The determined indeterminacy of white supremacy

Abstract

Contemporary white supremacy often takes hold through strategies of racial disavowal. One strategy that political parties and regular citizens in Bulgaria use is what I call determined indeterminacy. Determined indeterminacy is a collective, institutionalized method of denying the ubiquitous systemic racism that undergirds social life. It allows people to naturalize white supremacy and render it adaptably persistent. This is the case especially in contexts of aspirational whiteness, such as Bulgaria, where whiteness is fraught and many people claim that their country has never been racial. Tracing Bulgaria's history of racial disavowal helps us understand how the local particularities of white supremacy naturalize, transform, and set in place long-standing racial hierarchies.