Location: 1 Devonshire Place, Room 023N

Speaker: Miko Zeldes-Roth

Register: https://forms.gle/yyfsrXJ8WGF12t7g6

White Americans’ investments in sovereignty are fundamentally at odds with ideals of democratic politics in the United States today. At a time when the salience of racial identity on political outcomes is growing, white Americans’ continued attachments to sovereignty not only undermine the viability of any form of democratic politics predicated on the political equality of all Americans. In this project, I consider how whiteness is equivalent with full citizenship: to be white is to have standing to rule over racialized minorities normatively categorized as ruled subjects.

I focus on the carceral state – policing and prisons – to examine the mechanisms through which the US state reinvests in white sovereignty on a continual basis, despite constitutional commitments to colorblindness, race-neutrality, and multiculturalism. This notion of white citizenship constructed through the carceral state is one that is authoritarian, hostile to multiracial politics, and dangerous for the future of democratic politics in the US.