“The Spectacle and Quotidian”: Metaphors of White Supremacist Violence

• In Event: Extremist Violence in the U.S. and Abroad

Abstract

How does public discourse following acts of white supremacist violence inhibit structural anti-racist change? White supremacist attacks often drum up metaphors of “infiltration,” conjuring images of an external enemy inflicting damage on an otherwise nonviolent society. Though scholars have paid considerable attention to how media outlets and politicians portray the perpetrators of white supremacist attacks, there has been comparatively little theory-building regarding how the wider milieu of white supremacist violence is described—and what those utterances reveal about our assumptions surrounding the causes and consequences of that violence. I explore this act of societal meaning-making through critical analysis of metaphors applied to white supremacist violence in the United States. In so doing, I show how discourse positions this violence as occurring “in”, but not being “of”, U.S. society, thereby ignoring the structural role of white supremacy in making violence thinkable and permissible.

Author

• Anna Meier, University of Nottingham