Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of black church burnings

ABSTRACT

I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the “undercommonsense” to form a survival discourse and what possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, “root”) meaning-making practices may hold. This essay advances communication studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology, and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil society’s material rhetorics that mask the material realities of racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these dynamics and how it might be revised or contested.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• whiteness
• fragmentation
• material rhetoric
• public memory

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Michelle Colpean, Kendall Phillips, Sara McKinnon, along with Mary Stuckey and the reviewers, for their insightful feedback on various versions of this essay. I am especially grateful to Karma Chávez for inspiring this essay and encouraging me to build on her insights. Finally, I would like to thank Meg Tully, Ace Eckstein, Hannah Johnson, Claire Sisco King, K.C. Councilor, and Beth Kaszynski-Gilmore for providing helpful commentary on earlier drafts. This essay was presented at the 2016 National Communication Association convention in Philadelphia, PA.

Notes

1. The victims included Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson. Nick Corasaniti, Richard Pérez-Peña, and Lizette Alvarez, “Church Massacre Suspect Held as Charleston Grieves,” New York Times, June 18, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting.html; Alissa Greenberg, “Another Black Church Burns in the South, 8th in 10 Days,” July 1, 2015. http://time.com/3942688/black-church-burning-mount-zion-ame-south-carolina/.

2. Kate Briquelet, “Burned Black Churches May Be ‘Violent Backlash’ after Charleston Shooting,” The Daily Beast, June 29, 2015. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/29/burned-black-churches-may-be-violent-backlash-after-charleston-shooting.html; Shenequa Golding, “Twitter Asks #whoisburningblackchurces in Response to the String of Churches Set on Fire,” Vibe, June 29, 2015. http://www.vibe.com/2015/06/twitter-who-is-burning-black-churches/.

3. Karma Chávez, “Racialized Violence as Common Sense,” supersession panel presentation at the Rhetoric Society of American 2016 convention. May 29, 2016. Atlanta, GA. Unpublished paper (acquired/cited with permission and gratitude). Bryan J. McCann, “On Whose Ground: Racialized Violence and the Prerogative of ‘Self-defense’ in the Trayvon Martin Case,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 4 (2014): 480–99.

4. Chávez, “Racialized violence.” (E.g., the hanging of Sandra Bland; the state murders of defenseless black children, twelve-year old Tamir Rice and seven-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones; the spectacular strangling of Eric Garner; the police killing of Freddy Gray, Philandro Castile, Rekia Boyd, and Tanisha Anderson – to name just a few.)

5. See Kelly E. Happe, “The Body of Race: Toward a Rhetorical Understanding of Racial Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 133–34. See also Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 109–33; Alexis Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2011).

6. Happe, “The Body,” 132. Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58, no. 3 (1994): 141–63; Sharon Crowley, “Reflections on an Argument That Won’t Go Away: Or, a Turn of the Ideological Screw,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 4 (1992): 450–65; Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 1 (1980): 1–16; Ray E. McKerrow, “Marxism and the Rhetorical Conception of Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 2 (1983): 192–205; Phillip Wander, “The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism,” Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 1–18. See also the special issue on “Ideology and Communication” edited by Philip C. Wander in Western Journal of Communication 57, no. 2 (1993): 105–287.

7. Maurice Charland, “Finding a Horizon and Telos: The Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 1 (1991): 71.

8. My use of “technology of racism” is intended to reflect my interest in what racism does as opposed to what racism is, and to think in terms of the instrumentalities that engender the transposition of racsims’ guiding logics and rationalities into governmental methods of control and policing over a given population, and how these mechanisms produce and regulate a certain kind of discourse.

9. Plato, “Gorgias,” The Dialogues of Plato, Vol 1. Sixteenth Edition. transl. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), 505–87; Paul Ricouer, “Rhetoric – Poetics – Hermeneutics,” in From Metaphysics to Rhetoric, ed. Michel Meyer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 143. I am not conflating these nuanced terms. Instead, I use the language of common sense to speak across the disciplinary borders of rhetorical studies, cultural studies, and race theory where the concept has common purchase.

10. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, transl. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 141, 142.

11. John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).

12. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, transl. Quintin Hoare and Geoffery Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 362, note 5.

13. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1.

14. Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of American Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 1 (1990): 280.

15. McGee, “Text,” 280.

16. Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 431, 411–40.

17. McGee, “Text,” 282.

18. Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24. Rhetorical scholars have given account of racisms’ shape-shifting nature, the rhetorics of colorblindness, and how contemporary racisms manifest in discrete, seemingly incommensurable patterns. See Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Roopali Mukherjee, “Bling Fling: Commodity Consumption and the Politics of the ‘Post-racial,’” in Critical Rhetorics of Race, ed. Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 178–96; Catherine R. Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New York University Press, 2014); Rona Tamiko Halualani, “Abstracting and De-racializing Diversity: The Articulation of Diversity in the Post-race Era,” in Critical Rhetorics, ed. Lacy and Ono, 251; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism,” Communication, Culture, & Critique 4, no. 1 (2011): 23–30 (originally published as Enck-Wanzer); others have revealed how dominant narratives represent blackness as always already violent and whiteness as heroic and pure, making the idea of white violence against black communities unthinkable. Suzanne Marie Enck, “All’s Fair in Love and Sport: Black Masculinity and Domestic Violence in the News,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 1–18 (originally published as Enck-Wanzer); Michael G. Lacy and Kathleen C. Haspel, “Apocalypse: The Media’s Framing of Black Looters, Shooters, and Brutes in Hurricane Katrina’s Aftermath,” in Critical Rhetorics, ed. Lacy and Ono, 21–46. See also David Wilson, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence: Discourse, Space, and Representation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005).

19. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), 47. See Flores, “Between.” See also Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72; Lisa M. Corrigan, “Blackness in the Rhetorical Imaginary,” Southern Journal of Communication 81, no. 4 (2016): 189–91; Enrique D. Rigsby, “African American Rhetoric and the ‘Profession,’” Western Journal of Speech Communication 57, no. 2 (1993): 191–99. To study race or racism as subject matter without centering such citation ethics/practices is to commit a form of epistemic violence.

20. Cloud, “The Materiality.”

21. Julia T. Wood and Robert Cox, “Rethinking Critical Voice: Materiality and Situated Knowledges,” Western Journal of Communication 57, no. 2 (1993): 280.

22. Cloud, “The Materiality,” 155.

23. Kristen Hoerl, “Selective Amnesia and Racial Transcendence in News Coverage of President Obama’s Inauguration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 2 (2012): 178–202.

24. David Morley, “Cultural Studies, Common Sense and Communications,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2015): 23.

25. The four young victims were Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins.

26. Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 117. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro Church (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011). Black women have played a central role in organizing through black churches since the late 1800s, a history that is often erased. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

27. Michele M. SimmsParris, “What Does It Mean to See a Black Church Burning? Understanding the Significance of Constitutionalizing Hate Speech,” Journal of Constitutional Law 1, no. 1 (1998): 138, 127–53.

28. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the SSBC,” September 18, 1963, SSBC, Birmingham, Alabama. https://www.drmartinlutherkingjr.com/birminghamchurchbombingeulogy.htm.

29. As Michelle SimmsParris notes:

As Black Churches became the epicenter of the social and political struggles for African-American equality, they increasingly became targets for racially motivated violence. Thus, a broad assault on members of a Black community could effectively take place by burning a Black church. The bombing and burning of Black churches translated into an attack upon the core of civil rights activism, as well as upon the larger Black community. SimmsParris, “What,” 139.

30. See John M. Sloop, “Illuminating Greene’s Materialist Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 410–13. See also Kendall R. Phillips, “Introduction,” in Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 2–3.

31. See Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 16–57; Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010). For more on how “whiteness serves as the invisible hand of public memory,” see G. Mitchell Reyes, “Introduction,” in Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity, ed. G. Mitchell Reyes (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 6.

32. Renee C. Romano, “Narratives of Redemption: The Birmingham Church Bombing Trials and the Construction of Civil Rights Memory,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, ed. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), 125, 116, 117. Original emphasis. Rhetorical scholars have detailed how periodic public punishment of individuals mutes critical voices and diverts attention away from entrenched systems of power. Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki, “The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Matthew Shepard Murder,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 3 (2002): 483–505; Dreama Moon and Thomas Nakayama, “Strategic Social Identities and Judgments: A Murder in Appalachia,” Howard Journal of Communications 16 (2005): 87–107.

33. Romano, “Narratives,” 118. See also 118–121.

34. Moira Lavelle, “The Fire Last Time: The 1990s Wave of 145 Church Burnings – Map,” PRI (July 2, 2015). http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-02/fire-last-time-1990s-wave-145-church-burnings-map. See also Taryn Finley, “Bill Clinton’s 1996 Speech on Church Attacks Shows Nothing Has Changed,” The Huffington Post, June 19, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/19/clinton-speech-charleston_n_7624582.html.

35. Finley, “Bill Clinton’s 1996 Speech;” National Church Arson Task Force (NCATF), Second Year Report for the President, United States Department of the Treasury; United States Department of Justice; United Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; Federal Bureau of Investigation (October 1998). http://www.justice.gov/crt/image-report-cover.

36. NCATF, Second Year Report.

37. NCATF, Second Year Report.

38. SimmsParris, “What,” 142–43. Willed faith in the law is among the constitutive features of how racial ideology legitimates, masks, and reproduces itself. See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” Harvard Law Review 101, no. 7 (1988): 1352. See also Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Fernando Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187,” Communication Theory 8, no. 3 (1998): 245–70.

39. David Theo Goldberg argues that the anti-racism born of the 1960s has been replaced by anti-racialism, an ideology and social practice that “suggests forgetting, getting over, moving on, wiping away the … very vocabulary necessary to recall and recollect, to make a case, to make a claim.” David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 21.

40. Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 19.

41. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36.

42. Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also McGee, “The Ideograph.”

43. As Hall writes,

by inferential racism I mean those apparently naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, … which have racists premisses and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions. These enable racist statements to be formulated without ever bringing into awareness the racist predicates on which the statements are grounded. Hall, “The Whites,” 20. Original emphasis.

44. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 16; Chávez, “Racialized Violence.”

45. Butler makes a similar point about racial slurs. See Butler, Excitable, 52. On the ties between violence and language see Nathan Stormer, “On the Origins of Violence and Language,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 182–90.

46. Butler, Excitable, 51. Original italics.

47. McGee, “Text,” 287.

48. An anonymous informal reviewer suggested the image of a “sticky ball,” rolling down a hill accruing loose fragments on its sticky surface to create layers of meaning over time, as an alternative metaphor for visualizing this process.

49. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: The MacMillan Press, 1978), 166.

50. Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, “Common Sense Neoliberalism,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 55 (2013): 9.

51. Hall, “The Whites,” 18–20.

52. McGee, “Text,” 288.

53. Bonnie J. Dow, Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 12.

54. Jared Keller, “The Ongoing Destruction of Black Churches,” The Pacific Standard, July 7, 2015. https://psmag.com/news/why-the-destruction-of-black-churches-matters.

55. Rick Jervis, “Fires at Black Churches Raise Concern,” USA Today, July 1, 2015. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/06/30/black-churches-fires-charleston-shooting/29516267/.

56. Sarah Kaplan and Justin Wm. Moyer, “Why Racists Burn Black Churches,” The Washington Post, July 1, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/01/why-racists-burn-black-churches/?utm_term=.bc91f3932c5b.

57. Philip Bump, “The Good News: There Probably Isn’t an Unusual Rash of Arsons at Black Churches,” Washington Post, July 1, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/01/the-good-news-there-probably-isnt-an-unusual-rash-of-arsons-at-black-southern-churches/?utm_term=.a49f073cf92c.

58. Eliot C. McLaughlin, “Why Are Black Church Fires Associated with Hate?” CNN, July 2, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/us/black-church-fires-history-society-reaction/.

59. McLaughlin, “Why.”

60. López, Racism, 110.

61. John M. Sloop, “Critical Studies in Gender/sexuality and Media,” in The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Communication, ed. Bonnie J. Dow and Julia T. Woods (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2006), 325.

62. McGee, “Text,” 288.

63. Anne Makus, “Stuart Hall’s Theory of Ideology: A Frame for Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 4 (1990): 498.

64. Makus, “Stuart Hall’s Theory,” 500.

65. Stuart Hall, “Culture, Media and the Ideological Effect,” in Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran et al. (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, 1977), 315–48. Original emphasis.

66. Kaplan and Moyer, “Why.”

67. Alan Blinder and Richard Pérez-Peña, “Lightning Believed Cause of Fire at a Black Church,” New York Times, July 1, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/us/black-church-in-south-carolina-is-latest-to-burn-in-south.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0.

68. Keller, “The Ongoing.”

69. Jervis, “Fires at Black Churches.”

70. Elliott C. McLaughlin and Ashley Fantz, “Lightning Might Have Caused South Carolina Church Fire, FBI Says,” CNN, July 2, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/30/us/south-carolina-church-fire-mount-zion-ame/.

71. Vico, The New Science, 144.

72. James M. Thomas and W. Carson Byrd, “The ‘Sick’ Racist: Racism and Psychopathology in the Colorblind Era,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 13, no. 1 (2016): 181–203.

73. Makus, “Stuart Hall’s Theory,” 498.

74. Conor Friedersdorf, “Thugs and Terrorists Have Targeted Black Churches for Generations,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/thugs-and-terrorists-have-plagued-black-churches-for-generations/396212/.

75. Sam Sanders and William Huntsberry, “Investigators Probe Fires at 6 Black Churches in 5 Southern States,” NPR, June 29, 2015. https://www.npr.org/2015/06/29/418490411/arsonists-hit-6-black-churches-in-5-southern-states.

76. Staff, “Report: Fire at South Carolina Church Wasn’t Arson,” WLTX, July 1, 2015. http://www.wltx.com/news/report-fire-at-south-carolina-church-wasnt-arson/234946242.

77. Jeffrey Collins, “Black Churches Have Been Burning throughout the South since the Charleston Mass Shooting,” Business Insider, July 1, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/black-churches-have-been-burning-throughout-the-south-since-the-charleston-mass-shooting-2015-6.

78. Friedersdorf, “Thugs.”

79. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2015), 33–54.

80. For example, consider the manner in which white neighborhoods are created by affluent or aspiring white buyers who are aided both by governmental policies that disproportionately benefit white people and by mostly white realtors, bankers, and sellers; how communities of color are pushed from these neighborhoods by rent control and landlord discrimination, extra-legal and state sanctioned policing, and other processes that ultimately produce de facto racial segregation and racial isolation; how these racially isolated communities then often lack access to quality food, clean water, adequate education, health facilities, transportation, and protection, etc.; and how all of these and other factors not only lead to different life chances for differently situated racialized groups, but how all of these practices (and especially their material outcomes!) seem “natural” or simply the result of personal choice, thereby leading to certain, often unstated or common-sense presumptions within collective white thought about communities of color. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Carla Goar, and David G. Embrick, “When Whites Flock Together: The Social Psychology of White Habitus,” Critical Sociology 32, no. 2–3 (2006): 229–53; Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). This is not to equate the practices of buying a home, redlining, and burning a black church, of course. Rather, it is to recognize each as being among a broad, disparate set of mechanisms, techniques, and technologies that exist on a spectrum of rhetorics and praxes which undergird systemic racism that, when taken together, engender and rigidify racial formations, structures, arrangements, and ideologies. These matters that perpetuate such entrenched racisms and racial oppressions cannot be excused due to lack of intention; there is no absolute moral high ground for white people in a nation built upon a constitutive anti-blackness and racial domination, and thus divestment from whiteness (and the personal and collective reinvestment in an anti-racist politics/affect/praxis) is necessarily an ongoing process that is never complete or final for all time.

81. hooks, Talking Back, 113.

82. The news media were quick to claim the “end of the postracial myth” in the wake of the 2016 election and its corresponding rise in hate crimes and white supremacist groups. Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The End of the Postracial Myth,” New York Times, November 15, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/20/magazine/donald-trumps-america-iowa-race.html. To be sure, the public discourse of postraciality engendered by the election of Barack Obama has certainly abated with the rise of the 45th president. But, more problematically still, to claim that “we” were ever a postracial state is to tacitly admit we were once a racial state, a concept that has never been salient or fully acknowledged within the white, dominant public. Therefore, one might more appropriately say that, as a nation built on the systematic exclusion, containment, enslavement, criminalization, and destruction of people of color in general and black people in particular, that the United States has always been post racial – always already beyond race, and those marked by race, as demanding of substantive public attention, care, resources, and concern.

83. Mills, The Racial, 127.

84. William F. Lewis, “Telling America’s Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 3 (1987): 292.

85. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Lowman and Littlefield, 2014, 2017), 10.

86. McGee, “Text,” 280. See also Roger Aden et al., “Re-Collection: A Proposal for Refining the Study of Collective Memory and Its Places,” Communication Theory 19, no. 3 (2009): 311–36.

87. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 654 (originally published Darrel Allan Wanzer). Original emphasis. See also Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 25–28.

88. Wanzer-Serrano, “Delinking,” 650. See also Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando P. Delgado, “Reading Latino/a Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 1 (2004): 1–21; Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 19–46; Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords.

89. The Storyteller (@KKoterwski), “So you’re willing to talk about 4th of July terror threats but not terror attacks on EIGHT black churches … ? #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches.” July 3, 2015. https://twitter.com/KKoterwski.

90. Carlos Da Jackal (@lliCH_SANCHEZ), “Trust and believe the @FBI knows #whoisburningblackchurches just like it knew #whoisburningblackchurches in the 60s and did nothing.” July 4, 2015. https://twitter.com/IIiCH_SANCHEZ.

91. Joy Lampkin Foster (@FreelyJoy), “Attacks on black churches – not new in this place we call America. A longtime way of terrorizing black community #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches.” July 3, 2015. https://twitter.com/FreelyJoy.

92. Son of Septima (@chaddgway), “#NothingMoreAmerican than allowing historically Black churches to burn and not calling it acts of terrorism. #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches.” July 3, 2015. https://twitter.com/chaddgway.

93. ArtsyBamaGirl (@BamaIntrovert) “Amerikkka’s worried about poss. terror attacks when we’ve already had them. Do the #AMEShooting & #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches ring a bell?” July 3, 2015. https://twitter.com/BamaIntrovert?lang=en.

94. Rachel Kuo, “Racial Justice Activist Hashtags: Counterpublics and Discourse Circulation,” New Media & Society 20, no. 2 (2018): 496. See André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–49; Sarah Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’: Communication and Cultural Performance on ‘Black Twitter,’” Television & New Media 15, no. 3 (2013): 223–37; Raven S. Maragh, “‘Our Struggles are Unequal:’ Black Women’s Affective Labor between Television and Twitter,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 40, no. 4 (2016): 351–69.

95. Kuo, “Racial Justice,” 496. See Armond R. Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women’s Mobility,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 122–26.

96. Lisa M. Corrigan and Amanda N. Edgar, “‘Not Just the Levees Broke’: Jazz Vernacular and the Rhetoric of the Dispossessed in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 100.

97. David A. Love, “Following the Attack on Emanuel AME, Two Recent Fires at Black Churches Strike at the Heart of Black America,” Atlanta Black Star, June 26, 2015. http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/06/26/following-the-attack-on-emanuel-ame-two-recent-fires-at-black-churches-strike-at-the-heart-of-black-america/.

98. Love, “Following the Attack.”

99. Kirsten West Savali, “Silence Around Who Is Burning Churches Speaks Volumes,” Common Dreams, July 5, 2015. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/05/silence-around-who-burning-black-churches-speaks-volumes. Original emphasis.

100. Wanzer-Serrano, “Delinking,” 653.

101. Chávez, “Racialized Violence.” See Ji-Young Um, “On Being a Failed Professor: Lessons from the Margins and the Undercommons,” #alt-academy: a mediacommons project, August 11, 2014. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/pieces/being-failed-professor-lessons-margins-and-undercommons. See also Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

102. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly. Sound Recording. Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records (2015); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

103. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

104. Saba Mahmood calls for re-thinking these radical practices beyond the terms of “resistance.” The language of resistance often reinscribes a sense of teleological progress that ultimately works in the service of the racial status quo. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 14.

105. McGee, “The Ideograph,” 5.

106. Charles Morris III and Kendall Phillips, eds., The Conceit of Context (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press), In Press; Wanzer-Serrano, “Delinking.”

107. For more, see Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities of Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

108. David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some Thoughts on Method,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 7 (2009): 1275. For an example of a relational approach, see Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014).

109. Sean Field, “Critical Empathy through Oral Histories after Apartheid,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31, no. 5 (2017): 660–70.

110. Cynthia Townley, “Toward a Reevaluation of Ignorance,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 42.