White extremism has been a rising trend in North American and European countries over the past two decades. Despite the systemically engrained privileged status of people who identify as white in US society, one of the causes of white extremism is a perceived threat of being sidelined/disadvantaged by individuals with non-white identities. For example, the mainstreaming of the great replacement theory among right-wing media outlets and politicians demonstrates this perception. We examine this perception, and white extremism rhetoric and radicalization broadly, within the context of social exclusion at both the individual and systemic levels. We further embed this analysis within theories and research focused on concepts of “the self,” social identity, and related psychological needs usually impacted by social exclusion. We recommend researchers and practitioners interested in extremism and radicalization to intentionally consider self-related theories and constructs going forward.

Analyzing major and lesser-known utopian and dystopian literature from 1945-present, we define white supremacy as both a regime of exploitation and violence by people of European descent upon others deemed to be outside of whiteness and a process of centering whiteness. We look at the relationship between white supremacy and American culture from the period through two main trends. The first asserts white supremacy in either a default form assuming the centrality of whiteness or an explicit form that calls for white supremacist revolution. Texts here range from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold to McCarthy’s The Road to the notorious Turner Diaries. The second trend directly challenges white supremacy, including some notable texts such as Butler’s Parable series to a flood of post-Black Lives Matter works such as Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to Coates’s Between the World and Me to short works by adrienne maree brown and others.

Black youth who attend school in non-Black spaces do not always feel welcomed or comfortable, and they regularly experience everyday racism that is interpersonal and institutional. Young Black changemakers use multiple strategies to resist racism. Resistance involved creating safe spaces in schools they could claim as their own, holding administrators accountable, and raising awareness of Black culture and experiences. Black youth noted the importance of authentic allies in non-Black spaces, and also shared the burdens that arise from the emotional labor of being in non-Black spaces and engaging in racial justice work.

This chapter critiques Western and scientific philanthropy scholarly understanding of the nonprofit sector. It argues that this narrow analysis of nonprofits limits our understanding of Muslim prosocial behaviors that are less dominant in the academic literature. By examining the tenets and roots of Muslim prosocial action, we see how this specific view of social good has been limited in the broader conversation, which in turn has limited our understanding of the nonprofit sector across the world. The chapter also explores Muslim prosocial action by examining its theological and cultural sources to create a broader conception of giving behavior within an Islamic context, and discusses the challenges associated with strict adherence to the Western definition of the nonprofit sector for scholars who want to include Muslim perspectives and charitable acts. Ultimately, it suggests a framework that nonprofit-sector scholars can use to move beyond Western-centric definitions of prosocial action to include other cultural and faith perspectives. This approach treats Muslim prosocial action as a practice-oriented religious tradition.

Chapter 10 engages the global and historical attributes of lynching and situates the practice within a North American environment of anti-Black terror. This chapter links national lawmakers who advocated for White supremacy to the increase and severity of violence against Black individuals (and others), surveying how violence and the construction of race served to create and uphold relationships of power and economy in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. It centers on Congressional discussions in the Reconstruction era and the brutal death of Lee Walker, a Black man, at the hands of a White mob in 1893. The creation of a new racial order, one that harkened to earlier forms of racial intimidation, was intricately connected to work. Violence ensured that the linkages between low-status labor, poverty, and skin color remained unbroken.

This chapter recovers the voices of marginalised US communities – Native, Jewish, and African Americans – bringing out of oblivion their Tercentenary contributions. It asks whether underprivileged racial and ethnic groups accepted the alleged superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural heritage, and whether, by appropriating Shakespeare, they attempted to become part of that heritage or to challenge its exclusivity. It demonstrates that 1916 America was torn between competing impulses of assimilation and diversity. The white majority held out ostensibly universal cultural standards to which all should aspire, while believing that they were unattainable to some groups. The minorities faced the irreconcilable demands of trying to conform to these standards at the cost of renouncing their distinct identity, while sensing that white supremacists would never accept them as equal no matter what they did. The Tercentenary celebrations registered these tensions and allowed the members of American minorities to produce hybrid Shakespearean appropriations, which accommodated a far-reaching critique of dominant ideology. They helped them to express their distinctive identities, while highlighting the entrenched inequality that they endured.

Socrates identified hubris as the principal obstacle to wisdom and knew that most people will not listen to reason until they are taken down a few notches. Martin Luther King similarly knew that Southern white leaders would not negotiate in good faith until their racial hubris was challenged. Socratic questioning created a personal crisis, that is, a teachable moment, for those subjected to it; King’s protests created a political crisis and a teachable moment in those Southern towns subjected to it. Martin Luther King is well known for his stirring denunciations of American racism, militarism, and poverty; King is less well known for his denunciations of the complacency of the Christian church in America, both Black and white. Yet King’s prophetic witness led to his persecution by political leaders as well as his excommunication from his own Black Baptist Church convention. Americans like to think of their country as the promised land, but for many of its Black citizens, the American experience has been more like bondage in Egypt than freedom in Canaan. In King’s prophetic vision, America will be redeemed by the suffering of its Black citizens, especially in the South. Like Moses, King hoped to liberate his people from bondage; and like Jesus, King would liberate his people not by conquest but by redemptive suffering.

This volume, part of the Feminist Judgment Series, shows how feminist legal theory along with critical race theory and intersectional modes of critique might transform immigration law. Here, a diverse collection of scholars and lawyers bring critical feminist, race and intersectional insights to Supreme Court opinions that deal with the source of the power to regulate immigration, state and local regulation of immigration, citizenship law, racial discrimination, employment law, access to public education, the rights of criminal defendants, the detention of noncitizens, and more. Feminist reasoning values the perspectives of outsiders, exposes the deep-rooted bias in the legal opinions of courts, and illuminates the effects of ostensibly neutral policies that create and maintain oppression and hierarchy. One by one, the chapters in this book reimagine the norms that drive immigration policies and practices. In place of discrimination and subordination, the authors here demand welcome and equality. Where current law omits the voice and stories of noncitizens, the authors here center their lives and experiences. Collectively, they reveal how a feminist vision of immigration law could center a commitment to equality and justice and foster a country where diverse newcomers readily flourish with dignity.

Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities was, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single category. Their message often went unheeded, particularly in the most widely circulated versions of feminist thought, which elevated white middle-class experiences over those of working-class, Indigenous, Black, Latina, and Asian women. Throughout the century, narratives by women of color pushed back against the white supremacist version of feminism. The American novel narrated multiple feminisms, triumphant and defeated, jubilant and anguished, razor-focused and utterly lost.

While scholars in the United States have long regarded the prospect of “Fascism in America” as unlikely, they have begun to reconsider their views since the rise of Trumpism. In the past half-decade, an extended debate has raged in the USA about whether present-day right-wing political trends should be seen as fascist. To date, however, this debate remains unresolved. The introduction seeks to break this deadlock by surveying the debate’s origins, clarifying its stakes, and assessing its course. It then introduces the volume’s twelve chapters, all of which weigh in on the debate in different ways. They are grouped into four sections that seek to illuminate different aspects of American fascism. These areas of focus are: (1) “Strategic Thinking about Fascism”; 2) “Homegrown Nazis”; 3) “White Antidemocratic Violence and Black Antifascist Activism”; and 4) “Countering Fascism in Culture and Policy”.

This chapter discusses the challenges of developing local and national policy responses to white supremacist and far-right extremism in the United States. The chapter proceeds in three sections. The first section offers an overview of recent policy changes and responses to the rising threat of white supremacist extremism, domestic extremism, and “home-grown violent extremism” from the far right, spurred in large part by global and domestic terror attacks and thwarted plots. The second section traces ongoing policy dilemmas. Policymakers face a situation in which white supremacist extremism will almost certainly get worse as the USA faces unstable and highly contested election seasons, ongoing disinformation campaigns, and the insufficiency of single-platform bans to curtail hate clusters. The chapter’s final section offers policy recommendations, including a focus on greater transnational engagement and more strategic ways to share expertise between academic scholars and local, state, and national policymakers. There is a need for improved national research capacity and expertise, and for pathways to support local community engagement, communication, and preventative education.

“Negotiating Whiteness” draws on the work of critical race studies scholars and whiteness studies scholars to present my book’s main argument and outline its core theoretical concept: the “intraracial color-line.” Shakespeare’s plays disrupt the common understanding of the Black/white racial binary in ways that have implications for modernity regarding the uncivilized, less-than-ideal white self. In Shakespearean drama, this figure serves two functions: The white other is an embankment that keeps “good” white people in check by demarcating the ever-shifting boundary between what the ideal white self should and should not be or do, by showing the costs of “bad” whiteness; and the white other figure embodies non-somatic blackness, constantly reifying anti-black and anti-Black discourse. By centering critiques of whiteness, I isolate the kinds of intraracial tensions that underscore the instability of racialized whiteness and that emphasize the need for understanding how that instability depends on upholding whiteness as superior.

Part Two: “Ostracism/Initiation,” examines twentieth-century Japanese immigrants and their descendants in relation to structural anti-Blackness and its instantiation in a nationwide system of racial segregation and anti-Black violence. Entering the U.S. in the wake of Chinese exclusion, the Japanese inherited the mantle of the Asiatic/Mongolian, much to their dismay. Despite the pointed burdens associated this label, they discovered that the constitutive not-Blackness of the Asiatic/Mongolian also enabled their qualified and uneven advancement and mobility in an anti-Black order. This remained true even during the turbulent, traumatic events of the Second World War. The wartime internment of Japanese Americans constituted not only the extreme limit of their ostracism, but also, as others have noted, their symbolic initiation into the nation. As the Cold War unfolded, accounts of Japanese Americans as an ascendant “model minority” were just one symptom of how they came to be weaponized against the Black freedom struggle and in defense of the U.S. state and racial capitalism. Like the Chinese before them, Japanese Americans deployed their not-Blackness to their advantage in their efforts to achieve residential mobility, educational success, occupational advancement, and social assimilation in the postwar era.