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George Yancy: Trump Relies on Centuries-Old Notions of Whiteness to Activate His MAGA Base
Whiteness is baked into the US’s DNA. Can it be structurally dismantled?I was appalled and sickened by the AI-generated image of the Obamas as apes on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account on February 5, 2026. Bear in mind that this shameless anti-Black vitriol came out on this year’s 100th anniversary of Black History Month. In response to the justifiable backlash to the racist image, Press…
The term “racism” must be understood within the context of an anti-Black American polity.
To attack critical race theory is to attack Black knowledge production and attempt to silence its epistemological disruptive reverberations, which challenge the U.S.’s atrocious anti-Black racism. The attacks waged against everything deemed “critical race theory” constitute a new form of McCarthyism, deeming all ideas legitimately critical of realities in the U.S. as “un-American.” Contemporary attacks against critical race theory also expose its conservative attackers’ abysmal ignorance regarding its central claims.
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Acutely aware of how critical race theory is facing attacks from white supremacists on the right, I was troubled to also find it facing a different sort of attack by Black law professor Randall Kennedy in his recent American Prospect article, “The Right-Wing Attack on Racial Justice Talk.” While Kennedy does argue against the recent right-wing attacks on critical race theory, depicting them as self-serving efforts of so many to avoid coming to terms with the U.S.’s history of racism and its continued existence, he simultaneously labels various aspects of critical race theory as “misguided,” and argues that they ought to be rejected.
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Kennedy’s framing here is itself deeply misguided. He assumes that because some Black people are in positions of power, those Black people can therefore use such “power to effectuate their prejudices” and that this means that they would qualify as racists. What I fear most about Kennedy’s position is that right-wing white enthusiasts, to put it mildly, will take his words as support for the idea that racism is also a Black phenomenon, and not fundamentallyand inextricably a feature of the structure and practice of whiteness. Kennedy’s position opens the doors to a more widespread embrace of the erroneous and damaging concept of “Black anti-white racism.”
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Because so many white people dread being called the r-word, as if it was somehow comparable to the n-word, Kennedy’s argument provides cover for white people to obfuscate the systemic feature that is indispensable when discussing critically the nature of racism. He also conflates some Black people’s “power to effectuate their prejudices” with 400 years of white people in positions of systemic power over Black people, where being white sufficiently constituted the “power to effectuate [white] prejudices.”
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As professors, we are still Black professors. Our academic statuses are forms of temporary reprieve at best. Class might free us from trying to use a “fake” $20 bill, but at the end of the day we are both George Floyd, Black bodies navigating a larger white system where we are believed to be “criminals” a priori. Having a Ph.D. will not shield me against white police officers killing me dead as they approach me in the night, mistaking my holding a copy of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for a weapon, or mistake Kennedy’s holding a cell phone for a gun. Then again, perhaps someday we might have to face the fact that the $20 bill that we have is fake and find ourselves under the knee of white violence, white “law and order.” Within the context of anti-Black America, Blackness functions as an ontological and political deflationary signifier, but it also constitutes a material condition where to be Black in the U.S. is to be always already imminently dead. In Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore powerfully writes about racism where she refers to it as the “state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
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Part of the difficulty with Kennedy’s argument about Black racism is his failure to interpret with precision the thesis held by scholars of anti-racism that racism is “prejudice + power.” For example, in her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, educator and psychologist Beverly D. Tatum holds to this thesis, arguing that racism involves a system that advantages some and disadvantages others based upon race. Within the context of this discussion in her book, Tatum uses the term “people of color” to refer to those who she says cannot be racists. Hence, if people of color are in fact racist (and by implication if Black people are racist) then they must, for Tatum, “systematically benefit from racism.” Black people, however, don’t systematically benefit from racism. I once had a white student raise the issue of affirmative action as an example. The problem with that argument is that affirmative action is not meant for Black people to benefit from racism, but it is meant as an approach to curtail the effects of racism. Tatum also argues that for people of color to be racist, we would need to live in a world characterized by the “systematic cultural and institutional support or sanction for the racial bigotry of people of color.” Historically, the fact of the matter is that Black people have never had systematic cultural and institutional support or sanction for their “racial bigotry.” It is important to note, however, that Tatum does argue that if we were to define racism narrowly as consisting of racial prejudices alone, then, yes, people of color, which includes Black people, can be said to be racist. I’m sure that there are Black people and people of color who don’t like white people, and that have racist prejudices against them. I would ask, however, about the basis of those “racial prejudices.” The aim is not to justify them by making such an inquiry, but to try to understand them within the context of centuries of anti-Black racism. I would also argue that even if we grant that there are Black people who hold racial prejudices, we will need to examine and be truthful about how those prejudices are not linked systemically to a system of anti-white racism. White racist prejudices in the U.S. are fundamentally linked to white supremacist systems that oppress Black people. So, even if Black people have racial prejudices, they cannot be racist oppressors in relationship to whites unless we are prepared to denude racism of its structural and systemic oppressive logics, which is how we understand the use of the term “racism” within the context of an anti-Black American polity.
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The idea that Black people who hold racial prejudices and occupy positions of relative power qualify as “racists” akin to white supremacist racists would only ever make sense to me if a counterfactual (i.e., wildly fantastical) set of historical events were also real. Let me explain. For years now, I have used the following counterfactual history (presented in the block quote of my own words below) as an example to challenge and augment the narrow and protected memory of my white students, many of whom have never even heard of the white abolitionist John Brown. That historical archive seems too dangerous for those who are afraid to investigate what lies within the belly of the beast, the monstrous structure of white supremacy. (Spoiler alert: In the imagined history below, I have simply reversed the actual history of anti-Black racism in the U.S. in order to make clear the ridiculousness of claiming that Black people are racist.)
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Without this counterfactual history, the idea of a Black racist is titular and does far more harm. For example, the claim that “Black people are racist” risks denuding the historical and current monstrosity of what we know to be the manifestations of white racism in the U.S., and the venomous nature of the ways in which white supremacy is a global phenomenon.
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To maintain that Black people can be racist is as absurd as comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the KKK. It’s as absurd as comparing India Walton to David Duke. Therefore, literacy regarding the legacy of white supremacy and its extant reality is so crucial. The truth of white supremacy is not flattering. It is a hard pill to swallow for white people. Yet isn’t it better to choke on the truth than to ingest delectable lies? According to James Baldwin, “People who imagine that history flatters them are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world.”
George Yancy: Pete Hegseth Has Banned 3 of My Books From the US Naval Academy
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a ceremony to present the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy to the U.S. Naval Academy football team in the East Room of the White House on April 15, 2025, in Washington, D.C. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES. ~~ Not one, not two, but three of my books have been removed and banned from the United States Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library by the order of…
i've been trying to figure out for the past month why i just don't feel like writing fic stuff rn. i'm for certain it's not just writers' block, it's grief.
today i ran into this list of books just removed from the Nimitz library. the majority of the texts on race, racism and identity are ones i taught, read or included in my work.
we don't really have a name for this kind of grief, do we? teacher grief, scholar grief, archival grief just don't do it justice when you're watching your colleagues and your field get devoured. it's not even really anticipatory at this point either. this is the part where the once slow train speeds past you.
and there's this anger that comes from seeing how vulnerable people are when they're denied access to things that could have helped. it's bitter like a stomach ache from too much coffee, and it claws back at you when you think you're well beyond its grasp.
please do what you can to protect your local library or start a little free library with books about the real history of this place.
George Yancy: How Should We Rethink Our Relationship to US Violence Around the World?
People hold an antiwar vigil on the 20th anniversary of the U.S. war in Iraq, on March 19, 2023, in New York City. LEONARDO MUNOZ / VIEWPRESS Democracy-destroying forces thrive off militarism. We have to resist both. The outrages are raining down one after another: Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine is responsible for the war with Russia, which thus blames Ukraine for the deaths of its own…
George Yancy: Frederick Douglass’s Words Ring True: “Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand”
An image of Frederick Douglass is projected onto the Robert E. Lee Statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, on June 18, 2020. JOHN MCDONNELL / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES As I was reflecting on Frederick Douglass this Black History Month, I thought about the blitz of executive orders coming from Donald Trump. The term “blitz” is apropos as it comes from the German Blitzkrieg,…
“Trump is American gangsterism crystallized, honest about itself, unashamed and bold,” says West.
During times like these, I am reminded of the courageous speech of philosopher Cornel West, who attributes to St. Augustine the profound existential observation that we are born between urine and feces, that we are born out of and through the funk. West has said, “We down in the funk, and there is love and freedom and sublimity in that funk.” Within the context of this funk, West urges us to think of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, reminding us: “His funk raised us and renewed us. His funk got us through.” The point here is that we must be on intimate terms with funk and despair but not prisoners of despair. . . . . . . West reminds us, and it is an existentially powerful message at precisely this historical moment, that pain and sorrow can be our constant companions as we continue to “engage in an endless quest for healing and serving others.” It is this sense of ethical fortitude in the face of this election that led me to reach out to my dear brother Cornel West. This exclusive interview is the fruit of West’s generosity. As a person who refuses to be bought by empire and seduced by “sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal,” brother West urgently reminds us of a tradition of speaking truth to power and refuses to honor a political and corporate duopoly that has forgotten about poor and working-class people. Read closely and you will feel the pain, the outrage, and the love and insistence to keep on keeping on.
George Yancy interviews Dr. West. Listen up.
George Yancy: The Violent “Othering” of Palestinians
In my book, Black Bodies, White Gazes, I interrogate the white gaze, which I describe as a structural and habitual way of racially distorting the world in binary and hierarchical terms, buttressed by ideological, material and institutional power. In that book, I argue for the dismantlement of whiteness and the eradication of the white gaze. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon tells the story…
