ABSTRACT
The former term designates people or practices that claim one race as superior to others, while the latter names this general attitude or institution. Over the past 60 years, with dramatically increased usage in just the past decade, the designation “white nationalism” has come to name one version of the long-standing intersection of the race and the nation. Both “religion” and “race” have circulated for hundreds of years, in popular culture, government, and scholarship, as part of mutually informing and authorized discourses on human similarity and difference. Drawing partially on critical race theory—a late-twentieth-century, cross-disciplinary “collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power”. Thus, historicizing the devices of human difference that are taken by some to be essential, hereditary, and authoritative necessarily means making plain that things could have been otherwise.
