We are in the fray of another signature moment in the long history of
the United States as a project of anti-Black and racial–colonial
violence. Long before (and well after) November 2016, white
nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft
proliferated state and extra-state terror as a common order. Here,
Dylan Rodríguez counter-narrates the long “post–civil rights”
half-century as a period of White Reconstruction, in which the
struggle to reassemble the ascendancy of White Being toxifies the
formal disassembly of U.S. (Jim/Jane Crow) apartheid and permeates
the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion,
formal equality, and “multiculturalist white supremacy.”
Thinking across a
variety of archival, testimonial, visual, and activist texts—from
Freedmen’s Bureau documents and the “Join LAPD” hiring campaign
to Barry Goldwater’s hidden tattoo and the Pelican Bay prison
strike—White Reconstruction implicates the cultural politics
and statecraft of white liberalism and reaction alike, illustrating
how anti-Black and racial–colonial domestic war not only survive
periods of reform but are the conditions of dominance on which such
reforms rely, and through which they often articulate.
Throughout White
Reconstruction, Rodríguez considers how the creative,
imaginative, speculative collective labor of abolitionist praxis
responds to legitimated and normalized state violence and terror,
showing how the complex and constructive work of abolition can
displace and potentially destroy the ascendancy of White Being and
Civilization in order to create possibilities for insurgent thriving.
