Introduction to Special Issue: Whiteness in the Age of White Rage

Abstract

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.

"Our Experiences are Different...Our Risks are Different": Racialized Women's Online Activism to End Violence Against Women in Canada

“…In the Canadian context, "white rage was enacted to protect and perpetuate the building of a 'white' Canadian nation-state" (Deliovsky & Kitossa, 2020, p. v). Deliovsky and Kitossa (2020) urge that white cisgender women be included in discussions of white rage given their complicit, and sometimes direct, role in the ongoing enforcement of settler colonialism, racism, cisheteropatriarchy, and white supremacy in the context of challenging and ending violence against women.…”