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This article examines a selection of the North American scholarly research that calls for “moving beyond” a “Black/White binary paradigm.” Some scholars suggest this paradigm limits or obscures a complex understanding of the historical record on race, racism, and racialization for Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, and Native Americans. On the face of it, the notion of a Black/White binary paradigm and the call to move beyond appears persuasive. The discourse of a Black/White binary paradigm, however, confuses, misnames, and simplifies the historical and contemporary experiences structured within what is, in fact, the racially incorporative matrix of a black/white Manicheanism. We assert this call sets up blackness and, by extension, people socially defined as “black” as impediments to multiracial coalition building. As a result, “moving beyond” is epistemologically faulty and politically harmful for African-descended people because it is based on “bad faith” toward blackness.

This essay is a discrete survey of administrative-authoritarian criminologists’ neutralizing techniques for justifying and aiding and abetting racial profiling in policing and, by inference, racialized ‘carding’. Principally focused on Canada and the US, material for this survey arises from the effort of administrative-authoritarian criminologists who claim to refute commissioned reports, case law and obiter dicta, government reports and scholarly research affirming racial profiling in particular and racial discrimination in the criminal legal system generally. Rooted in counter-colonial, anti-criminology and abolitionist epistemology my method of exposition is to turn the claims administrative-authoritarian criminologists hold to be true back onto criminology itself to see what account it provides for itself. Following the path worn by Hannah Arendt, I set out to demonstrate that in taking the effects of racial profiling and the legibilizing of ‘carding’ as objectively authoritarian-criminologists, administrative-authoritarian are irresponsible in the exercise of judgment to true ideas.

This Special Issue—“Whiteness in the Age of White Rage”—names and interrogates what is implicit in anti-racist, Indigenous, and whiteness studies: white rage. Drawing on Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2017), we invited scholars to explore empirical and theoretical inquiry of how rage is a defining characteristic of settler colonialism, whiteness, and white supremacy in Canada. In this Introduction we elaborate how contemporaneously, historically, and theoretically a vital dimension of the configuration of whiteness in Canada is the normalization of rage as a property right of whiteness. Presently, as fascism is once again a global phenomenon, there is an opportunity for critical scholarship on whiteness in Canada to name and explicate the social effects and quotidian mobilization of rage in conservative and liberal articulations of white supremacy. We offer a general outline to the theme of whiteness in the age of white rage to introduce nascent scholarship that builds on the scholarship of Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and critical whiteness scholars.

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