White Reconstruction

We are in the fray of another signature moment in the long history of the United States as a project of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence.  Long before (and well after) November 2016, white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft proliferated state and extra-state terror as a common order. Here, Dylan Rodríguez counter-narrates the long "post-civil rights" half-century as a period of White Reconstruction, in which the struggle to reassemble the ascendancy of White Being toxifies the formal disassembly of U.S. (Jim/Jane Crow) apartheid and permeates the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion, formal equality, and "multiculturalist white supremacy." Thinking across a variety of archival, testimonial, visual, and activist texts-from Freedmen's Bureau documents and the "Join LAPD" hiring campaign to Barry Goldwater's hidden tattoo and the Pelican Bay prison strike-White Reconstruction implicates the cultural politics and statecraft of white libe