We argue that a focus on white supremacy and settler colonialism illuminates the material practices of domination that lead to the exposure to premature death and sustain racism within settler societies. White supremacy is wrapped up in everyday geographies that continue to sustain material advantages of whiteness within settler colonial states. Our focus on white supremacy builds on studies of whiteness and white privilege to refocus discussions around questions of power and violence. While analysis of white privilege in geography reveals the systematized and often taken-for-granted power of whiteness, we argue that white supremacy is a more useful analytic that challenges and destabilizes the geographic reproduction of ‘white worlds’ (Gilborn, 2004) and white hegemony. Recent critiques of white privilege underscore the ways whites are implicated in the reproduction of white supremacy and call antiracist praxis in the context of the privilege literature into question. Perhaps most notably, Robyn Wiegman has been critical of what she calls ‘the hegemony of liberal whiteness’ (1999: 121; see also Ahmed, 2004, 2012; Giroux, 1997). She contends that while Whiteness Studies seeks to produce a white anti-racist subject that is disaffiliated from white supremacy, this ultimately requires a re-articulation of whiteness, thus reifying the material practices that give whiteness its power and meaning. In other words, seeking to disidentify from liberal whiteness reconstitutes a kind of counter-whiteness that allows white scholars and activists to hold onto the underlying structural condition of white supremacy while disassociating themselves from the ‘unearned’ privileges of the present. Similarly, Sarah de Leeuw, Margo Greenwood, and Nicole Lindsey (2013) problematize the ‘good intentions’ of liberal scholars and academic policies ostensibly seeking to redress racist and colonial histories (see also Ahmed, 2012; Berg, 2012). They argue that just as racial awareness has given rise to new subjectivies shaped by ‘good intentions’ and the desire to be anti-racist, subjective investments in unsettling colonialism are both situated within and actively expanding settler colonialism. As with Wiegman’s (1999) critique of whiteness studies, De Leeuw, Greenwood, and Lindsey argue that well-intended scholarship and policies – produced through white settler subjectivities and embedded within settler institutions – often rely on gestures rather than structural change, which re-entrenches rather than destabilizes settler social formations. We are particularly interested in these lines of inquiry as we think beyond white privilege to focus on white supremacy and settler colonialism. Moreover, we’ve argued that there is much to gain in engaging with the insights of settler colonialism in building a more robustly anti-racist geography (see De Leeuw et al., 2013; De Leeuw, 2014; Hunt, 2014; Hunt and Holmes, 2015; Pasternak, 2015; Dempsey et al., 2011). A settler colonial perspective illuminates the interconnections between colonization and anti-black and anti-indigenous racisms and understands them as an ongoing structure rather than a series of historic events. The example of the Bundy ranch is a ‘colonial moment’ (Kempf, 2010; Seawright, 2014), illustrating the unremarked ‘expansion of the settler state’ and the ways in which this social condition is premised on the interconnections of racial hierarchies and place (Arvin et al., 2013: 10). While this instance is grounded in a US context, broader understandings of white supremacy and settler colonialism that engage with processes of colonial dispossession have the potential to broaden anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles (Inwood and Bonds, 2013). That is, within settler colonial nation-states, one cannot challenge the unfettered accumulation of capital without also advocating for decolonization, and as a consequence, a robust anti-racist agenda cannot be developed in settler nations without recognizing the material conditions that gave rise to the differentially racialized geographies (Pulido, 2006) of settler nations in the first place. Finally, the lack of a broader engagement with settler colonialism distorts our understanding of the central and ongoing roles that genocide and slavery play in the continuously and always unfolding white supremacist, settler colonial landscape and leads to incomplete understandings of the role race and whiteness continue to play in our everyday geographies. The idea of race is mediated on and through local histories that not only have come to define different groups, but is also the result of historically grounded structures and struggles (Allen, 2004). These historic struggles are important to contextualize because they form the basis for processes of ‘differential racialization’ (Pulido, 2006). This shifts focus from the social condition of whiteness and emphasis on individual experiences and unrecognized privileges to underscore the underlying institutions, structures, and power relations that sustain whiteness and its attendant privileges. By placing the genocidal geographies of forced removal and slavery centrally, settler colonialism accentuates a historicized focus on the underlying foundations of white supremacy as a continuously unfolding set of social, economic and political processes across the landscape. Seeing white supremacy this way allows us to relationally situate it within different historical and geographical contexts and to examine how it changes and morphs through time and space. We believe geographers have much to offer broader treatments of settler colonialism and understandings of white supremacy. Antiracist geographic scholarship can not only problematize settler colonialism, it can also illustrate the ways in which the discipline itself has been complicit with white supremacist settler projects. Calling attention to the intertwined logics of settler colonialism and white supremacy not only foregrounds analysis of race, but broadens geographic engagements with race beyond the black/white binary that dominates much of the literature on race and racism within Anglogeographic scholarship. As such, efforts to centralize race within the discipline must consolidate analysis of ongoing processes of colonization in settler nation-states. Geography, in particular, is well positioned to explore how land use practices and histories connect to the legacies and permanence of these structures and to the development of new understandings of the ways in which genocide, land appropriation, and labor exploitation are tied to white supremacy and other structures of oppression. As a discipline we have much to offer in illustrating the materiality of racism and the uneven geographies of the ill-gotten wealth of colonialism. The effort to contextual settler societies necessarily pushes us beyond a focus on white privilege and instead places emphasis on the white supremacist foundations of the socio-spatial dialectic and the unfolding of space and place across settler colonial nations.
We argue that a focus on white supremacy and settler colonialism illuminates the material practices of domination that lead to the exposure to premature death and sustain racism within settler societies. White supremacy is wrapped up in everyday geographies that continue to sustain material advantages of whiteness within settler colonial states. focus on white supremacy builds on studies of whiteness and white privilege to refocus discussions around questions of power and violence. analysis of white privilege in geography reveals the systematized and often taken-for-granted power of whiteness white supremacy is a more useful analytic that challenges and destabilizes the geographic reproduction of ‘white worlds’ and white hegemony Whiteness Studies seeks to produce a white anti-racist subject that is disaffiliated from white supremacy, this ultimately requires a re-articulation of whiteness, thus reifying the material practices that give whiteness its power and meaning seeking to disidentify from liberal whiteness reconstitutes a kind of counter-whiteness that allows white scholars and activists to hold onto the underlying structural condition of white supremacy while disassociating themselves from the ‘unearned’ privileges of the present We are particularly interested in these lines of inquiry as we think beyond white privilege to focus on white supremacy and settler colonialism. Moreover, we’ve argued that there is much to gain in engaging with the insights of settler colonialism in building a more robustly anti-racist geography A settler colonial perspective illuminates the interconnections between colonization and anti-black and anti-indigenous racisms and understands them as an ongoing structure rather than a series of historic events. broader understandings of white supremacy and settler colonialism that engage with processes of colonial dispossession have the potential to broaden anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles the lack of a broader engagement with settler colonialism distorts our understanding of the central and ongoing roles that genocide and slavery play in the continuously and always unfolding white supremacist, settler colonial landscape and leads to incomplete understandings of the role race and whiteness continue to play in our everyday geographies This shifts focus from the social condition of whiteness and emphasis on individual experiences and unrecognized privileges to underscore the underlying institutions, structures, and power relations that sustain whiteness and its attendant privileges. By placing the genocidal geographies of forced removal and slavery centrally, settler colonialism accentuates a historicized focus on the underlying foundations of white supremacy as a continuously unfolding set of social, economic and political processes across the landscape We believe geographers have much to offer broader treatments of settler colonialism and understandings of white supremacy. Antiracist geographic scholarship can not only problematize settler colonialism, it can also illustrate the ways in which the discipline itself has been complicit with white supremacist settler projects. Calling attention to the intertwined logics of settler colonialism and white supremacy not only foregrounds analysis of race, but broadens geographic engagements with race beyond the black/white binary that dominates much of the literature on race and racism within Anglogeographic scholarship. Geography, in particular, is well positioned to explore how land use practices and histories connect to the legacies and permanence of these structures and to the development of new understandings of the ways in which genocide, land appropriation, and labor exploitation are tied to white supremacy and other structures of oppression. The effort to contextual settler societies necessarily pushes us beyond a focus on white privilege and instead places emphasis on the white supremacist foundations of the socio-spatial dialectic and the unfolding of space and place across settler colonial nations.