Racial Gaslighting

2019

The United States has numerous social-cultural issues affecting its population. One of these problems is white supremacy. This concept refers to a racist perception that white persons are naturally superior to individuals of other races and should thus dominate them. While white supremacy in previous centuries galvanized a lot of support among white people, the concept is now regarded vicious by white, African American, Latino as well as other races. The modern American society is structured under cultural sensitiveness, racial equality, and religious tolerance. Unlike the years of slavery or reconstruction, all citizens in the United States are afforded equal rights irrespective of their cultural identities. Nevertheless, white supremacist notions persist in a nation that prides itself for its democratic model, cultural diversity, religious tolerance and socioeconomic transcendence. The state of white supremacy is that America can be manifested by violence, imperialistic tendencies, discrimination in the society, unfair immigration policies, poor political leadership, and the deplorable role of the media. With the growing number of atrocities being committed around the United States by both members of identified and non-identified white supremacist group, it is time to address this issue together. This paper, is a constructive discussion venting the many ills of racial discrimination in every aspect that affects minorities at all spheres of the society and the deplorable state of white supremacy in America.

Fast Capitalism, 2021

Language provides [fascism] with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation."-Theodor W. Adorno The toxic thrust of white supremacy runs through American culture like an electric current. Without apology, Jim Crow is back suffocating American society in a wave of voter suppression laws, ongoing attempts by right-wing politicians to implement a form of apartheid pedagogy, and the resurgence of a right-wing cultural politics organized around the legacy of white nationalism and white supremacy. The emergence of white supremacy to the centers of power is also evident in the reign of police violence against Black people that came into full view with the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer and the ensuing mass protest against racist police brutality across the globe. White supremacy works not only through the force of state repression and violence but also in the colonizing of subjectivity, manufactured ignorance, and the power of a reactionary culture with its relentless pedagogies of repression. The cult of manufactured ignorance now works through disimagination machines engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. Its politics of cruelty now cloaks itself in the false claims of "patriotism." The spectacle of Trumpism and its brew of white supremacist ideology and disdain for the truth undergirds the further collapse of democratic visions in higher education and in broader public spheres, made all the more obvious by the obsession with methodologies and the reign of instrumental reason, which has returned on the educational front with a vengeance. Education as a vehicle for white supremacy now moves between the reactionary policies of Republican legislators that now use the law to turn their states into white nationalist factories and a right-wing social media machine that uses the Internet and other online services to spread racial hatred. As William Barber II, Liz Theoharis, Timothy B. Tyson, and Cornel West have argued, white supremacy has once again turned deadly and has put democracy on trial. They write: Even now, the ancient lie of white supremacy remains lethal. It has left millions of African-American children impoverished in resegregated and deindustrialized cities. It embraces high-poverty, racially isolated schools that imperil our children-and our future. It shoots first and dodges questions later. "Not everything that is faced can be changed," James Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced."i In what follows, I want to examine the totality of white supremacy as an educational force by connecting its threads through the rise of voter suppression, the attacks on education via critical race theory, and the culture of police violence.

Direct democracy by citizen initiatives is often heralded as the avenue for the true will of the people to be heard. While scholars have debated whether this leads to a form of Madison’s ‘‘tyranny of the majority,’’ the debate over the concrete impact of such initiatives on racially marginalized groups remains unsettled. We examine a different question about racially marginalized groups’ interests in this process: the symbolic assertion of white supremacy expressed through this mechanism of majority will. We develop the concept of ‘‘racial spectacles’’ to describe the narrative vehicles that serve to symbolically reassert and reinforce real existing racial hierarchies and inequalities. We explore the creation of these spectacles through the initiative process because it is a state-sanctioned vehicle that enables white dominance. Paradoxically, these campaigns that purport to be colorblind depend on the enactment of these racial spectacles. Through an analysis of five statewide anti-affirmative action initiative campaigns from 1996 to 2008, we explore both macro and micro political dynamics: public displays of these campaigns as well as individual, private agency expressed in the public and private act of voting; court decisions in initiative litigation as well as individual and interest group participation in these cases. Ultimately, we argue that this form of racial spectacle further inculcates the public in the post-racial ideology of colorblindness.

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2019

Through a Critical Whiteness Studies framework, this essay engages in an ideological critique of white supremacy that conceptualizes sites of 20th century spectacle lynching as public pedagogy. After establishing historical sites of terror as teaching/learning moments, the author focuses on contemporary sites of violence—the modern classroom—and links educational structures, policies, and practices to violent legacies. Theorizing ideology within Althusserian and Žižekian frames, spectacle lynching is argued as a situation which crystallized understandings of racial dominance/violence that lay the foundation for modern educational contexts where racial violence is persistently mishandled. Theorized as a “collective turning,” legacies of violence are examined within contemporary educative situations, and readers are asked to recognize white supremacy and avoidance as active forces our contemporary realities.

Despite boasting its self-characterization as the "land of the free, " US American "freedom"is, at times, tainted with historical amnesia, hypocrisy, and inhumanity. This article examines today's socio-political climate by drawing from de Tocqueville's (2003) prediction that American democracy is a tyranny of the majority. Because tyranny relies on gaslighting and dismissing facts, no definitive portraiture of freedom is made; therefore, the tyrannized wonder whether they are truly living within freedom or, instead, in collective submission to its illusion. This article examines this phenomenon in order to investigate how whiteness (re)produces conditions of disillusionment and tyranny. By employing hermeneutics of whiteness as a methodology, the authors investigate how whiteness infiltrates thoughts/epistemology, speech/rhetoric, emotions/emotionality, and nationalistic symbols/semiotics. The authors analyze implications for US education and offer a plea for all to consider.

Logics of Genocide, ed. Anne O'Byrne and Martin Shuster, 2020

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress [CRC] presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide.” While the petition was never formally considered by the UN, the project of naming, analyzing, and contesting systematic anti-black violence in the United States has inspired activist groups such as We Charge Genocide [WCG], a grassroots organization challenging police violence against youth of color in Chicago. Both organizations engage strategically with formal institutions such as the UN in a way that exceeds the restricted agenda of those institutions and struggles for revolutionary social change. But the UN’s narrow definition of genocide, and the analogy with homicide upon which it relies, pose challenges for this project. I propose a concept of structural genocide, based on a model of social justice rather than criminal justice, as a tool for articulating the harm of policies and practices that undermine a group’s life chances, whether or not they directly kill people.

This research paper carries the overlying objective of exploring Christian identity and the religious foundations of White Supremacy ideology, which promotes violent hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Christian theological principles were employed to explore the religious domain of white supremacy. It was discovered that Christian identity was incorporated as a tool to fuel white supremacy and justify violence against the black plus Jewish community of the United States (US). In accordance with Christian principles, Anglo-Saxon individuals were the lost biblical Israeli tribes and the chosen people of God. On the other hand, Jews were claimed to be the offspring of Satan that employed manipulation for gaining dominance over the world's finances and promoted the destruction of Aryan civilizations. Moreover, it was stated that, amidst the second coming, a war between the children of light (Christians) and darkness (Jews) will institute the Kingdom of Christ. Hence, hatred was fueled against the Jewish community, and justification for violent crimes was undertaken. Further adding on, Christian identity was further employed for the justification of racial segregation. White individuals and Aryans are stated to follow in line with Adam and Eve, while, non-Aryans or black individuals were regarded as children of Eve and the serpent. The Christian school of thought argues that racial mixing was the original sin resulting in the expulsion of the "white man from the Garden of Eden". Henceforth, racial segregation and racism against the black community were justified on religious grounds. The violent manifestations of these narratives were witnessed under the KKK. The hate group induced organized terror against African Americans and Jews on the basis of theology, and their implications are witnessed to this day. American society is still struggling with racism and anti-Semitism, which explains religious rhetoric in militant organizations has lasting implications on the narrative of communities.

2017

THIS COLLECTION ESPOUSES a rhetorical lens for employing theories and methods of whiteness studies to analyze twenty-first-century texts and contexts; as such, it argues for the continued relevancy of whiteness studies in the twenty-first century. In particular, this collection identifies new sites for analyses of racialized whiteness, such as digitized representations of whiteness on the web and implicit representations of racialized whiteness in educational policies and politics. In the process, this collection exposes how seemingly progressive gains made in representing nonwhites in various cultural sites often reify a normative, racialized whiteness. Our attempt to revivify whiteness studies from its demise during the first decade of the twenty-first century is necessary because, in the words of one anonymous reviewer of this manuscript, whiteness studies had become "exhausted. Stagnant. Its momentum stalled in the wake of post-racial self-congratulations. Tedious. .. Critical Race Theory in whiteface. Insular and self-congratulatory. Mattering mostly only in the academy with little impact on or a relationship to social policy or to those outside of the academy." To counter such a demise, our collection offers broadly engaging analyses that inform academic readers interested in rhetoric, social media, whiteness studies, cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, communication studies, and critical race theory in both upper division and graduate classes as well as general readers interested in social media, film, school testing, and technology. Provocative in tone and argument, our collection invites these audiences into further discussions and actions that interrupt racialized whiteness in twenty-first-century culture; as such, our collection promotes rhetorical analyses as a productive means of fostering such discussions and actions. We three coeditors of Rhetorics of Whiteness also coedited a 2004 special edition of Rhetoric Review that focused on whiteness studies as an important site for developing antiracist and antiwhiteness tactics. But our scholarly call resulted in only a few scholarly projects, such as Jennifer Trainor's Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School. One result of our collaboration, however, is that we periodically chat about the state of whiteness in U.S. culture. Recently we noted two seemingly contradictory cultural trends that intrigue us: the momentum of whiteness studies as an active research field has waned during the past decade even as the two elections of President Barack Obama have rendered white an operative term in mainstream discourses. Given this emergence of white in mainstream discourses, the need for whiteness studies as a means for theorizing, analyzing, interpreting, and challenging racialized whiteness seems more urgent than ever. So we decided to create this edited collection, Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in

First Amendment Studies, 2021

This essay argues that recent controversies over conservative speakers on college campuses are an opaque vehicle for White supremacy. Revisiting Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance through the lens of Critical Race Theory, this essay sketches the features of repressive victimhood: the advancement of categorical minority status orchestrated to shield white people from charges of intolerance while reframing counterspeech as commensurate with overt bigotry.

Religion Dispatches, 2015