Affecting white accountability: what Mr. Rogers can tell us about the (racial) futures of communication

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Notes

1 Robert Meija, Kay Beckermann, and Curtis Sullivan, “White Lies: A Racial History of the (Post)Truth,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 109–26.

2 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 79 (2004): 117–39.

3 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 195.

4 Given the length of this piece, I follow Ahmed and Cveckovich in using affect, emotion, and public feelings interchangeably.

5 Erin J. Rand, “Bad Feelings in Public: Rhetoric, Affect, and Emotion,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 18, no. 1 (2015): 174.

6 Ibid.

7 James Jasinski, “Instrumentalism, Contextualism, and Interpretation in Rhetorical Criticism,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of the Science, eds. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997); Raymie E. Mckerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111.

8 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 2.

9 Lisa Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019).

10 Alissa Wilkinson, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor’s Morgan Neville on Mr. Rogers’s ‘Radical Kindness,’” Vox.com, June 10, 2018, https://www.vox.com/summer-movies/2018/6/8/17433842/morgan-neville-interview-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-fred-rogers-neighborhood-christian.

11 Ibid.

12 Eric Miller, “Art of Gratitude—A Conversation with Jeremy David Engels,” Eric C. Miller (blog), May 30, 2018, https://ericcmiller.com/2018/05/30/art-of-gratitude-a-conversation-with-jeremy-david-engels/.

13 I say this with the caveat that people of color are always already subjects in extractive care economies. Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press: 2018), 136–48.

14 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1997): 278–85; Mariana Alessandri, “It's a Terrible Day in the Neighborhood, and That's O.K.,” New York Times, November 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/opinion/mister-rogers-neighborhood.html.

15 C-SPAN, “On May 1, 1969 Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) Appeared Before Senate Commerce Committee to Support Public TV,” April 6, 1990, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4663883/1-1969-fred-rogers-appeared-senate-commerce-committee-support-public-tv.

16 Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 15.

17 Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember (New York: Hachette Books, 2019).

18 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, rev. ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018).

19 Associated Press, “Fred Rogers’s Obituary,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 2, 2003, https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/postgazette/obituary.aspx?n=fred-rogers&pid=833599&fhid=2289.

20 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).