Introduction to Special Issue: Whiteness in the Age of White Rage

: This Special Issue—“Whiteness in the Age of White Rage”—names and interrogates what is implicit in anti-racist, Indigenous, and whiteness studies: white rage. Drawing on Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2017), we invited scholars to explore empirical and theoretical inquiry of how rage is a defining characteristic of settler colonialism, whiteness, and white supremacy in Canada. In this Introduction we elaborate how contemporaneously, historically, and theoretically a vital dimension of the configuration of whiteness in Canada is the normalization of rage as a property right of whiteness. Presently, as fascism is once again a global phenomenon, there is an opportunity for critical scholarship on whiteness in Canada to name and explicate the social effects and quotidian mobilization of rage in conservative and liberal articulations of white supremacy. We offer a general outline to the theme of whiteness in the age of white rage to introduce nascent scholarship that builds on the scholarship of Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and critical whiteness scholars.

outline of the latent and manifest dimensions of white rage. In this context, then, we situate white rage as always in a dynamic process of cloaking (subtle, imperceptible) and uncloaking (visibly/manifestly violent) in relation to whiteness and racism in North America. We suggest the culture and politics of rage, as a property of whiteness, demands much more explicit theorization than it has received in Canada.

Whiteness and Racial Domination: A Brief History
Whiteness, as the manifestation of the complex interplay of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and European ("white") cultural practices-including religion and law-shaped being "white." Whiteness became a special property interest unique to European people-an invented "white" race made up of various ethnic groups perceived to have a common ancestry in various parts of Europe (see, for example, Allen, 1994;Du Bois, 1935;Harris, 1993;Jacobson, 1998). Whiteness became a franchise that, over 200 years, selectively and strategically incorporated a variety of Eastern and Southern European people once imagined as "not quite white" and among the "degenerate races." Over time the inter-ethnic conflation and fabricated racial appellation of "white" became a legal category for determining the rights and privileges bestowed on Europeans. Both in Canada and the United States, whiteness determined who could own property and who would be property, who could vote, who could own a business, who could ride on a bus, who could marry whom and who would live or die.
Sanctified as a property right by custom and law, the colonialist-racial-state authorized the mass accumulation of wealth, power, and psychological advantage for white people (Brodkin, 1998;Ignatiev, 1995;Roediger, 1991).
From the early 17th century to the 19th century, slave-owning of both Indigenous and Black people was a widespread, although an uneven, practice in colonial Canada until its abolishment in 1834. Importantly, this white franchise necessitated the conferring of blackness onto the bodies of African-descended people to establish blackness as a condition of white property ownership 1 (i.e., chattel slavery). As Barrington Walker (2010) notes, slavery "was a system of racially based economic coercion that was legally codified… [in] Canada…where the law…[of property ownership] was integral to producing blackness" (p. 5). Along with the black and white Manichaeism, the imputation of savagery onto the bodies of Indigenous v peoples was necessary for the justification of Indigenous enslavement (in Lower Canada/New France) and colonial displacement. Bonita Lawrence (2016) points out, for example, that in the colony of New France two-thirds of the slaves were Indigenous until 1750, when the number of Indigenous peoples enslaved in French Canada began to decline. By 1834, with the abolishment of slavery in the British colonies, slaves of African descent far outnumbered Indigenous slaves. Subsequent anti-immigration policies and cultural investment in a "White Canada Forever" (Ward, 1990) ensured the creation and consolidation of a white cultural geography lubricated by white rage in a dynamic and dialectical process of cloaking (subtle, imperceptible) and uncloaking (visibly/manifestly violent). As such, within a colonial and white supremacist schematic of power, bodies and space are marked with meanings imposed by the state and the white settler colonial caste (Austin, 2013, McKittrick, 2006Walker, 2010). Veritably, the belonging of Thobani's (2007) "exalted" subjects justifies the venting of rage at the ontology and perceived transgressions of the Other.
Latent and manifest articulations across Canada depended on regional and local proclivities. Sometimes white Canadians used indirect, somewhat cloaked means of ensuring the perpetuation of "white" privilege. For example, in 1912 legislators enacted a law ("White Women's Labour Law") preventing Asian men from hiring white women to work in their establishments. According to Constance Backhouse (1999), this law constitutes a remarkable point in Canadian history. It appears to be the first explicit racial recognition of whiteness in Canadian Law. Prior to this case, whiteness was inferred, but rarely stated in law-she calls this a mythology of "racelessness." This legislation was an attempt to prevent marriages between white women and Asian men. In contrast, measures taken against marriages between Black men and white women were far more direct-these unions often evoked an uncloaking of white rage. In one case, 75 members of the "Kanadian Knights of the KKK" (who were businessmen in Hamilton, Ontario) marched through the town of Oakville on February 28, 1930 in order to prevent an interracial marriage between a white woman and a man whom they believed to be Black. As the man was forcibly removed from his home, a large cross was nailed on his front lawn and set on fire. In another case, this one recounted by Susanna Moodie in her memoir, Roughing It In The Bush (1852), a group of white men dragged a newlywed Black man along railway tracks until he died.
These examples of legislation (cloaked) and manifest violence (uncloaked) are but a few examples of how white rage was enacted to protect and perpetuate the building of a "white" Canadian nation-state. Enakshi Dua (1999) reminds us that "through a discourse of race, the nuclear family emerged as one of the main institutions for constructing a racialized and gendered nation-state" (p. 248; see also Silvera, 1993). For example, domestic worker and seasonal agricultural schemes exploited the labour of Caribbean and Asian men and women while preventing the constitution of their families in Canada (see, for example, Silvera, 1993).
For Indigenous peoples, the express aim of the State's "civilizing mission" has been cultural genocide of the family through the Indian Act and Residential Schools (Emberley, 2001;Fournier & Crey, 2011). Fundamental to the settler nation-building endeavour was a legal apparatus of expulsions, constraints, and restrictions that perpetuated racial inequality and the aggrandizement of white power (Backhouse, 1999).
In the context of a society founded on white imperial and colonial violence, and justified through tropes of the dangerous Other, whiteness and thus white rage is never signified outside a process of racial domination. While, as Anderson argues, "white rage" can achieve its ends effectively, and sometimes more destructively by working in the halls of power, it nonetheless has (and needs) its moments of rupture-its "uncloaking." Why does it need to uncloak into enactments of visible violence?
The Canadian nation-state stands on an edifice forged through violence and profound inequality justified through constructions of "barbarians at the gate"-the ungodly, savage, but noble "Indian"; the "black" threat; the "yellow" menace-threatening to break through the gates and wreak havoc among the greater civilizing "white" race. Such an edifice-forged in and defended through violence-demands a securitization of its "white" gates from the enemies within and outside its borders. This defending includes a terrorizing of the "barbarians"-the "Other"-to discipline them into compliance and consign them to their rightful place in the racial/social order. From a psychosocial perspective, the uncloaking functions as a cathartic release that dialectically sutures the class divide among white subjects through the unifying function of an enemy. But people and nations cannot "uncloak" and rule by visible violence alone (or for extended periods of time); it becomes more advantageous to conceal and "cloak" overt expressions of white domination. Franz Fanon (1964/67), in Toward the African Revolution, tangentially speaks to our cloaking metaphor. He states that [f]or a long time it looked as though racism had disappeared. This soul-soothing, unreal impression was simply the consequence of the evolution of forms of exploitation.
Psychologists spoke of a prejudice having become unconscious. The truth is that the rigor of the system made the daily affirmation of superiority superfluous. (Fanon, 1964/67, p. 37) It is not that whiteness and white rage have become fully cloaked but rather the daily, aggressive marking of whiteness as a property of white privilege has become unnecessary. It has become unnecessary, as Fanon states, because the rigour of the culturally patterned thought has made the daily marking of whiteness superfluous. The idea that daily affirmations of racism will be unnecessary also reflects the material dynamic that more and more people, including more and more of the white and middle class, are also superfluous. This sense of superfluity, thought to be proper for Black people, immigrants, Indigenous peoples, people of "colour" and even poor whites, is now biting hard at the heels of the white middle class. The result, it has been noted, both in Europe and in North America, is a turn to the right that links "nation" with "whiteness" and culture as a site at which the reaction to capitalism channels white rage (see, for example, Seidel, 1986). The cropping up of a range of groups from middle class khaki-wearing tiki torch bearers, "militias," an oddment of ex-military, police, and wannabe Rambo gun-toting defenders of whiteness, along with a silent majority from whom their ranks are drawn, reflect a culture whose whiteness is, in part, defined by seething and misplaced resentment.
Yet paradoxically, in the midst of growing economic redundancy, whiteness remains at the centre. In as much as whiteness is articulated as "positional superiority" and a structural location of advantage, it is wholly dependent on racism for its continued reproduction. And considering that racism has become structurally embedded in society and absorbed by the state (think, for example, of the criminal justice system or immigration system), overt individual daily affirmation of white rage is oftentimes superfluous. Fanon states that "racism has not managed to harden. It has had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change its appearance.
It has had to undergo the fate of the cultural whole that informed it" (1964/67, p. 32). In line with Fanon's argument, what is perceived as a subtle, almost imperceptible white rage can be explained as a renewal or an adaptation of white domination. Joel Kovel (1971), in a similar line of reasoning, calls this adaptation "metaracism." He explains that [m]etaracism is a distinct and very peculiar modern phenomenon. Racial degradation continues on a different plane, and through a different agency: those who participate in it are not racists-that is, they are not racially prejudiced-but metaracists, because they acquiesce in the larger cultural order which continues the work of racism. (Kovel, 1971, pp. 211-212) While racism now operates on a different plane and the daily affirmation of superiority through aggression has become unnecessary, this does not mean overt violence never occurs.
On the contrary; we now bear witness to the moments when racial domination reasserts itself in overt forms through spontaneous displays of individual and state aggression that are in line with the principles of whiteness. The videotaped killings/murders of Black men by a militarized police force (e.g., George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Philando Castille, among viii others), the travesty of the law's legitimation of killer white vigilantes (e.g., Colton Boushie by Gerald Stanley's and Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman), the murders and "incidental" killings of Black and Indigenous women (often in their homes) (e.g., Sandra Bland, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Chantel Moore, and Breonna Taylor, among others), and the previously and much-publicized beating of Rodney King are all fitting examples of the convergence of individual and state aggression in the expression of white domination. As Kovel (1971) states, "what had been invisible becomes visible when it threatens the order of things, and that order attempts to adapt to the threat so as to maintain its underlying assumptions about the world" (p. 38). Those underlying assumptions support a cultural complex of whiteness, and one of the more important aspects of that culture is the way that anger is cloaked as a defining aspect of whiteness.

Hate and White Extremism: Rethinking Middle Class and Statist Discourses on White Rage
Frantz Fanon asserts that "[t]here are…cultures with racism and cultures without racism" (1964/67, p. 32). But to the extent that culture and race in the context of colonialism are dialogic with material exploitation under capitalism, racial ideology is a necessary condition to manage tensions between members of the exploiting group. Cedric Robinson (2000) refers to this historic process as "racial capitalism." In such a configuration, racism is a refutation of class conflict and an elevation of the supposed fundamentalism of inter-racial conflict. White labour, both working and middle class, effectively abdicate class solidarity in the historic conflict between capital and labour. By a process of substitution, the result of a presumed trans-class consensus and solidarity within whiteness cultivates a psychologyespecially in times of crisis-that seeks to avenge the white self for its meagre position in the capitalist social order. Most explicitly, for an assortment of white fundamentalists on the right "culture," in an essentialist sense, is the site at which their last stand against the "loss of their country" is made. It is here that through racial ideology whiteness exists as a trans-ethnic unifier and an identity to be defended. It is through this defence against-rather than a commitment to-class politics that anger emerges as a prerogative of whiteness. Particularly for members of the dominant racial group exposed to the vagaries of the market, anger in such configurations is a fundamental value in private and public life (see Douglas in this Special Issue).
At this moment in Canada, the United States, and all Western countries, white anger is seething, manifest, pervasive, and even murderous. It is taking two forms. The first garbed in conservative political ideology, and the second in so-called hate crimes. Both serve as an approximate metric for white rage, but we suggest that, in excluding the quotidian practices of the middle class within the sanctum of institutional settings and shielding white women through gendered tropes of caring, we miss crucial constituents who express white rage.
At the conservative and right-wing ends of the ideological spectrum, "hate crimes" and the Alt-Right/Alt-Lite are indices of white rage. Influenced by an array of right-wing ideologues such as Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopolous, young, hip, educated, techsavvy, middle class-and mostly male-white Canadian university students have embraced these brands of white supremacy. Indeed, supported by the similar claims of Jordan Peterson, affirmative action, employment equity and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives are singled out as the clarion call for "everyday white people" who feel hard-done-by concessions to historically excluded groups. In Canadian universities-the bastion of the middle classwhite rage articulates itself through coded resistance to affirmative action/employment equity and the commitment to "free speech" (Pang, 2020; see also Perry, 2011). There is, as a result, growing awareness, but some (Gracie, 2018; Murray, 2020) suggest little urgency at extreme radicalization among white Canadian youth (Daigle, 2020). By thinking within the conceptual limits of the state definition of reality (i.e., hate as a crime), it is impossible to think of the white settler colonial state as the chief practitioner and propagator of hatred and white rage. This, of course, does not disavow that economic crisis is a source of the increase in "hate" crimes, nor that it is motivating reactionary politics, as well as a growing embrace of participatory totalitarianism (see, for example, Dean & Altmeyer, 2020).

The Unlikely "Deplorables": The White Middle Class and White Women
Toward enlarging the conceptual frame for thinking about white rage, we call attention to two general areas we think worthy of inquiry. It is vital at the outset to abandon the historic prejudice of middle class researchers to foist onto poor and working class white people the opprobrium that they are a "basket of deplorables." At the same time, one must guard against the Romanticism of the Chicago School tradition that turns the researcher into a zookeeper who, in "appreciating" "their" subjects, shields them from critical reflection as much from spectators who might throw stones (see, for example, Gouldner, 1968). All of this has the salutary effect of concealing the middle class from examining its own investment in white rage, which in reality differs only in degree, milieu, and method for its expression. The white poor and working class vent their rage by turning to arch conservative plutocrats, voicing

INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS IN THE AGE OF WHITE RAGE
xi complaints about "losing their country," feeling like "strangers in their own land" and venting their rage at immigrants and anyone that is different from them (Gest, 2016;Hochschild, 2016;Isenberg, 2016;Metzel, 2019;Vance, 2016). Here, however, is the significance of Fanon's (1964/67) and Kovel's (1971) analysis concerning the strategic methodology for the state and private bureaucracies embedding racism within rules and organizational practice.
White middle class rage is coded and concealed, both by the discourse of civility and organizational priorities in the reproduction of capitalist, colonialist, and racist relations of domination.
From this perspective, a different order of questions arises to take us beyond the white middle class framing of anger and rage and that of state-sanctified definitions of hate.
Questions might run along the following lines: Why cannot the state itself be a hateful and vengeful enterprise? The wilful abrogation of Indigenous sovereignty, be it forcing through pipelines or refusing to uphold treaty hunting and fishing rights might suggest so. When the police murder civilians, strip-search civilians, engage in racial profiling and carding and when they set their dogs on Black people, does this not connote white rage and sadism? Evidence from the Ontario Human Rights Commission may suggest so (OHRC, 2020;Wortley, Laniyonu, & Laming, 2020). Does not the scandal of continued and grossly disproportionate child apprehensions from Black Canadian and Indigenous families smack of organized hatred and rage? Scholarly inquiry, news reports, and legal clinic reports gesture in that direction (Maynard, 2017;National Collaboration for Child Welfare, 2017). What of teachers, guidance counsellors, principals, and superintendents who call Black parents by racial epithets and, through criminalization and expulsion, expedite the school-to-prison pipeline for Black students? Reports from advocacy groups and school boards indicate that within the protective cover of schools, where their authority is nearly absolute, the white middle class are effectively destroying the future of Black children, and particularly those in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) (Chadha et al., 2020;Morgan, 2016). These and other questions present themselves if we are to demystify the reality of white rage in Canada.
But in addition to rethinking class, it is vital to rethink the role of white women as contributors to the reproduction of white rage. It is imperative to get past strategic deployments of emotion and postures of defence that would obstruct analysis (see, for example, Srivastava, 2005). Researchers suggest that "stereotypes about women, which reflect gender and heterosexist biases, [which] include the notion that women are nurturing, submissive helpmates to men" need to be rethought (Stemple, Flores, & Meyer, 2017, p. 302). Critical feminist scholars demonstrate that contemporary and historical evidence shows white women are complicit with colonialism, nationalism, racism, totalitarianism, and white supremacy much beyond being anomalies to be sequestered (Bannerji, 1993;Dua, 1999).
In Dallas Jokic's essay in this Special Issue, the question of women's roles in racializing anger as a property right of whiteness brings us to some appreciation of how rightwing white women enact masculinity and mobilize whiteness as patriarchy. Jokic writes, Sheila Gunn Reid, a writer for the far-right website "The Rebel" tweeted a video of the counter-protestors disassembling the blockade, writing, "The protesters just stand there shitting their pants, totally stunned, as the scent of pure testosterone and vigor wafts past their nostrils and overwhelms their soy-dullened senses. Ladies, we almost don't deserve Alberta men." (Jokic, 2020, p. 17) Abandoning the stereotype that white supremacy is only expressed by women in the KKK and other assorted vigilante and violent white groups entails an epistemic and methodological shift. Dawn McIntosh (2018) powerfully demonstrates that white women play an imperative role in recentering whiteness. She states that "[i]f White women are culturally organized as nurturing, innocent, and pure, then they are never racist. White supremacy is secured through White feminine enactments of whiteness while simultaneously running covertly under the radar as never marked in these hostile ways" (2018, p. 109; see also Leonardo & Boas, 2013).
McIntosh further notes that white women, especially middle class women, long ago made their compromise with colonialism, slavery, and imperialism. And, like their men of all classes, generally endeavoured to get as much out of racial capitalism as they could. The theorizing of gender, as if this means women and only really white women, requires consistent and critical scrutiny, for like middle classness we are more than likely to miss the ubiquity of white rage.

Overview of the Special Issue
The four essays in this Special Issue each attend to different articulations of white rage.
Dallas Jokic's "Cultivating the Soil of White Nationalism: Settler Violence and Whiteness as Territory," is a theme that was most clearly articulated in German National Socialism (i.e., Nazism)-"blood and soil." The chief distinction, however, is that white settler colonialism is mapped, paradoxically, onto the claim that Canada is a liberal democracy. Jokic argues that white settler claims and rationalizations for the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Canada rest on the Lockean assertion of property rights that inhere in both the state and the embodiedness of a rational white colonial settler. The key to Jokic's argument is that the white settler colonial state, through its conceptions of law and other methods of ideological hegemony, deputize the white colonial settler as a supplementary coercive force. Mobilizing Cheryl Harris's concept of whiteness as a property right, Jokic argues that the embodiment of whiteness is vested with the authority of the extra-judicial right to exclude, constrain and to kill Indigenous peoples.
In "Un/Covering White Lies: Exposing racism in the era of racelessness," Delia Douglas examines a Canadian court case that involves the largest arson homicide in the history of Vancouver, British Columbia. Drawing on Mbembe's concept of "necropolitics," Douglas shows how anti-Black and anti-Brown racism were motivations that meshed with the presumed right of a white supremacist to extinguish persons-immigrants and refugeesdeemed superfluous to Canada. Douglas considers the crime and the legal proceedings as a case study to further our understanding of discourses of race, racism, and citizenship in Canadian government formally apologized for these residential schools, it also routinely denies and undermines that recognition in other narratives that aim to cloak land and resource and appropriation, dispossession and abrogation of treaties. Undertaking a discourse analysis of five Canadian media platforms during and subsequent to the TRC process, the paper unpacks the cognitive dissonance of an apology that is concurrent with the rhetoric and practices of settler colonial denial. Drawing on concepts such as the white possessive, white rage, and white fragility, findings from the analysis substantiate the hypothesis that the TRC worked to retrench the power of the Canadian (white, settler) state through "bad faith" bargaining.
Can white racism be an equal opportunity employer? Does white anger have interlocutors who are not epidermally or culturally white? If so, what are the implications for the cloaking of white rage when racial Others, approved by the white middle class, legitimate angry white herrenvolk defences of liberalism (i.e., whiteness as property)? Shelina Kassam's "Rendering Whiteness Palatable: The Acceptable Muslim in an Era of White Rage" demonstrates that a critical and underdeveloped aspect of metaracism is the granting of honorary whiteness to "Acceptable Muslims." She based her thesis on two Canadian case studies: 1) Irshad Manji, a Canadian Muslim journalist and activist who has been an active commentator on a variety of issues including those related to Muslims; and 2) the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), the first "mainstream" Canadian television series to feature a caste of multiracial Muslim and white characters. The Acceptable Muslim is palatably represented as assimilable, "moderate," "modern," urbane, and secular. By contrast, the Acceptable Muslim is neither an unjustifiably angry, "medieval," extremist Arab/Muslim male nor a long-suffering oppressed Arab/Muslim female. Centrally implicated in white Canadian herrenvolk debates about multiculturalism, gender equality, citizenship, and secularism, Acceptable Muslims (re)confirm and sustain, while cloaking, the racial boundaries of the nation-state. In the process, the Acceptable Muslims become iconic voices of multiculturalism and reason, reanimating the whiteness at the heart of the Canadian nationstate.
The contributors point to the ways that white rage is cloaked in policies and quotidian practices, uncloaked in murderous acts of white rage, and sometimes upheld by racial Others.
By expounding on the epistemological relevance of white rage as a deeply entrenched aspect of Canadian culture, we hope this Special Issue contributes to the existing body of critical inquiry that supports resistance to colonialism and white supremacy in Canada. In addition, the review in this Special Issue by Sarah Smith of Jonathan Metzl's (2019) Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland offers an intriguing reflection on the boomerang effect of white people's commitment to white rage.