White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception

Abstract

White identity is forged through violence. The moment that whites aspired to be white, they set themselves up for immediate, inevitable failure: they try to inhabit an identity of superiority that cannot exist, and this sets them into a perpetual identity crisis, an existential emergency that threatens who they are and who they think they want to be. The ensuing identity formation—white by force—comprises an entire set of strategies, tactics, institutions, and structures meant to prop up an inherently failure-based identity and to do so through brutality, resentment, anger, contrived fear, and murder. Such an identity impacts everyone, including white people themselves, in devastating ways. In what following article, I will put forward a theoretical model called “White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception”, conceptualizing key aspects of this model to provide an emerging vocabulary for studying, discussing, and dismantling white identity, violence, authoritarianism, racism, and the existential crises that we are all facing. Our discourse around race and racism, since the Civil Rights Era, needs new language from which to diagnose an inherently violent identity formation that ultimately benefits no one, especially not people of color or white people from lower socioeconomic strata.

“Unless we call one white man, by name, a ‘devil,’ we are not speaking of any individual white man. We are speaking of the collective white man’s historical record. We are speaking of the collective white man’s cruelties, and evils, and greeds, that have seen him act like a devil toward the non-white man. Any intelligent, honest, objective person cannot fail to realize that this white man’s slave trade, and his subsequent devilish actions are directly responsible for not only the presence of this black man in America, but also for the condition in which we find this black man here. You cannot find one black man, I do not care who he is, who has not been personally damaged in some way by the devilish acts of the collective white man!”—Malcolm X.

“I’m probably a dead man already.”—Malcolm X.

1. Introduction

At the outset of this article, it is crucial to emphasize the importance of Malcolm X’s differentiation above, for this distinction between the collective white man and woman and specific individual white men and women runs throughout my entire model of “White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception”, I will present a diagnostic and normative analytical framework and critique of white identity through a model that claims whiteness, as an identity, is truly devilish, irredeemable, and deeply dangerous for all people, including those who find themselves and/or ascribe to being white and cultivate that whiteness themselves, as well as those people who have worked hard to de-privilege their whiteness and dismantle the racism of white supremacy. Yet, this conviction against whiteness is not about a particular white person, unless specifically articulated, but about an identity that was constructed over hundreds of years, one that white people have been deeply socialized into, have in many cases chosen to perpetuate, and, in virtually all cases, have participated in; as Chares Mills said, both signatories and non-signatories to the racial contract benefit from white privilege.

I believe we need to destroy whiteness, and free, as Malcolm X (1992, pp. 306–7) phrased it, the “Black man” and Black woman, all Black and brown peoples, and white people themselves, laying the groundwork for a radically different way of living together. This is not a simple ideal to me; rather, it is imperative if we are to survive. Whiteness is inherently insatiable, and therefore it has consumed and dug up and divided and tore up the earth, it has created the climate crisis, and, as long as whiteness remains dominant and continues to exist, we will all perish sooner rather than later. Therefore, so that we may better study and discuss this existential identity formation, I will present new ways to conceptualize white identity, theorizing concepts that provide a thorough, honest assessment of the “race problem” in America and globally. Coming out of the Civil Rights Era, unfortunately, not only did white identity emerge virtually unscathed, it also continued to protect itself by creating false narratives that claimed that any critique of whiteness was somehow “reverse discrimination”, “political correctness”, and now “wokeness gone wild”.

Those who have continued to seek justice and eradicate racism have constantly been forced onto the defensive within the dominant discourses of American politics—narratives that claim that we have made progress, that we are post-racial, that we have leveled the playing field, and, among many white people, that we are now going too far and that we are now victimizing white people, white people who had nothing to do with slavery or Jim and Jane Crow and are innocents who now suffer for things they have not done. The very existence of such narratives—and the dominant position that they have taken within our overall conversations about race and racism—is not only deeply inaccurate but also one of the biggest indicators that little progress has actually been made and that white identity still dominates our language and every single aspect of our lives. The model presented here is another attempt, among many strong voices and scholars, to flip the script, to take our defense off the field and go on the offense. My hope is that this is a contribution, among others, to unmasking the dominant and false narratives and replacing them with the critique that we need in order to make actual progress against racism, which is also the critique that white people, as white people, have been vehemently evading since the founders of whiteness came to dominate our political societies with force and impunity.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of white people, as white people, to dismantle whiteness—it is time that they did the heavy lifting and lifted whiteness up and off our societies. We have been living in political societies that proclaim democracy, freedom, equality, and authentically consent-based political authority for a long time now. Every conscious and reasonable adult is aware of these aspirational values; therefore, in making a series of decisions, choices, and non-decisions that perpetuate racism, they are responsible for its continued existence and the tragedy therein and thereof. My hope is that “White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception”, as an academic and democratic model, will offer renewed ways for white people to truly understand the identity through which so much of their lives are lived, understand the deeply serious and urgent nature of this emergency, and understand their place in dismantling whiteness. I also hope to reach the group that most would deem unreachable, the group of white people who, among white people, suffer the most from whiteness: socioeconomically underprivileged white people, MAGA white people, and those whose white privilege does not, and will not, translate into measurable improvement for their everyday lives. These are white people who, if not for whiteness, could join powerful interracial coalitions that would bring real, positive change to all working-class people.

2. Theory: White by Force, the Racialized State of Exception, and Spirit Murder

The white supremacy project is the authoritarian system of rule in which white-dominated political societies create a multi-track reality and trajectory for its citizens. White people exist upon and ride upon one track, that of whiteness as power, privilege, priority, protection, and property, which I call “whiteness⁵”. Those designated, in shifting ways, as nonwhite, are forcibly set on a track where they are, to sometimes varying degrees, denied the rights and privileges of democratic citizenship. The phraseology of white supremacy itself involves a two-part structure, put in place by the attempt at whiteness⁵, an impossible identity that claims a non-existent innate superiority based upon “race”. These two parts include, first, white supremacy as ideology, which is the notion that white people are better than nonwhite people, and second, white supremacy as materiality, which involves the maldistribution of life’s chances, opportunities, and resources in favor of those designated white to the detriment of those defined as the racial “other”. “White by force” is the identity that has emerged to force and enforce the impossibility of whiteness upon the world. And, while whiteness as whiteness is impossible, the attempts at its realization have devastated the world, the Earth, the universe, and every nonwhite person, who, as Malcolm X said, “has been personally damaged in some ways by the devilish acts of the collective white man” and woman. Even though it is impossible, whiteness⁵ as a project exists, and it exists as an authoritarian form of political and economic power globally.

White by force is the discursive–material–ideational identity structure that has led to the world being in the precarious position in which it now finds itself. White by force is vicious, mendacious, pervasive, thieving, murderous, insatiable, and irredeemable. As long as whiteness⁵ exists, Black people in America live under authoritarian rule in which they are confined, surveilled, harassed, controlled, and subjected to brutality and murder with impunity. The “racialized state of exception” is the co-structure of their authoritarian subjection, meaning that wherever they go, whatever they do, they exist in a linked and never-ending series of hostile environments, where they are America’s public enemy number one—the existence from which all white people’s identity crises are resolved through the use of “reasonable” force and “justifiable” murder and the constant threat thereof. In their homes, bedrooms, living rooms, swimming pools, Starbucks, Subways (both underground and the sandwich shop), hotel lobbies, neighborhood public streets (for jogging and walking and being with one’s thoughts and with nature), post offices, convenience stores—the doorways and pathways and resting places of life—they find no respite. Nowhere is safe for Black people in America (Fiske 1998).

White by force and the racialized state of exception permeate, inhabit, construct, and reconstruct all of society’s institutions and maintain the racial cartels through which people rise, fall, fail, and are forced into racially constructed versions of failure that serve to perpetuate the lie of white supremacy ideologically. Racial cartels involve the various ways in which family, social, neighborhood, and institutional networks “lock-in” white supremacy, ideologically and materially (Roithmayr 2014).

The establishment emergency (please see Figure 1) meant that those who made the devastating choices to become, and be, “white people of biological superiority” would choose to establish the appearance of supremacy through violent domination; through this domination, enormous force and brutality were used to invent a racialized hierarchy and racialized “other”, a phantom posed as a threat to white life. White identity, therefore, was built from and for violence, for abuse of power, for brutality, for pre-emptive wars, for the exploitation of people and land, for the devastation of natural resources, and for entitlement to everything. The founders of white identity chose to obtain as much of everything as possible both to deprive the newly created “other” races of what was rightfully theirs so that they could render them subordinate and to attempt to demonstrate their fantasy of white exceptionalism through theft, hyper-consumption, and materialism writ large.

A truth that is difficult for white people in America to hear, let alone face, is that they are responsible for creating and perpetuating an identity forged through violence—there would be no white identity if not for extraordinary uses of force to create and perpetuate it, including slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, genocide, Jim Crow I and II, Jane Crow, Juan Crow, the war on drugs, the war on crime, and many more atrocities committed in the name of white supremacy. The moment that whites aspired to be white, they set themselves up for immediate, inevitable failure, i.e., they try to inhabit an identity of superiority that cannot exist, and this immediately sets them into an unending identity crisis, an existential emergency that threatens who they are and who they think they want to be.

As Charles Mills described in The Racial Contract, white supremacy, as “the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” (1), is consent-based. He defines the Racial Contract as follows:

The Racial Contract is that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements…between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated…as “white”, and coextensive with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities…the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them.

Mills (1997, p. 11)

John Locke (1980), who many consider the father or grandfather of American political thought, was an epistemological authority who reinforced the ideas around civilized/uncivilized and the racist colonialization–imperialism–authoritarianism thoughts of his time. In his Second Treatise—a work in which he argued for consent-based political authority, a definition of property based upon the work that one put into something, and a right to rebel—Locke also theoretically dismayed many when he justified inequality via the invention of money, as well as when he rationalized the colonization project of stealing the land of nonwhite peoples. Locke, in what is arguably a character trait of whiteness itself, did not envision land—the Earth—as having intrinsic value; instead, it only became valuable when it was tilled and excavated and used, i.e., when it was exploited for its natural resources. He said, “And hence subduing or cultivating the Earth, and having Dominion, we see are joined together. The one gave Title to the other”. Locke argued that the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas did not deserve the land upon which they lived, because they did not bring out the value in the land—they did not turn the land into private property from which large landowners could cultivate crops such as cotton, which they could then sell for a profit. Locke, the most important social contract theorist for American political theory—the first several paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are essentially lifted right out of the Second Treatise—helped construct the division of human beings into human/subhuman and person/subperson and thereby helped justify colonialism and slavery.

2.1. The Racialized State of Exception and Spirit Murder

To establish the “appearance” of white superiority, founders of whiteness created a dialectical marriage between a dysfunctional epistemology and a violent ontology. Creating a racialized state of exception (Agamben 2005), whites defined nonwhite subjects as an existential threat; such a threat “required” the white use of extraordinary force and a rationalizing and condoning of white brutality. Foucault, linking biopower to racism, says, “they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results…in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race” Foucault (1997, p. 256). Linking a terrorist ontology to an inherently mendacious epistemology, white people created the context for using the cover of racialized states of exception to exercise their inherent terror-based identity. As America’s perpetual threat and emergency, Black men, women, and children have lived in, and continue to live in, a series of unending and inescapable hostile environments.

To narrate a racial state of exception, white people have used widespread group spirit murder. Patricia Williams talks about spirit murder, “One of the reasons I fear what I call spirit murder—disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard—is that it produces a system of formalized distortions of thought. It produces social structures centered on fear and hate, a tumorous outlet for feelings elsewhere unexpressed” Patricia Williams (1991, p. 73).

Mills talks about the various ways in which the division between person/subperson emerged and how it has been perpetuated. One mechanism through which the Racial Contract has coexisted with the rise of so-called liberal democracies is through the “epistemology of ignorance”. Mills states,

Thus, in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.

Mills (1997, p. 18)

The epistemology of ignorance is in line with Williams’ discussion of spirit murder. In fact, we could argue that the epistemology of ignorance structures the various ways in which Western societies in particular have murdered the spirit of people of color, and when thinking about Mills’ Racial Contract and a division between those who could be included in civil society, in political societies, we see that people of color have been rendered dead citizens; in the words of Colin Dayan, they are continually being excluded through civil death. Dayan says,

The extremity of contemporary punishment in the United States—practices (anomalous in the so-called civilized world) of state-sponsored execution, prolonged and indefinite solitary confinement, excessive force, and other kinds of psychological torture—can be traced back to the country’s colonial history of legal stigma and civil incapacity. This terrain of disfigured personhood is everywhere.

Dayan (2011, p. 71)

Spirit murder becomes a mechanism and instigation toward physical murder, and its rationalization.

During the establishment emergency, we witness the development of a sociopathic whiteness, the invention of a person who holds no worry or concern about their place in creating a racialized “other” that does not exist and then reveling in their achievement of securing victory over that “other”—of maiming and taming the “wild”. These are the violences of warriors and victors, murder with impunity, no conscience, and no looking back; just note the huge efforts underway across America right now to erase (Hannah-Jones 2021) the fact that for there to be some approximation or appearance of white superiority, white people have to have been forged through violence, have forced failure, death, and exploitation upon millions and millions of human beings, and have done so in a so-called democratic and free society. The heart of whiteness has comprised a devastating mechanism of firmly establishing a racialized authoritarianism within, and surrounded by, democratic facades. To face this would mean that white people would have to face their inherent identity crisis head on and acknowledge that they could only be white through might makes right.

2.2. Aspirational Failure

Aspirational failure involves the cognitive dissonance at the heart of white identity: while they are told and tell themselves that they are better because they are white, they live a life where they experience a number of challenges, setbacks, and failures that mean that they do not even come close to such a position of superiority. This is the perpetuation emergency (please see Figure 2), the fact that it is impossible to perpetuate white supremacy in reality, just as it was impossible to establish it in theory. To reduce this dissonance, white people turn back to the racial other for cover. They take things a step further, and, within a supposedly less unjust and more democratic world, they do not simply reimagine the racialized other as that which they claim that they are not and is inferior to them, they create a public enemy, a group of people who have taken what is rightfully theirs: success. Whiteness mobilizes and continues to mobilize “spirit murder”. White people engage in “ignorance” with a purpose, as they invent another layer of threat—the threat of a group that is violent and dangerous, will steal their jobs and promotions, and threatens their way of life and their lives.

The major feature of this spirit murder is the “us versus them” framework and, more specifically, the enemy construction (Edelman 1988) (racialized state of exception) of those who differ. The white overclass is constantly mobilizing this by telling white-embodied whites that their identity is constantly under threat and that their way of life is at stake. What this means is that the white underclass spends a great deal of time and energy living a life trying to protect elusive whiteness; it is this elusiveness, combined with the construction of threatening enemies, that leads the white underclass toward aspirational failure racism.

The white overclass tells the underclass that the reason why they are not receiving the fruits of whiteness is that the enemy is taking it from them, not that the policies of the white overclass lead them into impoverished conditions. This deadly combination leads the white underclass to focus their anger, fear, anxieties, and hatred toward racialized groups whom they blame for the fact that they will never attain whiteness—these are the features that make up aspirational failure for most white people of the underclass and middle class. Their endless aspirational failure, enemy construction as scapegoats, and racism become their own form of white identity. This racism does nothing to change their life circumstances and life chances; however, it provides them with a psychological strategy that explains why they can never succeed in living up to the asinine invention of white supremacist ideology.

The perpetuation emergency brings with it a number of tactics to misconfigure reality. Flowing from a socialization process of infusion of whiteness⁵ into white-visible bodies and minds, many white people have, instead of giving up the white supremacy project altogether, embraced resentment (6 January 2021), supposed fear, outrage, and the invention of threats all around them, and many, particularly among the white underclass, not only face horrible working conditions, challenging jobs, bad health care, poverty, and broken bodies, they also break and re-break their minds and moralities as they continue to insist upon the white supremacist ideology. For these white people, the second major prong of white supremacy—the maldistribution of socioeconomic resources based upon white privilege—has not materialized. Yes, they do still enjoy accesses and resources mainly reserved for white-ascribing people, such as not being the “state of emergency” in the white imagination; however, we live under a money-based society with capitalism as the economic structure, and the exploitation and alienation of labor affects all.

2.3. Force Failure and White-Washed Racial Laundering

When white people fail where Black people succeed, this calls into question the very basis for their existence—this is how the establishment emergency is never far at hand for white people. Therefore, white people have had to try to ensure Black failure; they have used everything at their disposal to force the appearance of failure upon people of color; I call this force failure. If we consider just how much energy has gone into trying to dominate, control, criminalize, and scapegoat Black people in America, the reality of enormous Black success becomes a terrifying emergency for whites, because it completely undermines their claims that they are “better than”.

Force failure has involved massive efforts throughout our history—especially in modern and contemporary America—to create and perpetuate inter-institutional racism. Every major institution in our society is infused with racial inequality, and these inequalities are neither accidental nor coincidental. The injustice of police brutality and the entire criminal justice system, the deep inequalities of our educational systems, unequal access to good health care, higher poverty rates, higher rates of infant mortality, and the overall socioeconomic status of people of color are inherently anti-Black. They represent the pervasiveness of institutional racism and its profound impact on suppressing the life opportunities of people of color (Alexander 2012; Bell 2006; Feagin 2010; Katznelson 2005; Lipsitz 2018).

This is where we first see the importance of “white-washed racial laundering” in America (Adelman 2018). As these inequalities persist, over decades and decades, in a political society supposedly invested and instituted in democratic equality and liberty, how is it that Black people remain behind in virtually every socioeconomic variable? The first prong of white-washed racial laundering involves blaming the victims of racism for their own unjust living and loving conditions. Racist discourse is central to racial laundering. Racism is dirty business, and yet America—at least white people in America—believe that this country is clean as rain. One major racist discursive technique involves the narrative of “equality of opportunity”.

Daria Roithmayr describes what she calls “racial cartels” as deeply locked-in white privilege, established through iteration after iteration of generational and intra-racial networking among white people. White by force has many configurations through which it manifests whiteness⁵. One such means has involved the enforcement of interracial boundaries between white people and nonwhite people, particularly and especially preventing interracial friendships and romantic relationships. White by force creates these racial cartels of locked-in advantage for white people, and, while they might appear as the non-violent choices among white people in terms of whom they should befriend, love, and marry, the violence that has maintained the social distance necessary for the cartels has been, and continues to be, pervasive (Cover 1995).

In such pervasively racialized contexts of racial cartels, it is impossible to claim that equality of opportunity exists in America, yet this does not stop white people from claiming that all people, regardless of color, have the same and equal opportunities for success and for failure. Through this trick, white people engage in despicable racist stereotyping to blame Black people for their higher levels of poverty, unemployment, etc. For example, the phraseology “culture of poverty” emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and became a key narrative driving harsh welfare reform, signed into law by Bill Clinton, a Democratic president who himself talked about the need for tough welfare reform to break recipients out of cycles of poverty defined by a culture of poverty.

In addition to “blame the victim laundering”, another form of laundering involves that of undue white success, concealing the illegitimacy of resources gained unjustly and undeservedly, as well as the racial and brutal nature of white identity. White people use racially symbolic words such as, “merit”, “hard work”, “deserving”, “equal opportunity”, or “I/You did it on my/your own”, when the white supremacy project has, to some extent, worked for them and when they find themselves on the more advantaged side of white racial cartels that have placed them in “good” schools, “peaceful” neighborhoods, “great” colleges, and “stellar” positions at a given company. When they are able to use such positions of well-paying jobs and some job security (particularly when they know they can always fall back upon their racial cartel for support if they were to somehow—and always, in their cases, “unfairly”—lose their job), they are also in a position to engage in the racialized consumerism and materialism that are requisites for white supremacy; this is “accumulation whiteness”.

Another prong of white-washed racial laundering is the “spin cycle of white victimhood”. “White racial realism” is the inevitability of white failure, combined with the inevitability of Black success. In this wash cycle, white people who have not “made it” are the victims of circumstances, and these circumstances almost always focus on a racially imbalanced framework of deservingness, the threat that white peoples’ jobs are being taken by immigrants, and the insidious and false idea that white people are not being hired and promoted because of affirmative action. Aspirational failure is laundered through these false narratives, meaning that when such failure comes out of the spin cycle of white victimhood, it does so unscathed by personal responsibility or accountability, because now everything is somebody else’s fault, and that somebody else is the immigrant from Mexico or the Black guy at work—these are huge servings of spirit murder, racial scapegoating, and the appearance that political leaders are doing everything they can to bring back manufacturing jobs, open back up the coal mines, and stop outsiders from stealing jobs.

Spirit murder is just as important now as ever. Instead of risking the unmasking of their own delusional worlds, white people hold onto white supremacy and conclude that the failure to meet the promises of white entitlement to everything is certainly not their fault; it is the fault of the racial other, the enemy whom white people should have never allowed into their world and whom they will now fight to deport and exclude.

It is at this point of white by force that we see the merging and interactional dynamics of threat and resentment, fear and anger, anxiety and hostility, insecurity, and hatred. Carol Anderson (2017) has brought to light the cyclical nature of the white rage that accompanies the perpetuation emergency. She shows, time and time again, that whenever Black people gain a right or resource once denied, a massive white rage backlash emerges in response to such gains. Anderson’s excellent analysis and profound historiography provide us with evidence of the perpetuation emergency throughout American society. In a society where the majority group—by the social construct of race—insists, chooses, and believes in a non-existent superiority, when that superiority does not materialize in the form of successes felt to be their natural “better-than-ness” and the racist system upon which they feel they are entitled to everything is challenged, and is, in any way and by any measure at all, dismantled, this group—a group already lacking moral standing when they claim false superiority—becomes enraged.

This rage emerged with the construction of the racial enemy, the scapegoat and the target of deep animus. Not only did white people create a false racial “other”, one that they claimed to be better than, but, in order to suppress and mask the reality of human achievement and white underachievement, they had to ensure that the racial other was also a racial enemy, a person so threatening, devious, and underserving that they must sprout from evil. Here, we have another phase and layer of spirit murder; this time, instead of the narratives of racial superiority to rationalize and justify the stealing, brutalizing, and enslaving of brown and Black bodies, here, we have murderous narratives that are meant to reduce the enormous dissonance of white supremacist ideology and aspirational failure.

A grotesque example of such narratives is Donald Trump’s reading/performing of the song lyrics from “The Snake”. He prefaces his readings of these lyrics by telling the crowds to “Think of it in terms of immigration”. It reads as follows:

On her way to work one morning,

Down the path alongside the lake,

A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.

His pretty-colored skin had been all frosted with the dew.

“Oh well,” she cried, “I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you.”

“Take me in oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman”, sighed the snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk

And then laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk.

Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived.

She found that pretty snake she’d taken in had been revived.

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman”, sighed the snake.

Now she clutched him to her bosom, “You’re so beautiful”, she cried.

“But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died”.

Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight.

But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite.

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman”, sighed the snake.

“I saved you,” cried that woman.

“And you’ve bit me even, why?

“You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die”.

“Oh shut up, silly woman”, said the reptile with a grin,

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,

”Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman“, sighed the snake.

Recently, Trump’s racist narrative about immigrants has become more overtly vivid regarding the emergency posed by immigrants and the need for force in subduing the threat from immigration. During rallies on 2 April 2024, when speaking about immigrants, Trump said, “This is country-changing, it’s country-threatening, and it’s country-wrecking. They have wrecked our country”. At the same rallies, he said that President Biden’s immigration policies are creating a “border blood bath”; in fact, he titled his speech in Michigan “Biden’s border bloodbath”. In Wisconsin, he said that this year’s election was the nation’s “final battle” regarding the threat of immigration. Trump also described immigration as the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of our American suburbs, cities, and towns”. Also, more generally during his campaign, he said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country” and has begun referring to immigrants as “animals”.

3. Conclusions: The White Leviathan and the End of Whiteness

There are two major points that I want to emphasize as we conclude. First, it is worth noting that most policy positions of the Republican Party constitute what I call the “politics of negation”, recreating a political party as a vehicle through which to end, destroy, exclude, or stop—a party defined by what it is against, not by what it is for. The politics of negation are very much in line with whiteness⁵. Donald Trump’s presidency was defined by these politics of negation and exclusion: negating the Paris Climate Accord; negating Muslims; negating volumes upon volumes of governmental regulations; negating taxes for the wealthy; negating mask and vaccine mandates; negating the “deep state”; negating health care access; negating friends and family who disagree; negating arms treatises; negating everyone south of the U.S. border; negating “dreamers”; negating diversity; negating equity; negating inclusion; negating belonging; negating political opponents; negating science; negating, negating, negating.

The second point of emphasis in this conclusion is the flip side of negation, “limitless whiteness”, and this is absolutely essential for understanding why we—the “global north”, especially—are doing virtually nothing to end the climate crisis. Insatiable whiteness has led us to the precipice, and as long as whiteness⁵ exists, attempts to stop the devastation of climate crises will fail. White people, in choosing an entitlement to everything, are also choosing to continue to exploit and take and brutalize anyone or anything that stands in their way, including “mother earth”, symbolized by their rallying cry of “Drill baby drill”.

One could argue that whiteness has a kinship with how Hobbes (1994) described the state of nature: a space where everyone had a right to everything, a state of hyper-entitled individuals who, due to such a heightened sense of deserving everything they want, exist where life is nasty, brutish, and short. In the state of nature, a right to everything leads individuals, in order to survive, to pre-emptively strike out at others and take whatever they can; negation and insatiability are pervasive. Negation entails killing or intimidating anyone who seems to be a threat to one’s self-preservation, which, ultimately, is virtually everyone known within one’s vicinity. Insatiability is a state of always being suspicious of others and thinking that, at any moment, they will attempt to steal what one has accumulated, so one needs as much as one can possibly obtain in order to survive such an attack, or, according to Foucault, one needs to appear as though they are more than ready to go to war with their neighbor to prevent attacks (Foucault 1997). In any case, when not in an actual physical battle, one is always in a posture of war in the state of nature (as well as, by the way, within a commonwealth). Self-preservation in Hobbes’s state of nature leads rational individuals towards an insatiable obsession with appearing to be the strongest and the most capable of eliminating any and every possible threat.

A fervent entitlement to everything one wants is a defining component of whiteness as an identity formation. In fact, just as in Hobbes’s vision of the state of nature, white people, to survive as white people—for the self-preservation of whiteness—take as much as they can to appear white, which leads to a number of questions, a few of which I will point out here. First, how is it that life is not nasty, brutish, and short under white polities? Second, is life nasty, brutish, and short in white polities, and for whom? Third, are we entering a final phase of whiteness, where life is becoming nasty, brutish, and ultimately short-circuited for not just white people as white people but for everyone, including signatories to the racial contract, non-signatories to the racial contract, and people of color?

Such an identity cannot survive indefinitely; either those who inhabit whiteness will somehow come to realize the devastating nature of their racialized ontology and work hard to dismantle it or they will continue to devolve, both in terms of the available socioeconomic resources needed to satiate the insatiable and in terms of their ability to get along with one another, as white people. Only up to a certain point can white people united by their whiteness stand together under what is an inherently violent commonality. Interestingly, what makes individuals in Hobbes’s state of nature equal is their equal ability to murder one another. Considering Hobbes, one could argue that white people have been, in turn, the chaos and brutality of the state of nature, the Leviathan that maintains comfortable living for white people under a commonwealth, and, again, the chaos of returning to a state of nature where life becomes endgame-nasty, brutal, short, and forever gone.

As Charles Mills pointed out, Hobbes did not include nonwhites as being capable of entering into commonwealths, considering them to lack the rationality necessary to direct them toward a sovereign and away from anarchy. And those who are not part of the commonwealth are public enemy number one and therefore in a perpetual state of war with the sovereign. This state of war is akin to a posture of war via a state of emergency. In other words, those outside the commonwealth are the most pressing emergency, inherently incapable of living peaceably within the white commonwealth. Therefore, the nonwhite racialized “other” is justifiably killable and subject to all the powers of the sovereign.

Yet, as white polities emerge during roughly the same timeframe as social contract theories, notions of the rights of men, the scientific revolution and technological development, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, the “Age of Discovery”, colonialism, and the rise of biopower (Foucault 1997), white people, as white people, need both the natural resources of nonwhite peoples and their labor in order to attempt the futility of whiteness, as well as the power to use brutality to maim and kill those that they perceive as threats to their false biological superiority. Combining white identity with Hobbes’s political theory provides insights into social contract theory, the state of war, states of exception, sovereignty, and whiteness.

To cultivate a right to everything in white political societies, the state of nature becomes the realm of nonwhite “savages”, subjected to the collective power of the white commonwealth. Except for purposes of exploitation, these nonwhite people must be controlled or killed. White commonwealths must be in a constant posture of war with these states of nature that exist, in bounded ways, both within and outside white commonwealths. Nonwhites are an existential threat to white commonwealths; they represent a constant state of emergency. This is a vision of social contract theory that maintains a racialized division through white by force and the racialized state of exception. Ironically, the attempt to maintain an entitlement to everything within political society creates a situation where those supposedly most capable of self-rule are least capable of governing in contexts where resources are not unlimited, as we are witnessing in the inept responses among colonizing countries to the climate crisis.

Finally, Hobbes imputes individuals in the state of nature with vainglory, competitiveness, and distrust—again, all deeply inherent qualities of whiteness⁵. Returning to the three questions above, regarding the first two questions, life under the global white supremacy project has been brutal and short for those subjected to white authoritarianism, the White Leviathan that has dominated the global exploitation and maldistribution of socioeconomic resources, particularly and especially those of the Global South, and those considered nonwhite within white-dominated political societies, such as in the U.S. In the U.S., racial inequality is pervasive, in income, wealth, housing, education, health, food access, employment, corporate ownership and leadership, political access, and so on. The Global South, least responsible for climate crises, suffers the harshest consequences of climate change, with people finding no respite and nowhere to go.

It can be argued, finally, that we are in the final phases of the global white supremacy project; whiteness⁵ is exhausting its resources and its ability to find more resources to feed its insatiable appetite for everything. We are facing multiple existential crises, the climate emergency being one where, eventually, if we do not dismantle white identity, no one will have any respite, as there will be nowhere left to go. Also, we should not underestimate the potential of nuclear devastation, as white-ruled polities try to navigate a world that is becoming more fractured every day: a world where whiteness will no longer be able to maintain whiteness⁵, where the one thing white people have in common will collapse, and yet the mentality of whiteness will still prevail among those with the nuclear codes.

What Can We Do?

“White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception” (please see Figure 3), as a democratic model, is intended for various audiences, and for projects, practices, ideas, and innovation, all devoted to dismantling whiteness. There are many problems and issues that immediately arise when we call upon the people who benefit from something to be the people most responsible for destroying and transcending it. However, it is possible. On the one hand, we have examples throughout history of white people who have been committed in the way James Baldwin (1998) talked about commitment when he wrote to his nephew, “To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity”. Charles Mills pointed out that for white people to break the Racial Contract, there must be “race traitors” who “betray the white polity in the name of a broader definition of the polis” Mills (1997, p. 108). He continues, “Some have actually given their lives for the struggle…But the mere fact of their existence shows what was possible, throwing into contrast and rendering open for moral judgment the behavior of their fellow whites, who chose to accept Whiteness instead” Mills (1997, pp. 108–9).

Vincent Jungkunz has theorized ways in which white people can choose to dismantle their whiteness through various forms of democratic silences, i.e., silences chosen to de-privilege one’s status as white epistemic authority. One of the deep ironies of the politics and discourse of race and racism in the U.S. is that, as Derrick Bell (1992) pointed out, white people are given what he calls “heightened standing” when talking about race and racism. Under his “rules of racial standing”, white people are considered more reliable sources of knowledge about racism because they are considered somehow “objective” observers and commentators of the politics of race. On the other hand, the very people who are subjected to racism and experience it directly, pervasively, and constantly—people of color—are considered biased if they speak about the continuing prevalence of racism in contemporary life.

Therefore, not only are white people considered, due to whiteness⁵, epistemic authorities about life generally, but they are also considered more knowledgeable than people of color regarding race and racism. Jungkunz offers ways for white people to interrupt these dynamics of racial privilege. Instead of speaking up as an expert of racism, white people can refuse to be interpellated as such experts through engaging in silence. For instance, a white professor who teaches about critical race theory will refuse to talk as an expert of the Black experience of racism; instead, such a professor can highlight the various ways in which they have been privileged by whiteness.

White people can also engage in “silent yielding”, where they refuse to speak in order to decenter themselves as privileged speakers. In deliberative contexts, white people can restrain themselves from speaking first, from speaking the most, from interrupting, and from monopolizing deliberative conversations. Jungkunz states, “democratic theorists should be emphasizing the importance of silences that consider the plights, lives, struggles, dreams, fears, anxieties, and hopes of one another. These are not empty silences, because they are imbued with democratic affect—affection for those with whom we live and create our lives…” Jungkunz (2013, p. 17). When talking about silence and “political suicide”, Jungkunz states, “a deep silence and absence may be an option for those who wish to end a certain kind of political life, including the varied identities of contemporary politics” Jungkunz (2011, p. 15). Wendy Brown considers silences that we might use to allow parts of ourselves or life to drown in a pond, stating, “perhaps there are dead or deadening (antilife) things that must be allowed residence in a pond of silence rather than surfaced into discourse if life is to be lived without being claimed by their weight” Brown (2005, p. 93).

In a forthcoming work, Jungkunz and Lopez-Bunyasi (2025) theorize on what they call “democratic restraint” as possibly the most promising democratic practice in our contemporary context. Problems such as the climate emergency, sexual harassment and assault, race- and sex-based inequalities, unregulated artificial intelligence, police brutality, and the incessance of social media could benefit greatly if citizens learned to, and were socialized to, practice democratic restraint. Instituting a culture of restraint in policing, for instance, could not only drastically reduce racist disparities in police stops and police brutality but could also reduce the number of stops generally, the number of unnecessary arrests, and the all-too-often escalation of situations where, without restraint, officers would enter a situation treating the people involved as inherent threats, therefore employing states of exception.

While these forms of resistance to one’s privileged racial identity can be effective ways to begin to dismantle whiteness⁵, in my view, people who, through massive and complex forces, have been designated, ascribed, or chosen to be “white”, need an alternative. In other words, self-negation without an alternative to subscribe to can feel like entering an abyss, a nihilism that leaves one without purpose. In forthcoming projects, I will put forward such alternatives, and I encourage others to conceptualize other ways of living that are anchored in peace instead of force. Yet, we should be careful to avoid encouraging white people to subscribe to a humanism that emphasizes equal human worth and dignity but leaves in place other structures of a hierarchy of value. For example, when we talk about how racism “dehumanizes”, we keep intact a human/animal dichotomy that subjects the non-human animal world to human self-interests and exploitation.

Finally, it is important to return to where this paper began. This project is not anti-white people. Instead, it is anti-whiteness. This difference is crucial because it means that while white identity forged through violence is irredeemable, people do not have to be defined by whiteness. Instead, they can refuse whiteness as power, privilege, property, protection, and priority, and embrace the things we have in common. That way, we navigate the trials and tribulations of life together and find joy through unity.