by Dylan Rodriguez

About Dylan Rodriguez

Dylan Rodríguez is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside. He is the author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Welfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide; Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime; and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition. He is the current President of the American Studies Association.

Criminal

book Keywords for African American Studies

The figure of “the criminal” permeates the symbolic, ideological, and militarized racial-economic foundations of the U.S. nation-building project. Gendered racial notions of criminality permeate the foundations of U.S. modernity, structuring the primary power relations of chattel enslavement, (conquest and settler) colonialism, global imperialism, and variations of domestic warfare (from Manifest Destiny to the War on Drugs).

Critical

feature Keywords Now: Critical Race Theory

The discursive time in which we find ourselves is particular but not unprecedented; in fact, the vitriolic sputtering of conservatives in response to the straw person of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) is but the latest incarnation of ideo-warfare against the dispossessed. We should be clear: the recent attacks on Critical Race Theory are not exclusively—or even primarily—about CRT as a specific field of study. Some of the loudest in the anti-CRT lynch mob have demonstrated little to no understanding of CRT’s primary tenets and are entirely unapologetic in their declarative ignorance and dimwittedness. This (multiculturalist) white nationalist mobilization seems to have less to do with Critical Race Theory than it does with the fundamentalist impulse to raise Confederate statues rather than raze them.