White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide

This study examines how white supremacy has persisted in the decades following the Civil Rights Act. Rodriguez argues that the United States continues a long history of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence, with white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft operating throughout the post-civil rights era. Rodriguez analyzes a range of archival, testimonial, visual, and activist texts—including Freedmen's Bureau documents, LAPD hiring campaigns, Barry Goldwater's hidden tattoo, and the Pelican Bay prison strike—to reframe the past fifty years as a period of White Reconstruction. During this time, efforts to reassemble white ascendancy have shaped the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion, formal equality, and what Rodriguez calls "multiculturalist white supremacy." Throughout the book, Rodriguez explores how abolitionist praxis—understood as creative, imaginative, and speculative collective labor—might displace and potentially destroy white ascendancy and civilization, opening possibilities for insurgent thriving.