The Cultural Logic of Whiteness: Symbolic Boundaries, White Racial Framing, and White Supremacist Discourse

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Symbolic Boundaries

Abstract

This study reports findings from an ethnographic content analysis of white supremacist music lyrics and suggests that white supremacist discourse can be understood through a “cultural logic of whiteness” when we combine insights from the symbolic racial/ethnic boundaries and white racial framing approaches. The author argues that this cultural logic can be defined as a symbolic grammar that grounds experiences and observations on the basis of race, schematizes them as boundaries, and uses these boundaries to construct particular frame interpretations. This conceptualization of the cultural logic of whiteness illustrates how symbolic racial boundaries are the discursive mechanisms of the white racial frame and that these boundaries in turn function to endogenously maintain the frame at the discursive level and, as such, put the frame into action. These boundaries are further broken down into two components within the cultural logic: binary codes and narratives (Alexander and Smith 1993). Four binary codes are identified here, each of which is a source of boundary evaluation for a particular object of white supremacist critique: superiority-inferiority (race), stability-inferiority (nation), heritage orientation-self orientation (culture), and aggressiveness-passiveness (masculinity). Two narrative structures are reported which communicate the binary codes as stories and legitimate white privilege and domination: “white tragedy” and “white romance” (cf. Smith 2005). This analysis shows how the white racial frame lends itself to the maintenance and legitimation of not just racial, but also national, cultural, and gender boundaries/hierarchies as well.

Author

• Marshall Allen Taylor, University of Notre Dame