All content tagged with: White Supremacy

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  • In Fear of Black Revolutionary Contagion and Insurrection: Foucault, Galtung, and the Genesis of Racialized Structural Violence in American Foreign Policy and Immigration Law

    This article investigates the power relation between the political anatomy of the Black soul and non-somatic expressions of white supremacy-based violence. Utilizing Michel Foucault’s theories of discipline and punishment in conjunction with Johan Galtung’s theory of structural violence, I posit that the exercise of state-sanctioned discipline and punishment in furtherance of white supremacy constitutes racialized structural violence. Thus, this article contributes to the current public discourse concerning the role white supremacy plays in America by establishing a new construct that can be used to dissect the nature of racial oppression. Furthermore, this article analyzes the genesis and construction of racialized structural violence in American foreign policy and immigration law using America’s response to the Haitian Revolution as a case study. When combined, akin to discipline, American foreign policy and immigration law is a white supremacy-oriented, complex bundle of power technologies designed to evoke docility from Black and Brown nations. Both allow America to engage in dissociative white supremacy. Over time, America’s “right” and power to discipline and punish Black and Brown nations has been normalized as a rational function of our global society.

  • Combatting White Supremacy: The Pressing Need to Make the Baseless “Scientific” Origins of Race and Their Place in Society Part of American Curriculum

    By Matthew Fellows Associate Editor, Vol. 25 Race is a human invention. Although made up, race theories in their inception were offered and accepted as constituting natural scientific fact. The hierarchies created out of pen and paper articulated what people thought was a proper arrangement of the…

  • There Are No Racists Here: The Rise of Racial Extremism, When No One is Racist

    At first glance hate murders appear wholly anachronistic in post-racial America. This Article suggests otherwise. The Article begins by analyzing the periodic expansions of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the protection for racist expression in First Amendment doctrine. The Article then contextualizes the case law by providing evidence of how the First Amendment works on the ground in two separate areas —the enforcement of hate crime law and on university campuses that enact speech codes. In these areas, those using racist expression receive full protection for their beliefs. Part III describes social spaces—social media and employment where slurs and epithets may be used frequently. The final portion of the Article briefly explores two forms of unacknowledged racial violence—violence directed at minorities who move to white neighborhoods and extremist killings. Our inaccurate approach to bias-motivated crime and the culture of protection around racist expression, the Article concludes, leaves American society vulnerable to the danger created by racial extremists.

  • Systemic Racial Bias and RICO’s Application to Criminal Street and Prison Gangs

    This Article presents an empirical study of race and the application of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to criminal street and prison gangs. A strong majority (approximately 86%) of the prosecutions in the study involved gangs that were affiliated with one or more racial minority groups. All but one of the prosecuted White-affiliated gangs fell into three categories: international organized crime groups, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and White supremacist prison gangs. Some scholars and practitioners would explain these findings by contending that most criminal street gangs are comprised of racial minorities. This Article challenges and problematizes this factual assumption by critically examining the processes by which the government may come to label certain aiminal groups as gangs for RICO purposes. Based on the study findings, the Article argues that this labeling may be driven by systemic racial biases that marginalize entire racial minority groups and privilege mainstream nonimmigrant White communities. These systemic biases are characterized by converging constructions of race and crime, which fuse perceptions of gang-related crime with images of racial minorities. Conflating racial minorities with criminal activity enables the government to rely upon denigrating racial stereotypes in order to engage in invidious practices of racial profiling and to conduct sweeping arrests of racial minorities under RICO. This conflation also shields groups of nonimmigrant White criminal offenders from being conceptualized as gangs and shields nonimmigrant White neighborhoods from the stigma of having gang problems. In practice, this may harm communities that have White gang problems by preventing the government from executing gang-specific interventions within those communities.

  • Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States

    In recent years, the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, and Mato Grasso du Sol have implemented race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education. These states established admissions quotas in public universities for Afro-Brazilians or afrodescendentes. As a result, determining who is "Black'' has become a complex yet important undertaking in Brazil. Scholars and the general public alike have claimed that the determination of Blackness in Brazil is different than in the United States; determining Blackness in the United States is allegedly a simpler task than in Brazil. In Brazil it is widely acknowledged that most Brazilians are descendants of Africans in light of the pervasive miscegenation that occurred during and after the Portuguese and Brazilian enslavement of Africans. As a result, Brazilians ubiquitously profess their African ancestry. Yet, a highly stratified racial classification system exists in Brazil whereby the guiding principle for determining race is one's physical appearance—hair texture, skin color, nose size, eye shape, for example. However, it is commonly assumed that the rule of hypodescent-the presence of one African ancestor defines an individual as Black-determines an individual's "Blackness" in the United States. Accordingly, ancestry allegedly determines Blackness in the United States dissimilarly to Brazil, where one's physical appearance is determinative. Contrary to the proposition that race, and specifically Blackness, is fundamentally different in Brazil and the United States, Professor Greene contends that one's physical appearance is the primary determinant of Blackness in both American nations. Indeed, one's ancestry is necessarily implicated in determining race based on “physical appearance," as this method of classifying race is grounded in socially mediated presumptions concerning how an individual's physical appearance denotes his or her genetic makeup. Thus, in this Article, Professor Greene mitigates the void in Brazil/U.S. comparative scholarship discussing race-conscious affirmative action by delineating the universality of race, racial hierarchy, and racial ideology in Brazil and the United States.

  • Same-Sex Loving:Subverting White Supremacy Through Same-Sex Marriage

    This Article marks the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia- the landmark decision that responded to the question of the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws by firmly stating that the fundamental right to marry could not be restricted by race-by taking up the issue of the case's applicability in the context of same-sex marriage. The invocation of Loving has generally been in a manner that invites comparisons between interracial and same-sex marriage. Pro same-sex marriage arguments that utilize this comparison-which has come to be known as the "Loving Analogy"-- include the decision's freedom of choice and antidiscrimination elements, but rarely incorporate the Supreme Court's antisubordination message, as articulated through its anti-white supremacy stance. This Article seeks to rectify that. It argues that same-sex marriage subverts White supremacy by undermining heterosupremacy, countering notions of White superiority, and, because of the very existence of interracial same-sex couples, striking society "color-blind," thus rendering race temporarily invisible. This Article reaches the conclusion that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue that works against heterosupremacy and White supremacy and that Loving v. Virginia is indeed a case that can and should be extended to sanction same-sex marriage and support Lesbian and Gay couples.

  • Deconstructing the Ideology of White Aesthetics

    In this Article, the author provides a discussion on the dynamic between race and aesthetics. The author states that because Whites are the dominant group in America, they dictate what is beautiful. The consequence of this power dynamic is that the dominant group, Whites, can exercise preferences in deciding how to look or express themselves, whereas people of color are limited to either conforming to an imposed White standard or rejecting it. The author starts by laying out some of the features to what he terms the "ideology of White aesthetics." He then commences to examine how this ideology has played out in Black-White relations and in relations between Asian Americans and Whites, and how it may be used to shed new light both on race relations and on behavior within communities of color. The author concludes by addressing potential counter-arguments.