A Field Guide to White Supremacy

A Field Guide to White Supremacy

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Lawrence Grauman, Jr. Fund.

A Field Guide to White Supremacy

Edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez

Chapter 1 was previously published in NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 6, no. 2 (Fall 2019). Chapter 2 was previously published in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket, 2016). Chapter 5 is reprinted from A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year, Guernica, January 25, 2013. Chapter 6 originally appeared in Slate, May 1, 2018. Chapter 10 was previously published as the foreword to On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice by Judith Butler and Jewish Voices for Peace (Haymarket, 2017). Chapter 15 is excerpted and updated from Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Belew, Kathleen, 1981- author. | Gutiérrez, Ramón A., 1951- author.

Title: A field guide to white supremacy / Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020058505 (print) | LCCN 2020058506 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520382503 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520382527 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520382534 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: White supremacy movements—United States. | Anti-racism—United States.

Classification: LCC E184.A1 B348 2021 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | DDC 320.56/909—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058505

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058506

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

Thoughts on the Associated Press Stylebook

Kathleen Belew et al.

Introduction

Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Kathleen Belew

SECTION I BUILDING, PROTECTING, AND PROFITING FROM WHITENESS

1. Nation v. Municipality: Indigenous Land Recovery, Settler Resentment, and Taxation on the Oneida Reservation

Doug Kiel

2. A Culture of Racism

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

3. Policing the Boundaries of the White Republic: From Slave Codes to Mass Deportations

Juan F. Perea

4. The Arc of American Islamophobia: From Early History through the Present

Khaled A. Beydoun

SECTION II ITERATIONS OF WHITE SUPREMACY

5. The Longest War: Rape Culture and Domestic Violence

Rebecca Solnit

6. The Pain We Still Need to Feel: The New Lynching Memorial Confronts the Racial Terrorism That Corrupted America—and Still Does

Jamelle Bouie

7. Anti-Asian Violence and U.S. Imperialism

Simeon Man

8. Homophobia and American Nationalism: Mass Murder at the Pulse Nightclub

Roderick Ferguson

9. Wounds of White Supremacy: Understanding the Epidemic of Violence against Black and Brown Trans Women/Femmes

Croix Saffin

10. On Antisemitism

Judith Butler

SECTION III ANTI-IMMIGRANT NATION

11. Fear of White Replacement: Latina Fertility, White Demographic Decline, and Immigration Reform

Leo R. Chavez

12. Unmaking the Nation of Immigrants: How John Tanton’s Network of Organizations Transformed Policy and Politics

Carly Goodman

13. The Expulsion of Immigrants: America’s Deportation Machine

Adam Goodman

14. The Detention and Deportation Regime as a Conduit of Death: Memorializing and Mourning Migrant Loss

Jessica Ordaz

SECTION IV WHITE SUPREMACY FROM FRINGE TO MAINSTREAM

15. A Recent History of White Supremacy

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

16. From Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump: The Nativist Turn in Right-Wing Populism

Joseph E. Lowndes

17. The Alt-Right in Charlottesville: How an Online Movement Became a Real-World Presence

Nicole Hemmer

18. The Whiteness of Blue Lives: Race in American Policing

Joseph Darda

19. There Are No Lone Wolves: The White Power Movement at War

Kathleen Belew

Conclusion

Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Kathleen Belew

Notes

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index

Thoughts on the Associated Press Stylebook

Kathleen Belew with Khaled Beydoun, Adam Goodman, Carly Goodman, Emily Gorcenski, Nicole Hemmer, Cassie Miller, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Jessica Ordaz, Croix Saffin

As the field standard for journalists, the Associated Press Stylebook plays a major role in fixing the parameters of political debate and imagination. Consider that the most recent edition included contextual entries as long as a paragraph for the Islamist terror groups Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and the Muslim Brotherhood, but no entries for the white power terror groups Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis. White power activists have carried out an overwhelming majority of domestic terror fatalities and attacks in recent years, and the Department of Homeland Security now considers these the largest terrorist threat to the United States—outstripping radical Islamist terrorism.

Yet journalists using the AP Stylebook are ill-equipped to describe white power and militia groups. Our aim in this section is to briefly provide journalists with an overview of the terms and understandings agreed upon by most scholarly specialists and to encourage the editors of the Stylebook to reconsider some of the book’s guidance.

On close reading of the AP Stylebook, we noticed that scholars and journalists often use completely different language to discuss the same social problems. The recommendations here, focused on the terminology and reporting around race, gender, immigration, and political extremism, are meant as a starting point in what we hope will be a longer conversation about how we name and acknowledge white supremacy. In some contexts, we have no recommendations, only questions. In all cases, we welcome feedback from journalists and other scholars in how best to use our shared understanding to achieve clarity and accuracy.

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antisemitism

The AP Stylebook currently recommends hyphenating. We disagree, because we understand Semite and Semitism to be invented terms with a long history in pseudoscience.

•  •  •  •  •

immigration

We urge consideration and modification of the existing entry. Immigrants are people who move. People who move do so for many reasons: to seek better work opportunities, to reunite with family members, to flee danger or persecution. But the context for immigration involves more than individual choices: inequality, persecution, conflict, war, and exploitation by more powerful countries may frame immigration. Likewise, the United States has policies that draw people; immigration is not something that happens to the United States but is part of a process that has been facilitated by U.S. actors. Often when Americans think about immigration, they are thinking about U.S. policies that manage migration, including both admissions and restrictions. Lawful immigrants outnumber unauthorized immigrants. The United States admits people through a few categories (family, labor, humanitarian). Enforcement and restriction produce the category of undocumented.

We urge the AP Stylebook to discourage the use of immigration metaphors that might inspire fear or disgust or might dehumanize immigrants (flood, stream, wave, tide, swarm, horde, etc).

anti-immigrant (no current entry)

The Stylebook does not currently cover one of the most potent political forces of the moment. Anti-immigrant refers to a group, person, or policy that opposes immigration.

deportation, removal, inadmissibility, and voluntary departure

We urge reporters to use specific terminology around these procedures. For instance, documented immigrants can still be deported.

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race

In addition to the current category, Race-related Coverage, we urge the Stylebook to consider defining race itself as a socially constructed category of political identity that has changed over time.

caucasian

This is an outmoded term based on pseudoscience. We urge journalists not to use this term.

Black (capitalized)

Following several prominent media outlets, we agree that Black should be capitalized when it refers to a cultural and racial identity.

Indigenous (capitalized)

Latinx (capitalized)

As the most inclusive and encompassing term, we recommend use of this term, but journalists should defer, when possible, to how people self-identify. Many individuals prefer other terms. Latinx should not be used to refer to people in the past, when the term was not used in self-identification.

reverse discrimination

This term should be used sparingly and in quotation marks. Because racism is a system of power, we see it as incorrect to refer to racism against white people in a white supremacist society. Such arguments often disguise racist policies.

tribe/tribal

These words refer to an Indigenous nation. Do not use tribal to discuss broader political division.

white

The word white refers to a socially constructed and historically fluid category of identity in which people, systems of power, and wealth are invested. This is not a biological or unchangeable category, but neither is it neutral. We struggle with the question of whether to capitalize this word and urge further conversation. We choose not to capitalize white in these pages in keeping with current style guidelines.

white power movement, white supremacist extremist movement

see Terrorism

white supremacist (current entry a subsection of alt-right)

In the current configuration of the Stylebook, white supremacist appears as a subsection of the alt-right, implying first that not all of the alt-right is white supremacist and second that white supremacist is a smaller category. Neither is true. The alt-right is a small and largely faded component of the broader white power movement, which itself represents only one part of the larger group of people who identify as overtly white supremacist.

We propose the following definition of white supremacy:

Both individual belief that white people are inherently better than others and the broad systems of inequality that insure racial disparity of health, income, life, and freedom. Please note that systems can produce white supremacist outcomes without individual belief or racial animus.

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gender (additions and modifications to existing section)

gay

We propose that the Stylebook urge reporters not to use homosexual, even in clinical contexts or references to sexual activity, as this term refers to a long history of pathologizing this population.

gender identity

We understand this to be one’s internal concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither. It includes how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. One’s gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth. For many transgender people, their birth-assigned sex and their own sense of gender identity do not match. (Human Rights Campaign recommendation)

they

Use as a singular pronoun where preferred in self-identification and in stories about people who identify as neither male/man nor female/woman (which can include some transgender people and nonbinary, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming people).

transgender person

A transgender person (not transgendered) is someone whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they know they are on the inside. It includes people who have medically transitioned to align their internal knowledge of their gender with their physical presentation. But it also includes those who have not or will not medically transition as well as nonbinary or gender-expansive people who do not exclusively identify as male or female. (Human Rights Campaign recommendation)

Always use the name with which the person self-identifies.

preferred

When referencing a person’s pronouns or name explicitly, do not add the modifier preferred, e.g., preferred name or preferred pronouns. Instead, simply refer to their name or their pronouns.

pronouns

Pronouns should always match self-identification.

sexual orientation

This term refers to emotional, romantic, sexual, and relational attraction to someone else, whether you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, or use another word to accurately describe your identity. Refrain from using sexual preference, lifestyle, homosexuality, or heterosexuality. In addition, be mindful that some people are transgender and straight, while others are transgender and gay. (Human Rights Campaign recommendation)

woman/women

We encourage journalists to avoid using female and woman as interchangeable terms. Female refers to the genitals present at birth. Woman includes anyone who identifies as a woman.

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political extremism

We propose a new section correcting inaccuracies in the current Stylebook.

terrorism

This term refers to violent action designed to bring about political change and/or to create fear that limits civic life. Do not give detail for Islamist terrorism or left-wing terrorism and then omit similar detail for right-wing, white power, or white nationalist terrorist activity. Always consider comparative casualty rates when dedicating newsroom resources, beat reporting, and story placement related to types of terrorism (for instance, white power terrorism has recently caused more death, damage, and injury than Islamist terrorism, and far more than antifa).

accelerationism

Accelerationism is an extreme philosophy that aims to hasten the demise of current economic and political systems and create a new one, using political violence as a primary mechanism. The goal is to accelerate what is seen as an inevitable collapse of political and economic systems and start anew. Accelerationism has strong components of apocalyptic fantasies and conspiracy theories, and also overlaps significantly with the beliefs of white power, survivalist, and extreme prepper groups, along with doomsday cults and Islamist extremism.

white power movement, white supremacist extremist movement (no current entry)

This is the preferred terminology for the broad affiliation of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, sovereign citizens, Three Percenters, posse comitatus members, some skinheads, some militia groups, and similar groups who seek the violent overthrow of the United States through race war.

local groups and chapters

White power and antigovernment groups have historically changed their names, slogans, and identifying symbols to avoid description. Investigate claims of neutrality with experts, scholars, and watchdog groups rather than taking them at face value.

Local group and chapter names, as well as symbols and insignia, change more rapidly than a style guide can track. Journalists should refer to watchdog organizations and scholars to understand the relative size, prominence, and ideologies of local groups and chapters. These include paramilitary networks like The Base, casual and meme-driven affiliations like Boogaloo Boys, and small, cell-style operational movements like Atomwaffen Division in addition to organized groups with clear and public activities like Identity Evropa / American Identity Movement. We urge journalists to consult reputable tracking organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for Democratic Renewal regularly.

Atomwaffen Division

The Base

Boogaloo Boys

Identity Evropa / American Identity Movement

Oath Keepers

Oath KeepersProud Boys

Oath KeepersThree Percenters/III%

Major ideologies:

alt-left (current entry inaccurate)

False terminology, do not use.

alt-right (current entry inaccurate)

A subsegment of white power and white nationalist activism most active in 2016–17, now fractured. We urge journalists not to use this word to describe present-day activism, as this is an outmoded term.

antifa

Current entry is accurate.

antigovernment

Many militia groups, Three Percenters, sovereign citizens, and other groups are first and foremost antigovernment in their orientation and driven primarily by baseless conspiracy theories about the government disarming citizens and imposing martial law. Some, but not all, of these groups also identify with white power.

white nationalist (current entry a subsection of alt-right)

Use sparingly or in quotation marks as this term often masks violent ideology and intent.

Christian Identity, Odinism

These and other white supremacist religious belief systems may be most precisely referred to as political ideologies. Each of these posits that non-white persons are less than human or not valuable compared to white people.

Ku Klux Klan

Part of the white power movement, the Ku Klux Klan is an organized terrorist group dating from the post–Civil War era. Membership surges have aligned with the aftermath of every American war. The Klan has, since the 1920s, had representation in every region of the United States. The Klan is classically anti-Black and antisemitic but has used opportunistic targeting of other groups when convenient.

neo-Nazi

Part of the white power movement, neo-Nazism uses the symbols and ideology of Nazi Germany to imagine a white ethnostate.

skinhead

May refer to neo-Nazism, or to other belief systems. It is occasionally necessary to specify racist skinhead, but most skinhead groups in the United States are white power affiliates.

militia movement

A militia is an extralegal paramilitary group that trains, dresses, and prepares for combat, sometimes as part of a movement and sometimes as an unaffiliated group. Militias are extralegal in every state. The militia movement has largely opposed the government and upheld white supremacy. (National Guard units, which incorporated legal militias in the early twentieth century, still occasionally use the word militia without referring to the militia movement.)

lone wolf (no current entry, widely used incorrectly)

Do not use. Ideologically motivated violence should be identified as such. Violence with no motivating ideology should be treated as individual.

manifesto

A manifesto is a document laying out a political ideology, often to explain or incite violence. We urge journalists and editors not to reprint or hyperlink these documents, but rather to seek expert commentary to read, decode, and understand them. The word manifesto should not be misunderstood as an endorsement of quality or validity.

radical

This term refers to a person whose critique of society goes to its roots, whether on the far left or far right.

Radicalization is an active process and should not be referred to in passive voice.

white wellness, white wellness advocate, white well-being, pro-white, white rights advocate, and similar terms

These are synonyms for white power / white supremacist activism; do not use.

Introduction

Kathleen Belew and Ramón Gutiérrez

This Field Guide to White Supremacy illuminates the long and complex career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and across impacted groups, in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose it. We focus here not only on the most catastrophic incidents of white supremacist domestic terrorism—like the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and more recent mass shootings at stores and places of worship, and the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol—but also on the manifold ways that overt and covert white supremacy, supported by often-violent patriarchy and gender norms, have shaped American law, life, and policy.

A field guide is meant to train observers to notice a particular phenomenon—here, white supremacy—and its distinctions. This manual will help observers to notice and name variant forms of white supremacy, ranging from systems to laws, from hate crimes to quiet indifference, from the everyday interactions that comprise white supremacist society to the movements that demand something else.

A Field Guide to White Supremacy, in other words, is meant as a resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens who wish to understand the history, sociology, and rhetoric of this phenomenon. It also offers a sampling of some of the best writing and most recent scholarship on these subfields, to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, activists and their communities.

In this April 6, 1942, photo, a boy sits on a pile of baggage as he waits for his parents, as a military policeman watches in San Francisco. More than 650 citizens of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from their homes and sent to Santa Anita racetrack, an assembly center for the forced internment of alien and American-born Japanese civilians. (AP Photo)

As this volume took final form, between the summer of 2020 and the first weeks of January 2021, our planet and nation faced multiple crises. A devastating COVID-19 pandemic had left more than two million dead, with numbers mounting. The United States witnessed massive protests against systemic racism, a hard-fought presidential election, the U.S. House of Representatives voting articles of impeachment against President Donald J. Trump for the Incitement of Insurrection, and the inauguration of President Joseph Biden. A new chapter of the racial justice movement began on May 25, 2020, when George Floyd, a forty-six-year old Black Minneapolis resident, was arrested for purchasing cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. His arrest turned lethal when Officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground, placing his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, long enough to kill him. A long summer of peaceful mass protests against racist policing and systemic racism followed, escalating into rioting and looting in some cities. At many of these riots, militant-right activists ranging from antigovernment to white power militants delivered bombs, incendiary devices, and weapons to escalate peaceful demonstrations into confrontation with the militarized police forces. They assassinated law enforcement officers, plotted attacks on civil protests, and launched a major and coordinated attack on American communities. President Trump responded with a law and order campaign slogan and deployed federal forces from the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Prisons, and elsewhere—sometimes without name badges or identifying insignia—to subdue the streets, to dominate protesters, and to energize the white supremacist segment of his supporters.

Beginning several years before the 2020 presidential election, President Trump had constantly warned his loyalists that Democrats were determined to steal the election from him. Without corruption, he claimed, he, Trump, would easily win. When Joseph Biden beat Donald Trump by more than seven million votes, winning the electoral college by 306 to 232, Trump refused to acknowledge the results and instead contested his defeat with lawsuits alleging widespread voter fraud. Neither the suits nor the intimidation of state election officials changed the tally, and court after court rejected his claim. Trump’s final salvo over the stolen election was to call his supporters to a Save America March—part of Stop the Steal campaign—in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the day Congress would certify Joseph Biden’s election as president. The motley assemblage, which included white power armed militants, disgruntled military veterans, QAnon conspiracy proponents, radical evangelicals, and fervent members of the Trump base, arrived by the thousands. At the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House, President Trump roiled those gathered: We will stop the steal . . . we can’t let this happen . . . We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore . . . We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you . . . to take back our country. They marched to the Capitol but without Trump. He retired to a White House television set to watch the mob violently attack the building and its occupants for several hours, vandalizing and desecrating the building, injuring numerous Capitol guards, leaving five dead behind in the mayhem. The Federal Bureau of Investigation soon discovered that among the heavily armed insurrectionists were members of white power neo-fascist militias. They had conspired to plan the attack, intending to take prisoners, among them then Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, to stop the steal. Two pipe bombs at the Democratic National Committee and Republican Nation Committee headquarters did not detonate, and the activists used neither their Molotov cocktails nor their military-grade weapons, but the body count was stunningly low, considering their preparation. Once the Capitol building was again under federal control that night, Congress certified the election of Joseph Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States.

This was, make no mistake, a domestic terror attack on U.S. democracy, aimed at derailing free elections through the use of violent force. It was a show of force that used old texts like the white power novel The Turner Diaries to script its action and paved the way for recruitment and radical violence to come.

The House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump on January 13 for high crimes and misdemeanors for inciting an insurrection against the federal government at the U.S. Capitol. On the eve of Biden’s inauguration, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s leader, concluded: The mob was fed lies . . . They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.¹ Though threats had been made by Trump’s loyalists that they would disrupt the inauguration of the forty-sixty president of the United States on January 20, it occurred relatively peacefully, guaranteed only by the massive presence of National Guard troops and police and an increasing recognition of clandestine, extensive networks of organized, armed, antigovernment domestic terrorists espousing insurrectionist variants of white power.

It became clear to many Americans on January 6 that white power and white supremacy are yet live wires in our politics, in our relationships, and in our conversations with one another. As social media companies deplatformed Trump and various groups involved in the insurrection, then pulled hosting from alternative sites like Parler, people grasped for context to understand what they had just seen. But to scholars who have trained their eyes on the study of race and racism, these events did not represent a surprise or a moment of disconnect from who we are. Instead, they flow clearly from a long and fraught history, one now urgent to understand.

What is white supremacy? White supremacy is a complex web of ideology, systems, privileges, and personal beliefs that create unequal outcomes along racial lines across multiple categories of life including wealth, freedom, health, and happiness. It is not a matter of argument among the vast majority of scholars, but of demonstrable fact. White supremacy includes both individual prejudice and, for instance, the long history of the disproportionate incarceration of people of color. It describes a legal system still predisposed towards racial inequality even when judge, counsel, and jurors abjure racism at the individual level. It is collective and individual. It is old and immediate. Some white supremacists turn to violence, but there are also a lot of people who are individually white supremacist—some openly so—and reject violence. Others have seen the ugliness of their personal racism and renounced its manifestations large and small.

But white supremacy operates through a collection of misunderstandings. It requires public officials like George Wallace, Patrick Buchanan, and Donald Trump who engage and encourage it in volumes ranging from dog-whistles to overt shouts. It requires a body politic that is not curious about its own history, doesn’t understand the long and deep roots of its inequalities, and doesn’t recognize its own culpability in the failure to confront its massive injustices.

This story goes back to the founding of the nation. Historians sometimes argue over precise dates and the relative importance of key events, but the overwhelming majority agree that the colonies that eventually formed America were defined through violent articulation of the political identity that would become whiteness. From Christopher Columbus’s 1492 ill-fated settlement on Hispaniola, to the North American outposts the French and Dutch established before the foundation of Jamestown, the goal of these settler colonialists was the denigration of Indigenous peoples and the violent appropriation of their labor, natural resources, and even their lives. The loss of Indian labor quickly gave rise to the African slave trade. The founding documents of the United States promised life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness not for all, but for white, property-owning men. A long series of contestations has gradually opened citizenship to those previously excluded: non–property owners, women, people of color, Indians not taxed, and more—but this project has been incomplete, characterized by steps forward and back and by massive resistance to the extension of voting and civil rights to subordinated groups.

The historical moments when America saw more people incorporated as democratic subjects came not from goodwill or perfection of the American experiment, but through the actions and organizing of those people themselves. Women worked tirelessly for their own suffrage, for instance. And recent scholarship has highlighted the role of enslaved persons in fighting for their own freedom.

Whiteness itself is a socially constructed category that has changed dramatically over the course of United States history. In early America, whiteness worked as a political affinity among different ethnic groups. Not until the nineteenth century did racial pseudoscience introduce the idea of white as a biological marker. Even this whiteness changed over time, expanding to include previously excluded groups like Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants in the early twentieth century. And all along the way, whiteness was determined at the local level largely by individual bureaucrats, who variously held the line on strict standards or allowed passing and mutable boundaries as the local context required.²

As the bright line around whiteness changed and intensified, immigration restriction and anti-immigrant animus came to delineate large numbers of persons from Latin America and the Caribbean as nonwhite. Anti-Indian violence defined whiteness in early America. Slavery and Asian exclusion defined it in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century brought the mass forced deportations of Mexican Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans, the durability of Jim Crow segregation in the South and de facto segregation nationwide, and heightening immigration restriction at the U.S.-Mexico border. After intensifying measures born of terrorist threats at the end of the twentieth century, cross-border migrations had become more difficult and much more deadly, with vigilante enforcement of immigration restriction quite regular and, at the time of writing, even condoned by the state.

One need look no farther than basic disparities across medical care, incarceration, life expectancy, maternal mortality, and even incidence of coronavirus infection—which at the time of writing had a death toll twice as high among people of color as among white people—to see that America hasn’t fulfilled the promise of equality for women, people of color, LGBT and gender-nonconforming persons, and others. Nor has it reckoned with the legacy of settler colonialism—the process of taking and populating the nation through violence against, forced assimilation of, and legal exploitation of first peoples.

As with many social ills, at least part of this continued injustice has to do with failure to understand these problems as part of an overlapping system of race and gender disparity. Even in the scholarship, specialists often delve deep into one area of the problem—hate crimes against a particular group, for instance, or state violence to the exclusion of individual prejudice or vice versa. This Field Guide proposes that a better understanding of hate groups, white supremacy, and the ways that racism and patriarchy have become braided into our laws and systems can help people to tell, and understand, better stories.

To read the intertwined histories of hate crimes against Black Americans, women, Muslim Americans, Latina/o immigrants, Jews, and Asian migrants is to see the large patterns of exclusion and policing that have made possible the continued rule of white supremacy in the twenty-first century. It is to begin to inventory the injustices, past and present, with which the nation would have to reconcile to truly fulfill its democratic promise.

The Field Guide opens with a set of recommended changes to the Associated Press Stylebook. These are meant to directly engage journalists and other storytellers in a conversation around the ways in which language has contributed to, or failed to directly confront, white supremacy in our society. Here, we mean to begin a conversation, rather than to prescribe arbitrary changes.

Then, Section I, Building, Protecting, and Profiting from Whiteness, introduces the reader to the broad archaeology of exclusion that constituted United States law from early America to the present, spanning analysis of different racial and religious groups and their comparative access to, or denial of, full citizenship. These essays focus both on the history and mechanisms of exclusion and removal, and on the state violence integral to those processes even in the recent past. Together they argue that the construction and defense of whiteness rests on a plurality of discriminatory and violent systems that have worked to remove people of color from the American body politic.

In Iterations of White Supremacy, we closely examine groups who have borne the brunt of racist, patriarchal, and homophobic violence. Looking carefully at the casualties attributable to sources ranging from individual domestic violence cases to mass shootings of women; from mob lynching to government incarceration and execution of Black Americans; from harassment of Asian Americans, to homophobic mass murder, to the intersectional risks of trans persons of color; we can discover that the long history of vigilante perpetration of hate crime has gained a degree of implicit state approval. We can read as much in its continued presence in American life.

The next section moves to consider the Anti-Immigrant Nation, focusing specifically on the violent enforcement of immigration policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, the architecture and enforcement of deportation, and the way that anti-immigrant action groups have shaped a larger political consensus about what sorts of immigrants should be seen as deserving or criminal. These essays reveal the many ways that the nation is constituted by its borders and border-keeping practices.

In White Supremacy from Fringe to Mainstream, we seek to excavate the relationship between radical manifestations of white supremacist and nativist politics and their continued durability in mainstream political discourse. Spanning the recent career of white supremacy, we focus here on the legacy of the culture wars, the emergence of movements like the alt-right and Blue Lives Matter as new articulations of white identity, and the persistence of the white power movement as a violent undercurrent in American politics.

Finally, we ask, where do we go from here? What could knowledge and reporting look like with the context of the Field Guide in hand? If we can recognize and name the many variants of white supremacy around us, might we imagine a world that is not so permeated with them?

SECTION ONE

Building, Protecting, and Profiting from Whiteness

Over the last few decades, two new ideas which focus on the origins, legacies, and persistence of white supremacy in the United States and other settler societies around the globe have reshaped the telling of American history. One is settler colonialism, which names and documents contact and colonization by a nation that wishes to populate the encountered land, rather than, for instance, extract colonialism, in which the colonizers seek only to take wealth and resources back to their home country. The other is racial capitalism, the idea that capitalism and white supremacy have been intertwined since their inception.

Settler colonial accounts of the United States study the nature of first contacts between Indigenous peoples and European colonists. Though some of these encounters began as peaceful conquests directed by missionaries, they were always supported by force of arms, were routinely violent, and, ultimately, had genocidal results. Following in the wake of the Columbian voyages throughout the Americas, colonial settlers from Spain, England, and France imposed their dominance, systematically exploiting Native Americans, demanding their labor and their bodies, driving them off of ancestral planting and hunting grounds, then declaring those vacant, the rightful property of the settlers. These lies were compounded when European colonists asserted that the Indians were culturally inferior. They were said to worship false gods and had doggedly resisted Christianization and domination, behaviors the settlers racialized as Red. The Natives were savages who required civilizing by their white colonial lords and ladies, who claimed superiority of faith and genteel birth. Broken peace treaties and the loss of territorial sovereignty followed. Then came removal onto reservations and intentional exposure to diseases by agents of the U.S. government to quicken the vanishing of the Red race. For the children who survived this holocaust, it meant separation from their parents and cultures for placement in Indian boarding schools, where they were to forget their homelands, seeking an aspirational equality always denied, never fully Americans, ever Natives without rights. Settler colonialism featured two prominent mechanisms of genocide: one through direct violence, the other through forced assimilation. One does not have to look too far to witness the legacies of settler colonialism still present in Indigenous poverty, segregation, lapses in medical care, and victimization by predators ever intent on exploiting their natural resources without recompense.¹

American history relies on two racial dichotomies—white/Black and white/nonwhite—to tell the story of African slavery and colonial territorial expansion. James Madison offered one of many possible explanations for how these distinctions were born. In 1826, by then a former president of the United States, Madison wrote the U.S. Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Thomas L. McKenney, expressing a foreign policy concern. Next to the case of the black race within our bosom, that of the red on our borders is the problem most baffling to the policy of our country.² African slavery by then was a long-established, rapidly growing, profitable institution. For Madison slaves were property of their white masters, in the very bosom of the body politic and unproblematic, while Native Americans were outsiders and threats to the nation’s boundaries. Two decades later as the United States negotiated its spoils at the end of the Mexican War in 1848, John C. Calhoun rose before his Senate colleagues objecting to the incorporation of any Mexicans because they were mostly Indians. Ours is the Government of the white man . . . [of] the Caucasian race, Calhoun vaunted. The United States had never considered integrating Indian tribes. He reminded his listeners that they had been driven into the forests by force.³

As these quotations illustrate, this section of the Guide brings together authors who combine the insights of settler colonialism with those who chronicle the history of racial capitalism, two literatures long deemed distant and distinct. Settler colonialism interrogates anew how the United States managed its foreign policy with Indigenous nations. Racial capitalism reveals the relationship between slavery and development of capitalism as more than just distinct modes of deriving value from the exploitation of racialized human labor in the American South before the Civil War. It posits instead that slavery’s cotton production in the South fueled the industrialization of Northern cotton mills, its exports monetizing capitalism’s global reach, birthing America as its quintessential exemplar of capitalism. To the present it has continued to exploit and marginalize racial others to maintain white supremacy.⁴

Racial capitalism illuminates the historical lineages of our collective past and present, focusing on a white supremacist legal order and government public policies related to anti-Blackness and the denigration of nonwhite migrant and immigrant labor. It asserts that whiteness has a value today, and has always had such a value. Africans held in slavery were only three-fifths of a person under the Constitution; despite their hard labor as immigrants and model behavior as residents, Muslims were denied access to citizenship because they were not considered white. Until 1967, antimiscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriages between Blacks and whites and between nonwhites and whites. Simply calling a white person Black in the past was ruled a defamation by judges, requiring monetary compensation. Homer Plessy, of the famous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that upheld separate but equal as the rule of law, insisted that his seven-eighths whiteness was the most valuable sort of property . . . the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity. Unfortunately for Homer Plessy, he was not allowed to ride in railroad cars reserved for whites only. He was an octoroon. By laws derived by the idea that even one drop of Black blood contaminated his whiteness, he was Black.⁵

Today, in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, and more than 160 Black women and men were killed by police in 2020, our streets have boiled over with protest. From the Black Lives Matter movement and others protesting against state violence, mass incarceration, and the lack of opportunities for those racialized as Black and Brown, one constantly hears demands that racial capitalism be abolished for a more equitable economic system. Militant voices were raised after the Great Depression when New Deal government programs created safety nets for American citizens but excluded domestic and agricultural workers without using racist language to target Blacks and Mexicans.⁶ Between 1944 and 1971, the U.S. government spent over $95 billion in what was called the GI Bill of Rights for veterans of World War II. It helped millions of men buy homes, move into the suburbs, attend college, gain small business loans, and obtain government job. The benefits mainly reached whites.⁷

Here, then, we begin with Doug Kiel’s essay, which studies the Oneida Nation’s loss of some sixty thousand acres in northern Wisconsin in the years following the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. Ever since, the nation has tried to reestablish its territorial sovereignty, only to have it contentiously stalled and litigated by the white residents of Hobart, who own land within the reservation’s boundaries. In A Culture of Racism, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor delves into more recent iterations of white supremacy in government programs. Time after time, federal public policy architects have blamed poor Blacks for their lack of access to opportunities as rooted in their cultural pathologies and family structures, when in fact they are due to systemic racism. Juan A. Perea offers us a sweeping historical overview of the legal development of the plenary powers of the United States president and Congress used to manage African slave protest, remove Native Americans from their ancestral lands, and since 1882 to exclude Asians from entering the country and to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants. Finally, Khaled A. Beydoun turns our attention to the long history of Islamophobia in American law, starting with the 1790 Nationalization Act, which denied Muslim immigrants access to naturalized citizenship as nonwhites, a prejudice that continues, evident particularly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the more recent Muslim entry bans.