November 29, 2013 · by Robin James · in critical race theory, feminism, gender, MRWaSP, multi racial white supremacy, neoliberal, patriarchy, Puar, race, resilience, sexton, sheth
Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, or MRWaSP, is my term for early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony. I put a lower-case “a” in the acronym to both make the acronym something pronounceable to English speakers, and to echo the older acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). You say it like “Mr. Wasp”–emphasis on the “mister” shows that this is not just about white supremacy, it’s also about patriarchy.
MRWaSP is an upgrade on WASP. As critical theorists of race have been arguing, white supremacy has retooled itself to work more efficiently in and for globalized, neoliberal hegemonies. Not only are exclusion and border-patrolling resource-intensive, they’re also not the most efficient ways of promoting nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal interests. As Jared Sexton argues, contemporary multiculturalism/multiracialism is a “protest less against the genocidal objectives of Anglo white supremacy than the inefficiency of unrestrained violence as the means of its accomplishment” (Amalgamation Schemes, 200). You can extend this argument to patriarchy and other institutionalized forms of identity-based oppression. It is more cost-effective to include some formerly excluded/abjected groups in racial/gender/sexual supremacy, because this inclusion further reinforces both the supremacy of the hyperelites and the precarity of the most unruly groups (those who pose the greatest threat to MRWaSP hegemony). As the always-brilliant philosopher Falguni Sheth explains,more and more men and women of color have been invited into the offices of White Supremacy to share in the destruction of other men and women of color who are vulnerable, disfranchised, and rapidly being eviscerated through the policies of a multi-racial white supremacy…A multiracial white supremacy is a system of power that has invited in—or exploited wherever it could– people of color in order to wage institutional, legal, political assaults on other black, brown, and poor people—at “home” and internationally.
Sheth cites numerous recent examples, including Asian-American former Attorney General John Yu and African-American former Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Condoleza Rice’s central role in establishing and maintaining the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay. Though installing people of color in positions of real political, economic, and social power may not seem to benefit white supremacy, it actually does; when your racist project appears to be led by a person of color, that obscures the racism. It “promote[s] their claims to be non-racist by using the presence of these [non-white] individuals as cultural symbols to distract many of us” so that what is an “overt racial mission…can be couched as an ostensible hunt for justice.” Putting otherwise privileged people of color at the center of white supremacist institutions obscures the white supremacy (and the imperialism/coloniality), thus allowing it to run all the more efficiently. This inclusion is always conditional and always instrumental–this can’t be emphasized enough. People of color are folded into white supremacy only insofar as this augments white supremacy; the moment this becomes a bad deal for white supremacy, it ends.
Homonationalism, an idea developed by Jasbir Puar, is another type of MRWaSP strategy. The nominal inclusion of formerly abjected groups–here, homosexuals–is used to distinguish between successful, resilient nations and those nations in need of (white) savoirist intervention. “Good” societies recognize that gays and lesbians are normal people, too; “bad” societies cling to primitive homophobic views and traditions. Similar discursive moves also distinguish “good” post-feminist societies and “bad” traditional societies that still overtly oppress women (e.g., through veiling, genital cutting, child marriage, sex work, etc.) Supposedly liberated attitudes about gender, sexuality, and often also race distinguish resilient societies from primitive ones. Sometimes this distinction is used to disaggregate whiteness, generally along the lines of social class. For example, in 2013 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) featured a bad guy character (a “heel,” in industry parlance), Jack Swagger, who expressed anti-immigrant, nationalist, and sometimes overtly white supremacist views. The schtick is that these racist views are what qualify him to be a heel: they’re obviously odious to fans, evidence of the character’s vilany. “Good guys” should not harbor the racist, anti-immigrant views espoused by Swagger, and should instead be fully comfortable cheering on Swagger’s Mexican-American nemesis, Alberto del Rio. As neoliberal capitalism restructures the economy and leaves working-class and rural whites in the lurch, framing them as backwards and uneducated makes their increasingly marginal socioeconomic status seem like the result of their individual failings, not the result of broad economic forces. Just as it conditionally and instrumentally includes otherwise privileged people of color within white supremacy, MRWaSP conditionally and instrumentally excludes otherwise underprivileged whites from the privileges to which they are accustomed as white. Similarly, just as it conditionally and instrumentally includes otherwise privileged women, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities (think about pre-murder-trial Oscar Pistorious, or Temple Grandin’s recent fame), MRWaSP conditionally and instrumentally excludes otherwise underprivileged women, queers, and people with disabilities.
Another way of saying that is: MRWaSP uses resilience to cut the color line–and the gender binary, the line between homonormative and queer, and to differentiate between mainstreamable and non-mainstreamable people with disabilities. By “resilience” I mean a specific neoliberal ideology, not the general sense of surviving in the face of hardship and oppression. Mark Neocleous explains the relationship between resilience discourse and neoliberal ideology here. What I’m calling “resilience discourse” is another way of framing what Naomi Klein calls “shock doctrine” capitalism–it’s the incitement of damage for the purpose of overcoming it (because that overcoming generates surplus value/profit/etc.). I’ve talked a bit about resilience discourse and femininity here and here.
Resilient populations who can overcome their race/class/gender/sexual/immigrant/religious/ damage in socially profitable ways move closer to the center of white supremacist privilege, whereas less resilient, precarious populations move further and further from this center. Resilience deregulates the work of racialization, gendering, sexualization, bodily normalization, and so on; it treats racialization/gendering/sexualization/etc. like a deregulated marketplace. Rather than tying race status directly and primarily to phenotype (visible race), and then regulating on the basis of racial identity (e.g., Jim Crow, apartheid, etc.), resilience frames race as an effect or outcome of one’s response to underlying, background conditions. Similarly, rather than tying gender status directly and primarily to either sex and/or visible gender performance, resilience frames it as an effect or outcome of one’s response to underlying, background conditions. This makes your status seem like the result of your individual choices, a true meritocracy in which the hard-working overcome their damage, but the lazy and sick can or will not. Of course, however, these background conditions are not equal, and they’re definitely controlled by histories of racial exploitation, patriarchy, and so on. It’s harder to bounce back if you’re starting from behind.
It’s not just race that shapes these material and ideological conditions–it’s also cis/heteropatriarchy, capitalism, Eurocentrism, ableism, all of what falls under “kyriarchy”. Because all these -isms shape the background material and ideological conditions in which we all work, those who have the best odds of successfully demonstrating their resilience are the ones who have the most heavily stacked decks. So, bourgeois, cis-gendered, able-bodied people of color are generally the most resilient ones…in no small part because MRWaSP has to make fewer material and ideological compromises to let them in.
Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, or MRWaSP, is my term for early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony. I put a lower-case “a” in the acronym to both make the acronym something pronounceable to English speakers, and to echo the older acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). You say it like “Mr. Wasp”–emphasis on the “mister” shows that this is not just about white supremacy, it’s also about patriarchy.
MRWaSP is an upgrade on WASP. As critical theorists of race have been arguing, white supremacy has retooled itself to work more efficiently in and for globalized, neoliberal hegemonies. Not only are exclusion and border-patrolling resource-intensive, they’re also not the most efficient ways of promoting nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal interests. As Jared Sexton argues, contemporary multiculturalism/multiracialism is a “protest less against the genocidal objectives of Anglo white supremacy than the inefficiency of unrestrained violence as the means of its accomplishment” (Amalgamation Schemes, 200). You can extend this argument to patriarchy and other institutionalized forms of identity-based oppression. It is more cost-effective to include some formerly excluded/abjected groups in racial/gender/sexual supremacy, because this inclusion further reinforces both the supremacy of the hyperelites and the precarity of the most unruly groups (those who pose the greatest threat to MRWaSP hegemony). As the always-brilliant philosopher Falguni Sheth explains,more and more men and women of color have been invited into the offices of White Supremacy to share in the destruction of other men and women of color who are vulnerable, disfranchised, and rapidly being eviscerated through the policies of a multi-racial white supremacy…A multiracial white supremacy is a system of power that has invited in—or exploited wherever it could– people of color in order to wage institutional, legal, political assaults on other black, brown, and poor people—at “home” and internationally.
Sheth cites numerous recent examples, including Asian-American former Attorney General John Yu and African-American former Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Condoleza Rice’s central role in establishing and maintaining the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay. Though installing people of color in positions of real political, economic, and social power may not seem to benefit white supremacy, it actually does; when your racist project appears to be led by a person of color, that obscures the racism. It “promote[s] their claims to be non-racist by using the presence of these [non-white] individuals as cultural symbols to distract many of us” so that what is an “overt racial mission…can be couched as an ostensible hunt for justice.” Putting otherwise privileged people of color at the center of white supremacist institutions obscures the white supremacy (and the imperialism/coloniality), thus allowing it to run all the more efficiently. This inclusion is always conditional and always instrumental–this can’t be emphasized enough. People of color are folded into white supremacy only insofar as this augments white supremacy; the moment this becomes a bad deal for white supremacy, it ends.
Homonationalism, an idea developed by Jasbir Puar, is another type of MRWaSP strategy. The nominal inclusion of formerly abjected groups–here, homosexuals–is used to distinguish between successful, resilient nations and those nations in need of (white) savoirist intervention. “Good” societies recognize that gays and lesbians are normal people, too; “bad” societies cling to primitive homophobic views and traditions. Similar discursive moves also distinguish “good” post-feminist societies and “bad” traditional societies that still overtly oppress women (e.g., through veiling, genital cutting, child marriage, sex work, etc.) Supposedly liberated attitudes about gender, sexuality, and often also race distinguish resilient societies from primitive ones. Sometimes this distinction is used to disaggregate whiteness, generally along the lines of social class. For example, in 2013 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) featured a bad guy character (a “heel,” in industry parlance), Jack Swagger, who expressed anti-immigrant, nationalist, and sometimes overtly white supremacist views. The schtick is that these racist views are what qualify him to be a heel: they’re obviously odious to fans, evidence of the character’s vilany. “Good guys” should not harbor the racist, anti-immigrant views espoused by Swagger, and should instead be fully comfortable cheering on Swagger’s Mexican-American nemesis, Alberto del Rio. As neoliberal capitalism restructures the economy and leaves working-class and rural whites in the lurch, framing them as backwards and uneducated makes their increasingly marginal socioeconomic status seem like the result of their individual failings, not the result of broad economic forces. Just as it conditionally and instrumentally includes otherwise privileged people of color within white supremacy, MRWaSP conditionally and instrumentally excludes otherwise underprivileged whites from the privileges to which they are accustomed as white. Similarly, just as it conditionally and instrumentally includes otherwise privileged women, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities (think about pre-murder-trial Oscar Pistorious, or Temple Grandin’s recent fame), MRWaSP conditionally and instrumentally excludes otherwise underprivileged women, queers, and people with disabilities.
Another way of saying that is: MRWaSP uses resilience to cut the color line–and the gender binary, the line between homonormative and queer, and to differentiate between mainstreamable and non-mainstreamable people with disabilities. By “resilience” I mean a specific neoliberal ideology, not the general sense of surviving in the face of hardship and oppression. Mark Neocleous explains the relationship between resilience discourse and neoliberal ideology here. What I’m calling “resilience discourse” is another way of framing what Naomi Klein calls “shock doctrine” capitalism–it’s the incitement of damage for the purpose of overcoming it (because that overcoming generates surplus value/profit/etc.). I’ve talked a bit about resilience discourse and femininity here and here.
Resilient populations who can overcome their race/class/gender/sexual/immigrant/religious/ damage in socially profitable ways move closer to the center of white supremacist privilege, whereas less resilient, precarious populations move further and further from this center. Resilience deregulates the work of racialization, gendering, sexualization, bodily normalization, and so on; it treats racialization/gendering/sexualization/etc. like a deregulated marketplace. Rather than tying race status directly and primarily to phenotype (visible race), and then regulating on the basis of racial identity (e.g., Jim Crow, apartheid, etc.), resilience frames race as an effect or outcome of one’s response to underlying, background conditions. Similarly, rather than tying gender status directly and primarily to either sex and/or visible gender performance, resilience frames it as an effect or outcome of one’s response to underlying, background conditions. This makes your status seem like the result of your individual choices, a true meritocracy in which the hard-working overcome their damage, but the lazy and sick can or will not. Of course, however, these background conditions are not equal, and they’re definitely controlled by histories of racial exploitation, patriarchy, and so on. It’s harder to bounce back if you’re starting from behind.
It’s not just race that shapes these material and ideological conditions–it’s also cis/heteropatriarchy, capitalism, Eurocentrism, ableism, all of what falls under “kyriarchy”. Because all these -isms shape the background material and ideological conditions in which we all work, those who have the best odds of successfully demonstrating their resilience are the ones who have the most heavily stacked decks. So, bourgeois, cis-gendered, able-bodied people of color are generally the most resilient ones…in no small part because MRWaSP has to make fewer material and ideological compromises to let them in.
