Superposition strategies: How and why White people say contradictory things about race.

Due to the centrality of race and racism in social, economic, and political life, coupled with the racially privileged position of White people, the assessment of White racial attitudes is an ongoing concern. There is a great deal of survey-based, quantitative work that demonstrates a compelling case of White attitudinal polarization-a grouping of authoritarian, racist attitudes versus another alliance of progressive, antiracist attitudes-an increasingly racialized culture war. However, other studies, largely qualitative and open-ended, demonstrate the heterogeneous, shifting, and hypocritical nature of White discourse about race. To resolve this paradox, I refrain from the assumption that White racial "attitudes" are essentially bifurcated, while I also refuse the contention that White people produce spontaneous narratives whole-cloth. Rather, I argue that with sustained attention to time, context, and triangulation, we can better understand how and why White people speak of People of Color in positive ways one moment and negative the next, marshaling both to defend, rationalize, or improve their racialized subject position. I argue that these contradictions are-à la Schrödinger's famous thought experiment-"superposition strategies." Both racist and antiracist attitudes are simultaneously alive and dead in the same individual or group. Contradictory White discourse helps maintain a sense of self-efficacy and coherent White racial identity within conflictual and politically supercharged social situations, as well as within racially unequal social structures.

"Black people don't love nature": white environmentalist imaginations of cause, calling, and capacity.

I examine how white British members of a London-area environmental group conceptualize race in relation to ecological disasters. Based on a five-year (2018-2022) ethnographic study, members employed racialized narratives and symbolic boundaries to construct who was the cause of disasters, who had the moral responsibility or calling to remediate disasters, and who possessed the adequate resources and capacity to fix disasters. Together, these narratives formed a tripartite racial imaginary which functioned to demarcate the symbolic boundaries of an ideal, white racial identity that was intimately crocheted with notions of authentic guilt and remorse, responsibility and liability, work ethics, competent knowledge, resource mobilization, moral commitment, and racial paternalism and superiority. Through the pursuit of this White racial ideal, members frequently conceptualized ecological disasters throughout the non-white world as the fault of specific actions by non-White people, identified unique racialized actors as the proper responsible parties for working on the remediation of ecological disasters, and also assigned particular White people from Westernized, industrial, democratic states as the only people in possession of the appropriate knowledge, resources, and character to clean-up and manage a healthy environment.

Backstage discourse and the reproduction of white masculinities.

This article documents the shared patterns of private white male discourse. Drawing from comparative ethnographic research in a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, I analyze how white men engage in private discourse to reproduce coherent and valorized understandings of white masculinity. These private speech acts reinforce prevailing narratives about race and gender, reproduce understandings of segregation and paternalism as natural, and rationalize the expression of overt racism. This analysis illustrates how antagonistic forms of "frontstage" white male activism may distract from white male identity management in the "backstage."