed into monsters, whether to validate specific alignments of masculinity and whiteness, or simply to be pushed from its realm of thought. Although Cohen’s use of the term “nonwhites” is problematic in that it homogenises diverse groups of Black, Indigenous and Persons of Colour, whiteness is best conceived as a structural orientation of power. It normalises white authority and superiority, classifying others (regardless of their ethnic or cultural diversity) in relation to that group’s ability or willingness to conform to white colonial power structures (Moreton-Robinson; Bargallie). Monstrous worlds, however, are spaces where social structures, apparatuses of control, discipline, and governance are challenged, subverted, reinvented, or sought to be reinstated. The monstrous world of a zombie apocalypse necessitates the transgression of everyday norms as a means of survival and re-creation. Such breaks are contextualised in relation to how things were before (or how they were imagined to be), or conversely, how we wish them to be in the future. During a zombie apocalypse in the television series The Walking Dead (2010-2021), for example, the African American protagonists provide a revisionist history of America’s colonial past by drafting a charter to which to govern future behaviour in the “New (Zombie) World”. This was a process that African Americans were left out of during the drafting of the America’s constitution. Whilst revisionist in this regard, the show nonetheless maintains a white colonial narrative, situating the threat “outside”, and beyond the safety of the walled colony (Turner and Perks). The outbreak of a virus serves as the origin story to many monster narratives, and similarly mirrors historic outbreaks in society. Zombie stories in the 1980s, for example, mirror anxieties relating to the transmission of HIV (Musharbash “Introduction”). While it is too soon to imagine the portrayal of monsters relating to COVID-19 (but history signifies that it will likely be a topic of future works, see Marsh et al.), the recent coronavirus pandemic has nonetheless provoked a reconsideration of what “normality” or a “new norm” is. More importantly, it has pointed to the new possibilities that lie on the otherside of a monstrous situation (Fredericks and Bradfield “We Don’t Want”). The world of monsters offers social freedoms that necessitate—even celebrate—acts that would otherwise be unimaginable or in some cases abhorrent. With this comes the possibility for change. A parallel between the world of monsters and online/social media can be drawn. Musharbash writes on how monsters embody a hybrid liminal existence situated betwixt categories such as animal/human or life/death. It is the morphing between such categories alongside its distortion—which simultaneously renders something familiar and alien—that creates a heightened sense of anxiety, risk, or danger. The world in which monsters exist is liminal for it is an environment that reflects familiar social structures and norms, while at the same time becoming “other”. Social media can be likene

Several literatures including those focusing on settler colonialism, critical antiracism as well as ethnic studies and sociology more broadly often position racial injustice and genocide as a struggle against whiteness and white supremacy. Here I use my own positionality to illustrate what might be unseen in the current thinking about the meaning of what whiteness entails. Then I propose the preliminary workings of a nonbinary approach to thinking about racial justice and reconciliation that still centers the specific experiences of oppression but that does not also entail blaming a particular group as oppressor. While I focus on Canada and responsibility for Indigenous genocide and, to some extent, anti-Black racism, my hope is that the theoretical logic will also be of utility for thinking about moving forward on issues of racial justice and genocide in other contexts.

Interview:Margaret Huang on Confronting the History of Anti-Asian Hate and White Supremacy in the United States and Abroad Margaret Huang (bio) This article was contributed to Forum-the edition's portfolio of thematic content-by GJIA's Dialogues section. The Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) annual report on hate groups published early this year, "The Year in Hate and Extremism," recorded a total of 838 hate groups across the United States in 2020.1 Although this number was a slight decline from 2019, hate certainly did not, as evident through over 4,000 racist flyer incidents (hanging flyers to intimidate minorities or attract recruits) and the high visibility of rightwing and white supremacist organizations such as the Proud Boys in recent years. Although hate incidents against a number of identity groups (based on race, sex, ethnicity, religion) are prevalent in the United States, the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021, was an example of when hate violently deploys itself against an intersection of those identities.2 Six of the eight victims of the shooting were Asian American women. Members of Asian American communities deplored the racism and misogyny that targeted the victims. Many of the stereotypes in the United States associated with Asian Americans-—and Asian American women in particular—have had roots in the country for over a century.3 SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang spoke with GJIA on March 23, 2021, to discuss the most recent dynamics of hate in the United States with a particular focus on anti-Asian hate, as well as the international breadth of hate groups. She additionally shares how the state could respond to these hate movements without further curtailing civil liberties and how activist groups could collaborate as shared movements against hate groups. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs: For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has documented far-right groups and individuals that spout hateful rhetoric and commit discriminatory acts against racial minorities, religious groups, and other marginalized demographics. Since the advent of this documentation, have you seen any fundamental changes in the prominence or behavior of these right-wing hate groups? Margaret Huang: We actually see cycles happen over the decades; typically, there is an increase in the number of hate groups and their activities during Democratic administrations and then a reduction in activity during Republican administrations. What is interesting is that under the Trump administration, there was an opposite and dramatic increase in the number of these groups and the amount of activity taking place. During the four years of the Trump administration, there were record numbers of hate groups on our list. That was unusual, but I think it speaks to both the administration's willingness to engage with those groups directly as well as their hiring of people out of those groups to work in the administration. In that sense, there were numerous direct ties between this past administration and many of the groups we have been tracking. [End Page 162] GJIA: Some believe those ties are reflected in the Capitol riots.4 National Public Radio (NPR) reported that out of the first 140 rioters charged, around 20 percent were former or active-duty service members.5 Do you think that these individuals are indicative of a larger problem in the military or just a few bad apples? If they reflect a larger systemic problem, how do you think the government should address this issue? MH: My colleague Lecia Brooks gave testimony on March 24 to the House Arms Services Committee on this topic.6 We believe that there have always been elements of white supremacy and extremism in our military. The first time we wrote to the Department of Defense was in 1986 when we sent a letter to then [Defense] Secretary [Caspar] Weinberger, asking him to look at the activities of a group of enlisted men who were also participating in Ku Klux Klan activities. This is not a new problem, but at the same time it is not a pervasive problem. We do not believe there is pervasive extremism across the military. What we are concerned about and what we have recommended is that [the military] look at their...

In November 1988, in Southeast Portland, Oregon, three neo-Nazi skinheads murdered Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, with a baseball bat. The murderers had been recruited to commit violence against people of color by members of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), a White supremacist group founded in southern California. A few months after the murder, Elden Rosenthal, a Portland attorney, was asked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to serve as local counsel on a civil suit they were bringing against WAR founder Tom Metzger for inciting violence that led to Seraw's death. In this Oregon Voices essay, Rosenthal relays a personal account of the trial and makes connections between White supremacist rhetoric during the 1980s and 1990s in Portland and the resurgence of that rhetoric and hate crimes in recent years.

Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence