Field Guide to White Supremacy

Product Description
Drawing explicit lines, across time and a broad spectrum of violent acts, to provide the definitive field guide for understanding and opposing white supremacy in America\nHate, racial violence, exclusion, and racist laws receive breathless media coverage, but such attention focuses on distinct events that gain our attention for twenty-four hours. The events are presented as episodic one-offs, unfortunate but uncanny exceptions perpetrated by lone wolves, extremists, or individuals suffering from mental illness—and then the news cycle moves on. If we turn to scholars and historians for background and answers, we often find their knowledge siloed in distinct academic subfields, rarely connecting current events with legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. But recent hateful actions are deeply connected to the past—joined not only by common perpetrators, but by the vast complex of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs that comprise white supremacy in the United States.\nGathering together a cohort of researchers and writers,
A Field Guide to White Supremacy provides much-needed connections between violence present and past. This book illuminates the career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose that violence. The
Field Guide is meant as an urgent resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens, illuminating common threads in white supremacist actions at every scale, from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law. Covering immigration, antisemitism, gendered violence, lynching, and organized domestic terrorism, the authors reveal white supremacy as a motivating force in manifold parts of American life. The book also offers a sampling of some of the most recent scholarship in this area in order to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, and activists and their communities. \nA Field Guide to White Supremacy will be an indispensable resource in paving the way for politics of alliance in resistance and renewal.\nReview \n"Belew and Gutiérrez have compiled a superstar group of writers, commentators, and scholars who make sense of these vicious times of sophisticated hate. Collectively, they make the case that white supremacy—not ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom,’ as some like to think—is the most dominant idea (or ideology) in the history of the United States."
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The Progressive
From the Back Cover
"This timely and well-curated book analyzes a broad range of white nationalist, nativist, and other violent authoritarian forces, demonstrating their centrality to the development of the US. Given the extraordinary events of the last five years in particular, in which white nationalist groups have emerged as a powerful force within US politics and social debates, the book could not be more urgent and necessary."—Daniel HoSang, author of
A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone\n"A timely, important, and beautifully executed accomplishment. The uniformly high quality of the entries, the expansive scope of the histories under consideration, and the editors' success in marshaling essays that are diverse in voice and method but completely unified in spirit provide a cohesive start for civic discussion that connects the dots. Our civic life needs this, and the world would be a better place if our legislators, teachers, and journalists were to read it."—Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of
Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America \n"An invaluable resource for journalists, educators, policymakers, or people who simply want to understand the deep roots and wide reach of white supremacy in this country