ABSTRACT
In California, the white empire is striking back. Neo-Nazis, skinhead surfers, the Ku Klux Klan and their acolytes, and the White Aryan Resistance are just a few of the racist groups whose memberships are on the rise, a trend that is disturbing but not altogether surprising. Yet these groups are on the fringes of a significantly more coherent, broad-based, and influential whiteness movement that threatens to sever many of the lifelines that people of color have created throughout the years. The recent passage of California's Propositions 187, 209, and 227 represents more than a mere round of mean-spirited political victories for the radical right, but is alarmingly suggestive of the political coalescence of white identity formation that has been fomenting in the swamps of racial intolerance at least since the civil rights movement. These California propositions succeeded not because they were an example of bien trouvé legislation, but because they were able to effectively invest in a white subjectivity whose point d'appui hinges on the desperate fear of losing control of moral, economic, and cultural space. These propositions reflect the secret teeth of racist formations and are expressive of the “angry white male” narrative that views whites as being summarily “imposed upon” by people of color. For example, the visual images used to cultivate support for Proposition 187, the “anti-illegal alien” legislation (i.e., the attack on undocumented immigrants), were selections from a security camera videotape of Mexicans dashing through an opening in the fence at the highly militarized U.S.-Mexico border. Pro-187 television ads expressly avoided representations of the many whites from countries such as Canada who work without documents throughout the southwestern United States. Imagine trying to muster white support for Proposition 187 by televising Air Canada flights unloading more Anglo Canadians at Los Angeles International Airport! The new California politics of whiteness, with its public spectacles of white power, even places former Klansman David Duke in the mainstream of political discourse. During a debate on Proposition 209, a referendum on affirmative action, Duke expressed his moral concern that California was beginning to “look like Mexico” (Bernstein 1996; McLaren 1997). Many white Californians were enthusiastic about the new admissions policies at the University of California that ended decades of affirmative action. In abolishing affirmative action, the University of California regents effectively mandated that “minority taxpayers subsidize the educations of those who successfully discriminate against them” (Lipsitz 1998).
