The Plague of White Supremacy in the Age of Fascist Politics (original) (raw)

Language provides [fascism] with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation."-Theodor W. Adorno The toxic thrust of white supremacy runs through American culture like an electric current. Without apology, Jim Crow is back suffocating American society in a wave of voter suppression laws, ongoing attempts by right-wing politicians to implement a form of apartheid pedagogy, and the resurgence of a right-wing cultural politics organized around the legacy of white nationalism and white supremacy. The emergence of white supremacy to the centers of power is also evident in the reign of police violence against Black people that came into full view with the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer and the ensuing mass protest against racist police brutality across the globe. White supremacy works not only through the force of state repression and violence but also in the colonizing of subjectivity, manufactured ignorance, and the power of a reactionary culture with its relentless pedagogies of repression. The cult of manufactured ignorance now works through disimagination machines engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. Its politics of cruelty now cloaks itself in the false claims of "patriotism." The spectacle of Trumpism and its brew of white supremacist ideology and disdain for the truth undergirds the further collapse of democratic visions in higher education and in broader public spheres, made all the more obvious by the obsession with methodologies and the reign of instrumental reason, which has returned on the educational front with a vengeance. Education as a vehicle for white supremacy now moves between the reactionary policies of Republican legislators that now use the law to turn their states into white nationalist factories and a right-wing social media machine that uses the Internet and other online services to spread racial hatred. As William Barber II, Liz Theoharis, Timothy B. Tyson, and Cornel West have argued, white supremacy has once again turned deadly and has put democracy on trial. They write: Even now, the ancient lie of white supremacy remains lethal. It has left millions of African-American children impoverished in resegregated and deindustrialized cities. It embraces high-poverty, racially isolated schools that imperil our children-and our future. It shoots first and dodges questions later. "Not everything that is faced can be changed," James Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced."i In what follows, I want to examine the totality of white supremacy as an educational force by connecting its threads through the rise of voter suppression, the attacks on education via critical race theory, and the culture of police violence.