Aporia in Barack Obama’s 2016 Dallas Police Memorial Speech

ABSTRACT

On 13 July 2016, President Barack Obama delivered a speech memorializing five police officers slain during a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, Texas. Obama’s speech came on the heels of many other mass shootings, some associated with acts of racialized violence, during his administration. We argue that by deploying aporia, Obama addressed the conflicting constraints and exigencies exposed by the Dallas shooting and opened inventional possibilities that included virtuous behavior, commemorative speech, and dialogic-reciprocal encounters that also reappraised the concept of double consciousness. We conclude by exploring how aporia enables and undercuts discussions of complex social problems during epideictic encounters.

KEYWORDS:

• Aporia
• Barack Obama
• commemorative speech
• Dallas shooting
• presidential rhetoric

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editor and her reviewers for their extremely helpful comments and recommendations on this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ See Fitzgerel for the full transcript of Obama’s Dallas speech.

² Similarly, Terrill shows how Obama, in his Nobel Prize address, acknowledged the institutional constraints on his presidency when he was obligated to use force when necessary to protect American interests even as he also used his power to promote peace. See Terrill’s “An Uneasy Peace.”