A "compelling study" of how the idea of white supremacy persists long after the Civil Rights Act—"as thoughtful as it is fierce" (David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History).
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.
Industry Reviews
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.
