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The thing that connects people like David Duke, Richard Spencer, and anyone else we put under the white-power umbrella is a sense of imperiled whiteness. That has emerged as a very visceral, palpable thing over the past 10 or 15 years. Some segment of white Americans feel their world is under siege, and something needs to be done. That's the connection between efforts to restrict voting and the use of violence to intimidate certain groups of people.This notion of imperiled whiteness is as American as apple pie. It's more visible at some points in history than others. There was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, the anti-immigrant movement of the 1920s, the return of the Klan in the 1950s and '60s. The notion of whiteness, and white power, being at risk prompts people to do some really ugly, dehumanizing things.

What, if anything, can we do as a society to get a better handle on this?One solution would be teaching kids about race, history, and power in every grade, from elementary school to college. That way they could think critically about the subject, and when confronted with a particular theory about, say, what's driving immigration, they'd have tools to engage it, rather than accepting easier, more problematic explanations.

Today, states grapple with decarceration and deinstitutionalization, not necessarily because of an ethical recognition of the continuing harm of confinement and segregation, or because of an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, and punishment in the United States, but because of a desire to curb public spending on social services. These include the very services that people need as alternatives to more oppressive edifices and as preventive measures to winding up in such places. While public neighborhood urban schools, public housing, and mental health clinics are shuttered, private companies and “not for profit” services partially fill the void.

Alternatives emerge when facilities shut their doors. Closures, as prison justice organizer Angela Davis suggests, provide an opportunity for not only a “radical imagining” of the kind of social landscape desperately needed—but also the moment to build it. As people move between different forms and scales of cages, and as patterns of surveillance and punishment morph, new forms of capture do emerge and yet resistance is also possible. The state often refuses to offer services in place of the ones that were shuttered, leaving the responsibility to the individual (or her family and the market). This is a moment to collectively demand, fund, and build public infrastructure that will move everyone closer towards a world that does not rely on segregation and confinement, or access to private capital, as its mode of dealing with structural inequities.