State of White Supremacy investigates how race functions as an enduring logic of governance in the United States, perpetually generating and legitimating racial hierarchy and privilege.
The deeply entrenched patterns of racial inequality in the United States simply do not square with the liberal notion of a nation-state of equal citizens. Uncovering the false promise of liberalism, State of White Supremacy reveals race to be a fundamental, if flexible, ruling logic that perpetually generates and legitimates racial hierarchy and privilege.
Racial domination and violence in the United States are indelibly marked by its origin and ongoing development as an empire-state. The widespread misrecognition of the United States as a liberal nation-state hinges on the twin conditions of its approximation for the white majority and its impossibility for their racial others. The essays in this book incisively probe and critique the U.S. racial state through a broad range of topics, including citizenship, education, empire, gender, genocide, geography, incarceration, Islamophobia, migration and border enforcement, violence, and welfare.
"This timely work on race and the state offers an insightful and compelling discussion of the ways in which government policies and actions continue to generate and support racial inequality. Certainly, as measured by the increasing racial diversity of the nation's political leaders, the country is experiencing important changes. However, as this book makes clear, we must be careful not to mistake superficial indicators of difference with real changes in our state and institutional practices."
