Recontextualizing responsibility for justice: the lynching trope, racialized temporalities, and cultivating breathable futures

ABSTRACT

This essay critically engages the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Lynching in America report to illuminate how it uses lynching as a trope to gesture to an otherwise temporality of anti-Black violence that recontextualizes what it means to be responsible for structural injustice. Overall, through my analysis and by engaging theories of justice, racialization, and racialized time, while also centering the language of breathing and suffocation drawn from various Black voices, I advance a breathing-centered conception of responsibility for justice that is attuned to imagining a future beyond the enduring legacies of lynching.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-Black violence
• structural justice
• whiteness
• racial suffocation
• racial rhetorical criticism

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch aw in America,” The Arena 23 (1900): 15; Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2019), 136.

2 Wendy Hesford, “Surviving Recognition and Racial In/justice,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (2015): 537.

3 Ore, Lynching, 7–8.

4 Jessy J. Ohl and Jennifer E. Potter, “United We Lynch: Post-racism and the (Re)membering of Racial Violence in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” Southern Journal of Communication 78, no. 3 (2013): 185–201; Kristen Hoerl, “Burning Mississippi into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia as a Resource for Remembering Civil Rights,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 1 (2009): 54–79; Kelly J. Madison, “Legitimation Crisis and Containment: The ‘Anti-Racist-White-Hero’ Film,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16, no. 4 (1999): 399–416.

5 I use the second edition acquired through personal correspondence with the EJI. The third edition is available online and contains the same content, albeit on different page numbers for the most part. Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 2nd ed. (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015), 71. In previous essays, I have used the phrase “alternative temporality” instead of “otherwise temporality.” However, the term “alternative” functions to reify the hegemonic temporal formation as the norm. Otherwise, on the other hand, gestures to something beyond just “alternative,” as Alshon Crawley has taught me. For Crawley, “Otherwise, as a word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is. And what is is about being, about experience, about ontology.” Alshon Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 2. So, otherwise temporalities is intended to gesture to a temporality that opens up different ways of being, knowing, and thinking the world beyond that which is afforded or possible within the (hegemonic) temporality that is.

6 EJI, Lynching in America, 70.

7 Ibid.

8 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 4.

9 Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath, 2.

10 EJI, Lynching in America, 6.

11 Ersula J. Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatio-temporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication (forthcoming). See also Lisa A. Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (2020): 247–63.

12 Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation.”

13 Lisa Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), 23–46.

14 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on a Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 257.

15 Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 179.

16 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 184.

17 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrator (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 2.

18 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 5th ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Anti-Racist (New York: One World, 2019).

19 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 181–82.

20 Matthew Houdek and Kendall Phillips, “Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn: Race, Gender, Temporalities,” Women’s Studies in Communication, forthcoming. See also Nicole T. Allen, “A Reconsidering Chronos: Chronistic Criticism and the First ‘Iraqi National Calendar,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 4 (2018): 361–83; Frida Buhre and Collin Bjork, eds., “Bending Time: Rhetoric, Temporality, and Power,” special issue, Rhetoric Society Quarterly (forthcoming); Jenna H. Hanchey, “Reframing the Present: Mock Aid Videos and the Foreclosure of African Epistemologies,” Women & Language 42, no. 2 (2019): 317–45; Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke, 2014).

21 Randall Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991): 124; Damien Sojoyner, “Dissonance in Time: (Un)making and (Re)mapping of Blackness,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 70.

22 Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Society’s Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, eds. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 48.

23 Charles Morris III and Kendall R. Phillips, “Situating the Conceit of Context,” in The Conceit of Context, eds. Charles Morris III and Kendall R. Phillips (Ann Abor, MI: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).

24 Kirt H. Wilson, “The Racial Contexts of Public Address: Interpreting Violence During the Reconstruction Era,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, eds. Shawn J. Perry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 205; For the “context matters” quote, see Kristan Poirot, A Question of Sex: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Differences that Matter (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 12.

25 Houdek and Phillips, “Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn.”

26 See Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism.” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problem,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76.

27 J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, & Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 39; Stephen H. Browne, “Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 2 (1995): 248.

28 Equal Justice Initiative, “About EJI,” Equal Justice Initiative, http://www.eji.org/about.

29 Bryan Stevenson, Commencement Address (lecture, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, May 11, 2020).

30 Tricia Johnson, “Confronting History, featuring Bryan Stevenson,” in Aspen Ideas to Go, January 21, 2020, podcast, https://www.aspenideas.org/podcasts/confronting-history-featuring-bryan-stevenson-rebroadcast.

31 Brian Edwards, “Lynching Memorial and Slavery Museum in Montgomery Sets April Openings,” Montgomery Advisor, November 13, 2017, http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2017/11/13/lynching-memorial-and-slavery-museum-montgomery-sets-april-opening/857715001/.

32 EJI, Lynching in America, 2–4.

33 EJI, Lynching in America, 5.

34 Ore, Lynching; Peter Ehrenhaus and A. Susan Owen, “Race Lynching and Christian Evangelicalism: Performances of Faith,” Text and Performance Quarterly 24, no. 3/4 (2004): 276–301.

35 EJI, Lynching in America, 21.

36 Ronald L. Jackson II, Scripting the Black Male Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2006), 41.

37 Ibid.

38 EJI, Lynching in America, 4–5.

39 Elizabeth Woodson, Project Manager, Equal Justice Initiative (personal correspondence, June 28, 2020).

40 Quoted in Fred Smith, Jr. “Opinion: To Fix Today, We Must Confront Our Past Around Race,” AJC, May 30, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/opinion-fix-today-must-confront-our-past-around-race/27zAP85EgNZ9NoP4KlKp2M/.

41 Philip Kennicott, “A Powerful Memorial in Montgomery Remembers the Victims of Lynching,” Washington Post, April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/a-powerful-memorial-in-montgomery-remembers-the-victims-of-lynching/2018/04/24/3620e78a-471a-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html.

42 CharityWatch, “Equal Justice Initiative,” CharityWatch, March 2019, https://www.charitywatch.org/charities/equal-justice-initiative.

43 Jay Childers, “Transforming Violence into a Focusing Event: A Reception Study of the 1946 Georgia Lynching,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 4 (2016): 575.

44 EJI, Lynching in America, 73.

45 Ibid., 67–69.

46 Ibid., 37.

47 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 186.

48 EJI, Lynching in America, 58–59, 4.

49 Ibid., 54.

50 Ibid., 58.

51 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 13.

52 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 372–73.

53 EJI, Lynching in America, 59.

54 Ibid., 61.

55 Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation.”

56 EJI, Lynching in America, 56.

57 Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983).

58 Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998).

59 EJI, Lynching in America, 16.

60 Jackson, Scripting the Black Male Body, 19.

61 EJI, Lynching in America, 16.

62 Sara McKinnon, Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in US Law and Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 66.

63 McKinnon, Gendered Asylum, 13.

64 Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

65 EJI, Lynching in America, 22–25.

66 Ibid., 24.

67 Ibid., 58.

68 Ibid., 6.

69 Ibid., 61.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

72 Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightless and the Criminalization of the Dispossessed (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 3–8; Brian McCann, The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017).

73 EJI, Lynching in America, 47.

74 Ibid., 55.

75 Ibid., 50–55.

76 Ibid., 54.

77 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 71–72.

78 EJI, Lynching, 51.

79 Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation.”

80 Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation.”

81 EJI, Lynching in America, 27–34.

82 Lee Jarvis, Discourse, Temporality, and the War on Terror (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23.

83 EJI, Lynching in America, 4.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., 5.

86 Laura U. Marks, “The Language of Terrorism,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 1992, no. 38/39 (1992): 64.

87 Ibid. 4.

88 Ibid., 41.

89 Ibid., 7.

90 Ibid., 41.

91 Jarvis, Discourse, 17.

92 Ibid.

93 EJI, Lynching in America, 57.

94 Ibid., 71.

95 For “hemmed in,” “freezes him,” and “stifle” (the latter means to make someone unable to breathe properly, to suffocate), respectfully, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 52, 45, and 9/311. See “hemmed in” in Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965): 52. For the “lost in an atmosphere” quote, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 21. For “combat breathing,” see Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 65. Other terms (“choked,” “suffocated,” “smothered”) quoted from different translations of these same texts, see Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry, and Politics (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2017), 18. Interestingly, Fanon also describes the latent possibility for counter violence against the colonial regime as an “atmosphere of violence.” As he asks, “but how do we pass from the atmosphere of violence to violence in action? What makes the lid blow off?,” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 71).

96 Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Weber: Political Writings, eds. Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 311.

97 Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (New York: Beacon Press, 2019); Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “That Transformative Dark Thing.” The New Inquiry. May 19, 2015, https://thenewinquiry.com/that-transformative-dark-thing/; Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation.”

98 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 112.

99 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 83.

100 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 109.

101 Ibid., 62.

102 Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 9.

103 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 8.

104 However, even seemingly clear-cut victim–perpetrator instances cannot be removed from the broader culture of white supremacy and anti-Blackness that animate and structure individual life.

105 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 200.

106 Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 15.

107 To riff James Carville: “it’s the system, stupid!”

108 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Toward a New Political Praxis for Trumpamerica: New Directions in Critical Race Theory,” American Behavioral Scientist 63, no. 13 (2019): 1784.

109 David Dahmer, “The Harsh Truth About Progressive Cities,” Madison 365. September 3, 2015, https://madison365.com/what-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-race-and-progressive-cities/.

110 See Chirindo et al., “Coda.”

111 Woojin Lim. “George Yancy: To Be Black in the US Is to Have a Knee Against Your Neck Each Day,” Truth Out. July 18, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/george-yancy-to-be-black-in-the-us-is-to-have-a-knee-against-your-neck-each-day/.

112 Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 16–17.

113 Ibid.

114 Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath, 6.

115 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 200.

116 Ibid.

117 EJI, Lynching in America, 5.

118 Ibid., 69.

119 Matthew Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation and the Common Sense of Racialized Violence: Who is Burning Black Churches,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 298.

120 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 185.

121 Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation.”

122 Helen Ngo, “‘Get Over It’? Racialised Temporalities and Bodily Orientations in Time,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 40, no. 2 (2019): 241. For more on how whiteness manifests as a rhetoric, see Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 291–309.

123 Lisa Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here is Something You Can’t Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 202–9.

124 Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problem,” 470.

125 Derrick A. Bell, Jr. “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 no. 3 (1980): 518–33.

126 Kirt H. Wilson, “Is There Interest in Reconciliation?” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7, no. 3 (2004): 368. See also Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Re-Signing the Racial Contract,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7, no. 3 (2004): 391–405.

127 Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problem,” 468.

128 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 15.

129 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 182.

130 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 no. 1 (2015): 162–72.

131 Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation.”

132 Ore, Lynching; Sharpe, In the Wake, 106.

133 Gail Lewis and Claire Hemmings, “Where Might We Go if We Dare”: Moving Beyond the ‘Thick, Suffocating Fog of Whiteness’ in Feminism,” Feminist Studies 20, no. 4 (2019): 405–21; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women’s Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32.

134 Ersula J. Ore, “Pushback: A Pedagogy of Care,” Pedagogy 17, no. 4 (2017): 29.

135 See Ore’s contribution to Chirindo et al., “Coda: A Rupture in Time,” Women’s Studies in Communication. Forthcoming.

136 As Bonilla-Silva insists, “whites’ [racialized emotions] are not immutable, which makes them potential candidates for alliance.” Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race,” 15. For more on the role of affect and emotions in Black and racial justice politics, see Corrigan, Black Feelings; Anjali Vats, “Affecting White Accountability: What Mr. Rogers Can Tell Us About the (Racial) Futures of Communication,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 88–94.

137 Charles W. Mills, Black rights, White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4–5.

138 Magdalena Górska, “Feminist Politics of Breathing,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, eds. Lenart Škof and Petri Berndston (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018), 247–62.

139 EJI, Lynching in America, 65.

140 Mab Segrest, Born to Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice (Rutgers University Press, 2002), 158.

141 As with all contingent formations of whiteness, the ever-shifting politics of haole is incredibly complex. Furthermore, many white folks on the islands view the term as “reverse racism,” demonstrating an ignorance of how power works and a predictable fragility. Judy Rohrer, Haoles in Hawai’i: Race and Ethnicity in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). For more on the specificities of racism(s), anti-Blackness, and anti-Indigeneities, see Tiara R. Na'puti, “Speaking of Indigeneity: Navigating Genealogies Against Erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 495–501; Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 319–25. For more on the global reaches of whiteness, see the special issue in Thomas K. Nakayama, “Whiteness is not Contained,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 199–201.

142 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 21.

143 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.

144 Kendi, How to be an Anti-Racist, 131–32. This reflects the activist saying, “if you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Lila Watson is often credited with this quote for a speech she gave at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi. Yet, Watson has said that she was “not comfortable being credited for something that had been born of a collective process” and prefers that it be credited to “Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s.”

145 Others have also made the call for “conspiring” as “breathing together.” Timothy Choy, “Atmospherics: On Substances and Subjects in Suspension” (paper presented at the “Fact/Value” workshop, University of Chicago, June 3–4, 2011); Sefanit Habtom and Megan Scribe, “To Breathe Together: Co-Conspirators for Decolonial Futures,” Social Policy Briefs. The Yellowhead Institute. June 2, 2020, https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/06/02/to-breathe-together/. For more on respiratory philosophy, see Lenart Škof and Petri Berndston, Atmospheres of Breathing (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018).

146 David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, “Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing,” in Atmospheres, eds. Škof and Berndston, 9.

147 Timothy Choy, “Distribution,” Fieldsights, January 21, 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/distribution.

148 Kimberlee Pérez makes this same point about “I can’t breathe.” Kimberlee Pérez, “Embodying ‘I Can’t Breathe’: Tensions and Possibilities between Appropriation and Coalition,” in Precarious Rhetorics, eds. Wendy Hesford, Adela Licona, and Christa Teston (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2018), 82–104.

149 Pérez, “Embodying ‘I Can’t Breath,’” 92–97; Sharpe, In the Wake, 109.

150 Bonilla-Silva, “Toward a New Political Praxis for Trumpamerica,” 1784.

151 “Racial respiratory philosophy” appears in my short contribution to Chirindo et al., “Coda.” See Ore’s short contribution on “breathing while Black,” too, because it’s dope.