In November 2018, Loretta Ross and PRA convened a diverse group of activists, researchers, and scholars at the Blue Mountain Center, in upstate New York, for a wide-ranging conversation about gender and White supremacy.
The Public Eye Magazine
The Public Eye, Spring 2019
Issue
98
Last November, PRA worked with writer, professor, and longtime advocate Loretta Ross to convene a conversation about the relationship between gender and Both a system of beliefs that holds that White people are intrinsically superior and a system of institutional arrangements that favors White people as a group. Learn more . For decades, Ross says, too many fight-the-Right organizations neglected to pay attention to this perverse, right-wing version of intersectionality, although its impacts were numerous—evident in overlaps between White supremacist and A movement that emerged in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, a decision which prevented states from outlawing abortion under most circumstances. Learn more violence; in family planning campaigns centered on myths of overpopulation; in concepts of White womanhood used to further Repression occurs when public or private institutions—such as law enforcement agencies or vigilante groups—use arrest, physical coercion, or violence to subjugate a specific group. Learn more and An attitude toward social identities that can be mobilized to justify discrimination, state/vigilante violence, and exploitation. Learn more ; and in how White women themselves formed the backbone of segregationist movements. By contrast, today there is a solid core of researchers and activists working on this issue. At November’s meeting, PRA spoke to a number of them about their work, the current stakes, and the way forward.
Our second feature this issue, by Carolyn Gallaher, looks at another dynamic situation: how to understand changes on the political Right. Since Trump came to power, numerous conservative commentators—mostly “never Trumpers”—have predicted (or declared) the death of the Republican Party. “Collectively, these views attribute the party’s woes either to President Trump, depicted as a hostile interloper, or Republican officials too fearful to challenge him,” writes Gallaher. But what these arguments fail to account for is how much had already changed in the GOP to make Trump’s ascent possible. While once, in the 1970s, the New Right managed to unite business elites, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in common purpose, today that coalition is straining under changed realities and a rhetorical glue that no longer binds.
Another part of that changed reality is a Republican Party that has effectively deputized provocative and violent right-wing activists to serve as their militant arm. In her report on the Proud Boys, Emily Gorcenski finds that this group of self-declared “Western chauvinists” aren’t just acting as vigilante street fighters, but that their mission to “trigger the libs” serves a profound role in the contemporary conservative landscape. “It’s a style of antagonistic politics that has already become normalized elsewhere in the Republican Party, as every booming chant of ‘lock her up’ at a Trump rally further entrenches the idea that politics is about obliterating your opponent,” writes Gorcenski. “The Proud Boys and the Alt Lite don’t operate separately from this dynamic but within it.”
Finally, in our Q&A for this issue, Mariya Strauss talks to Daniel HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, authors of an important new book, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. For all of U.S. history, An ideology that assumes a hierarchy of human worth based on the social construction of racial difference. Racism as an ideology claims superiority of the socially constructed category, White, over other racialized categories based on the false idea that race is a fixed and immutable reality. Learn more and bias have informed the ways in which people are pitted against one another within a winner-takes-all economy. Much of that has boiled down to the deeply racialized idea of “makers and takers.” But in this moment of both rising White supremacism and strange bedfellows alliances on the Right, HoSang and Lowndes offer a roadmap for understanding how race and class work today.
In between issues of The Public Eye, PRA publishes articles, features, reports, and more online, so be sure to visit us at politicalresearch.org.
Kathryn Joyce
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