White Supremacy and Antiblackness: Theory and Lived Experience

Abstract

Our goal in understanding white supremacy should be theory building, viewed as instrumental in providing explanation and prediction as a foundation for activism. As humanists and social scientists, and more particularly as anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists, we should take to heart not only anthropology’s mandate to be holistic, comparative, and historical but also the tradition of anthropological theorizing. Lived experience is the substance of the, perhaps temporarily, ineffable structure of feeling, shaping, and structuring what we should desperately want theory to account for, including our pain, resentments, hatreds, longing, and joy—even the air we breathe and the rivers flowing among the United States, which are shaped by—fused with—white supremacy and antiblackness. White supremacy seeks to be totalitarian, even as it is contained by and/or co‐constructed by not only ancillary systems such as gender‐, class‐, and sexuality‐based ones but also larger systems such as capitalism, purposeful violence, and the state’s quest for hegemony. In this writing’s search for a deeper and broader comprehension of white supremacy, discussions are presented on underdiscussed themes in white supremacy, such as the “whitening” power of language, and additionally two key issues: (1) the change currently underway in the United States'white‐supremacist racial system from a race‐primary system toward a skin‐color primary system, accompanying a likely change in the basic principle for defining whiteness and (2) the necessity to understand that white supremacy is a key element in the degradation and exploitation of, not only labor of color but also white labor—to a lesser extent, and the looming possibility going forward of the United States’ decline domestically and internationally.

Latinx and Asian Engagement/Complicity in Anti-Blackness

“…The U.S. is built on white supremacy and anti-Blackness (Costa Vargas and Jung 2021;Spears 2021). With Blackness often seen as "the antithesis of whiteness," in the U.S., there is a hierarchy of racial classifications, with Black being in the "bottommost status group" (Spears 2021, p. 158).…”

“…Furthermore, ross states, "anti-Blackness indexes the structural reality that in the larger society, blackness is inextricably tied to slaveness" (p. 8). Slavery officially ended with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 but lived on de facto during the Jim Crow Era, particularly in the South, and continues de facto today with a new system created out of labor in prisons (Spears 2021). Additionally, in schools, there is video footage capturing Black children being abused or even murdered (Aronson and Boveda 2017).…”

Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions

“…Sociolinguists identified connections between race and African American speech varieties in the 1960s and 1970s (Labov 1972), with Black sociolinguists documenting the racializing effects of AAE in schools and in society (Baugh 2003, Smitherman 2000, Spears 1999). Despite its rich history, AAE continues to be of interest primarily to Black linguistic anthropologists (see Goodwin & Alim 2010, Jacobs-Huey 2006, Morgan 1994, Smalls 2018, Spears 2021. In Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., Alim & Smitherman (2012) analyze President Barack Obama's use of marked communicative registers and gestures.…”

Going beyond poles of power to examine the poles: A review of racism/anti‐blackness in Poland

“…Anti‐blackness in political spheres continues to persist in less overt ways, as scholars have explored in the context of public discourse on policy issues (Kroskrity, 2021; Spears, 2021). From this thread of linguistic inquiry, scholars have explored how anti‐Blackness persists in particular in institutions that stubbornly remain white‐dominated, as African American women scholars emphasize in the case of anti‐blackness in academia and other realms (Bell et al., 2021).…”