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157 Introduction 1. Ellison, Invisible Man, 4. 2. Ibid., 568. 3. Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 20. 4. Ibid. 5. Douglass makes a clear distinction between this type of unconscious black complicity, for which slaves should not be held accountable, and conscious black complicity (i.e., a willful desire to exploit black suffering for material or social gain), which he treats as reprehensible and deserving of death. 6. Ibid, 89. 7. Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place, 33. 8. Ibid, 29. 9. Roediger is riffing on Malcolm X’s comparison of white supremacy to the Cadillac car brand, the gist of Malcolm X’s argument–as relayed via Roediger–being that white supremacy resembles the prestigious Cadillac brand, in that it shifts its model offerings (i.e., outward appearances ) from year to year “but leave[s] the essence of the brand intact” (xiii). Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History, xiii. 10. See Ikard and Teasley, Nation of Cowards. 11. Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle, 30. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 31–32. 14. Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 103. 15. Eagleton, The Significance of Theory, 37. 16. Morrison, Beloved, 198. 17. George Zimmerman is of mixed raced heritage–one of his parents is white, the other Hispanic. I use “white” here to denote how Zimmerman self-identifies and is received in the public domain. 18. Cosby made these claims as the keynote speaker at the NAACP’s banquet celebrating the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision. 19. See Obama, The Audacity of Hope. 20. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” United States Department of Labor. 21. Mutua, Progressive Black Masculinities , 5. 22. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 40. 23. Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1907. 24. Ibid., 1901. 1. White Supremacy Under Fire 1. Jones, The Known World, 153. 2. Ibid., 162. 3. Ibid., 163. Notes 158 Notes to Pages 23–27 4. Donaldson, “Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South,” 271. 5. White indentured servants doubled in the colonies as a military force against Native American “insurgencies.” Outnumbering the aristocracy by a significant margin, they were as a practical matter a force to be recognized with. It was then in the aristocracy’s best social interest to build bridges with these groups–a reality that was made devastatingly clear in Bacon’s Rebellion, when European and African indentured servants formed a coalition on the basis of shared oppression, took up arms, and tried to overthrow the power structure. While Jones does not directly engage this history in the novel, its presence looms large over how whites, especially the white poor, negotiate their social value in relation to blacks. 6. Dyer, White, 19. 7. In the ur-text of this political tradition , Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , Douglass conveys white supremacist ideology as a contagion of pathology via Mrs. Auld–who after becoming a slave owner and being injected with “the fatal poison of irresponsible power” (35) moves from being the embodiment of moral virtue and “Christian” piety to becoming a cruel and heartless “demon.” Identifying white supremacist ideology as an equal opportunity contaminant of humanity, Douglass concludes, “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me” (39). 8. Donaldson, 271. 9. In his essay “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity,” Eyerman describes “intellectuals” as mediators and translators of collective cultural memory and consciousness. These intellectuals are crucial to their representative groups because they “mediate between the cultural and political spheres that characterize modern society.” When groups experience “tear[s] in the social fabric” of their communities –like the realization by African Americans during the post-Reconstruction era that they were not going to be issued full citizenship as promised–intellectuals help them reinterpret “the past as a means toward reconciling present/future needs” (63). 10. Jones, “We Tell Stories.” 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. This pattern has not escaped the attention of African American communities in the contemporary moment, as evidenced by filmmaker Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, political cartoonist Aaron McGrudger’s Boondocks animated series, and Dave Chappelle’s The Dave Chappelle Show. 14. See Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother for an insightful historical critique of African slavery and its similarities to and distinctions from European practices. 15. Addressing the accusation, in an interview with Maryemma Graham, that his novel lets whites off the hook...

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