Abstract
Some critical philosophers of race have argued that whiteness can be understood as a technology of affect and that white supremacy is comprised partly of unconscious habits that result in racialized perception. In an effort to deepen our understanding of the affective and bodily dimensions of white supremacy and the ways in which affective habits are socially produced, I look to insights from situated affectivity. Theorists in this field maintain that affective experience is not simply a matter of felt inner states, but rather socially and environmentally embedded and fundamentally relational. Jan Slaby presents the concept of an ‘affective arrangement’ as a way to approach affectivity in terms of relational dynamics unfolding within a particular setting. Applying this concept to the societal level, Paul Schuetze introduces the notion of ‘affective milieu.’ I argue that these notions of ‘affective arrangement’ and ‘affective milieu,’ together with an organicist account of habit, can help to illuminate the workings of white supremacy in the United States. My proposed account highlights the extent to which white supremacy is an affective, bodily phenomenon and how racist habits are formed over the course of learning and ongoing affective engagement, in the context of various social settings. Crucially, these affective habits are fully bound up with habits of appraisal, interpretation, and judgment, and therefore inseparable from how subjects come to see and understand their world.
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Notes
A discussion of the myriad ways that white domination manifests, as well as the non-white populations that have been impacted by it, is beyond the scope of this essay.
This ad, produced by supporters of George H.W. Bush, aired during his presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Horton, a Black man, was convicted of murder and then raped a white woman and stabbed her partner while furloughed from prison under a Massachusetts program in place when Dukakis was governor. The ad features an off-screen narrator telling the story of Horton’s crimes together with a menacing mug shot of Horton. The narrator notes that Bush supports the death penalty and concludes with the tag line “Weekend prison passes, Dukakis on crime.”
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Maiese, M. White Supremacy as an affective milieu. Topoi 41, 905–915 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09805-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09805-1