Global White Supremacy Research Articles

Shit Voyeurism, Anti-Blackness, and the Spherical: Rendering Antibiotic Use in Africa

This piece interrogates anti-Black racism and coloniality in global health reporting on antibiotic use in Africa. I focus on New York Times discourse, imagery, and films, reading these intertextually with wider political and public health rhetoric. In critically attending to mediated imaginaries of Nairobi, Kenya as “unhygienic,” I demonstrate how this figuration comes to index local pharmaceutical practices that appear “non-Scientific.” The situated knowledge informing such practices is disregarded or, worse, presented as a threat to be targeted and eliminated. Such biomedical transgressions are indexed in the NYT by racialized references to waste, dirt, and excrement, turning the (structurally white) reader-viewer into what I call a shit voyeur. Building on Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of Man, I argue that Man-the-shit voyeur disregards his own culpability in rising antimicrobial resistance, locating health risks instead in the contaminating nature of Others. This racialized grammar is further subtended by the logic of the spherical—the illusion that the world-as-sphere is a totality that Man can perceive with a unidirectional gaze. Global health reporting that is racialized via the logics of the spherical and shit voyeurism not only fails to accurately represent medical concerns in Africa but also perpetuates biomedical hegemony and/as global white supremacy.

Global Reparations within Capitalism: Aspirations and Tensions in Contemporary Movements for Reparatory Justice

ABSTRACTThe idea of global reparations has received increasing attention in recent years, not only with respect to legacies of slavery and colonialism, but also to interrelated issues such as climate change, debt crisis, or ongoing financial transfers from the Global South to the Global North. This article, which introduces and sets the Debate for the 2024 Forum issue on the political economy of 21st century global reparations, offers a critical perspective on contemporary global reparations agendas, including their macroeconomic and development implications for the Global South. It highlights the contentious, unresolved questions about how reparations movements should interact with the highly unequal structures of global capitalism. To what degree should they seek large redistributive gains within these structures, or else aim for more revolutionary standpoints which reject these structures? If the former, would this compromise any hope for reparations to be truly transformative and able to address the challenges presented by global white supremacy? The hope of reparations movements is to make progressive gains that could become the catalyst for more transformative changes on a global scale. At the same time, sympathetic critics question whether reparations are feasible or should be a primary focus of advocacy for achieving racial and climate justice on national as well as global levels. In outlining these points of debate, the article also considers the questions of how to make global reparations work for recipients, and how to finance them. It concludes by elaborating on the challenge of moving towards a more developmentalist emphasis of ‘systemic reparations’.

Reproducing the Conqueror’s South Africa: An Azanian Critique of the Constitutionalist Endorsement of Assisted Reproductive and Reprogenetic Technologies

Discussions on the use, regulation, and development of assisted reproductive and reprogenetic technologies are dominated by rights discourse, primarily paying attention to how these technologies can give effect to or violate individual or group rights within the current liberal human rights framework. South Africa has played a prominent role as Africa’s representative in this global discussion pertaining to the ethics of genetic and reproductive technologies; undoubtedly attributable to it having what is described by many as “one of the most progressive constitutions in the world.” One popular perspective presupposing the legitimacy of the 1996 constitution and prevailing human rights norms, argues for the relaxation of restrictions on these technologies to allow for the effective exercise and realisation of constitutionally protected rights. In this article I explore the use of these technologies from a constitutional abolitionist perspective espoused by the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. By understanding the 1996 constitution as the constitutionalisation of conquest, I contemplate the ways in which these technologies function in service of (global) white supremacy and settler domination in conqueror South Africa. The article argues that in a world ordered by bio-logic, these technologies effectively (re)produce the society envisioned by the conqueror; begging the question as to whether these technologies can indeed be used in service of a post-conquest South Africa.

Preface to a Philosophy by Which No One Can Live

This essay proposes an ethics for critical philosophies attuned to global white supremacy and its effects of violence, erasure, and precarity. The essay examines Arthur Schopenhauer as a potential forefigure for critical practices that aim to attend to the precarious survival of the global majority engulfed by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Through Denise Ferreira da Silva’s and Sara Ahmed’s philosophies of race, the essay carries out an autotheoretical dissection—tracing Ruffin’s own myopic relation to the white supremacist moralities that continue to thrive in critical interdisciplinary German studies. As a way out of the aporia that white supremacy enacts, the essay proposes an orientation away from what is thought to be life and toward a critical aesthetics that attends to the unsurviving.

Donna Awatere on Whiteness in New Zealand: Theoretical Contributions and Contemporary Relevance

In June 2022, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern designated the US-based neo-fascist groups The Base and the Proud Boys as terrorist organisations. This designation marks one of the few times white supremacy entered the national political discourse in New Zealand. Discourses of whiteness are mostly theorised in the North American context. However, Donna Awatere’s 1984 examination of White Cultural Imperialism (WCI) in her book Māori Sovereignty advanced an analysis of whiteness in New Zealand that has received limited scholarly attention and is essentially unexplored. This paper reintroduces Awatere’s conceptualisation of WCI. It offers core tenets of WCI and theoretical insights into contemporary discussions of white supremacy that move beyond the focus of individuals and groups to a broader national framework of New Zealand. Two interrelated features of WCI, as defined by Awatere, are the minimisation and normalisation of whiteness and white racial hostility – inherent features that maintain, protect, and reproduce the white institutionalised body as the primary beneficiary of Western European domination that will always thwart Indigenous sovereignty and equality. This paper concludes that Awatere’s articulation of WCI links whiteness in the New Zealand context to the broader network of global white supremacy that offers insight into contemporary criminal justice scholarship.

De-/Re-Whitening Russianness: A Liminal Space of White Privileges Represented in Non-Summit

This study investigates the representations of white ethnic identities in Non-Summit, a Korean television show, to disaggregate the generalized perception of homogenous whiteness and argue for a dialectical construction of white power and domination in Korea. Specifically, it focuses on representations of Russianness in Non-Summit in relation to the US Americanness, contextualized within post-Cold War and globalized cultural politics prevalent in Korea. Employing critical textual analysis, this study analyzes verbal and visual discourses constructing Russianness and US Americanness in Non-Summit. The findings suggest, in Non-Summit, Russianness is represented as ideologically and culturally deprived, and it appears as a dispossessed white identity that does not earn hegemony like US Americanness. At times, the marginal representations of Russianness seem to weaken the power of whiteness operating in and through the show. However, an encompassing global white supremacy remains intact when Russianness is fit into the category of whiteness through a re-whitening process.

Passing the Torch? Anglo-American Encounters in the British West Indies and Negotiating White Supremacy, c. 1865–1914

This article explores encounters between U.S. tourists and British imperial actors in the British West Indies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Drawing on published traveller accounts from the period, it argues that literary cross-fertilization and practices of colonial sociability encouraged shared understandings of the Caribbean framed around visions of global white supremacy. Although these supported the Anglo-Saxonist project that underpinned the geopolitical rapprochement between the two powers between the 1890s and First World War, there were also tensions and disagreements, especially over which nation was best placed to defend the racial order in the Caribbean in the new century. As the volume of U.S. tourists grew, these disagreements became clearer, as revealed in the accounts given of the aftermath of the diplomatic crisis that followed the Kingston earthquake of 1907. Traveller accounts on the ground contrasted with efforts in Washington and London to resolve the crisis amicably. In this sense, the cultural politics of inter-imperial sociability did not always perfectly align with geopolitical imperatives.

Blackness in Indonesia: Articulations of Colonial and Postcolonial Racial Epistemologies

ABSTRACT This article offers a framework for understanding how the white supremacist colonial foundations and postcolonial racist formations combine to denigrate Black people in contemporary Indonesia. Situated within critical race theory, this study contributes to studies of Blackness and articulations of colonial and postcolonial forms of anti-Black racism. Drawing on ethnographic research and personal experiences, I depict the anti-Black racism rampant and systemic in Indonesia as well as the Papuan struggle for change. My personal stories from the field indicate the perpetuation of racist colonial legacies. Persistent white supremacist and postcolonial Malay and light-skinned Indigenous Indonesian cultural models relegate Black citizens to a condition I describe as compound racial subordination. Racist postcolonial cultural models produced out of European racial science and current racial structures of inequality perpetuate global white supremacy. [Blackness, racism, white supremacy, Malaysia, Indonesia]

“White People Still Come Out on Top”: The Persistence of White Supremacy in Shaping Coloured South Africans’ Perceptions of Racial Hierarchy and Experiences of Racism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

White supremacy shaped both the formation of the South African racial state and the formation of racial groups, including the creation of the Coloured category as mixed and liminal between White and Black. There are, however, debates about the continuing legacy of white supremacy in post-apartheid, contemporary South Africa. This paper joins others in the important task of delineating racial hierarchies within contemporary South African society to help reveal the form of oppression, and the accompanying underlying assumptions and ideologies, such as white supremacy, that allows racial difference and deprivation to remain. In this paper, I analyze semi-structured interview data from 50 “Coloured” adults in order to explore their understanding of white supremacy, the racial hierarchy, and contemporary racism. I find that white supremacy negatively impacts Coloureds’ lived experiences through shaping their experiences of structural and interpersonal discrimination from White South Africans. In addition, Coloured South Africans understand the legacy of white supremacy in shaping contemporary racial hierarchies such that White South Africans “still come out on top.” However, I argue that, at the same time, white supremacy also “colours” or hinders some Coloured respondents’ perceptions of their remaining relative privilege in post-apartheid South Africa. This project contributes by revealing a more complete story about the pervasiveness of contemporary hegemonic, global white supremacy that impacts all aspects of the racial hierarchy, including those mixed or in the middle.

Review: Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora, by Danielle N. Boaz

This book provides a global perspective on the legal challenges for, and rights violations against, African diasporic religions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Danielle Boaz uses the appellation “religious racism” to refer to the racializing effects of religious freedom laws and the worldwide restrictions of practitioners’ rights and abilities to practice African diaspora religions. She borrows this term from practitioners of African diaspora religions in Brazil, and uses it to draw out the intersections between racism and religious discrimination. With religious racism, Boaz brings together the ways in which systemic discrimination against African-identified religions has qualities similar to and connections with institutional racism. She shows how it has complex historical roots in racial slavery and colonialism, revealing the connections and parallels between forms of discrimination today and the kinds of regulation and oppression faced by Afro-diasporic traditions after emancipation. Some of the cases of religious racism Boaz examines, in places like the Caribbean and southern Africa, also show that white supremacy can continue even without White folks in immediate positions of power.The book is divided into three parts. Each section focuses on a set of African diasporic traditions and a set of legal and rights issues. An introduction to each section provides an unfamiliar reader with basic background on the particular Afro-Atlantic religions under examination. Section one focuses on examples of religious racism against Lucumí, Palo Mayombe, Vodou, Candomblé, and Umbanda from the United States, Haiti, Brazil, and Venezuela. These cases include physical violence against practitioners and places of worship, the restriction and outlawing of animal sacrifice, arrests for exhumations of human remains, and disputes over child and family services taking custody of the children of practitioners because of their religion. Chapter 3 is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the stigma and arrests for the disinterring of bodies against practitioners of Palo Mayombe in the United States, an important and challenging subject that has received little scholarly attention.Section two focuses primarily on Islam and Rastafari and issues of denial of freedoms due to discrimination based on headwear and hairstyles, like scarves and dreadlocks. This section looks at examples from Western Europe, East and Southern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Forms of religious racism under examination include expulsion from school, denial of access to courtrooms, and employment discrimination, among others. This section takes up issues of the sustaining of global white supremacy through Eurocentric norms of dress and hairstyle that also adversely affect access to religious freedom by practitioners of Afro-diasporic religions.Finally, section three focuses on practices that have often been excluded entirely from the category of religion, specifically voodoo and obeah, the latter of which is still illegal in parts of the Caribbean. Boaz points the reader to the irony that while the persecution and criminalization of the practices of (largely White) Neopagan witches have greatly declined, persecution and lack of recognition have continued to plague practitioners of so-called witchcraft identified as African-derived, including in purported bastions of liberalism and religious freedom like Canada and the United States.I did have a few questions after reading Banning Black Gods. The book does not directly engage with conversations within the critical study of religion or the anthropology of law, and Boaz explicitly admits that these are outside the scope of the book. Nevertheless, while she does not overtly engage with religious studies theory, her approach and examples could serve as the basis for a strong argument for the role of redescription and the rectification of categories as steps in processes of racial justice making. This could demonstrate the importance and relevance of religious studies theory and extend the definition of religion beyond the classroom walls. Further questions I had concern conflicting claims to religious freedom coming from multiple sides. For example, how should friction over the exhumation of human remains be resolved between practitioners of Palo Mayombe and the living relatives of the deceased from whose graves Palo practitioners take human remains for ritual purposes? With potentially clashing claims about ethical relations with the dead, how should legal scholars, scholars of religion, and practitioners handle such conflicts?Boaz has formal training and expertise in both law and the histories of Afro-Atlantic religions, but she does not assume a high level of expertise on the part of the reader in either the legal issues or African diaspora traditions under examination. With each section beginning with basic information and background context for the particular rights issues and African diasporic traditions under consideration, this book would be very good for undergraduate students. Provocative, timely, and accessibly written, this book makes important contributions to the study of religion and law and African diasporic religions that will also be of interest to scholars beyond those fields.

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

National Conference of Black Political Scientists Presidential Address

National Conference of Black Political Scientists Presidential Address

Prometheus as Racial Allegory: The Sociological Poetics of W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois often appropriated and deployed the metaphor of “Prometheus,” drawing from Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Goethe’s poem “Prometheus,” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Throughout Du Bois’s career, he employed this figure in order for the reader to better understand the racialized social order in general and White supremacy in specific. In what follows, I cover the eighteenth and nineteenth century use of the Prometheus metaphor in regard to critiques of racism and slavery. I then establish how Du Bois stepped into this tradition to advance a multifaceted critique of global White supremacy that continues to resonate today. Precisely, Du Bois rendered this character in six patterned forms: (1) as an embodiment of de jure and de facto segregation; (2) as newly conscious Black people that would soon revolt against White supremacy; (3) as the paradoxical capture and harm of White people by their own design; (4) as the prejudice, discrimination, and racism born of White supremacist politics; (5) as the struggle of Black folks against White supremacy; and (6) a Black-centered spiritual worldview of eventual liberation. Together, these six deployments signal the early manifestations of both critical race theory and Afrofuturism—two modes of inquiry that help us to reconsider not only the material repercussions of racial inequality but the pathways and roadblocks toward racial utopia.

Black Feminist Ethnography and the Racial Politics of Porter Labor in Ghana

AbstractBlack scholars have long been at the forefront of ethnographic accounts of race and racism. Still, ethnicity rather than race is a preferred valence for understanding identity politics in Africa. The marginalization of African and diasporic women's intellectual output on race and gender on the continent contributes to a vision of Africans as perennial subjects and overlooks a rich discourse on global antiblackness and white supremacy. With ethnographic attention to Ghanaian women migrants known as kayayoo/kayayei (head porter[s]), this article draws on the work of Black women scholars – and African feminists in particular—to interrogate the racial politics of gender in Africa. In addition to analyzing the enforcement of class hierarchies, I examine how migrant exclusion at Accra's Makola Market reflects racialized sentiments about rural Ghana that are associated with slavery and colonial sensibilities about modernity. To meet these aims, I draw on somatic praxis of radical listening and haptic experience to demonstrate how affective relationships can productively theorize race and exclusion in Ghana.

Racializing the Good Muslim: Muslim White Adjacency and Black Muslim Activism in South Africa

Founded in Birmingham, England in 1984, Islamic Relief is today the world’s largest and most-recognized Western-based Islamically-inspired non-governmental organization. Framed by an analysis of processes of racialization, I argue that Islamic Relief operationalizes not a singular, but multiple Muslim humanitarianisms. I examine what I suggest are competing racial projects of distinct humanitarianisms with regards to HIV and AIDS, health, and wellness. I consider the racial implications of British state-based soft-power interventions that seek to de-radicalize Muslims towards appropriately ‘moderate’ perspectives on gender and sexuality. In South Africa, I argue that Black Muslim staff embrace grassroots efforts aimed towards addressing the material and social conditions of their community, with a focus on economic self-determination and self-sufficiency. I claim that the orientation of these Black Muslim grassroots initiatives denotes a humanitarianism of another kind that challenges the material and ethical implications of a humanitarianism framed within a logic of global white supremacy, and that is conditioned by racial capitalism.

Rise: Emergent Strategies for Reclaiming Joy and Agency Against Neofascist and White Supremacist Assaultive Speech

Since the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, there has been an uptick in the number of faculty reporting that they have been the subjects of harassment and intimidation by organizations and individuals espousing views consistent with ideologies of the alt-right, neofascism, and global White supremacy. In this new virulent environment, verbal assaults and threats of violence against progressive scholars are increasingly common, particularly in the case of women academics, minoritized professors, and those whose writing deals critically with racism and other forms of supremacy. This essay, informed by critical race theory, presents a phenomenological narrative and critical analysis of actual events in which an art education scholar was the target of assaultive speech and threatened physical harm following the publication of a book chapter critical of Whiteness. Understanding assaultive speech as an attempt to replace joy with affects of fear, paranoia, and hate, the authors examine the events that occurred in the course of performing one’s duties as teachers, researchers, or concerned citizen-scholars, in detail to reveal (a) the overarching structure and life cycle of these all-too-common attacks and (b) how they affect the targeted person’s mindbody. This combination of structural and embodied forms of knowledge can inspire new liberatory projects as a part of an emergent strategy for scholars, teachers, and activists interested in justice, critical pedagogy, or transformative practices to rise and reclaim joy and agency in troubled times.

All Around the World Same Song: Transnational Anti-Black Racism and New (and Old) Directions for Critical Race Theory in Educational Research

As demonstrated through the disregard for Black humanity and respondent Black social movements throughout Latin America, anti-Black systemic racism is a transnational phenomenon birthed from global White supremacy. Across the Americas, the hemispheric parallels undergirding collective resistance to anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence lend themselves to multifaceted interdisciplinary scholarly examinations. Using transnational anti-Black racism in Latin America as a point of departure, we advance a theorization of critical race theory in education capable of interrogating racist structures of coloniality, modernity, and White supremacy that operate globally to suppress Black humanity and humanness in general. To that extent, we draw from and reposition critical race theory (CRT) from its sociohistoric heritage in the United States and instead conceptualize transnational anti-Black racism vis-à-vis a Black Diaspora reading of CRT. Finally, we return to education as a key site of contestation for transnational anti-Black racism and draw implications for the meaning of this global theorization of CRT in urban education, praxis, and educational research. We end by charting new and old directions for CRT in educational research.

Rights, Gifts, Repair

Rights, Gifts, Repair

White cyber-protest in a Facebook group

Abstract This study builds upon a nascent body of scholarship that examines the transnational movement of White Westerners. The purpose is to complicate the literature on multiculturalism and globalization by examining the “reverse” migration from, rather than to, the West. Specifically, it examines White migrants’ mobilization of online social protest through a Facebook group that came together in response to a report broadcast on South Korea’s Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) that was interpreted as racist and xenophobic. In response, White residents in Korea organized dissent and engaged in symbolic protest that served a collective ego function, creating community around a perceived sense of shared oppression as racialized minorities. To do so, they drew on global hierarchies, White supremacy, and heteronormativity to challenge their lack of control over their own representations in the local culture.

Black Religion and Black Power: The Nation of Islam’s Internationalism

The Nation of Islam’s influence has extended beyond the United States. This Black American Muslim movement has used the intersection of race and religion to construct a blueprint of liberation that has bonded people of African descent throughout the Diaspora. Their transnational dimensions and ideas of freedom, justice and equality have worked to challenge global white imperialism and white supremacy throughout the 20th century and beyond.