Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present by Moon-Kie Jung (review)

The relentless acts of resistance staged by the Movement for Black Lives have made it increasingly impossible for dominant groups to continue ignoring the persistent problems of gendered racial violence and inequality in the US and across the globe. As anti-racist struggles focus our attention on contemporary injustices, it is incumbent upon us to clarify how racism functions on diverse terrains and scales. In his theoretically generative book, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present, Moon-Kie Jung offers precisely such clarifications. Jung shows that racisms are neither singular nor shallow in their expressions. He refines and reframes our understanding of racisms by attending to their unconscious, durable, and habituated dimensions. Revisiting sociological concepts and methodologies that are generally taken for granted, the book reveals the damaging blind spots created by epistemologies of ignorance and nationalist frameworks.

Beneath the Surface is divided into three parts. In Part I, Jung denaturalizes common sense assumptions about race and racisms. Having outlined his key research questions in Chapter 1, Jung devotes Chapter 2 to a new theory of racism. Building on established sociological theories, Jung theorizes racisms’ unconscious, habituated dimensions as well as their structural, relational, and global scales. In Part II, Jung denaturalizes the common assumption that the US is a nation-state. Reframing the US as an empire-state, Jung shows how nationalist investments keep us from reading racisms relationally. Re-reading foundational Supreme Court cases in Chapter 3, he demonstrates how the fates of groups and geographies within and beyond the US are inextricably linked. Jung further examines the pitfalls of nationalist frames in Chapter 4. Highlighting the problematic premises of neoclassical and segmented assimilation theories in sociology, he shows how scholarly frames can unwittingly perpetuate racist and nationalist assumptions. Finally, Jung devotes Part III to denaturalizing structures of ignorance in greater detail, meticulously elaborating on two concepts briefly introduced in Part I. In Chapter 5, Jung examines the ways dominant actors ignore subaltern discourses generated by oppressed people, a process he defines as symbolic coercion. In contrast, Chapter 6 shows how dominant actors ignore their own knowledge of racial oppression, a process Jung defines as symbolic perversity.

Jung’s core contribution lies in his ability to offer theoretical precision and depth about the unconscious, habituated, and taken-for-granted ways racisms function in familiar situations. He examines racisms’ operative logics in divergent domains ranging from incidents of police violence, massacres of Filipinos in Hawai’i, mainstream newspaper coverage, legal cases, and scholarly conventions in sociology. He seeks to move us away from narrow readings of racism as individual acts of consciously motivated bigotry toward a layered and relational comprehension of racisms as deep structuring schemas. For example, he opens the book by describing a tragic yet all-too-common scenario in the US: a white police officer’s killing of a young Black man. Officer Daniel Norbits’s killing of Kiwane Carrington in Champaign, Illinois was, predictably, rendered justifiable. As usual, the police denied that racism factored into the outcome of the encounter. In contrast, Black community members and anti-racist advocates claimed that racism was central in Carrington’s tragic death. While agreeing that race and racism factored into the incident, Jung challenges us to explain racism’s operative logics in police violence with greater precision. If the police fail to utter racist speech, how do we account for racism’s presence? Police officers routinely deny that race affects their perceptions, judgments, or actions. Yet the disproportionate number of Black, Native, and Latino/a victims affected by police violence suggests that this cannot be the case.

Radically divergent interpretations of police violence suggest that dominant actors and those subject to domination use profoundly different epistemological paradigms and ontological assumptions. To account for these ontological and epistemological divergences, Beneath the Surface expands our conceptual framing of racisms beyond conscious intentionality and avowed ideologies. Jung encourages...