Kathleen Belew

Ramon A. Gutierrez

"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-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. 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. This Field Guide proposes that a better understanding of hate groups, white supremacy, and the ways that racism and patriarchy have 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"--

A Field Guide to White Supremacy

The New Latino Studies Reader is designed as a contemporary, updated, multifaceted collection of writings that bring to force the exciting, necessary scholarship of the last decades. Its aim is to introduce a new generation of students to a wide-ranging set of essays that helps them gain a truer understanding of what it’s like to be a Latino in the United States. With the reader, students explore the sociohistorical formation of Latinos as a distinct panethnic group in the United States, delving into issues of class formation; social stratification; racial, gender, and sexual identities; and politics and cultural production. And while other readers now in print may discuss Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Central Americans as distinct groups with unique experiences, this text explores both the commonalities and the differences that structure the experiences of Latino Americans. Timely, thorough, and thought-provoking, The New Latino Studies Reader provides a genuine view of the Latino experience as a whole.

A Twenty-First-Century Perspective

The New Latino Studies Reader

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.

Ramon A. Gutierrez

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