Abstract This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump’s campaign and postelection rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.

On November 20, 1969, eighty-nine American Indians calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes” (IOAT) invaded Alcatraz Island. The group’s founding proclamation was addressed to “the Great White Father and All His People,” and declared “We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery” (2). Tongue-in-cheek, the IOAT offered to purchase Alcatraz Island for “twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red clothe.” In this essay, I illustrate how the IOAT engaged in a rhetoric of détournement, or a subversive misappropriation of dominant discourse that disassembles and imitates texts until they clearly display their oppressive qualities. I argue that the Proclamation established a textual framework that calls for a skeptical and irreverent reading of dominant discourse. I conclude that strategic détournements suture dominant discourses to the moniker of colonialism and invite sympathetic audiences to engage in decolonization.

This essay unfolds in three sections. First, I develop a theory ofrhetorical counterinsurgency and explain its refinement within theFBI as a method of threat control and management. Second, I situate rhetorical counterinsurgency within a series of migrating culturalcontexts, including the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and culturalstereotypes of American Indians. These contexts constrained theavailable interpretations of Indian, as well as non-Indian radicalism andjustified the application of techniques of counterinsurgency. Finally,I offer a rhetorical analysis of both the FBI’s use of communicativetactics as a method of counterinsurgency as well as the content of theirrhetorical constructions of AIM. I investigate two disarming topoi ofsavagery: AIM as communist surrogate and American Viet Cong.