Winner, The Frantz Fanon Award for an Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought 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 November 2016, white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft proliferated. 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-Dylan Rodriguez 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 permeates the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion, formal equality, and "multiculturalist white supremacy." Throughout White Reconstruction, Rodriguez considers how the creative, imaginative, speculative collective labor of abolitionist praxis can displace and potentially destroy the ascendancy of White Being and Civilization in order to create possibilities for insurgent thriving.
Dylan Rodriguez, Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, served as Chair of Ethnic Studies from 2009 to 2016, and as President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition. He is a founding member of Critical Resistance and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.
Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction: "The Cause Is Effect": Inhabiting White Reconstruction 1 1 "I Used Her Ashes": Multiculturalist White Supremacy/Counterinsurgency/Domestic War 35 2 "Let the Past Be Forgotten . . .": Remaking White Being, from Reconstruction to Pacification 59 3 Goldwater's Tribal Tattoo: On Origins and Deletions of Post-Raciality 107 4 "Civilization in Its Reddened Waters": Anti-Black, Racial-Colonial Genocide and the Logic of Evisceration 135 5 "Mass Incarceration" as Misnomer: Domestic War and the Narratives of Carceral Reform 176 Epilogue: Abolitionist Imperatives 215 Notes 229 Index 281
As thoughtful as it is fierce, White Reconstruction is a pleasure for those of us who study and teach history. Refusing to imagine the historian's concerns as at odds with those of the theorist, Rodriguez shows white supremacy reinventing its forms without losing sight of its imperatives. In consolidating slick new moments of control, rulers retain old modes of domination. Moments of multiculturalism and those of terror against vulnerable populations do not succeed, but instead structure, each other in this compelling study.---David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History Drawing from a deep reservoir of radical writing and activism, leading abolitionist thinker Dylan Rodriguez creatively frames the current multiculturalist moment as the latest stage of historical reconstructions of white domination. He astutely distinguishes anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power while demonstrating how they remain linked by global white supremacist aspirations and logics. White Reconstruction challenges us to think more radically both by eschewing reformist ideas and terms and by learning from the creative genius of liberationist insurgencies that call us to abolitionist struggle.---Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
