White Reconstruction

Dylan Rodríguez argues that the United States has long been organized around anti-Black violence and racial colonial domination, and that white nationalist, white terrorist and white fascist power were gaining ground well before the 2016 election. The book reads a wide range of sources, including Freedmen's Bureau records, the recruitment drive "Join LAPD," the concealed tattoo of Barry Goldwater, and the Pelican Bay prison strike, alongside testimony, images and activist writing. Rodríguez reframes the decades after the civil rights movement as a second period of Reconstruction, one in which efforts to restore white dominance worked through the language and institutions of diversity, inclusion and formal equality, a pattern he calls "multiculturalist white supremacy."

The later chapters turn toward resistance. Rodríguez examines how the imaginative, speculative and collective work of abolitionist practice might dismantle white ascendancy and the idea of Western civilization that supports it, opening space for insurgent forms of flourishing.