White Supremacy Research Articles

Leadership in the Church of England at a Time of Crisis: Toward a Deconstruction of Normativity

All too frequently, privileged white male power is unable to extricate its sense of normalcy from the leadership it exercises. This essay embarks upon a deconstruction of the modes of power and authority at work in the current leadership of the Church of England. This includes upholding a presumptive quasi-regal polity blended with the inevitable executive managerialism—what is termed an “ecclesiocracy” run by “ecclesiocrats,” supporting episcopacy. In beginning to deconstruct the power of the polity, we can see how alterity relates to what is held to be normative. This, in turn, poses searching questions for those who claim to hold presiding-mediating roles in English Anglican polity, which extends the life of some disputes and maintains averse hierarchical approaches to diversity.

Then and Now, Newsroom Diversity Matters for Mississippi’s Black Journalists

ABSTRACT Mississippi newsrooms should be among America’s most diverse. More than a third of residents are Black, and U.S. journalism organizations have long stated a goal of achieving racial parity with the communities they serve. Through the frame of social identity and critical race theory, the researchers analyzed 12 in-depth interviews with Black Mississippi journalists. The findings from these interviews indicate a wide range of challenges in Mississippi newsrooms, with the assertion that achieving diversity is contingent on having diverse leadership. The study explores what these journalists believe is necessary to foster a newsroom culture where minority journalists feel better supported and more empowered to express their opinions, The results also highlight apprehensions about the coverage of Black communities in Mississippi markets, particularly in the capital city of Jackson, where most of the population is Black. Interviewees expressed dissatisfaction with the disproportionate allocation of news reporting resources to cover minority criminal activities, a practice attributed by Campbell, C. P. (1995. Race, Myth and the News. Sage) to a legacy of white supremacy.

Analyzing violent attacker texts: examining ideologies through machine learning-assisted topic modeling

ABSTRACT The rise in extremist violence is a global concern, prompting advancements in threat assessment. This study applies machine learning to dissect publicly available texts from violent attackers with white supremacist, incel, and political extremist ideologies, as well as from those driven by personal grievances. Through natural language processing, the research identifies specific linguistic patterns and themes inherent to each group and explores the intersections among them. It uncovers shared narratives of disenfranchisement and aggression alongside unique ideological signifiers. Additionally, it identifies themes unique to each group, offering a clear thematic distinction between ideologies. These insights contribute to a more accurate identification of radicalization indicators, supporting the development of intervention strategies tailored to the ideological nuances of each group. Enhanced threat assessment tools informed by this research can improve the precision of prevention efforts by law enforcement and mental health professionals, reflecting the complex realities of extremist motivations and actions.

‘And I am more than this man can comprehend’: Contemporary Arthurian Texts & Resistance to White Supremacy

Abstract Beginning with the appropriation of medieval iconography by alt-right movements, particularly in the contexts of Brexit and the January 6 2021 American insurrection, this article highlights how modern adaptations of the Arthurian legend (in particular, Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, and the video game We Happy Few) resist white nationalist rhetorics. These texts remix figures and symbols from the Arthurian oeuvre to offer stories wherein characters come to recognize and thus resist systematic forgetting, or a societal attempt to overlook uncomfortable facts from the past, thus offering alternative visions of identity and belonging. The ethical implications of historical representation and the power of narrative in contemporary political discourse make these texts powerful works of art that speak to and counter white supremacist attempts to claim and revise medieval iconography to serve their own ends.

The integrated Mexican nation-state building in the 20th century

Since gaining independence in the early 19th century, Mexico embarked on a path toward building a nation-state. In criticizing the evolutionism that promotes white supremacy, Mexican society has embarked on a journey of introspection, delving into the essence of its indigenous national character. Following the Mexican Revolution at the turn of the 20th century, a nationalism advocating for integration was firmly established. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government incorporated the principles of national integration into the broader building of the nation-state. On the one hand, it affirmed the crucial role of indigenous peoples and their cultures, tracing the origins of the Mexican nation-state back to these roots. On the other hand, the promotion of unified education, coupled with the implementation of a land-centered state corporatist system, aimed to achieve the integration and governance of Indigenous peoples, thereby incorporating them into the nation-building process and ultimately facilitating the integration of the nation-state. While the PRI government’s integration efforts led to tendencies towards marginalization and assimilation of indigenous peoples, alongside insufficient attention to their rights and political participation, it fundamentally changed the historically unrecognized status of indigenous communities since the colonial era. These efforts primarily addressed the issues that had challenged Mexican social development concerning indigenous peoples since the colonial era, contributing to maintaining national stability over an extended period.

Mother of All Labour: Vulnerability and Immunity in Times of Ebola

Wonkifong Ebola treatment unit was unique at the time of the outbreak that hit the Guinea in 2014. Contrary to other infrastructures run by Western workers, Wonkifong mainly employed personnel from Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cuba. Even so, the unit constituted a racialised landscape where proximity to white agencies granted privileges to certain groups of racialised people while excluding others. In a humanitarian infrastructure aimed at empowering knowledge of epidemics in the Global South, Black children were quarantined without their parents and left mostly unattended. After many months, former patients were hired as nannies to remedy the infrastructure’s blind spot. These women were employed to care for the children thanks to their immunity to the virus. Building on the concept of a ‘politics of life’ and exploring how these women were exploited as ‘medical superbodies’, my article sheds light on how the humanitarian infrastructure produced a gendered labour that mirrors other economies exploiting female Black bodies such as the colony or the plantation. Relying on an ethnography of practices of care and mobility within the unit, this piece underlines how the postcolonial segregation at play during the outbreak operated not strictly in terms of skin colour, but in terms of gender and closeness to white power.

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.

The Whiteness Protection Program: A Typology of Agentic White Defense

White defensiveness in response to racial justice education has increasingly been understood through the “white fragility” framework. This study puts forth a new framework that instead identifies a typology of white defensive moves that actively work to uphold and fortify the white racial contract. Inspired by Solórzano and Delgado-Bernal’s (2001) framework for understanding students of color resistance to racism as active (even when it might look passive, on the surface), our theoretical model illustrates four distinct categories of white racial defense that actively protect whiteness. Because white defensiveness has been primarily examined in the context of Traditionally White Institutions, where white students have been presumed to be “ignorant” or “lacking stamina” for encounters in which whiteness is challenged, we provide examples from an instrumental case analysis (Stake, 1995) of 15 in-depth interviews with white students attending three different Historically Black Universities, where their whiteness has become hypervisible and salient. We identify a typology of four agentic forms of defense: The “Innocent Defense,” The “Liberal Defense,” The “Antiracist Defense,” and The “Persecuted Defense.” We refer to these defenses together as “the whiteness protection program” to connote a collective agreement (part of the racial contract), which calls for rethinking the individualized and passive notion of white fragility. In the end, we argue that understanding these modes of resistance as agentic, rather than fragile results of lack of exposure and knowledge, is essential to disrupting white supremacy and fostering students of color well-being.

The pragmatics of black–white conversations: Richard Wright’s representation of the African American experience

Abstract Richard Wright represents the African American experience of white racism in his novel Native Son and autobiography Black Boy. In the two works, Wright delves into the psychic effects of white racism on young African Americans. From a pragmatic perspective, this article analyzes the conversations between whites and young African Americans in the two works, with the aim of exploring how the conversations can impact on how the young African Americans think about reality and about themselves in relation to whites, that is, how whites attempt to form black subjectivity through conversation. The conversational mechanisms of the formation of black subjectivity are investigated by building on research in pragmatics on conversational cooperation and interpersonal pragmatics. The article first examines the structural features of black-white conversations, and explains the conversational norms by using Grice’s theory of conversation as the explanatory framework. The analysis sheds light on the relative nature of Grice’s maxims and the inseparability of the informational and the relational aspects of conversation. The article examines the relationship dynamics of black-white conversations by drawing on studies in interpersonal pragmatics. From the stylistic feature of the use of address terms, the study delves into the interracial pragmatics of black–white conversations.

'I can feel sad about it and I can worry, but inside I know everything happens for a reason': personal experiences in the aftermath of the March 15 Christchurch mosque attacks.

On 15 March 2019, a white supremacist gunman sequentially attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people aged from 3 to 77 years and bullet-injuring 40 more. Approximately 250 people survived the atrocity, and many more family and community members have been directly or indirectly affected. To develop an understanding of the personal experiences of some of those affected, including effects on daily life and well-being, in the 18-30 months following the attacks. Qualitative thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 21 men and women from September 2020 to August 2021 was performed. Participants were drawn from a larger quantitative study and included injured, bereaved, witnesses, family members and those from the wider Muslim community in Christchurch. Four superordinate themes were identified: being overwhelmed in the midst of chaos; experiencing silent and enduring impact; living similarly, but differently; and gaining meaning and growth. These themes captured ongoing distress inclusive of physical symptoms, family and community relationship dynamics and connectedness, secondary stressors, and diversity in coping and growth. For most, the centrality of Islam as a faith tradition was woven throughout. Consistent with previous literature, post-trauma reactions were pervasive and varied. This appeared to be compounded by secondary stressors in this cohort, such as sociopolitical circumstances, demographic diversity, the COVID-19 pandemic and justice processes. Findings also revealed a strong spiritual thread in the experiences of this minority faith community, shedding light on a complex interaction between recovery and post-traumatic growth.

Teaching the January 6th Insurrection: Historical Perspectives on a Crisis in American Democracy

Abstract This article offers a framework for analyzing and teaching the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. The crisis itself offers an opportunity to unpack and better understand American political discourses and institutions. I focus on four historical and contemporary currents that elucidate the January 6th crisis: 1) White supremacy and backlashes against Civil Rights; 2) conservative assaults on the New Deal order and the regulatory state; 3) organized labor’s decline, right-wing populism’s rise, and nativism; 4) political polarization, sectarianism, and minority rule. These themes enable students to assess both crucial challenges posed by January 6th and the vitality of American democracy.

“Can Corpses Undie?” Traces of Rothberg’s Trauma Model in Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s Ace of Spades

Interdisciplinary studies in memory have become more relevant since the turn of the twentieth century with scholars giving their divergent views. That way, personal and collective memories have been explored vis-à-vis communal identities. How tragic/traumatic events affect personal and collective memories remains the concern of trauma theory which has critically investigated both the personal and intergenerational traumas of victims of injustice. One major contribution of Michael Rothberg to collective memory is his advancement of solidarity between group victims of diverse cultures, nationalities, races, and identities in order to create a more peaceful world to live in. This paper purports that Rothberg’s multidirectional memory and theory of implication are useful theoretical tools for analysing Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s Young Adult novel, Ace of Spades (2021). The paper, therefore, indicates how diverse sites of trauma in the author’s world synergise with those of the protagonists. Also, the paper notably identifies some white characters in Ace of Spades as implicated subjects of racism and white supremacy. On the whole, the premise of this paper is that the new media can serve as a convenient site of thoughtful convergence for different victim groups to devise a means of dismantling long-existing regimes of oppression and injustice.

“Our American Optimism”: Race, Recognition, and Belonging in Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

This paper explores Claudia Rankine’s representation of the feelings of racialisation in her 2004 poetry collection Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Contextualising this work within wider debates in Afropessimist philosophy, it considers how the poet’s portrayal of emotional pain, depression, and numbness exemplify a form of ‘social death’ instigated by the ubiquitous violence of antiblackness. Through close readings of select sequences, it argues that Rankine frames death as an ongoing structure of African American experience, rather than a singular event. In turn, this paper also considers how her innovative and hybrid “American Lyric” form functions to create a new grammar for Black self-expression in an ostensibly ‘post-race’ culture that obfuscates contemporary systems of racial inequality. It argues that Rankine’s collection cultivates an ethics of attention to the experiences and pain of others, offering poetry as a form of “exhausted hope” to challenge the dehumanising force of White supremacy.

Hotep anti-Blackness: Misogynoir and queer exclusion in online conspiracy theorizing

Research suggests African Americans are more likely than Whites to support conspiracy theories, especially those related to the U.S. government. Locating the pedagogical practices of Black activists in the online hotep subculture, I use the concept of public pedagogy to understand how these activist influencers use social media to spread political messages in the public sphere. This essay situates hotep subculture as a conspiritualist project that uses Pan-Africanism, Afrocentricity, Black spirituality, and hip-hop culture to advance conspiracy theories among Black communities for consciousness-raising and economic independence. While hoteps have promulgated a pro-Black politic, their reliance on ethnonationalist homophobia and misogynoir promotes a form of erasure that is not only exclusionary and anti-Black but also reflects racial fears rooted in anxiety. This essay contributes to the growing literature on conspiritualism’s investment in white supremacy and the need for conspiritualist critiques to investigate how anti-Blackness shows up in discourses at the intersection of faith, spirituality, and global regimes of power. Drawing on the concepts of misogynoir and anti-Black heterotopias, Black gender and sexual minorities are framed within hotep discourse as subservient, deviant, and perilous to Black liberation.

Almost-Invisible White Supremacy: Racism, Silence and Complicity in the Interracial Interaction Order

Almost-Invisible White Supremacy: Racism, Silence and Complicity in the Interracial Interaction Order

Against the White Racial Imaginary: Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) makes legible what neoliberalism has obscured – the ongoing, even the intensification of, white supremacy’s organization of social space. This essay shows how Rankine illuminates an American landscape forged in history, steeped in memory and invested with symbolic meaning to argue that it is, fundamentally, constructed by and entangled with white supremacy. Rankine reworks pastoral lyric imagery and documentary photography to situate contemporary anti-black violence within a longer history of white terror. She defamiliarizes the language of reportage to critique documentary strategies of visual evidence that reinscribe racial hierarchies through reliance upon an unmarked white gaze. In place of individual testimony, documentary evidence and bounded lyric subjectivity, Rankine gathers an assembly of voices, employing rhetorical strategies that resist the violence of neoliberal individuation.

Racial Regimes and White European Jewish Supremacy as Property

This article argues that the Zionist theft and expropriation of Palestinian land resulted in it being made into white property and that Zionism can be understood as a textbook case of Cedric Robinson's concept of racial regimes that explains how race is reproduced even though race is denied by the Zionist colonisers as justifying the relations of power. The article follows Cheryl Harris's and Noura Erakat's work on whiteness as property that, according to Erakat, leaves the Palestinian natives outside the category of Jewish nationals to be removed, dispossessed, and contained. The article illustrates how the ongoing colonisation of Palestine as expressing white European supremacy involves several aspects of racial capitalism—the Judaisation of Palestinian lands, the segmentation of labour from the Zionist policy of the Conquest of (Hebrew) Labour to the reliance on cheap and dispensable Palestinian labour, and the lebensraum plans to relocate the Gaza Strip population and re-settle it. 2

Civic-military schools in Brazil: Feminist lenses to uncover a patriarchal, white supremacist, and queerphobic project

This article examines the rise of conservative policies in Brazilian education, particularly since 2014 when teachers became targets of accusations related to "ideological indoctrination" and "gender ideology." The Non-Partisan Schools Movement has significantly contributed to fostering a climate of distrust and the militarisation of education has gained momentum under Jair Bolsonaro's presidency (2019–2022). Focusing on the Civic-Military Schools Program (PECIM), the article employs relational and feminist lenses to analyse the arguments of conservative supporters. Although the policy does not overtly promote anti-gender or anti-feminist rhetoric, its documents and implementation reveal underlying biases. While militarisation is framed as a means to improve educational quality, results indicate a dangerous initiative involving untrained military personnel, abusive behaviours, and practices that undermine the self-esteem of girls, queer and Black students. An intersectional feminist perspective, therefore, is fundamental to highlighting contradictions in conservative discourse and interrupting their policies.

An analytic framework for theorizing the anti-gender agenda in education

This article theorizes the global anti-gender movement in education. This conservative movement opposes “gender ideology,” which is perceived as a threat to traditional social values. Building on a systematic literature review of how the anti-gender movement shapes educational policies, politics, and practices, with a specific focus on Brazil and the US, this article presents a theoretical framework for conceptualizing: 1) the contested meanings of “gender ideology”; 2) its discursive components; 3) the characteristics and composition of anti-gender alliances; 4) the anti-gender agenda’s manifestations in curriculum, pedagogy, the social relations of schooling, and education policy. We attempt to highlight the ways in which anti-gender politics often operate together with racial politics to reveal the ways in which conservative, right-wing alliances, frequently predicated on and united through anti-Blackness, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, exert influence on educational policies, politics, and practices to simultaneously maintain a white supremacist, cis-heteronormative, and patriarchal state. We conclude with a discussion of the contradictions of this agenda and resistances to these conservative attacks on equity, inclusion, diversity, and human rights.

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

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