STRANGE/R/NESS: Under Cover of Niceness: Deepening White Supremacy through Wellness, Crypto & Hyper Segregation

Event details

This event is part of a series hosted by the Postdigital Intimacies research cluster at Coventry University's Centre for Postdigital Cultures, offering a week-long online exploration of the uncanny, strange, and 'other' aspects of today's digital and postdigital intimacies.

Other events include: 

• Digital intimacies and the Queer Geographies of Encounter
• Who am I without the things that are familiar to me?
• Vanishing Act - An Ethnography of Digitalization and the Disappearance of Printed News

Biography

Dr Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology, Hunter College, USA

Abstract

The conventional way of understanding white supremacy is one that relies on a lens of Othering extremists as incomprehensible miscreants to ordinary, “nice” people. Contrary to this, I explore the way the very idea of “niceness” serves as a kind of cover, a Trojan Horse if you will, for the political and social goals of white supremacy often in very gendered ways.

In wellness culture, often dominated by white women, there are repeated efforts to eliminate social inequality from view by focusing on “light and love” inside often all-white spaces like yoga studios and retreat centers. In the world of cryptocurrencies, often dominated by white men, there are repeated claims that moving away from central banking (controlled by “globalists” an antisemitic dog whistle) will solve the world’s problems from a supposedly colorblind vantage point that relies only on math, configured here as “nice” rather than overtly political. The endpoint of both wellness and crypto is hyper segregation in geographic space, whether through gated communities or apartheid states.

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