A Field Guide to White SupremacyA Field Guide to White Supremacy

This Field Guide to White Supremacy illuminates the long and complex career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and across impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose it. We focus here not only on the most catastrophic incidents of white supremacist domestic terrorism-like the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and more recent mass shootings at stores and places of worship-but also on the manifold ways that overt and covert white supremacy, supported by often-violent patriarchy and gender norms, have shaped American law, life, and policy. A field guide is meant to train observers to notice a particular phenomenon-here, white supremacy-and its distinctions. This manual will help observers to notice and name variant forms of white supremacy, ranging from systems to laws, from hate crimes to quiet indifference, from the everyday interactions that comprise white supremacist society to the movements that demand something else. A Field Guide to White Supremacy, in other words, is meant as a resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens who wish to understand the history, sociology, and rhetoric of this phenomenon. It also offers a sampling of some of the best writing and most recent scholarship on these subfields, to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, activists and their communities.