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ABSTRACT
This essay claims that white nationalism is a political identity animated by the affect of racial anxiety. Drawing from Frantz Fanon's work on blackness as a phobic object, Hortense J. Spillers's conception of the flesh/body distinction, and Jacques Lacan's seminar on anxiety, the essay argues that the racial anxiety of the white nationalist subject emerges from encounters with the incapacity of post-racial fantasies of national wholeness to fully disavow the abjection of blackness that holds together the symbolic structure of race. The essay performs a rhetorical analysis of Dylann Storm Roof's manifesto “rtf88,” claiming that Roof's racial anxiety is anchored by an identification with the trope of “racial awareness” as an abject metaphor for his sovereignty. The essay uses this trope to trace three different relationships to racial anxiety that the white nationalist subject articulates on new media: discovery, mapping, and mobilization. The essay concludes by outlining future directions for scholars of race and media who wish to study white nationalism on the internet.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Alvin J. Primack, Calum Lister Matheson, Daniel Beresheim, George Weddington, Carol Bové, Corinne Sugino, Charles-Anthony Athanasopoulos, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and support.
Notes
1 Matthew Lysiak, “Charleston Massacre: Mental Illness Common Thread for Mass Shootings,” Newsweek, June 19, 2015, https://www.newsweek.com/charleston-massacre-mental-illness-common-thread-mass-shootings-344789; Frances Robles and Nikita Stewart, “Dylann Roof's Past Reveals Trouble at Home and School,” The New York Times, July 16, 2015, accessed July 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/us/charleston-shooting-dylann-roof-troubled-past.html; Stephanie McCrummen and Michael Williamson, “An American Void: These Are the People Dylann Roof Stayed with before the Charleston Church Shooting,” The Washington Post, September 12, 2015, accessed July 15, 2018, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/09/12/an-american-void/.
2 Caitlin Dewey, “Meet the Anonymous Online Sleuths Who Dug up Dylann Roof's Deranged Manifesto,” The Washington Post, June 22, 2015, accessed July 7, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/06/22/meet-the-anonymous-online-sleuths-who-dug-up-dylann-roofs-deranged-manifesto/.
3 Natasha Vargas-Cooper, “Meet the Lady Who Ruined Dylann Roof's Chance at an Insanity Plea,” Jezebel, June 201, 2015, accessed July 15, 2018, https://jezebel.com/meet-the-lady-who-ruined-dylann-roofs-chance-at-an-insa-1712829469.
4 Dylann Storm Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto,” The New York Times 13 (2016).
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Stephanie L. Hartzell, “Alt-White: Conceptualizing the ‘Alt-Right’ as a Rhetorical Bridge between White Nationalism and Mainstream Public Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 8, nos. 1–2 (2018): 6–25.
8 Michael J. Lee, “Considering Political Identity: Conservatives, Republicans, and Donald Trump,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 20, no. 4 (2017): 724.
9 Michael J. Lee, Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 18.
10 “14 Words,” Anti-Defamation League, n.d, accessed July 15, 2018, https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-words.
11 Ibid.
12 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
13 Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 48.
14 Barbara A. Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century: Speculations on Evental Rhetoric Ending with a Note on Barack Obama and a Benediction by Jacques Lacan: A Response to Samuel L. Becker's ‘Rhetorical Studies for the Contemporary World,’” in Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric: Current Conversations and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Mark J. Porrovecchio (London: Routledge, 2010), 16–36.
15 Ibid., 31.
16 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24.
17 Calum Matheson, “‘What Does Obama Want of Me?’ Anxiety and Jade Helm 15,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 135.
18 Michael Waltman and John Haas, The Communication of Hate (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 40.
19 Ibid., 41.
20 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 43 original emphasis.
21 Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 99.
22 Thomas DiPiero, White Men Aren't (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
23 Ibid., 198.
24 David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 42.
25 Ibid.
26 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 157.
27 Ibid., 129.
28 Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 42–43.
29 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xv.
30 Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 143–45.
31 Ibid., 125; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143.
32 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 126.
33 Ibid., 139.
34 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Grigg (New York: Norton, 2002), 76, 79.
35 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139 original emphasis.
36 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 32.
37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
38 Lacan, Anxiety, 100.
39 Lacan, Écrits, 682.
40 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 23.
41 Lacan, Anxiety, 34.
42 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 24.
47 Lacan, Anxiety, 89.
48 Stijn Vanheule, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4.
49 Matheson, “‘What Does Obama Want of Me?,’” 7.
50 Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012).
51 Lacan, Anxiety, 158.
52 Matheson, “‘What Does Obama Want of Me?’”
53 Lacan, Anxiety, 312 emphasis added.
54 Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2002), 20.
55 Sheldon George, “From Alienation to Cynicism: Race and the Lacanian Unconscious,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 19, no. 4 (2014): 362 emphasis added.
56 Seshadri, Desiring Whiteness, 41.
57 Ibid., 45.
58 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
59 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81.
60 Ibid., 66.
61 Ibid., 68.
62 Ibid., 67.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 68.
66 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Colombia University Press, 1982).
67 Lacan, Anxiety, 231.
68 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 231.
69 Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” 67.
70 Selamawit D. Terrefe, “Speaking the Hieroglyph,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 128.
71 Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 319.
72 Ibid., 322.
73 Catherine R. Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
74 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2006), 6.
75 Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 120.
76 Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 115.
77 Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
78 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2016), 1.
79 Ibid, 118.
80 Ibid.
81 Jodi Dean, “Affect and Drive,” in Networked Affect, eds. Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Pitt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 89.
82 Chun, Updating to Remain the Same, 67.
83 Ibid., 75.
84 Ibid., 44.
85 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Bryan J. McCann, “On Whose Ground? Racialized Violence and the Prerogative of ‘Self-Defense’ in the Trayvon Martin Case,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 4 (2014): 481.
89 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
90 Ibid.
91 Lacan, Anxiety, 319.
92 Ibid.
93 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 “Council of Conservative Citizens,” Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d., accessed December 15, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/council-conservative-citizens.
97 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
98 Daniels, Cyber Racism, 9.
99 Lacan, Anxiety, 117.
100 Ibid., 318.
101 Ibid., 302.
102 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid.
108 Lacan, Anxiety, 301.
109 Ibid., 305.
110 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
111 Ibid.
112 “Northwest Front,” northwestfront.org, n.d., accessed July 15, 2018, http://northwestfront.org/.
113 Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto.”
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Lacan, Anxiety, 307.
119 Ibid., 116.
120 Benjamin Peters, “And Lead Us Not into Thinking the New Is New: A Bibliographic Case for New Media History,” New Media & Society 11, nos. 1–2 (2009): 18.