* Content warning: mention of sexual assault
The nonfiction anthology A Field Guide to White Supremacy is a book that meets the moment. Edited and presented by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, it is about the idea of white supremacy—and, as Chicago poet Haki R. Madhubuti once said, “Ideas,” and their creators, “run the world.”
Belew and Gutiérrez, both faculty at the University of Chicago, 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.
Despite considerable racial progress, the idea of white supremacy is something many white Americans can’t seem to let go of or even admit to perpetuating. This book is meant as a corrective to that.
A Field Guide to White Supremacy leaves little out. Colonialism, patriarchy, racial violence, police brutality, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant policies, and many other manifestations of white supremacy are all addressed. The book is organized into four sections: “Building, Protecting, and Profiting from Whiteness,” “Iterations of White Supremacy,” “Anti-Immigrant Nation,” and “White Supremacy from Fringe to Mainstream.” Each section begins with a short introduction to set up each topic.
In his essay on the history of Islamophobia in the United States, Khaled A. Beydoun states that, between 1790 and 1944, it was official U.S. policy to not naturalize any person who was Muslim. This is, Beydoun suggests, the origin of the nation’s current strand of Islamophobia. When President Donald Trump banned Muslims, he was doing what the United States had previously done for more than 150 years. Historically, according to Beydoun, Muslims have always been considered to be “alien” and a “threat to American society.”
Rebecca’s Solnit’s essay, “The Longest War,” argues that patriarchy is an inseparable part of white supremacy. She says that rape culture, embedded in white supremacy, has been defended by men at every opportunity. The fact that the Republican Party ran five white men for office in 2012 who were “pro rape,” according to Solnit, is evidence of how little progress has been made in this area. These include Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who said God “intended” rape pregnancies; Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who declared that rape pregnancies don’t occur because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”; and Wisconsin lawmaker Roger Rivard, who opined that “some girls rape easy.”
The only consolation, Solnit notes, is that all five lost their bids for office.
Roderick A. Ferguson writes powerfully about homophobia, including the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting of 2016, the second worst mass shooting in U.S. history. He notes that the shooter has mostly been dismissed as an Islamic terrorist, even though he specifically targeted a nightclub full of LGBTQ+ people and even though he was born and raised in Long Island, New York, and not overseas. Ferguson ties the shooting back to the nation’s ultra-violent white nationalist atmosphere.
“Bearing witness . . . to that aggression and other hatreds . . . is more crucial than ever,” Ferguson writes.
The book’s opening section, titled “Thoughts on The Associated Press Stylebook,” provides ground rules for journalists in deciphering and writing about white supremacy. The writers contend journalists are “ill-equipped to describe white power” because white supremacy is so pervasive that people can write in its language and perpetuate its mindset without even knowing it.
A Field Guide to White Supremacy presents an expansive history and a mountain of evidence that we are living in very dangerous times. White supremacy, this book says, is not a Black-white paradigm. It is an idea that currently has the United States in a death spiral.