H258: Extreme Heat

White Nationalism in the Age of Climate Change

Instructor: Anne Berg

anneberg@sas.upenn.edu
W 3:30-6pm

Course Description
The Amazon is burning. The glaciers are melting. Heat waves, hurricanes, earthquakes, oods,
wild res, and droughts devastate ever larger swaths of the earth, producing crop failures, air
pollution, soil erosion, famine and terrifying individual hardship. At the same, time the so-called
Western World is literally walling itself o from the millions who are eeing from disaster and
war with what little they can carry. White militants chant “blood and soil”and “Jews will not
replace us,” social media spreads memes and talking-points about “white genocide” and
“white replacement” and YouTube celebrities fantasize about building white ethnostates. Are
these developments connected? Is there a causal relationship? Or are these conditions purely
coincidental?

Increasingly, arguments about limits to growth, sustainability, development and climate change
have come to stand in competitive tension with arguments for social and racial equality. Why is
that case? What are the claims and underlying anxieties that polarize western societies? How
do white nationalist movements relate to populist and fascist movements in the rst half of the
20th century? What is new and di erent about them now? What is the relationship between
environmentalism, rightwing populism and the climate crisis? And how have societies

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 responded to the climate crisis, wealth inequality, nite resources and the threat posed by self-
radicalizing white nationalist groups?

This course examines the parallel trajectories of environmental consciousness and a

beleaguered white identity in Europe and the United States from the late 1960s to the present
and probes their connections and points of friction.

Weekly preparation (asynchronous)

- reading: secondary and primary sources

- reading responses

Weekly discussion

- We will meet once a week as a group on zoom during the time class is scheduled

- These sessions will be focused on clari cation, discussion and source analysis

- We will work in the big group as well as in breakout session.

Assignments
- Participation (Session introductions, short re ections, preparation, discussion) 25%

- Project proposal (1-2 page) 10%

- Four blog posts/position papers (500 words) 40%

- Final project (web-based) 25%

Books:

Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

Charles Mills, Racial Contract

All other readings are available on canvas. In addition to the readings listed on the syllabus,
expect to read short primary sources (video clips, blogs, news clippings, tweets, etc) on a
weekly basis either for preparation or class discussion.

This course’s connection to the present are deliberate and accordingly the sources somewhat
unusual.

O ce Hours: Wednesday 1:30-3pm and by appointment

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 SCHEDULE

Week 1 Sept Introduction

Thomas Fuller, “Coronavirus Limits California’s E orts to Fight Fires with Prison Labor”

Week Sep White Supremacy

Charles Mills, The Racial Contract

Anderson, 1-67

Week Sep 1 Climate Crisis

Jonathan Franzen, “What if we stopped pretending?”

Kathryn Schulz, “The really big one”

Alexandra Tempus, “Are we thinking about Climate Migration All Wrong”

Dina Ionesco, “Lets Talk about Climate Migrants, not Climate Refugees”

Week Sept 2 Civil Rights

Huey P. Newton, “Freedom,” Huey P. Newton Reader, 38-43

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Anderson, 68-97

Play: To My Unborn Child Love Letter from Fred Hampton by Richard Bradford.

Week Sept 2 Overpopulation

Below, Part I

Paul Ehrlich, excerpt

Anderson, 98-137

Jordan Dyett, “Overpopulation Discourse: Patriarchy, Racism and the Specter of Ecofascism”

Due: Project proposal

Week Oct Black Power & White Power

John Drabble, “From White Supremacy to White Power”

Below, Part II

Huey Newton, “Intercommunalism, February 1971,” 181-199

Week Oct 2 Culture Wars

Below, Part III

Dying of Whiteness, excerpt

Week 8 Oct 2 Gender

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 Michael Kimmel and Abby Ferber, “White Men Are This Nation”

Daniel Noah Halpern, “Sperm Count Zero”

Sydney Bauer, “The New Anti-Trans Culture War Hiding in Plain Sight”

Madeleine Kearns, “From Sussex, England, to New England, Gender Activists Are Loosing”

Lacey Lynn, “The 1965 Red Pill”

ContraPoints “Jordan Peterson”

Week Nov Great and White (Again)

Anderson, 138-178

White Right ( lm)

Moses, “‘White Genocide’ and the Ethics of Public Analysis”

David A. Graham, “The Stubborn Persistence of Confederate Monuments”

Due: Revised Project Proposal

Week 1 Nov 1 Climate Apocalypse & Ecofascism

Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

Sam Adler-Bell, “Why White Supremacists Are Hooked on Green Living”

Marc Hudson, “Beware far-right arguments disguised as environmentalism”

Matthew Phelan, “the Menace of Eco-Fascism”

Charles Mills, “Black Trash”

Week 11 Nov 1 Boogs, Fashboys and Antifa

Extremist Files, Southern Poverty Law Center, browse

Robert Evans and Jason Wilson, “The boogaloo Movement is not what you think”

Daniel Penny, “An Intimate History of Antifa”

Jane Coaston, “The Proud Boys Explained”

J.M. Berger, “What is the Alt-Right? A Twitter Taxonomy”

Suggested reading: Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the alt-
Right is Warping the American Imagination (book)

Week 1 Nov 2 No class

Week 1 Dec Fulcrum 2020

Angela Davis, “This moment holds possibilities for change we have never before experienced”

Sarah Churchwell, “The Plot writes itself”

Je Sparrow, “Eco-fascists and the ugly ght for ‘our way of life’ as the environment
disintegrates”

Adam Gabbatt, “‘They need voters’: QAnon is nding a Home in the Republican Party”

Week 1 Dec Wrap

TBD

Due: Final Project

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