Abstract
The dreadful genius of the “postracial”/“postracist” moment lies in the creative disruption of white bodily monopoly in the operative sites of US nation-building (racial empire) from the grass roots to the White House. The ascendancy of postapartheid and “postcivil rights”1 multiculturalisms marks the obsolescence of “classical” white supremacy as a model of oppression and socially ordering violence based primarily or even predominantly on the (relatively) exclusive vesting of hegemonic institutional power in the collective white social body. Postracial, postracist Americanism—accumulating momentum as the still racial nationalist narrative of the twenty-first-century United States—is far worse than a naïve or misinformed mythification of the civil rights dream: it is the signaling of a sophisticated, flexible, and “diverse” (multiculturalist) white supremacy as the heartbeat of the US national form.
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Notes
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
See Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–345.
Stuart Hall, “Gramscis Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 5–27.
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: “Mugging,” the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 394.
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, ed. R. J. Johnston, Peter J. Taylor, and Michael J. Watts (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 261.
See generally Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993).
George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder: Westview Press, 2007).
The work of David Roediger and Steve Martinot offers some of the more engaged scholarly studies of how white supremacy composes a specific political and cultural formation that is not reducible to the processes of racialization and racial formation. See Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007).
Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s historical understanding of racial formation and the “racial state” reproduces precisely the conceptual (and political) errors that I am trying to correct here. Namely, that “white supremacy” composes a relatively compartmentalized moment in the historical life of racial formation in the United States, and thus “racism” is a kind of “racial project” (or mode of racialization) that is not organically linked to the changing historical continuities of white supremacy as a logic of social domination. See especially pp. 69–76 in Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
See generally, Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).
Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005).
João Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).
William Bratton and George Kelling, “There Are No Cracks in the Broken Windows: Ideological Academics Are Trying to Undermine a Perfectly Good Idea,” National Review Online, February 28, 2006, accessed January 2009 at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bratton_kelling200602281015.asp.
For an overview of the contemporary history of “Zero Tolerance” and “Broken Windows” policing, see Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2000).
Amanda Petteruti and Nastassia Walsh, Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies (Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2008), see especially pp. 23 and 26.
“Frontline: L.A.P.D. Blues,” Public Broadcasting Service, airdate May 15, 2001.
For historical context, see Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007).
Joel Rubin, “11 LAPD Officers Face Discipline in May Day Melee,” Los Angeles Times (online edition), September 17, 2008, accessed December 2008 at http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/17/local/me-mayday17.
Dylan Rodriguez, “White Supremacy as Substructure: Toward a Genealogy of a Racial Animus, from ‘Reconstruction’ to ‘Pacification,’” in State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States, eds. Moon-Kie Jung, João H. Costa Vargas, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), 47–76.
By way of example, Manhattan Institute Scholar John McWhorter represents this political-intellectual tendency in his “Black neoconservative” texts Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000) and Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority (New York: Gotham Books, 2003).
See “Introduction: American Apocalypse,” Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (London: Routledge, 1996), 414.
See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
See Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order 30, no. 2 (2003): 18–27.
Jasbir Puar’s examination of “white ascendancy” in her significant work Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) is in direct resonance with my argument here.
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© 2011 Monica J. Casper and Paisley Currah
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Rodríguez, D. (2011). Multiculturalist White Supremacy and the Substructure of the Body. In: Casper, M.J., Currah, P. (eds) Corpus. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119536_3
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