HMEI Faculty Seminar: “Necropolitics at the End of Empire: The Paradox of White Supremacy in the U.S.”

Carolyn Rouse, the Ritter Professor of Anthropology, presented “Necropolitics at the End of Empire: The Paradox of White Supremacy in the U.S.” for our third talk in the fall 2021 HMEI Faculty Seminar Series.

Rouse explored how declining life expectancies among white Americans has led to a paradox of white supremacy where the state enables self-destructive politics based on fantasies of race and freedom. While presumed that white racism is directed solely at Black and brown people, Rouse’s fieldwork among rural low-income white Americans has found a deeply held Malthusian eugenics that advocates — at times under the guise of environmentalism — for the annihilation of various segments of the population.

The net effect is that the solution to people’s economic, social and personal problems has become the dismantling of the biopolitical state structured to protect and care for white Americans in the first place.

HMEI Faculty Seminar: “Necropolitics at the End of Empire: The Paradox of White Supremacy in the U.S.”

Publish Date

November 2, 2021

Presenter(s)

Carolyn Rouse

Link to Video

https://youtu.be/bpwZBFbSOis

Video Length

55:51

Carolyn Rouse, the Ritter Professor of Anthropology, presented “Necropolitics at the End of Empire: The Paradox of White Supremacy in the U.S.” for our third talk in the fall 2021 HMEI Faculty Seminar Series.

Rouse explored how declining life expectancies among white Americans has led to a paradox of white supremacy where the state enables self-destructive politics based on fantasies of race and freedom. While presumed that white racism is directed solely at Black and brown people, Rouse’s fieldwork among rural low-income white Americans has found a deeply held Malthusian eugenics that advocates — at times under the guise of environmentalism — for the annihilation of various segments of the population.

The net effect is that the solution to people’s economic, social and personal problems has become the dismantling of the biopolitical state structured to protect and care for white Americans in the first place.