Does "White" Equal "White Supremacy"?

What do we think of when we hear the term "White supremacy"? A Grand Dragon in a hood and sheet? A Tiki Torch-bearing neo-Nazi? Britt Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno would like to change that perception. In Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy in the American Midwest, they offer us a new way to conceptualize White supremacy: they argue that it is less an individual mindset or pattern of behavior than it is a part of the systems and structures of power that control resources and lives. Halvorson and Reno's case rests on their analysis of midwestern works of the imagination, as well as accounts from popular media, and the ways in which these works enact a pastoral mythology that constructs the Midwest as White. Further, they maintain that the whiteness of these works enables White supremacy, which, in turn, furthers nationalist and imperialist projects.

Undeniably, White supremacy is an egregiously serious problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 733 hate groups in the United States, 47 of which are categorized as White nationalist organizations.¹ Many of these are located in the Midwest, and Halvorson and Reno are right to inquire about the region's participation in this heinous social movement and to analyze the ways in which midwestern discourse informs identity and shapes thinking about race. As Jon K. Lauck observes, "regional identities arise from the aspirations, visions, and self-perceptions of those who create and monopolize the discourses about the localities and regions in which they occur."² Lauck is talking about the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves as Midwesterners. These stories, derived from agrarian principles, portray Midlanders as virtuous, industrious, and self-reliant. Are these White stories? And, if they are, does that whiteness equate to White supremacy? And does this implicate the region in national and global racist endeavors? Halvorson and Reno would answer yes to these questions.

Energized by the attention directed at White working-class heartland voters in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Halvorson and Reno address what they believe is a culturally misplaced emphasis. Trumpism is not a new thing, they point out, showing how, throughout the region's history, midwestern pastoralism has been portrayed on stage and screen, in the visual arts and in popular discourse, as normative virtuousness through which good, elite Whites distance themselves from deplorable, racist Others. They contend that this conceptualization does not address the region's structural racism and its depredations. "We need fresh, new ways of thinking about and seeing what racism is and does in order to begin the multigenerational, hard, and unglamorous work of dismantling white supremacy," they assert (4).

Perhaps a useful way to understand this argument is to reflect on second-wave feminism's conceptualization of "woman" compared to that of third-wave feminism. Fifty years ago, second-wave feminists talked about "women" and "women's rights" in an essentialized way that tacitly equated "women" with White, middle-class, cis-gendered heterosexual women, thus eliding women of color, queer women, and working-class women. More recently, third-wave feminists have offered the corrective of intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. This new way of thinking jettisons a generic woman to make way for an inclusive feminism that acknowledges that oppression is experienced differently by women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations.³ Similarly, Halvorson and Reno are arguing that the Midwest has been constructed in just such an essentialized manner that elides ethnic and racial differences.

However, the authors stumble when they take their claims one step further. Their argument is grounded in Frances Lee Ansley's definition of White supremacy: "a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily resonated across a broad array of institutions and social settings" (53).

This definition is capacious enough to include almost everything White or "coded White" and thus fails to provide an adequate warrant for Halvorson and Reno's claims that "the whiteness of the Midwest...