Immigration & the Origins of White Backlash

The success of Donald Trump's anti-immigrant campaign surprised many. But I show that it was actually a continuation of a long-standing Republican strategy that has targeted immigrants and minorities for over five decades. It is not only a long-term strategy but also a widely successful one. Analysis of the vote over time shows clearly that White Americans with anti-immigrant views have been shifting steadily toward the Republican Party for decades. The end result is a nation divided by race and outcomes that often favor Whites over immigrants and minorities.

“A White-and-Negro Environment Which Is Seldom Spotlighted”

This article investigates white-black race relations in postwar urban Kansas. Focusing on seven small and mid-sized cities, it explores how white Kansans continued to maintain discrimination, segregation, and exclusion in these years, even as they yielded slowly to the demands of civil rights activists and their supporters. Specifically, it examines the means employed by whites to assert their dominance in social interactions; to discriminate in housing, employment, and commerce; and, in some cases, to defend their all-white (or nearly all-white) municipalities, the so-called sundown towns, from any black presence at all. In addition, it briefly discusses the white backlash which followed as whites turned sharply to the right on racial issues, convinced that blacks now enjoyed full equality and no longer required further concessions. In so doing, the article provides insight into the history of the black freedom struggle in a sampling of cities in a midwestern state, supplements the historiography of racism in Kansas, and opens new lines of inquiry into the historiography of the freedom struggle in the North during this period of rapid and profound transformation.

“Real Men Stand for Our Nation”: Constructions of an American Nation and Anti-Kaepernick Memes

On September 1, 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled for the playing of the national anthem arguing that he was “not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” noting that “this is bigger than football and it would be selfish . . . to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” Kaepernick received a tremendous amount of backlash for this action, and many White fans/media pundits accused him of disrespecting the flag and U.S. military. This act took place during the very contentious presidential election in the United States between eventual winner Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. During this election, the Trump campaign mobilized discourses of White nationalism, and even employed alt-right member Steve Bannon as Trump’s chief advisor for a period. The Trump campaign capitalized on a set of White backlash politics that had been growing since the 1990s, and the reactions to Kaepernick’s protest cannot be separated from this larger context. In this article, we critically read internet memes of Colin Kaepernick to gain insight into the relationship between race, gender, and the nation during the rise of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency.

He Looks Like a Big Flag

This chapter traces the articulation of colorblindness as a coherent ideology around the issues of busing and affirmative action in the years between 1974 and 1978. The chapter offers a close reading of Rocky, highlighting the manner in which the film offers race-conscious images and implications to colorblind political discourse. Just as the political struggles over integration produced a coherent colorblind ideology, they also, through Rocky, reflected the first appearance of Hollywood’s colorblind aesthetics. Rocky was instrumental in shaping colorblindness, which was fundamental in the opposition to affirmative action and busing. This analysis of Rocky highlights the integral role Hollywood played in both the white backlash of the late 1970s and the articulation of colorblindness. The chapter then turns to the intersection of the rise of colorblindness and neoliberalism. Ultimately, it argues that neoliberal thought gained momentum in the 1970s because it offered solutions to two problems: first, to the economic sluggishness of the decade, and second, perhaps more importantly, to the broad “problem” of excessive government intervention and to matters of racial inequality specifically.

Losing Elections, Winning the Debate: Progressive Racial Rhetoric and White Backlash

Recent years have seen liberals moving sharply to the left on issues related to race and gender, the so-called “Great Awokening,” accompanied by commentary arguing that this has led to a popular backlash against the left. Through a preregistered survey, this study polls a representative sample of white Americans to test the effect of a Democratic candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, arguing for programs designed to help blacks and declaring the significance of white privilege in American life. Our results show that statements about white privilege decrease support for the candidate, with an effect size that is about equal to a one standard deviation shift to the right in ideology. The effect is concentrated among moderates and conservatives. Advocating reparations and affirmative action has a similar but smaller effect. At the same time, arguing for reparations actually increases support for such policies, and discussing white privilege may decrease some aspects of white identity among conservatives. The results indicate that taking more liberal positions on race causes white voters to punish a Democratic candidate. However, there is no evidence for the hypothesis that white Americans move to the right in response to such rhetoric or develop stronger feelings of white identity.

The Civil Rights Movement and American Law, 1950–1969

This chapter shows that Brown v. Board of Education raised hope for fundamental change but produced few results. Massive resistance blocked school integration, and only the emergence of black-led organizations and massive grass-roots protests forced Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to support civil rights legislation and Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act. The federal bureaucracy and courts aggressively enforced these laws to topple Jim Crow, bring African Americans into the political process, and open economic opportunities. Although change was dramatic, it bypassed many poor blacks, including those living in northern cities. As the 1960s ended, their anger sparked urban uprisings that shattered the illusion of progress and generated a white backlash.

The White Response to Black Lives Matter and Mike Brown

Using the year 2015 to frame and contextualize the discussion, this article asks why white backlash is an expected reaction to black resistance. In short, white backlash is built into the liberal construction of race. Utilizing Joel Olson’s conception of Herrenvolk democracy, this article analyzes how the color-blind norm of race moves race into a sphere of discourse where it is omnipresent but also disempowered for any legal remedy. Policing becomes an institution by which race is made apparent, as the inequitable treatment by the police dictates who is protected by the color line. Drawn from polling surveys and government reports, data is provided with regard to the unchanging perceptions of racial attitudes. Black Lives Matter takes up the Black radical tradition in order to reassert Black humanity in the face of a system that normalizes racial violence, racial terror, and its own racial ignorance. In this way BLM displays the counternarrative to white hegemony. This counternarrative forces us to realize the depth of the race problem by mobilizing a language of abolition. Circling back to Olson’s abolition democracy, this article concludes by looking at how far we must go in terms of applying abolition to our discourse, language, conception of humanity, and democracy.

The White Backlash Narrative and the Politics of Racial Dis (Orientation)

To the degree that Donald Trump represents a disorienting reversal of a supposed state-sponsored promise of neoliberal racial progress typified by the election of the first Black United States president, liberals have been equally committed to reorienting themselves through the explanatory framework of white backlash. This article approaches the white backlash narrative with a healthy skepticism in order to explore its cultural and political uses. Through an analysis of popular discursive representations—a Saturday Night Live sketch, Obama’s first significant political speech since leaving the White House, and two widely read Atlantic articles by Ta-Nehisi Coates—this article critiques the ways in which liberals have sought to rationalize the racially disorienting transition between the Obama and Trump eras through the use of the white backlash narrative. More specifically it argues that in the wake of Trump, the white backlash narrative delimits the Obama era as a period of unfulfilled “post-racial” progress, and the Trump era as a wholly separate, reactionary moment of white supremacy. In so doing, the narrative reaffirms the protection of minoritized populations from formally recognized white supremacist violence in the Trump era, while obscuring neoliberalism’s own regimes of racialized oppression in the Obama era. By revealing such shortcomings of the white backlash narrative, it asks that we envision alternative ways to remember, interpret, and historically index the entanglements between racial neoliberal and white supremacist modalities linking the Obama and Trump eras.

Toward a New Iconoclasm

The epilogue sketches the influence of Civil War monuments on the most influential American war memorials during the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, when the public monument had declined dramatically from the prestige of the cultural form between the 1860s and 1930s. As memorials regained in popularity during the 1980s, the advances of the civil rights movement inspired many monuments to African American soldiers; white backlash led to fresh Confederate monuments. Racial violence and digital media placed Civil War monuments at the center of a return to iconoclasm in American memorial culture in the 2010s. The epilogue traces the “tagging” of monuments with graffiti and the coalescence of a movement to take down Confederate monuments in conjunction with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The emphasis on Civil War monuments in protests centered on the militarization of law enforcement recognized the extent to which these memorials had contributed to a racialized militarization of American culture.