Historicizing White Supremacist Terrorism with Ida B. Wells

• Date: 01 April 2022
• Published date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211021381
• Author: Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211021381

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(2) 275 –304

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211021381

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Article

Historicizing White

Supremacist Terrorism

with Ida B. Wells

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson1

Abstract

In light of increasing white supremacist violence in the United States, calls

to identify such violence as terrorism have surged in public discourse.

Federal and state agencies have taken up these demands and included white

supremacy in counterterrorism and national security policy. While this

classification appears to remove the racist double standard in applications

of the terrorism label, it has come under criticism for obscuring the history

and distinctly U.S. American roots of white supremacy, on the one hand,

and expanding the harmful and typically racially coercive consequences of

U.S. counterterrorism, on the other hand. There is, however, a robust yet

neglected tradition in U.S. racial justice activism that uses the language of

terrorism to make sense of white supremacy. By examining this tradition, this

essay offers a more nuanced assessment of the dangers and possibilities of

classifying white supremacy as terrorism. Specifically, I look at Ida B. Wells’s

analysis of lynching as racial terrorism to recover an alternative narrative

of white supremacist terrorism. I argue that the understanding of white

supremacy as terrorism in her writings not only exposes the partisan use of

these terms and their complicity in constructing a narrowly circumscribed

and biased public knowledge about racial domination, but also reveals some

mistaken assumptions of the current debate. This essay thus sheds new

light on a neglected discourse of white supremacist terrorism and makes it

relevant for contemporary purposes.

1Associate Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Syracuse University, 541 Hall of Languages, Syracuse, NY

13244, USA.

Email: verlenbu@syr.edu

1021381PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211021381Political TheoryErlenbusch-Anderson

research-article2021

276 Political Theory 50(2)

Keywords

white supremacy, terrorism, lynching, Wells

This essay examines the contested meaning of terrorism and the term’s stra-

tegic uptake in struggles against state violence and systemic injustice. Since

the 1970s and especially after 9/11, terrorism has been associated with “for-

eign” threats to national security, where foreign virtually exclusively means

Islam. But an increase of white supremacist attacks in recent years has led to

demands to identify such acts as terrorism. In the aftermath of the Capitol

siege on January 6, 2021, in particular, consensus quickly emerged among

policy makers and the larger public that what had happened at the Capitol

was an act of terrorism that must be met with domestic terrorism laws and

counterterrorism practices (Kanno-Youngs and Hong 2021). Although this

classification is welcomed by people concerned about the threat white

supremacy poses to national security, and by racial justice activists who have

long criticized the racist double standard in the identification of terrorist acts

(Aaronson 2019; Bayoumi 2017; Beydoun 2018; Corbin 2017), efforts to

extend the language of terrorism to white supremacist acts and perpetrators

have come under criticism for misrepresenting the problem of white suprem-

acy and expanding harmful practices of U.S. counterterrorism. The current

debate about whether the terrorism label should be applied to white suprem-

acy has, therefore, reached a sort of impasse between champions of consis-

tency, who regard the ostensibly “colorblind” use of the term as an obvious

good, and eliminativists, who warn that invoking, let alone expanding, the

language of terrorism will entrench racist practices of counterterrorism

(Erlenbusch-Anderson 2018, 168–173).

This essay seeks to sidestep this impasse by shifting our attention from

normative questions about whether the language of terrorism should be

extended in this way to a more descriptive account of how terrorism as a

“power/knowledge formation has already been contested by multiple forms

of counter-conduct” (Lorenzini 2020, 3). I ask under what conditions, by

whom, and how the concept has been and is taken up in a critical and even

subversive attempt to show the limitations of dominant counterterrorism

frameworks. For instance, invocations of the term “terrorism” in U.S. social

justice activism as a means to name, criticize, and call for the abolition of

white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, and xenophobia are neither simply

consistent uses of the prevailing notion of terrorism as it is articulated in

national security policy, nor are they inattentive to the white supremacist

foundations of the U.S. polity. Instead, they pose a challenge to the main-

stream understanding of terrorism as a specific form of illegitimate political