An Anthropology of White Supremacy in Detroit: Spatial Politics at Sites of Food and Liquor

White supremacist ideas are prefabricated within the concept of a hierarchized white racial order and resultant unequal distribution of life and death. These age-of-Enlightenment-humanist ideas remain tethered to public opinion and policy, cohering racial whiteness as the ideal in a collective political unconscious. Of course, an anthropology of white supremacy is not a departure from existing radical political economic analytics but rather a companion/continuation of related projects. In this essay, we provide analytical terms specific to the anthropology of white supremacy and suggest five principles, theorized through the context of ethnographic encounters in, and historiography of, the city of Detroit. More broadly, this article suggests that white supremacy is a crucial foundational element toward the emergence of capitalism and liberalism in the modern period. To follow, we take a specific if narrowed approach attuned to the way that the concept, white supremacy, a priori marks the structural signification of persistent, destructive ideas such as scientific racism and racial whiteness as the unraced, nonwhite lack of reason/understanding and nonwhite lack of being-in-the-world—ideas that anthropology as a discipline would do well to unpack.