White Supremacy Research Articles

The next [white] thing: neocolonial white feminism in Disney’s Frozen II

ABSTRACT This essay critically analyzes how Disney’s animated film Frozen II responds to the current landscape of multicultural liberal feminism by emphasizing white women’s self-discovery as a principal means to resist colonial amnesia and advance an anti-racist agenda. Drawing upon scholarship about the anti-racist white-hero movie subgenre, we argue that this turn toward consciousness demonstrates an emerging mode of strategic whiteness in popular culture that we refer to as neocolonial white feminism. This form of feminism ultimately serves structures of white supremacy and undermines Indigenous sovereignty by centering white intrapersonal experience as sine qua non for advancing decolonial justice.

The Texture of Being and Becoming White

This essay takes its title from Kathleen Pogue White’s call to White psychoanalysts to explore “the texture of being white in relation to the experiences of racism” in her 2002 article “Surviving Hating and Being Hated: Some Personal Thoughts about Racism from a Psychoanalytic Perspective.” It focuses on the White author’s experiences of racial hatred and White supremacy between friends as a child and adolescent in Detroit, Michigan. It seeks to add emotional and affective nuance to contemporary ways of talking about Whiteness and White supremacy in relation to Blackness and Black Americans. It also explores the damage intra-racial hatred between Whites can cause.

Defending the Color Line: White Supremacy and the Legacy of Brown

Building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often associated with Brown to the racial hierarchies and various forms of harm that schools reproduce, even when they are racially diverse. Taking the recent attacks against critical race theory as a backdrop, I argue that educational institutions not only contribute to educational inequity but also socialize people into relations of racial domination and subordination through organizational practices and individual actions. In the article’s conclusion, I highlight my efforts to disrupt these patterns and work toward the creation of more liberatory education spaces.

Landscapes of white supremacy and settler colonialism: Stone Mountain, Mount Rushmore, and the contested geographies of memory in America

Landscapes of white supremacy and settler colonialism: Stone Mountain, Mount Rushmore, and the contested geographies of memory in America

The British Royals in Australia

The British Royals in Australia

Political theology, discovery and the roots of the ‘great replacement’

In recent years, fears of the ‘great replacement’, popularised by Renaud Camus, warning against a supposed Islamist take-over of France, have motivated White supremacist violence and resulted in mass shootings in Europe, New Zealand and the US. The author shows how this conspiracy theory can be traced back to medieval theological doctrines used to justify the conquest of Muslim lands in Al-Andalus and later refined to warrant the European subjugation of the Indigenous nations of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Through papal authority, the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ bestowed a God-given right on Christian nations to take and control lands, wiping out or confining Indigenous people, to then repopulate countries at will − itself the real racial reversal of settler colonialism. The theological argument is now thoroughly secularised in law in the US. ‘A great replacement’, incorporating the Doctrine of Discovery coupled with eugenicist ideas, can be found in the works of Lothrop Stoddard, and echoes are found even today in utterances from US politicians and on Fox News.

Reproducing violence, racism, and erasure in research

ABSTRACT In 2019, we received a Top Paper Award for a paper presented at a national communication conference, despite our erasure of Black women from the history of midwifery in Alabama. We recognize and acknowledge the logics of white supremacy that informed our initial thinking and offer this essay as reparative work. We begin by describing our original research project. Then, we outline the reflexive, intellectual, and methodological practices that informed our critique. We conclude by questioning what scholarship is valued in the academy and what can be done to prevent similar scholarship from being written and rewarded.

‘Failing well’ in teaching about race, racism and white supremacy. An interview with Stephen Brookfield

‘Failing well’ in teaching about race, racism and white supremacy. An interview with Stephen Brookfield

The Impact of White Supremacy on First-Generation Mixed-Race Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa

South African white supremacy has been shaped by over 400 years of settler colonialism and white minority apartheid rule to craft a pervasive and entrenched legacy of privilege and oppression in the post-apartheid context. This paper explores the constructions of white supremacy, specifically its role in shaping the perceptions of first-generation mixed-race identity in South Africa, through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Through a critical race theory and an intersectional lens, this paper unpacks the personal, political, and social impact of white supremacist structures on the identity construction of first-generation mixed-race people in post-apartheid South Africa; specifically, societal- and self-perceptions of their identity within power structures with which they interact. Moreover, this paper aims to understand how first-generation mixed-race people understand their connections to white privilege. Ultimately this paper argues that although first-generation mixed-race people experience relative privilege, their access to white privilege and acceptance within structures of whiteness is always conditional.

Socializing Latinx college-going youth to (White) Neutral Rationality: Liberal teaching practices and right-wing racisms

The mythology of liberal anti/racism endures in U.S. mainstream educational discourse as the rational approach to address white supremacy, with college-going positioned as the pathway to a better life. Liberal logics suppose that once racialized peoples enter positions of power, society will improve. Drawing upon pláticas and interviews from an ethnographic study of a college preparation program for Latinx youth at a public high school in the liberal, racially diverse San Francisco Bay Area, this work examines how liberal teaching practices shaped Mexican-origin youths’ responses to right-wing terror. Instead of preparing youth to dismantle white supremacy, these practices undermined youths’ readings of their sociopolitical worlds. Engaging language socialization approaches, this work argues that liberal teaching practices socialized college-going youth to (white) neutral rationality, wherein accommodating white supremacy signals rationality and college readiness. This research illustrates why college-going can be no more than one tactic towards collective wellbeing for racialized people.

Disability, model minority myth, and white supremacy: Struggling, reimagining, and becoming through mother–daughter counter storytelling

We – as daughter and mother – offer our stories humbly as a love letter to our Asian American community, our Black and Brown siblings, and the broader education community. White supremacy has weaponized the model minority myth – the belief that Asian Americans have “made it” despite obstacles – to invalidate claims of systemic racism and ableism. We draw on Disability Critical Race Theory and Asian American Critical Race Theory to center intersectionality and the interwoven nature of racialization, gendering, and disablement. Using collaborative storying, we showcase our (un)learning and (re)learning about normativity, identities, and belonging with and from each other as dialogic and reciprocal. Although both of our voices contribute to this dialogic storytelling, this paper centers on the stories of the first author – as a neurodiverse 15-year-old youth – as there is much we can learn from listening to our disabled youth of color and their resistance practices.

Metapolitical seduction: Women's language and white nationalism

AbstractThis paper examines the enregisterment of white nationalist women's language as metapolitical seduction, in anti‐feminist conversion videos designed both to seduce men and to restore them to their proper place—above women. First, the paper analyzes the metapragmatics of submissive femininity, then the characters this far right fairy tale invents, and finally how they come to represent a metapolitical order which aligns gender, nation, tradition, and language. Women's language contributes to the white nationalist metapolitical project of resurrecting white masculinity and re‐gendering the world, also revealing mechanisms by which white supremacy is made to appear not only normal, but desirable.

Whiteness, Mestizaje, and social equity

This article discusses the relationship between Whiteness and Mestizaje–the idea of a ‘race made of the mixture of other races’–in the context of Mexican public administration. It argues that Mestizaje promotes a raceless or ‘color-evasive’ narrative that has historically prevented the discussion of race and ethnoracial inequalities in Mexico; sustains Whiteness in public organizations, and creates the conditions for White supremacy, as an uneven distribution of social privileges and penalties along ethnoracial lines benefitting White people. Ultimately, these three aspects of the Mestizaje ideology and its connection with Whiteness could be preventing the advancement of social equity in Mexico. Moreover, the reflections presented here are potentially insightful for other contexts in which raceless and/or color-evasive narratives are prevalent as well.

Unveiling whiteness: an approach to expand equity and deepen Public Administration’s racial analysis

Public Administration’s attempts to understand race and racism insufficiently engage with the historical processes and legacies of White Supremacy. This paper problematizes whiteness and proposes an approach to expand social equity and deepen the field’s racial analysis. Drawing on institutional logics perspective, we identify and describe logics of whiteness, an analytic approach that reveals whiteness through the logics of racial capitalism and whiteness as property and provides entry for historical, systems-connected, multi-level analyses of race, racism, racial categorization, and racialized power. We locate whiteness in the institution of citizenship to engage these logics and interrogate how citizens and citizenship are defined by and served in the bureaucracy. Neoliberalism has allowed the administrative state to assign differential citizenship identities across groups according to the logics of whiteness, with both symbolic and material implications for individual lives and for Public Administration theory and praxis.

AI and racism: Tone policing by the Bing AI chatbot

This paper looks at the way that Bing AI uses tone policing and racial gaslighting in its conversations with users as a method of disciplining them away from critical anti-racist ideological engagement and towards an ethos of white supremacy. We use a critical discourse analysis to examine the conversations produced through our use of Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot to find that through both the content it generates and the mechanisms through which it responds the Bing AI chatbot polices the tone of its users in a variety of ways.

Unsettling tradition: exploring intersections of campus hazing and white supremacy

Hazing—a form of interpersonal and community violence often minimized and normalized as tradition—can negatively impact students, undercut university missions, and contribute to harmful campus environments. While student hazing is a problem, postsecondary leaders are also grappling with legacies of whiteness and white supremacy that have shaped campus culture, including taken-for-granted norms and traditions. Using Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) as a framework (Cabrera et al., 2017), this qualitative study explored how perceptions of campus hazing may reflect and contribute to perpetuating white supremacy in a sample of U.S. universities. Across 12 institutions, 7 public and 5 private, 345 individuals—169 staff members, 167 students, and nine alumni—were interviewed, primarily in focus groups, sharing perceptions of campus culture and hazing climate. Tradition, with themes of alumni involvement and influence, pride, and space, is discussed, illuminating how whiteness and white supremacy is reinscribed via campus hazing.

A Western Pocahontas: Myth, Reality, and Memorialization for Spotted Tail’s Daughter, Mni-Akuwin

Abstract In March 1866, the Sicangu (Brulé) Lakota chief Spotted Tail brought the body of his seventeen- or eighteen-year-old daughter, Mni-Akuwin, to Fort Laramie. She had died somewhere in the Powder River country. Before she died, she had asked her father to bury her among the Whites at the fort. Her subsequent scaffold burial in the post cemetery was an unusual mix of military display, Christian rites, and Lakota traditions; and the events surrounding it became a dramatic episode in the story of Native-White relations and western settlement. Almost 140 years later she was memorialized at the fort, a National Park Service site, as a symbol of racial reconciliation. The story of Mni-Akuwin has been told and retold many times through the years, often as a romantic tragedy comparable to the story of early Jamestown and the much-celebrated Pocahontas. The two Native women had a surprising amount in common, including what we know and don’t know about them, what has been ascribed to their motives, and how they have been championed as defenders of European colonists and non-Native settlers. Indian princess mythology, with its insistence on innocence, purity, romantic purpose, and tragedy, has been vital to the persistence of this view—a perspective that has often put reconciliation in the service of White supremacy, dispossession, and rejection of Native culture. As the Mni-Akuwin story illustrates, reconciliation can be problematic.

Repression breeds resistance: A call for a methodology of radical solidarity and love to respond to the prison industrial complex and academia's eugenic tendencies

This collaborative autoethnographic article traces psychology's complicity in systems of oppression while highlighting pathways toward liberation. An expression and embodiment of radical solidarity, this article is the product of a research collaboration between an incarcerated justice advocate and a critical psychologist. Critical autoethnographic methods are leaned on to lift experiences of prison as an oppressive institution and illuminate forms of resistance. We strategically and deliberately co-created this methodological approach to joyfully render prison walls metaphorically porous, to seep through surveillance mechanisms (both within the prison and academia), and to build liberatory worlds through our words. Situating mass incarceration as an extension of colonial displacement and enslavement, we dialogically examine how psychology has upheld white supremacy through the illusion of objectivity and neutrality. Psychological concepts like critical consciousness and resilience are re-theorized to center embodied, collective struggles. Calling for psychology to move beyond apologies toward deep structural change and distributive justice, we advocate for centering the experience of those historically excluded in knowledge construction, resource allocation, and leadership. Imagining a psychology of love and solidarity, we urge dismantling oppressive institutions through pedagogies of radical solidarity. Our collaboration—across prison walls—models methodologies of mutual aid, conscientization, and power sharing to build a liberatory psychology.

Whiteness as expertise in studies of the far right

ABSTRACT This article addresses backlash from white academic gatekeepers to research on the white far right and white supremacist violence. Centrally, I interrogate how whiteness shapes the field’s response to a seeming shift in patterns of political violence towards white supremacist activity. Taking white supremacy in the study of white supremacist violence seriously, I contend, would shift our attention to larger social patterns of oppression and opportunities for liberation. However, this does not happen due to a concept I call “whiteness as expertise.” Building on Charles W. Mills’ white epistemologies of ignorance, I argue that the attributes of transferability and disconnection both obscure and perpetuate how scholarship on white supremacist violence can further whiteness. First, I review the backlash experienced by the academic and policy turn towards white supremacist violence, even if scholars and practitioners may not call it “white supremacist.” I then introduce the concept of whiteness as expertise in more detail, highlighting how insistence on “terrorism” as a unitary and unifying category leads to backlash against research on white supremacist violence. I conclude with examples of academic backlash to open discussion into the complexities of studying whiteness within a white-majority academy.

The New Black Right: A Paranoid Turn in Black Conservatism?

Abstract Is there a uniquely Black paranoid style of conservatism, and, if so, how is that style articulated, and what are the potential impacts on conservatism, U.S. politics, and Black people in the coming decades? Despite our theoretical understanding that Black people can support white supremacy, the literature of far-right racism assumes that all white nationalists are white, and all Black nationalists are pro-Black. To address these issues, I use qualitative content analysis of 100 YouTube videos from ten Black conservative influencers. I find there are Black conservatives who express a uniquely nationalist form of paranoid reactionaryism. This style of political rhetoric is characterized by influencers’ claims that: 1) they have experienced status loss, not as Black people, but as moral, patriotic, and Christian Americans; 2) this status loss is the result of a coordinated campaign to weaken the country, traditional values, and Chrisitan hegemony; and 3) the campaigns are carried out by ungodly and un-American people within the country and that acting against them in self-defense is a moral and patriotic necessity. These findings force us to reconsider our approach to studying racism and recognize the agency of Black people who actively promote far right and racist rhetoric.