Dylan Rodrguez - White Reconstruction

Coming up in Alexandria, Virginia (a nearby suburb of Washington, DC), during the Reagan-Bush years, i was shaped by the expressive racism and anti-Blackness of Northern Virginia white liberals as well as the organic white supremacist politicization of emergent Young Republican assholes. Yet what may have been most personally (and thus politically-intellectually) formative about this period was the degree to which i experienced the subtleties and ideological seductions of multiculturalist white supremacy (as defined in ).

This book is significantly shaped by a long-cultivated disgust with the cultural-political regimes of multiculturalism, compulsory diversity, and inclusivist American optimism, as well as their many derivative overtures. Yet throughout this same period, i have been privileged with teachers, mentors, classmates, friends, and co-conspirators who obliterate the political and cultural frameworks of multiculturalism/diversity/inclusivity through their caring, deep, collective commitments to other forms of creativity, movement, scholarship, and praxis: Black radicalism, Third-World liberation and anti-colonialism, radical feminism, carceral abolitionism, Indigenous decolonization and self-determination, critical trans radicalism, and queer radicalism, to name a few. At the risk of overreliance on a profane political dichotomy, i can profess to the reader that this upbringing and collective education has convinced me that i can (usually) tell who is full of shit and who is ready to fight.

Bluster aside, i cannot claim to have ever been fully outside of the regimes of multiculturalist white supremacy, which hail so many who fall within certain gendered racial class profiles. To the contrary, i live and work in the toxicities of these regimes even as i oppose and despise them. As a result, i write, think, talk, move, and teach for the sake of joining many of you in the service of an unending charge: Our critical, radical gestures must somehow participate in creating possibilities for collective exercises of radical, creative, political-cultural genius that demystify White Being and incite (or even productively weaponize) other insurgent practices and methodologies of human life. This is difficult, scary, and beautiful work. And if more people do not attempt to engage in it, many more will disappear.

I have come to realize that anyone who generously reads my writing and patiently considers my words is a partner in the historical present. This is not a benign partnership, nor is it one to which i can simply affix or deduce static, prescriptive responsibilities. At best, we will have reason to talk, argue, create, and consider our positioning and movement within and beyond these different places. Perhaps we can find ourselves together in dangerous times, finding beauty and creating joy in the process of surviving another fight. I thank you in advance and offer the following pages as the first of a two-book series addressing what i have chosen to call, with the encouragement of my late colleague and friend Clyde Woods, White Reconstruction. Around 2009, Clydesitting next to soon-to-be Fordham University Press editor Richard Morrisoncajoled me into writing this book after i casually used the phrase in response to one of his typically challenging questions. White Reconstruction is the first of a two-book sequence, to be followed by White Reconstruction II, a shorter narrative text that is multivocal and speculative, mixing polemic, fantasy, theory, and fictions of the now, the future, and the recent past. We miss you, Clyde.

Maraming salamat to current and former studentsgraduate and undergraduatewho have (or will soon) become my colleagues, teachers, and co-conspirators. They have profoundly influenced how i think, what i do, and how i do it: Martha Escobar, Ren-Yo Hwang, J. Sebastian, Angelica (Pickels) Camacho, Loubna Qutami, Luis Trujillo, Arifa Raza, Casey Goonan, Lucha Arvalo, Aaron Alvarado, Orisanmi Burton, Cinthya Martinez, Lawrence Lan, Alejandro Villalpando, Justin Phan, Jolie Chea, M. T. Vallarta, Jalondra Davis, David Chavez, Cameron Granadino, Aundrey Jones, Jules Smith, David Chavez, Tania Hammidi, Juli Grigsby, John Maldonado, Kenneth LeBleu, Jocelyn Romero, Damon Cagnolatti, Lorena Macias, Kaelyn Rodriguez, Roberto Labrada, Gaby Ocon, Brittnay Proctor, Joana Chavez, Azadeh Zohrabi, Kevin Cosney, Joshua Mitchell, Kehaulani Vaughn, and Sormeh Hameed.

A community of people continually embraces me with their love and labor. Their radical creativity and political courage push me to think, speak, and fight beyond what i would otherwise dare. I thank Critical Resistance (http://criticalresistance.org/), Scholars for Social Justice (http://scholarsforsocialjustice.com/), the Abolition Collective (http://abolitionjournal.org), and Southern California Library (http://www.socallib.org/) for including me in their extended, increasingly global collectives of organizers, teachers, activists, artists, researchers, and makers. Yusef Omowale and Michele Welsing from Southern California Library are stalwart custodians and defenders of community-accountable knowledges and archives, and they have enabled the work of many people mentioned in this preface and cited throughout these pages. The formation of the Blackness Unbound core working group at the University of California, Riverside in 2018 germinated a critical energy that pushed me through the final stages of writing this book.

I am privileged to be supported by people who possess the magical ability to apprehend the best possibilities of anything i say, write, or think, reflect it back to me with generosity and critical insight, and dare me to do better.

The people who have worked, fought, suffered, and grown with and alongside me at the University of California, Riverside have nourished a sense of defiant political-intellectual autonomy that encourages and periodically challenges me to thrive and create to the best of my capacity. It is impossible to thank them enough for their collective camaraderie. Everywhere i have turned, there has been someone with whom i can laugh, think, rage, conspire, and reflect: Joo Costa Vargas, Sarita See, Jodi Kim, Erica Edwards, David Lloyd, Mariam Lam, Amalia Cabezas, Tamara Ho, Michelle Raheja, Vorris Nunley, Crystal Baik, Jeff Sacks, Jayna Brown, Traise Yamamoto, Keith Harris, Freya Schiwy, Alessandro Fornazzari, Donatella Galella, Stephen Cullenberg, the late Emory Elliott, Eddie Comeaux, Allison Hedge Coke, Cherysa Cortez, Devra Weber, Pat Morton, Judith Rodenbeck, Ricky Rodriguez, Cathy Gudis, Emma Stapely, and Jonathan Walton, among others. There are some who came through UCR for too short a time, but whose contributions to the community of critical and radical practitioners were indispensable. They remind me that to be in these institutions is not necessarily to be of them. Thank you to Nick Mitchell, Ashon Crawley, Eric Stanley, Fred Moten, Maile Arvin, Deb Vargas, Laura Harris, and the late Lindon Barrett.