Progress report

Geographies of identity I: Geography (neo)liberalism white supremacy

Lawrence D. Berg
University of British Columbia, Canada

Progress in Human Geography 36(4) 508517 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132511428713 phg.sagepub.com

Abstract As geographers interested in issues of identity, we need to be concerned with the subject effects of our own positioning in the world. I argue here that we need to be especially cognizant of the impact that neoliberalization has had on our own subjectivities as critical geographers, and how the consequent subject-positions produced in a neoliberalizing geography efface our roles in the reproduction of white supremacy in geography. Keywords critical geography, liberalism, neoliberalism, subject position, white supremacy

I Introduction
This is the first of three progress reports on geographies of identity that I will write over the next three years. My objective over these three essays is to focus not so much on progress in geographies of identity, but instead to focus on three areas where we continue to experience what we might awkwardly call a lack of progress. The essays will be loosely connected, but can also easily be read as stand-alone pieces. The first will address issues of white supremacy in geography; the second will focus on interlocking forms of marginalization (after Hill-Collins, 1990) in geography; the third, two years hence, will focus on issues of disableism in geography. This first essay draws on what has come to be known outside geography as white studies (Bonnett, 1996). I present, in very schematic terms, a theoretical argument for understanding the discipline of human geography generally, and what is now widely known as Critical Geography more specifically, as key sites in

and through which white supremacy is reproduced in the academy. In making this argument, I am not suggesting that geography is more culpable in the production of white supremacy than other social (and physical) science disciplines. That very well may be the case, but my intent here is to focus on a different object. In this regard, I suggest that it is because critical geographers understand ourselves as more critical than our (non-critical) colleagues, this sense of being critical produces in us a subject position that remains ignorant of the ways that we reproduce particular forms of racialized marginalization. As one can ascertain from my use of us and our, I include myself in this argument, which is designed to be an immanent critique, one that is supportive of critical

Corresponding author: Centre for Social, Spatial & Economic Justice, University of British Columbia, 3333 University Way, Kelowna, Canada Email: Lawrence.berg@ubc.ca

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geography, but also recognizes the problematic ways that we as critical geographers (re)produce white supremacy. My critique and theorizations are also somewhat autobiographical (Moss, 2001), and thus the paper draws partly on autoethnographic (Butz, 2001; Butz and Besio, 2004, 2009) approaches to understand the production of geography (after Sidaway, 1997) as a set of disciplinary and disciplining practices. There are three key components to my argument: First, I make the empirical point that critical geography is an amazingly white field of research and teaching (Kobayashi, 2002; Mahtani, 2006; Pulido, 2002; for wider discussions beyond geography, see Henry and Tator, 2009; Schick, 2002). Second, I link this whiteness to the production of geographic subjectivity that is also produced in and through a hegemonic liberalism, a form of understanding of the Self as unified, monolithic, fully selfaware, and rational that is being intensified under current rounds of neoliberalization of the academy (e.g., see Berg and Roche, 1997; Castree and Sparke, 2000; Castree et al., 2006; Dowling, 2008). Third, I link the first two components of my argument to a theoretical argument that suggests we need to understand geography generally, and critical geography specifically, as operating within a wider spectrum of white supremacy as the everyday state of affairs in the societies in which geographers operate. Here I suggest that present readings of society as hegemonically white misread Gramscis (1971) theorization of hegemony. Such misreadings reproduce our own white subject position in our analyses, and in so doing, fail to recognize (let alone contest) the actually existing forms of white supremacy that operate in contemporary colonial settler and imperial societies in places like Europe, North and South America and Australasia. It is important to note that this paper is an attempt to theorize questions that I have only recently learned to ask, and in learning to ask these questions, I have also become much more

aware of my complex and contradictory positioning within white supremacy. The paper is produced from within that complicity, and the stories I tell and the arguments I make are directed primarily at white members of the geography academy. For white people working in a white supremacist academy, my arguments might seem new and innovative even, but for geographers of colour the story will be all too familiar and certainly neither new nor innovative. My reflections in this paper have been stimulated, in part at least, by four important works in feminist critical race studies: Audrey Thompsons (2003) theorization of the way that white anti-racists like me appropriate the theoretical work of people of colour and indigenous peoples to produce a wonderfully flexible positional superiority even as we work to contest (obvious) forms of racism; Robyn Wiegmans (1999) work on white liberal disaffiliation, which describes the way that liberal white people attempt to disaffiliate ourselves from the more obvious forms of racism all the while continuing to benefit from the structural social relations of white supremacy; and, Sarita Srivastavas (2005) study of white feminists and pro-feminists and our over-investment in a politics of the anti-racist Self combined with Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razacks (1998) theorization of the subject positions in feminism that produce in white feminists a feeling of innocence and a consequent failure to interrogate our complicity in other peoples lives, thereby allowing us to continue participating in the practices that oppress other men and women.

II Geographys whiteness
These arguments should be seen in the context of what Patricia Price (2010: 156) notes as the remarkably persistent whiteness of geographys practitioners. In attempting to come to grips with this whiteness, she goes on to query the prominence of white studies in the discipline, suggesting the possibility that:

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the popularity of white studies in geography may in fact simply reflect the whiteness of geographers, and as such constitute a zone of racial solipsism, or worse, a comfort zone rather than a space of truly critical engagement with racism (let alone antiracism . . . ). The prominence of white studies in geographic studies of race may in fact not simply reflect but also unwittingly act to reinforce white dominance in geography. (Price, 2010: 156)

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the monolithic whiteness of geographic fieldwork. All of these authors arguments taken together suggest the continued dominance of whiteness in Geography.

III (Neo)Liberalism and geography

The whiteness of geography is, in part, a legacy of the subject positions open to geographers in a discipline that crosses the social science/physical science divide. But it is also a reflection of the exclusions inherent in liberalism and neoliberalism, two discursive frameworks that the vast majority of geographers even (if not especially) those of us who see ourselves as critical geographers draw from in order to understand ourselves as knowing subjects in the discipline (Berg and Roche, 1997; Castree et al., 2006; Paasi, 2005; for more on the corporatization of geography, see Castree and Sparke, 2000; Chatterton and Maxey, 2009; for more on the corporatization of universities, see Chan and Fisher, 2008; Nocella et al., 2010). Scholarship by feminist academics of colour highlights the importance of recognizing the white supremacist nature of American society (Hill-Collins, 1990; hooks, 1989). Drawing on works by these writers, I argue the need to understand white supremacy as the everyday state of affairs in critical geography (and I provide more detail about this later in the essay). Moreover, I argue that this white supremacy is supported by and produced through a hegemonic discourse of liberalism in the western academy. Here I draw on writers like Carol Tator (2009) for support, as she argues:
It is indeed paradoxical that one of the defining features of the Culture of Whiteness as it manifests in the academy today is its reliance on the values and norms associated with liberalism. (Tator, 2009: 4)

Price is certainly correct to query the motives behind the rapid rise in popularity of white studies in geography, especially given the fact that geography is one of the whitest social science disciplines in Euro-American academia. Geography is so white, in fact, that its whiteness has rarely been queried in any thoroughgoing manner, although there have been a few exceptions to this rule, and their numbers are growing. Audrey Kobayashi (2002), for example, documented the dominance of white academics (98% of all geographers) in Canadian Geography departments. Laura Pulido (2002), Ruth Wilson-Gilmore (2002), Linda Peake and Audrey Kobayashi (2002), Minelle Mahtani (2006), and Audrey Kobayashi and Sara de Leeuw (2010) have theorized various aspects of the whiteness of Anglo-American geography. Divya Tolia-Kelly (2010) argues that there tends to be a focus on the other in Geography that effaces in our work the significant lived geographies of racialized people. She argues that it is necessary to make practice within the academy more inclusive and politically orientated towards valuing scholarship and scholars at the edges and margins of, and other to, the usual moral geographies of the discipline (Tolia-Kelly 2010: 358). In this same vein, Minelle Mahtani and Emily Murai organized a special session at the 2007 Association of American Geographers annual conference that discussed the dominance of whiteness as a set of academic-cultural practices and theorized ways that women of colour might negotiate this landscape of whiteness in the academy. Finally, Abbott (2006) has argued the need to decolonize

Perhaps more importantly, and as I have argued elsewhere (in Castree et al., 2006), this liberalism is becoming more virulent as processes of neoliberalization produce new forms of

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individualized academic subjectivities, and this in turn, reproduces among us individualized forms of analysis of the relationships between academics and other objects in the world. This neoliberalizing form of liberalism1 has one immediate consequence in geography: when we (white) academic geographers reflect on our own relationship to racism, there is an increased reliance on idealist concepts that locate racism in individual bodies of those having bad (read: racist) attitudes towards people of colour both inside and outside the academy. This allows critical academics, especially and paradoxically critical geographers, feminists and anti-racists, to disaffiliate ourselves from racism (after all, we do not have racist attitudes), while we continue to benefit from the structures and sociospatial relations of white supremacy (after Fellows and Razack, 1998; Wiegman, 1999).

age), liberalism produces forms of exclusion based on difference, then denies the very existence of the difference that it produces (Giroux, 2010; Goldberg, 2009; Mehta, 1990). This production of non-difference has a long history in liberalism, which, as Uday Mehta (1990) observed more than two decades ago, produces the very strategies of exclusion that it purports to erase. This process has been transformed under neoliberalization, where certain forms of difference are highlighted, but others are effaced. Susan Searls Giroux (2010) describes this process at some length:
Although, in the common articulation of liberal philosophical tradition, greater freedom begets greater responsibility, deregulated markets and deregulated racisms were by definition reflexively managed and accountable to no one. Responsibility was divested of its social character; indeed, according to predominant neoliberal wisdom, there was no such thing as society. And so began the strange era of personal responsibility in which disaggregated, anxious individuals were left more or less to their own devices in the ruthless (and rigged) global competition for power and material reward, answerable to themselves alone for their successes or failures. (Giroux, 2010: 3)

IV (Neo)liberalisms affects
As I suggest above, there is an interlocking relationship between white supremacy and (neo)liberalism in the academy, and I will outline three vignettes taken from within geography in order to illustrate what I refer to as (Neo)Liberalisms Affects, or the way that emotions, theories and practices produced in (neo)liberal academic settings are caught up in the reproduction of white supremacy in geography.

1 Were all the same

David Theo Goldberg (2009), in a wide-ranging analysis of racial neoliberalism, argues that one of the key processes by which (neo)liberalism (re)produces new forms of racism is in the way that (neo)liberalism denies difference. (Neo)liberalism thus produces an epistemological space in which humans are all the same (the so-called level playing field) and ironically where to even raise the spectre of racial difference is itself read as an act of racism. In this way, and as it does with all other forms of difference (such as class, gender, sexuality, disability,

In practice in the academy, neoliberalized policies have tended to acknowledge difference and ostensibly programs (such as Affirmative Action hiring policies in the USA and Equity hiring policies in Canada) were implemented to provide assistance to members of those minoritized groups that were marginalized by the very policies that were ostensibly about setting such individuals free to achieve their highest potential. But also in practice, these programs have failed to achieve their intended outcomes, in large part because the hegemonic (neo)liberal discourse of sameness tended to operate to marginalize members of those same minoritized groups by highlighting their difference in order to construct them as beneficiaries of supposedly undeserved special treatment.

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This simultaneous erasure and emphasis of difference is now a classic manoeuvre in the western academy, especially when white masculine ableist privilege is threatened by people of colour claiming a space from which to operate in the academy. Thus we see academics (often white men, but also white women) engaged in highly reactionary moves in defence of so-called standards. As Carol Tator argues:
the values of liberty, academic freedom, individualism, and universalism continue to hold ideological supremacy in the . . . academy. In practice, liberal sentiments, often are expressed in coded language such as colour-blindness, neutrality, objectivity, merit, and equal opportunity. However, these central concepts in a liberal discourse, especially in the context of academic institutions, have immensely flexible meanings, and often become the ideological framework through which racialized beliefs and practices are reinforced and defended. (Tator, 2009)

hooks, 1989). Similarly, the neoliberal university has produced new spaces of identity and reshaped the research agendas of academics in such a way as to devalue the communitybased and participatory research and activism of many women of colour in favour of more corporatist and individualist research endeavours (Cotera, 2010).

2 Liberal white rescue fantasies

Another way that (neo)liberalism works to reproduce white supremacy is through the micro-geographies of what I term white rescue fantasies. These rescue fantasies operate in the following ways in critical geography. As (critical) geographers, but also as people operating in a (neo)liberal white frame, we understand ourselves as good white folks. That is, in the ironic terms coined by Audrey Thompson (2003), we understand ourselves to be friends of people of color.2 We are especially able to do so because we understand ourselves to be critical geographers, and because we draw on (neo)liberal frameworks to disaffiliate ourselves from racism as individuals, at the same time that we continue to be privileged as members of a group (white people) that benefits from white supremacy (see Wiegman, 1999). Because we understand ourselves to be critical geographers, and because we see ourselves as friends of people of colour, we sometimes (if not always) engage in some highly problematic micro-geographies of race in Geography, white rescue fantasies. In this regard, as good (neo)liberal white critical geographers, we assume that our own lack of racism can ensure positive race relations, but especially so when we meet actual people of colour one-on-one. Yet, this is so rarely the experience of people of colour, who through long study of white folks (as a survival strategy), learn to be cautious when meeting us. They know through (bad) experience that white people can be dangerous, especially so when we are the (often self-

In this way, academics in general (and certainly Geographers) reproduce white supremacist frameworks of meaning without ever raising the spectre of race. It is through such coded words as standards, accordingly, that white supremacy gets reenacted over and over again in the academy, often in banal and prosaic ways, but in ways that have significant consequences for people of colour. For example, it is such standards that allow white academics to continually fail to give people of colour credit for theorizing issues of race and racism. Instead, white academics tend to understand people of colour as telling stories and anecdotes about racism and white supremacy, but we rarely acknowledge their work for its value as theory (James, 2010). Perhaps this helps explain why few white academics seem willing to admit white supremacy as a theoretical term to describe the current racial formation in western academia, even though women of colour have been using such terminology for more than two decades now (see, for example,

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righteous) friends of people of colour. More often than not, as white people who are anti-racist and critical, we spend far too much time trying to prove to people of colour (and ourselves, perhaps?) that we are not racist, that we are their friends, and in so doing, we further marginalize people of colour through our (critical and anti-racist) colonization of spaces of difference. We do this primarily because we operate with (neo)liberal frameworks for understanding inter-personal relationships as individual relations rather than social relations. I will give an example of the white rescue fantasy in action based on relatively recent experiences at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) conference in 2007 where a special session entitled People of colour negotiate the Academy had been organized by women of colour (Mahtani and Murai, 2007). I should note that this session was one of the best special sessions I have ever attended at the AAG, but it was also the most troubling. In this regard, the session was predominantly attended by women of colour, although there were also a few men of colour and two or three white men and women (including me). By and large, the very few of us who are white took up the most space in these sessions during question period, with each one of us attempting to ensure through our comments that everyone else in the room was certain of our anti-racist intentions. As white people, we both reinforced and drew on powerful (neo)liberal discourses of individual responsibility in order to construct our own anti-racist identities. In so doing, we also managed to colonize one of the few spaces at the AAG set aside by and for people of colour to discuss issues of importance to their identities as professional Geographers. In this way, we white people managed to reproduce the colonizing sociospatial relations of white supremacy at the very moment we proclaimed our commitment to anti-racist struggle in the discipline.

3 (Neo)liberal exclusions through inclusionary teaching

The third form of liberalisms affects that I want to discuss involves the way that white people, and especially critical geographers, draw on neoliberal understandings of the Self in order to construct pedagogical methods when teaching anti-racism and critical geography in our classrooms. In this regard, I want to point out that no matter what our critical approaches in our research may be, we almost inevitably draw on (neo)liberal models of education (Dowling, 2008; Giroux, 2002; Whiteley et al., 2008) in our teaching. These (neo)liberal approaches focus on the development of individual (personal) growth (accumulation of cultural capital) and empowerment (becoming critical). In so doing, our teaching rarely focuses on group differentiated access to education produced by the very neoliberalism that we often unwittingly draw upon as our model for understanding student progress. Our focus on personal accumulation of cultural capital by students is reinforced structurally through such processes as student evaluations of teaching and through other neoliberal processes of audit and assessment (Davies and Bansel, 2010) of both students and teachers, but we rarely understand our teaching as produced through such practices. Instead, we know our teaching through such (neo)liberal signifiers as excellence and innovation, and in this way we avoid critical reflection on the ways that our teaching marginalizes those it purports to protect. Let me give an example of how all of this might play out in practice, in the case of white faculty members teaching anti-racist geographies in the university. Drawing on (neo)liberalism, us good white teachers of anti-racist geographies do our best to draw our white students into antiracist understandings of the world. Yet, because these students are steeped in the practices of a white supremacist society, coming to anti-racist awareness is a difficult process. The spaces of anti-racism are never easy for such students to

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locate, and the journey to such spaces is a complex one at best. Nevertheless, as good neoliberal white professors, we do our utmost to support our white students as they come to anti-racist consciousness, and we are very supportive of these students as they make mistakes along the way. We work hard to make our white students feel comfortable, safe, and protected in this process. However, if we are realistic about this process, we should acknowledge that we are lucky if we manage to bring just one or two of our white students into anti-racist consciousness in any given course of instruction. Unfortunately, we seem to be blissfully unaware of the impact this has on the students of colour in our classes. Thus, at the same time that we manage to transform the lives of one or two students privileged by their whiteness, if we have any students of colour in our classrooms, it is very likely that their experience of this kind of teaching where white students are protected, encouraged and supported as they blunder through issues of race and racism, and as they often reproduce white supremacist ideas in the classroom can best be described as traumatic. Research that I have just begun working on suggests that many students of colour point to their university years as some of the worst experiences of their life. Of these awful experiences, students of colour point to their critical social science courses as the worst because of the way that their professors and white students deal with issues of marginality generally and race specifically. They note that they are forced to listen to the stupid shit that white students say about race,3 which then goes unchallenged in the classroom. They question the conditions in the classroom that allow white students to make ignorant (and often racist) statements in class, and they also question whose lives are valued in such spaces. As good (neo)liberal teachers who want to attend to the personal (anti-racist) development of our students, we are often impervious to the fact that our practices often traumatize those people of colour that our anti-racist teaching proposes to protect.

V Hegemonic whiteness or white supremacy?

The three vignettes of (neo)liberalisms affects in geography that I have just presented suggest that there is a problem with the way we currently understand whiteness in the academy. For almost two decades now, scholars have argued that we need to be more attendant to whiteness, and in particular, to the hegemonic character of whiteness (for example, see Bonnett, 1996; Dyer, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993), but the question arises: for whom exactly is whiteness hegemonic? If we take Gramscis (1971) theory of hegemony seriously, then we have to concede that whiteness is not hegemonic for most indigenous people, people of colour, or other racially minoritized people. Members of these social groups have a longstanding practice of studying whiteness as a survival strategy (see especially hooks, 1989, 2005; see also Gilbert, 1998). As bell hooks (2005) argues:
Although there has never been any official body of black people in the United States who have gathered as anthropologists and/or ethnographers to study whiteness, black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversations with one another special knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people. (hooks, 2005:19)

So, in this instance, those people who are marginalized by whiteness are clearly not fooled into reproducing that marginalization because of the cultural arguments of the dominant social bloc (although they might reproduce white supremacy as a poorly formulated survival strategy itself; see hooks, 1989). As Gramsci (1971) argued, hegemony is never complete, but must always be worked at. Yet that does not seem to accurately describe the present racial formation under advanced capitalism in white settler (and former imperial) societies. Rather, the only people for whom whiteness is seemingly invisible is white people, and we clearly benefit from the seeming invisibility of our whiteness and the privilege that

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goes with it (see Hartmann et al., 2009; also see Pulido, 2002; Thompson, 2003; Wiegman, 1999; Wilson-Gilmore, 2002). With that in mind we need to think of the power of whiteness not as arising within the social formation that Gramsci (1971) described as hegemony, but rather a social formation that is much better described (in theoretical language at least) as supremacy. This is a conclusion that the black feminist cultural critic bell hooks came to decades ago now. In 1989 she stated:
As I write, I try to remember when the word racism ceased to be the term which best expressed for me exploitation of black people and other people of color in this society and when I began to understand that the most useful term was white supremacy. (hooks, 1989: 84).

Germany, the UK, and Spain. It might be a bit more troubling to import such definitions directly into other European spaces, which might be defined as paradoxically both colonized and colonizing at the same time. But what is very certain is that geography, especially in its current Anglo-American hegemonic phase (see Berg and Kearns, 1998), clearly fits the definition of white supremacy.

VI Conclusion
I have argued in this brief progress report that geography and (critical) geographers are thoroughly (neo)liberal now. Within the context of this (neo)liberalism, white supremacy gets (re)enacted all the time. At the same time, this (neo)liberalism produces for us as critical geographers a subject position (good geographers) within which we continually fail to see ourselves as either (neo)liberal or as white supremacist. Geographers and others have mistakenly theorized white supremacy as a condition of hegemonic whiteness, but a more careful analysis of the process suggests that hegemony is not the most appropriate way to understand it. All geographers are invited into white supremacy (after Sherene Razack, personal communication, 2010), but not under the same conditions nor with the same penalties for refusal to enter. Geography which cannot escape the (neo)liberal social relations of the society in which it is embedded must be understood as being characterized also by the social relations of white supremacy. This white supremacy is invisible to most Geographers, and especially so to critical geographers, because of the way that (neo)liberalism provides us white (critical) Geographers (and others) with the means to disaffiliate ourselves from racism to claim innocence all the while benefiting in very real material ways from ongoing white supremacy. Acknowledgements This reports origins lie in a paper given at the Association of American Geographers

She suggests that unlike taken-for-granted definitions of white supremacy as some kind of extraordinary state of affairs best reserved for the description of the activities and beliefs of white supremacists groups like neo-Nazis, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Ku Klux Klan in the USA, The Northern League in Italy, or the BNP and Skinheads in England, we need to understand that white supremacy is a much better description for what passes as everyday life in such spaces. This is certainly how Charles W. Mills (2005) defines white supremacy in The Companion to African-American Philosophy. Citing Ansley (1989), Mills defines white supremacy as:
a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. (Mills, 2005: 269; see also Razack et al., 2010)

This definition clearly describes the present conditions in white settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA, as well as former European imperial powers like

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Geography. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 149166. Butz D, and Besio K (2004) The value of autoethnography for field research in transcultural settings. Professional Geographer 56(3): 350360. Butz D and Besio K (2009) Autoethnography. Geography Compass 3(5): 16601674. Castree N and Sparke M (2000) Professional geography and the corporatization of the university: Experiences, evaluations, and engagements. Antipode 32(3): 222229. Castree N, Aspinall R, Berg LD, Bohle H-G, Hoggart K, Kitchin R, et al. (2006) Forum: Research assessment and the production of geographical knowledge. Progress in Human Geography 30(6): 747782. Chan AS and Fisher D (2008) The Exchange University: Corporatization of Academic Culture. Vancouver: UBC Press. Chatterton P and Maxey L (eds) (2009) Corporate involvement in geography. Special issue. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 8(3): 429551. Cotera ME (2010) Women of color, tenure, and the neoliberal university. In: Nocella AJ, Best S, and McLaren P (eds) Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex. Edinburgh: AK Press, 328336. Davies B and Bansel P (2010) Governmentality and academic work: Shaping the hearts and minds of academic workers. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 26(3): 520. Dowling R (2008) Geographies of identity: Labouring in the neoliberal university. Progress in Human Geography 32(6): 812820. Dyer R (1997) White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge. Fellows ML and Razack S (1998) The race to innocence: Confronting hierarchical relations among women. The Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 1: 335353. Frankenberg R (1993) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gilbert MR (1998) Race, space and power: The survival strategies of working poor women. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88(4): 595621. Giroux H (2002) Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: The university as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review 72(4): 425464. Giroux SS (2010) Sades revenge: Racial neoliberalism and the sovereignty of negation. Patterns of Prejudice 44(1): 126.

conference in Washington DC, at the University of Roskilde, Denmark, and as a keynote address at the Spaces of Difference Conference, University of Milano-Bicocca. I am grateful to participants in all these presentations for their comments and criticisms, which greatly improved the paper. I am especially grateful to Minelle Mahtani and Morgan Berg who at different times provided astute comments on earlier versions of the essay and I am grateful for their careful criticisms and suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to Sarah Radcliffe and Noel Castree for their helpful critiques of earlier drafts of this paper, which resulted in a number of important revisions. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors of fact and interpretation. Notes
1. I represent this neoliberalizing liberalism textually with the partially parenthetical term: (neo)liberalism. 2. The original uses the American spelling (color) and I use that spelling whenever it is used by the original author(s). 3. This statement is not a direct quote but rather an amalgamation from informal discussions that I have had with a number of students as part of the development of this research project.

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