White Supremacy

Course Description

This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar on racial formation. Specifically, the course examines white supremacy in politics and theory. We shall take a critical-historical approach to theorize the continuities and changes in whiteness over time. For instance, what power hierarchies and political goals has white identity been fashioned to advance historically? By studying whiteness as race---and not the absence thereof--we will take up questions of how to best understand and contest contemporary manifestations of white supremacy in environmental racism, imperialism, discourses of race war and replacement theory, and ongoing neo-colonial, biopolitical and death-dealing necropolitical projects. Building on this work, we will investigate the white disavowal of existential crises of climate change and pandemic threats within apocalyptic modes of whiteness---ways of thinking and acting where the end of white supremacy is imagined and lived as the real end of the world.

Code

AS.190.469

Credits

3

Subject

Political Science