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 by the 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.