Introduction: racism doesn’t care about democracy either

ABSTRACT

As the US approaches an intense inflection point in this grand experiment with democratic ideals, a pinched nerve in the form of a presidential election, this second special anniversary forum considers what resources (I almost said weapons) lay undiscovered or undervalued with which we may forge a future. Fortunately, there are gems – brilliant in the proper light – available for use; from the Global South to the US South, this forum imagines more than geographic places, but rather forms of care and powerful Black feminist community-building and critique of the retrenchment of multiple forms of racialized domination.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• care
• blackness
• environmental communication
• Postracial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Robert L. Ivie, “Introduction: About Democratic Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 21 (2024): 22–8.

2 Ivie, 22.

3 Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14 (2017): 317–33.

4 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

5 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

6 Joshua Gunn, Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

7 Eric King Watts, Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World (Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 2024).

8 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

9 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum Books, 2010).

10 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, It’s Over-Representation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003): 257–337; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

11 Paul Elliott Johnson, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022).

12 Fred Moten, quote from conversation. Racial Disposability & Cultures of Resistance, A Sawyer Seminar Series by Penn State’s Department of African American Studies, October 10–12, 2019. Panel participant with Lisa Cacho & Roopali Mukherjee.