A Field Guide to White Supremacy

Kathleen Belew, Ramon A. Gutierrez, Kathleen Belew, Ramon A. Gutierrez

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520382534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Drawing explicit lines, across time and a broad spectrum of violent acts, to provide the definitive field guide for understanding and opposing white supremacy in America Hate, racial violence, exclusion, and racist laws receive breathless media coverage, but such attention focuses on distinct events that gain our attention for twenty-four hours. The events are presented as episodic one-offs, unfortunate but uncanny exceptions perpetrated by lone wolves, extremists, or individuals suffering from mental illness—and then the news cycle moves on. If we turn to scholars and historians for background and answers, we often find their knowledge siloed in distinct academic subfields, rarely connecting current events with legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. But recent hateful actions are deeply connected to the past—joined not only by common perpetrators, but bythe vast complex of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs that comprise white supremacy in the United States. Gathering together a cohort of researchers and writers, A Field Guide to White Supremacy provides much-needed connections between violence present and past. This book illuminates the career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose that violence. The Field Guide is meant as an urgent resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens, illuminating common threads in white supremacist actions at every scale, from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law. Covering immigration, antisemitism, gendered violence, lynching, and organized domestic terrorism, the authors reveal white supremacy as a motivating force in manifold parts of American life. The book also offers a sampling of some of the most recent scholarship in this area in order to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, and activists and their communities. A Field Guide to White Supremacy will be an indispensable resource in paving the way for politics of alliance in resistance and renewal.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Nicholas Fandos, “Senate Leader Says President ‘Provoked’ Mob,” New York Times, January 20, 2021, 1, 23.

2. See, for instance: Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

SECTION I: BUILDING, PROTECTING, AND PROFITING FROM WHITENESS

1. On settler colonialism, see: Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017); Edward Cavanagh, The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (New York Routledge, 2017); Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018); Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Natsu Taylor Saito, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists (New York: NYU Press, 2020).

2. James Madison Papers, vol. 75: February 4, 1826, Library of Congress, as quoted in Nicholas De Genova, Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians in the Remaking of the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1.

3. Senator John C. Calhoun, “Speech on Mexico’s Annexation,” The Congressional Globe, January 4, 1848, 96–100.

4. For the classic works on racial capitalism, see: C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (New York: Russell & Russell, 1944); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

5. Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (June 2013): 2151–2226.

6. Cybelle Fox, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

7. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 113–41.

CHAPTER 1. NATION V. MUNICIPALITY

This chapter is reprinted from NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 6, no. 2 (Fall 2019).

1. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 population estimates, the total population of Hobart is 9,496, with 78.3 percent of the population identifying as white (non-Hispanic or Latino) and 10.6 percent of the population identifying as American Indian / Alaska Native. See www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/hobartvillagewisconsin,US/INC110217.

2. Hugh Danforth, letter to the editor, Kalihwisaks, October 31, 2002, 7A.

3. Hugh Danforth, letter to the editor, Kalihwisaks, April 4, 2002, 10A.

4. Dawes Severalty Act, February 8, 1887, 24 Stat. 388. For an overview of Oneida history during the allotment period, see L. Gordon McLester III and Laurence M. Hauptman, The Oneida Indians in the Age of Allotment, 1860–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008).

5. “Petition of the Oneidas for Admission to Brown County,” Daily State Gazette (Green Bay, WI), February 13, 1890, 3.

6. “Oneida Reservation, Proposed to Invest the Indians with Local Town Governments,” Oshkosh Northwestern, April 24, 1903, 4.

7. “Ready for Legislature, Bill to Create Townships for Reservation Is Drafted,” Appleton Post, April 23, 1903, 3; “Would Annex Part of the Reservation,” Post-Crescent (Appleton, WI), February 1, 1908, 8.

8. “Five New Members in County Board,” Green Bay Semi-Weekly Gazette, April 11, 1908, 1; “Oneida Organized into a Township,” Post-Crescent, April 7, 1910, 1.

9. Hugh Danforth, letter to the editor, Kalihwisaks, November 29, 2002, 6A.

10. Rebecca M. Webster, “Service Agreements: Exploring Payment Formulas for Tribal Trust Lands on the Oneida Reservation,” American Indian Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2015): 347–63.

11. John Greendeer, “State of the Tribes Address,” Wisconsin State Assembly, March 13, 2012, https://wiseye.org/2012/03/13/assembly-floor-session-with-state-of-the-tribes-address-part-1-of-4/.

12. Paul Egelhoff, letter to the editor, Kalihwi...