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A Field Guide to White Supremacy
Drawing explicit lines, across time and a broad spectrum of violent acts, to provide the definitive field guide for understanding and opposing white supremacy in America
Hate, racial violence, exclusion, and racist laws receive breathless media coverage, but such attention focuses on distinct events that gain our attention for twenty-four hours. The events are presented as episodic one-offs, unfortunate but uncanny exceptions perpetrated by lone wolves, extremists, or individuals suffering from mental illness—and then the news cycle moves on. If we turn to scholars and historians for background and answers, we often find their knowledge siloed in distinct academic subfields, rarely connecting current events with legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. But recent hateful actions are deeply connected to the past—joined not only by common perpetrators, but by the vast complex of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs that comprise white supremacy in the United States.
Gathering together a cohort of researchers and writers, A Field Guide to White Supremacy provides much-needed connections between violence present and past. This book illuminates the career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose that violence. The Field Guide is meant as an urgent resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens, illuminating common threads in white supremacist actions at every scale, from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law. Covering immigration, antisemitism, gendered violence, lynching, and organized domestic terrorism, the authors reveal white supremacy as a motivating force in manifold parts of American life. The book also offers a sampling of some of the most recent scholarship in this area in order to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, and activists and their communities.
A Field Guide to White Supremacy will be an indispensable resource in paving the way for politics of alliance in resistance and renewal.
Hate, racial violence, exclusion, and racist laws receive breathless media coverage, but such attention focuses on distinct events that gain our attention for twenty-four hours. The events are presented as episodic one-offs, unfortunate but uncanny exceptions perpetrated by lone wolves, extremists, or individuals suffering from mental illness—and then the news cycle moves on. If we turn to scholars and historians for background and answers, we often find their knowledge siloed in distinct academic subfields, rarely connecting current events with legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. But recent hateful actions are deeply connected to the past—joined not only by common perpetrators, but by the vast complex of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs that comprise white supremacy in the United States.
Gathering together a cohort of researchers and writers, A Field Guide to White Supremacy provides much-needed connections between violence present and past. This book illuminates the career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose that violence. The Field Guide is meant as an urgent resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens, illuminating common threads in white supremacist actions at every scale, from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law. Covering immigration, antisemitism, gendered violence, lynching, and organized domestic terrorism, the authors reveal white supremacy as a motivating force in manifold parts of American life. The book also offers a sampling of some of the most recent scholarship in this area in order to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, and activists and their communities.
A Field Guide to White Supremacy will be an indispensable resource in paving the way for politics of alliance in resistance and renewal.
421 pages, Paperback
Published October 26, 2021
85 people are currently reading
908 people want to read
About the author
Kathleen Belew
4 books143 followersShe specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy.
Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).
Belew has spoken about Bring the War Home in a wide variety of places, including The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered. Her work has featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline).
Belew is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned tenure at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she spent seven years. Her research has received the support of the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation. Belew earned her BA in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Belew has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2019-20), Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of history of the present, conservatism, race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war.
Belew is co-editor of and contributor to A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and has contributed essays to Myth America and The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.
Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).
Belew has spoken about Bring the War Home in a wide variety of places, including The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered. Her work has featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline).
Belew is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned tenure at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she spent seven years. Her research has received the support of the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation. Belew earned her BA in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Belew has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2019-20), Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of history of the present, conservatism, race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war.
Belew is co-editor of and contributor to A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and has contributed essays to Myth America and The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 6, 2022
This book is a collection of insightful academic essays that explore the contours and nuances of white supremacy primarily through the lenses of history, journalism, and the social sciences. However, from something called a "field guide", I was hoping more for a tool to help quickly identify and combat white supremacist narratives, political projects, and symbols. It's less a field guide and more a primer.
April 17, 2022
I appreciate the effort and the intent, but the execution is just so poor. Also, a "field guide" this is not.
January 4, 2022
Not sure who this book is for.
January 26, 2025
THE US IS NOW A TOTALITARIAN STATE.
This took me ages to read because there’s so much in it and so much I didn’t understand about white supremacy. Make no mistake, Trump and Musk are white supremacists and the fact that the U.S is currently in the hands of white supremacists is endlessly terrifying.
I guess I didn’t really see white supremacy as real; no one could really believe that, it was just trolls online, incels and other mediocre white men who needed someone to blame for their shortcomings.
Going back to the Jim Crow era, this was a hard old slog but the glossary at the start was helpful for explaining what would be entailed.
For instance, I was shocked to see Tallinn in Estonia was overrun with white supremacists (telltale tattoos) and I thought this guide might go into the meanings behind the tattoos. It doesn’t and if you want that in your search history you can probably go through yourself. Instead it explains how immigration (particularly against Mexicans) and hatred towards trans people are the main two ingredients of every white supremacist and Lo and behold were the first two agenda items in Trump’s first week of office part deux.
Their hate is real but thankfully the far right are quite splintered and will defeated again. (This isn’t in the book, this is me trying to make the best of a bad situation).
This took me ages to read because there’s so much in it and so much I didn’t understand about white supremacy. Make no mistake, Trump and Musk are white supremacists and the fact that the U.S is currently in the hands of white supremacists is endlessly terrifying.
I guess I didn’t really see white supremacy as real; no one could really believe that, it was just trolls online, incels and other mediocre white men who needed someone to blame for their shortcomings.
Going back to the Jim Crow era, this was a hard old slog but the glossary at the start was helpful for explaining what would be entailed.
For instance, I was shocked to see Tallinn in Estonia was overrun with white supremacists (telltale tattoos) and I thought this guide might go into the meanings behind the tattoos. It doesn’t and if you want that in your search history you can probably go through yourself. Instead it explains how immigration (particularly against Mexicans) and hatred towards trans people are the main two ingredients of every white supremacist and Lo and behold were the first two agenda items in Trump’s first week of office part deux.
Their hate is real but thankfully the far right are quite splintered and will defeated again. (This isn’t in the book, this is me trying to make the best of a bad situation).
October 21, 2022
This is a source book. Chapters by various authors cover racial injustice against many different groups including Blacks, Latinos, Asians, immigrants, gays and trans people. The chapters can be uneven, some very academic, some polemical, some long and some short. Some are very informative and some restate the obvious to the reader who would pick up this book. But two overall themes bring the chapters together. First, that white supremacy is fundamental to American society, that it affects and defines every aspect of our social, political, and legal lives. And second, changing hearts and minds is insufficient at best and a waste of time at worst. What is needed is a change of ideology. Big charge, but I feel the book as a whole provides a lot of needed material for that to support the work. The main audience for the book is mainstream journalists and others such as public figures and policy folks who may know there is a problem, but have been limited and perhaps even cowardly in their analysis.
This is a review of the first two parts of the book. Parts three and four focus more on the rise of fascism and the so-called new right in America. I’ll be editing when I have read those sections.
This is a review of the first two parts of the book. Parts three and four focus more on the rise of fascism and the so-called new right in America. I’ll be editing when I have read those sections.
October 13, 2022
This reads like a field guide to all the issues that most on the left would blame for those on the right, in particular, the white conservative male. Trump and his supporters are at the center of this work. There is good information, but in some respects, there is not a lot new here, or the people who would most read this work are already aware of these issues. Will White Supremacy be an issue in the years ahead? Yes, it will. It is not a great thing, especially as America continues to face polarization.
Worth a read for those who have not followed much of the news and want a deeper read. However, if you are already familiar with the issues, this work will not add or change much.
Worth a read for those who have not followed much of the news and want a deeper read. However, if you are already familiar with the issues, this work will not add or change much.
May 22, 2022
I literally finished reading this right before hearing the news of the Buffalo Shooting where a racist gunman targeted and murdered black shoppers under the guise of responding to "the great replacement." It was bizarre how poignant the last chapters of the book were in their exploration of how trumped fears of "white replacement" drive white supremacy today and are becoming a mainstay of modern political discussion on the right. Hearing mainstream commentators like Tucker Carlson stoking fears of white replacement should be bleak and terrifying to all people with any sense of decency.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a breakdown of how white supremacy has operated in the US over the course of its history. It's a good overview of the history of racism as well as how its legacy persists and even flourishes today.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a breakdown of how white supremacy has operated in the US over the course of its history. It's a good overview of the history of racism as well as how its legacy persists and even flourishes today.
March 16, 2025
Overall this was a really good read. As with most collections if essays by various authors, I felt the quality varied in places and there was a bit if repetition.
I honestly don't have anything specifically negative to say about this book, I just feel like there was room for improvement. Would still definitely recommend it for any fans of Kathleen Belews first book.
I honestly don't have anything specifically negative to say about this book, I just feel like there was room for improvement. Would still definitely recommend it for any fans of Kathleen Belews first book.
February 18, 2025
Belew does an extensive job chronicling the movement in the US with thorough research and insight into the movement. A must read for anyone wanting a better understanding of the changes happening in the USA.
January 7, 2022
Uzitocne zhrnutie. Hlavne pre novinarov. Ale aj pre mna, tzv. siroku verejnost.
June 14, 2022
This is an essential book for understanding where we are in this moment, both politically and socially.
January 25, 2025
Great read minus the essay on Anti-semitism, which was possibly the worst take on the subject I've ever read. Nothing more than an opinionated rant by the author.
February 6, 2022
I’m not a huge fan of books about history, but I really enjoyed this book. When I was originally sent a review copy of this book, I thought it was just a regular book about the history of white supremacy. To my delight, it was actually a collection of writings from various authors who contributed to this book. This definitely made the book a bit more enjoyable for me because it covered a wide range of topics around the history of white supremacy in the United States with different styles and tones throughout the book. I learned a lot that I hadn’t known before, and it’s interesting to see how much work we still have to do in modern America. Kathleen also has a chapter in this book that’s phenomenal and focuses on the most recent years. White supremacy is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit these days, so it was nice to learn exactly where it comes from and how it’s oppressed Black people as well as minorities so we can work on finding solutions. If you’re interested in learning about this topic, this book is a great place to start.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews