The Persistence of White Supremacy: Indigenous Women Migrants and the Structures of Settler Capitalism

ABSTRACT Since the 2016 presidential election, there has been a resurgence of openly white supremacist discourse and action in the United States. The public debate following the election often suggested that Trump and his followers represented a backlash against the assumed progress of a multicultural and potentially even postracial society. However, the assumption inherent in this perspective, that white supremacy can be voted out or voted back in, is problematic. In this article, based on ten years of research with Indigenous women migrants from Mexico and Central America, I will apply an analytic of settler colonialism in order to explore how white supremacy is structured into our institutions and everyday social relations. In particular, I will consider the intersection of capitalism and the settler state, and how the changing needs of capitalism shape discourses of race differently over time yet remain fundamentally underwritten by white supremacist assumptions. Examining the shift from neoliberal multiculturalism to what I call neoliberal multicriminalism , I argue that neoliberal multiculturalism, with its accompanying discourses of tolerance and rights, may have reached its limits, and that the resurgence of open white supremacy is a response to the changing needs of white settler capitalist power. [ white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, migration ]