Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present

Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity

by Moon-kie Jung

Racism has never been simple. It wasn't more obvious in the past, and it isn't less potent now. From the birth of the United States to the contemporary police shooting death of an unarmed Black youth, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy investigates ingrained practices of racism, as well as unquestioned assumptions in the study of racism, to upend and deepen our understanding. In Moon-Kie Jung's unsettling book, Dred Scott v. Sandford , the notorious 1857 Supreme Court case, casts a shadow over current immigration debates and the "war on terror." The story of a 1924 massacre of Filipino sugar workers in Hawai'i pairs with statistical relentlessness of Black economic suffering to shed light on hidden dimensions of mass ignorance and indifference. The histories of Asians, Blacks, Latina/os, and Natives relate in knotty ways. State violence and colonialism come to the fore in taking measure of the United States, past and present, while the undue importance of assimilation and colorblindness recedes. Ultimately, Jung challenges the dominant racial common sense and develops new concepts and theory for radically rethinking and resisting racisms.

Genres: Race, Politics, History, Sociology, Nonfiction, Social Science

262 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2015

About the author

Moon-kie Jung is Professor of Sociology at UMassAmherst.

Professor Jung holds a Phd from the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Jackson Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work on race and systems/structure theory, really powerful accounts of racist police violence against Asian Americans, and very good work on the cultural theory of racism, is creation, maintenance, and reproduction of social order. If you are looking for a remarkable work of theory that is grounded tightly to journalist like tellings of accounts of institutionalized white supremacist violence, this book is it. Also, very helpful consistent epigraphs from the work of James Baldwin.