White Supremacist Ideology Research Articles

Overcoming Far-Right Respectability: The Case for Systemic Approaches to Studying White Supremacy

ABSTRACT This contribution to the Forum collection traces the rhetorical strategies taken up by far-right actors to cast white supremacist ideas as “respectable” in the post-civil rights era, including the adoption of “colorblind” and “reverse racism” frameworks. Today’s reactionary figureheads have inherited these frameworks, while adapting them to the norms and affordances of the digital attention economy. Popular indicators of conservative respectability today include the adoption of “mitigating rhetorical strategies,” appeals to free speech, and performances of intellectual and journalistic rigor. The piece ultimately argues that these tactics of obfuscation and abstraction should not deter political communication researchers from identifying white supremacist ideology as such, even when it manifests in coded and “respectable” ways. Adopting a systemic rather than individualistic understanding of white supremacy can help us to undertake the critical analyses required in this moment.

Blackademics as prophetic witnesses and the continuing struggle for racial justice in higher education

ABSTRACT This multidisciplinary paper illuminates white supremacist ideologies that serve to disenfranchise critical Black scholars in the U.S. academy. We situate the work of what we describe as the ‘Blackademic’ within the theological tradition of the prophetic witness. The conceptualization of critical Black scholars as a prophetic witness illuminates how they traverse the increasingly neo-liberal academy while they also navigate anti-Black white supremacist racism in higher education. This paper seeks to identify practical crossroads between the study of the experiences of Black scholars in academia and Blackademics (e.g. critical Black scholars). This paper also extends our previous emergent theoretical understanding of the actions of Blackademics.

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.”

Hiding the Hate—Contextual Effects on Hate Crime Reports

This study examines the influence of local norm shifts driven by white supremacist ideology on hate crime reporting by US law enforcement agencies. Results show a substantial association, indicating a threefold increase in expected hate crimes reports in counties experiencing a spike in local hate group activity. Specifically, Republican vote share acts as a moderator, reducing reported hate crimes by 23% in counties with strong Republican support and right-wing hate group presence. Adjacent Republican counties also show a 13% reduction in expected reports, suggesting a spillover effect. Beyond local politics, a regional impact is evident; Northeastern counties with higher right-wing hate group presence show a 23% lower incidence rate. Using longitudinal data from the FBI UCR, SPLC, MIT Election Lab, and the US Census (2010–2020), through negative binomial regressions, this study highlights how right-wing hate groups can affect law enforcement’s enforcement of general civil rights depending on the local context.

The case against “alt-right”: A review and typology of scholarly approaches

ABSTRACT Scholars and journalists frequently use the term “Alt-right” to encapsulate a broad collection of identities and ideologies within the political right. Although early interpretations of the “Alt-right” provide a valuable foundation for understanding the range of (far)-right ideologies that have grown in recent decades, current characterizations remain fraught in the wider literature. To sharpen understandings of the “Alt-right” in academic discourse, I offer a typology outlining five common approaches scholars use to portray it, showing how scholarship routinely lacks definitional clarity. Consequently, I argue that the continued use of the term in academic literature is ill-advised. Specifically, the term normalizes and perpetuates the white supremacist ideologies entrenched within the broader history of academia; it hinders historically and theoretically grounded examinations of (far)-right variations and their situatedness within spectrum of far-right ideologies worldwide; and it blurs crucial distinctions between them that precludes the meaningful evaluation of their extremist tendencies and material threats.

“In the end, we had to leave”: Truth-telling to unsettle whiteness in nursing academia

Nursing is renowned for its high ethical standards and is considered one of the most trusted professions globally, yet it has deep historical ties to Eurocentric and white supremacist ideologies. These entrenched ideologies in nursing raise significant concerns regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion within the profession as they shape nursing education, research, and practice. Western nursing institutions are deeply engrained in a system designed to center and uphold whiteness, which frequently serves to safeguard dominant groups in power while detrimentally affecting faculty from underrepresented backgrounds. Consequently, faculty members from underrepresented groups depart academia due to systemic racism and inadequate institutional accountability and support. To decenter whiteness in nursing, we have shared our experiences to underscore how systems of oppression marginalize underrepresented faculty in nursing academia.

Empowering Self-Care: Caring Things in Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 1890s "New Woman" Short Fiction.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson is mostly remembered as a poet, activist, and ex-wife of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her volume The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899) has been largely overshadowed as a result. Yet, the collection contains a portfolio of heroines analogous and contemporaneous to the famed New Woman figure of the fin de siècle. In this article, I consider Dunbar-Nelson's heroines in light of their New Woman-esque agency and autonomy as they find remedies and power in objects and materials steeped in New Orleans's cultural heritage. Ceded neither social nor political self-governance nor domestic comfort, this article reads these transcendental, metaphysical objects as sources of self-care. With close analysis of "The Goodness of St. Rocque," "Tony's Wife," and "Little Miss Sophie," I argue that Dunbar-Nelson's protagonists exert influence over their lives, specifically in the negotiation of romantic relationships, through voodoo charms, Catholic candles, tarot cards, sewing machines, and knitting needles. Covering courtship, break-ups, and unhappy marriages, I demonstrate the ways in which these empowering spiritual objects respond to health concerns, including malnutrition and domestic violence, in turn, situating them as alternatives to patriarchal and historically racist medical institutions. Valorizing the cultural milieu of New Orleans and the customs of the Caribbean and European heritage, and thereby conveying Dunbar-Nelson's resistance to white and male supremacist ideologies in late-nineteenth-century Southern America, the article ultimately assesses the parallels with (predominantly white) New Woman fiction, through shared themes of fraught heterosexual dynamics and women's declining health.

Taking stock of far-right terrorism through manifestos: Glorification of identity

Abstract This research delves into the identity construction and violence justification within the context of far-right lone-actor terrorism, particularly motivated by white supremacist ideologies. Employing a qualitative analysis of manifestos compiled by five lone-actor terrorists, this study adopts a model to unveil the nuanced processes behind the justification of violence and glorification of collective identities. The model has been formed for the purpose of the study, drawing from social identity and identity fusion approaches, including steps such as group alignment, exclusion, threat, virtue, and celebration. The analysis of these manifestos illuminates a progression through each phase of the violent act, meticulously crafted through textual expression. Central to the terrorists’ objectives is the creation of a rhetorical platform aimed at fomenting violence against non-white, ethnic, and religious groups. Their motivation arises from the perceived threat of the ‘white race’ being supplanted by immigrant communities across various social, political, and economic domains. This justification of violence hinges on the portrayal of themselves as protectors of the majority society, pitted against these minority groups. Strikingly, the terrorists celebrate their actions by commemorating past white supremacists who employed violence against marginalised communities.

Exposing the violence on African American people by white supremacist ideology: Poetry of Sterling Brown and Esther Popel

Exposing the violence on African American people by white supremacist ideology: Poetry of Sterling Brown and Esther Popel

Another Look at a Knowledge Organization Pioneer: Traces of Racism in Paul Otlet’s Writings

Critical strand of studies in Knowl­edge Organization (KO) and Library and Information Science (LIS) have been focused on gender bias and power inherent in the classification of knowl­edge artefacts. From the mid-2000s, attention turned to other types of biases notably racial biases. These studies have exposed and rightly critiqued how the supposedly “universal” classification and knowl­edge artefacts designed by LIS and KO pioneers were designed mostly by white men. Wiegand (1996) demonstrated that Melvil Dewey, the creator of DCC, was a notorious racist and antisemite. This paper raises the issue of how the LIS and KO communities have dealt with the legacy of one its most celebrated pioneers, Paul Otlet, whose writings had imprints of white supremacist ideologies at least in two of his texts ‘Afrique aux Noirs’ and ‘Monde. Essai d’universalisme’. In particular, we speculate about the quasi-omerta that had surrounded Otlet’s writings on race and racial relations considering the amount of exegesis done on his works. The one-sided narrative portraying Otlet mostly in a positive light and magnifying his works has led to epistemicide and “documentary injustice”.

The Many Genealogies of Feminist Activism

The stakes of feminist activism, and the fault lines within feminism, have a newfound significance in this cultural moment. In response to the fall of Roe, the ascendancy of incendiary far-right politics, and the mainstreaming of white-supremacist ideologies, grassroots feminist activism and its impacts have never mattered more. When reading Rachel Seidman's Speaking of Feminism and Arielle Rotramel's Pushing Back, both books that feature interviews and ethnographic work on feminists and feminist groups prior to the 2016 election (Seidman interviewed participants from 2014 to 2016, and Rotramel worked on this material primarily from 2007 to 2011), the gap between the pre- and post-2016 realities seems ever more stark. These books highlight feminisms just prior to the series of aggressive assaults that feminism (and all forms of social justice) would face following the 2016 US presidential election. Both serve as a kind of warning—feminists of all ages understood the hazards of fusing misogyny and white supremacy—and as capturing the histories of feminist activism before the cascade of traumas that would ensue from 2016 to the present day. In this way, feminist ethnographic work and interviews with activists operate as time capsules with unique relevance to the genealogical structure of feminist history and activism. By foregrounding women-of-color-led activisms in particular, historians can trace in this period the movement from theorizing about intersectionality to enacting feminist activisms that draw from experiences of marginalization. The significance of feminist work that built on, and contributed to, theorizing about intersecting identities and interlocking oppressions is brought boldly to life in these two texts.

So-Called Sovereign Settlers: Settler Conspirituality and Nativism in the Australian Anti-Vax Movement

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality have pieced together settler narratives about a New World Order and external threats to Western society from far-right and white supremacist Christian ideology circulated via new media. Using anti-colonial discourse analysis, we elucidate the undercurrent of white supremacist ideology in the Australian anti-vax movement, and highlight the misuse of Indigeneity in far-right and anti-vax narratives. We discuss how these narratives are settler-colonial and how conspiritualists co-opt and perform Indigeneity as a form of settler nativism. As a case study, we analyse the use of the term sovereignty by settlers attached to Muckadda Camp—a camp of ‘Original Sovereigns’ occupying the lawn outside Old Parliament house from December 2021 to February 2022. Using Indigenous critique from both new media and academia, we argue that although settlers may perform Indigeneity, they are exercising white supremacist settler narratives, and not Indigenous sovereignty.

The greatest lie(s) ever told: Rush Limbaugh and the white supremacist blueprint in middle grades historical fiction

ABSTRACT U.S. libraries and classrooms are under siege by private and governmental entities working to simultaneously ban/remove justice-focused literature and inundate these spaces with reactionary/ultra-conservative materials. It is within this educational crisis that we conducted a critical content analysis of the award-winning, best-selling historical fiction series, Rush Revere: Time Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans by Rush Limbaugh. The analysis worked to answer two central research questions: How does the Rush Revere series promote white lies about U.S. history? and What curricular violence is enacted through the Rush Revere series? Findings illuminate how each book individually centralizes an aspect of white supremacy—exceptionalism, capitalism, militarism, patriotism, paternalism—that collectively then creates the infrastructure to indoctrinate young readers into white supremacist ideology.

Hollywood’s Racial Order and the Re-throning of White Supremacist Identity

Abstract Released during a period of heightened racial tension over the impact of racism in the United States and Europe, the 2021 films Stillwater and Dune Part One reveal the pervasiveness of Arab Muslim misrepresentations in Hollywood and the subtilty of white supremacist ideology as it re-emerges in new cinematic productions. With many symbolic and pronounced references to the delusions of the “great replacement” theory, the foundational blueprint of white supremacist identity in both stories, this article contends that these films recentre whiteness to either villainise Arab Muslims or totally erase them. Stillwater disguises the stereotypes on which Arab racialisation is predicated by embedding them in the details of a subplot. Dune, by contrast, is set in an imaginary Arab space with no Arabs, and yet portrayals of Arabs and Islam are front, and centre and it imagines a world with fierce but “generic” coloured people serving their great white leaders.

Toward Critically Analyzing Whiteness in Immigrant Health.

Assimilation theories dominate immigration scholarship to examine differential life chances, opportunities, and health of immigrants across three waves of immigrants in the United States. Assimilation theories are widely used in public health to explain the health status of immigrants despite the embedded White supremacist ideology while ignoring the role of whiteness. This article reviews and critiques assimilation theories to propose a critical analysis of whiteness in immigrant health scholarship. Critically analyzing whiteness in immigrant health studies allows us to recognize (a) the problematic framing of assimilation theories because of the theories' devotion to a White-European vision of upward mobility and a mainstream characterized as elite and White and (b) how a purportedly colorblind immigration law reinforces White supremacy through possessive investment in whiteness. To highlight whiteness in immigrant health, we examine the anti-immigration rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies and surveillance while providing implications for future research in the scholarship of immigrant health.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat

Reviewed by: Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat Kevin Grove Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South David Silkenat. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. I and 260 pp., figs, notes, bibliog, index. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780197564226) The field of environmental history has often played an influential role in the development of geographic research on human–environment relations. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis and Changes in the Land, for example, helped contour geographic debates on socio-ecological hybridity and the ontological politics of nature during the tumultuous “science wars” of the 1990s and early 2000s. David Silkenat’s Scars on the Land holds similar promise today. Silkenat’s text excavates the environmental impacts of slavery on landscapes and ecologies of the US South, and offers an unwavering emphasis on the need to link environmental destruction to the dehumanizing horrors of chattel slavery, white supremacist ideologies, and opaque practices and landscapes of Black and Indigenous resistance. Much like Cronon’s work three decades earlier, Scars on the Land comes along at a crucial conjuncture in geography — a moment where the broader impact, utility and value of social science and humanities research is being contested and reconfigured. As is well known, calls for a new social contract between science and society have proliferated since the early 2000s, with the demand that science contribute solutions to emergent and pressing social needs. Geography is not immune to these debates. As recent efforts to reorganize the National Science Foundation’s Human-Environment and Geographical Directorate illustrate, some disciplinary colleagues are all too ready to dismiss qualitative and critical geographic research as “unfit” for NSF support on grounds that it does not contribute to solutions-oriented interdisciplinary collaborations (see Grove and Rickards 2022). Given how these directorate changes come on the heels of long overdue interest in Black and Indigenous geographies, the current moment presents geography with a unique problem. Rather than demonstrating the interconnections between nature and society, the challenge is now to excavate how the social production of nature works through the production of racialized difference; and to do so in a way that can speak to novel demands for the social utility of science. Scars on the Land illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations across environmental history and geography can address both problems. [End Page 215] To be clear, Scars on the Land is primarily written for an audience of historians. As Silkenat explains in the introductory chapter, the text aims to bridge disconnected debates on the social and environmental histories of the American South within the field of southern US history. While the text admirably succeeds in this regard, it perhaps bypasses some opportunities to build bridges with work in other disciplines, particularly research in Black geographies and the geography of the US South (both of which feature prominently in this journal). Its core arguments on the environmental impacts of slavery will resonate strongly with scholars working in fields such as Black ecology and Black geographies, which situate socio-ecological problems in the long history of anti-Black racism and the life-destroying landscapes it produces (Pulido 2002, Wright 2018, Moulton and Salo 2022). Nonetheless, there is much to be gained from a close engagement with Silkenat’s arguments. One major contribution Scars on the Land offers is the robust array of archival materials and secondary sources Silkenat draws on to develop an environmental history of slavery in the US South. Each chapter focuses on a specific environmental attribute, and deftly draws on troves of historical documents to bring to life fragile southern environments, the violent logic of plantation ecology — specifically, its treatment of land and enslaved labor as dispensable and given to free, instrumental use — and its contradictions that created opaque niches of Black resistance and alternative forms of life. Chapter 1 starts from the ground up, focusing on soil. Here, Silkenat introduces the key dynamic between racialized extraction and resistance. On one hand, soil clearly illustrates the plantation system’s compulsive drive to total objectification and consumption of non-white and non-human life. Plantation agriculture cleared forests and overworked fragile soils, creating denuded...

Critical Family History: A Tool to Dismantle Racism

As schools and universities are under attack for educating students about race, racism, and other topics with deep roots that directly link to our current societal challenges, we must find and utilize meaningful tools of resistance. This article is a collaborative auto-ethnographic narrative inquiry that presents the stories of two professors and two students who engaged in the reflective work of critical family history (CFH). Currently, merely mentioning the word racism is so troubling to many politicians whose ideas are rooted in White supremacist ideology that laws are being passed in the U.S. to ban books on certain topics about race and LGBTQIA+ issues so that students cannot even read about these topics. A Tennessee law recently passed in both the state House and Senate seriously diminishes and limits how professors teach putative “divisive topics” related to race and its societal impact at the college level. A valuable teaching tool, critical family history, offers an impactful approach for us, especially for educators, to face the truth about the complexity of our lives and our ancestors, specifically in relation to issues of race—in a subtle, yet powerful way that is grounded in courage, wisdom, and compassion. The findings in this article are both surprising and troubling, which points to why educators need to seek ways to incorporate CFH in their work to dismantle racism.

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

Classroom Communities, Pandemic Portals: Rethinking Solidarity Through Pedagogy and Practice

The P-16 classroom, already a space of potential conflicts and contradictions, gained new levels of complexity with the overlapping crises of 2020 onward: the COVID-19 pandemic; police brutality and corresponding “summer of abolition;” book and mask bans; and anti-critical race theory and anti-social emotional learning legislation. In this paper, we respond to these crises with collaboration through the concept of interdependency. Using disability and transformative justice organizer Mia Mingus’s definition of interdependency, we argue that an interdependent classroom can be a way out of narratives of atomized disconnection. Interdependency sees an individual’s survival as inherently connected to a larger community, emphasizing solidarity over the illusion of independence. Inspired by duoethnographic methods, we share our own reflections as students and teachers in classrooms where connection may or may not have been present. We find that, though we cannot go back to “normal,” we can go forward into new classroom context where white supremacist ideologies do not shape students’ and teachers’ shared learning experiences. Instead, interdependence can serve as a form of creative resistance to the more implicit forms of harm embedded in educational experiences, opening up platforms to counter marginalization and speak against what has been traditionally silenced.

Taking the “Race” Out of Master Race: The Evolving Role of the Jew in White Supremacist Discourse

Abstract Across Europe and North America, political leaders and elites use ethnoreligious appeals based on white supremacist ideology with increasing success. Yet this rhetoric frequently includes positive references to Jews and Israel. What explains this pivot away from the historic reliance on the so-called “nefarious, menacing Jew”? Rather than interpret the transformation of the white supremacist Jewish trope as an ideological shift, this article demonstrates that the transformation reflects a mainstreaming of white supremacist discourse. More specifically, as white supremacist discourse increasingly finds a home in successful nativist political parties, framing Jews as a religion rather than a race sidesteps hurdles to attracting votes. Second, positive references to Israel rather than Jews demonstrates the evolution of an identitarian strand within white supremacy rather than a de-escalation of racist ideology. A comparison of the German AfD and the American Republican Party, two parties that increasingly employ white supremacist rhetoric alongside pro- Jewish rhetoric, illustrates the phenomenon. Within a larger political context, the de-racializing of Jews in white supremacist discourse reflects a shift in twenty-first century nativism from a preoccupation with race and nationality, to a focus on civilizational, cultural, and religious identities.