Chapter 4 - America and/as White Supremacy

Summary

Analyzing major and lesser-known utopian and dystopian literature from 1945-present, we define white supremacy as both a regime of exploitation and violence by people of European descent upon others deemed to be outside of whiteness and a process of centering whiteness. We look at the relationship between white supremacy and American culture from the period through two main trends. The first asserts white supremacy in either a default form assuming the centrality of whiteness or an explicit form that calls for white supremacist revolution. Texts here range from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold to McCarthy’s The Road to the notorious Turner Diaries. The second trend directly challenges white supremacy, including some notable texts such as Butler’s Parable series to a flood of post-Black Lives Matter works such as Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to Coates’s Between the World and Me to short works by adrienne maree brown and others.