Against all Supremacies

Rejecting the foundations of critical race and whiteness studies and considering that they support rather than fight against racism, this article argues that the concept of whiteness transforms all white people into unwitting supremacists and paradoxically reinforces supremacist narratives by positing whites as a homogeneous group. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s critique of the concept of race and emphasizing the multiracial character of movements for the abolition of slavery, Giuseppe Cocco claims that whiteness studies promote guilt and expiation rather than struggle, fail to account for conflicts beyond the Black/white binary (Ukraine, Syria, Gaza), and ignore the complexity of power relations described by Foucault as an “archipelago of different powers.”