![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of the 2016 election of President Trump, a veritable cottage industry of opinion pieces, blogs, and articles emerged overnight, most of which seemed to agree that only the post-truth could explain how a racist, misogynistic, neo-nationalist member of the economic elite could win a presidential election. This article, in contrast, is inspired by Barbara Christian’s injunction that we question why a given statement, concept, or theory is now acceptable when before it was not. Operating in this spirit, we critique post-truth critics for neglecting the material tradition of ideological criticism in favor of epistemological explanations for understanding post-truth literature; we then offer two case studies—American drug policy and housing policy—to illustrate the racial amnesia required for claiming that only now do we live in a post-truth era.
Acknowledgements
We thank D. Robert DeChaine, the two anonymous reviewers, Rachel Dubrofsky, Ethan Zuckerman, and the participants of the Data & Society Research Institute’s Propaganda and Media Manipulation Workshop for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
1 Nick Tattersall, “Turkey Draws Western Condemnation over Arrest of Kurdish Lawmakers,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-kurds-idUSKBN12Y2XA.
2 Robert Wright, “The Post-Truth World—Notes from the Occult (on Our Cybernetic Present)” In Media Res (2017), http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/.
3 The editors of Oxford Dictionaries made the decision to declare the term “post-truth” word of the year after noticing that its usage had increased 2,000% compared to 2015. “Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 Is … Post-Truth,” Oxford Dictionaries, https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/press/news/2016/12/11/WOTY-16.
4 W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion. 3rd ed. (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996).
5 Fiona Godlee, Jane Smith, and Harvey Marcovitch, “Wakefield’s Article Linking MMR Vaccine and Autism Was Fraudulent,” BMJ 342 (2011).
6 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007); Julian Borger, “Tapes Reveal Enron’s Secret Role in California’s Power Blackouts,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnews.
7 For a detailed analysis of President Bush’s rhetorical strategy, see Stephen J. Hartnett and Laura A. Stengrim, “‘The Whole Operation of Deception’: Reconstructing President Bush’s Rhetoric of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 4, no. 2 (2004): 152–97.
8 Oxford Dictionaries, “Oxford Dictionaries.”
9 Olga Khazan, “Why Did People on Medicaid Vote for Trump?” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/why-did-medicaid-beneficiaries-vote-for-trump/517584/; Paul Krugman, “Facts Are Enemies of the People,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opinion/facts-are-enemies-of-the-people.html?_r=0; Kate Starbird, “Information Wars: A Window into the Alternative Media Ecosystem,” Medium, https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f; Brian L. Ott, “The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of Debasement,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 1 (2017): 59–68.
10 Candice Benjes-Small and Scott Dunn, “Information Literacy and Fake News,” ACRLog, http://acrlog.org/2017/01/22/information-literacy-and-fake-news/; Brooke Borel, “Fact-Checking Won’t Save Us from Fake News,” http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fact-checking-wont-save-us-from-fake-news/; Brian McNair, “Fake News—A User’s Guide,” The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/fake-news-a-users-guide-73428; Michael Schudson, “Here’s What Non-Fake News Looks Like,” Columbia Journalism Review, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/fake-news-real-news-list.php; Amanda Civitello, “Equity of Access: Post-Truth Libraries,” In Media Res, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2017/01/29/equity-access-post-truth-libraries; Steve Inskeep, “A Finder’s Guide to Facts” NPR, www.npr.org/2016/12/11/505154631/a-finders-guide-to-facts; Katherine Schulten and Amanda Christy Brown, “Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/learning/lesson-plans/evaluating-sources-in-a-post-truth-world-ideas-for-teaching-and-learning-about-fake-news.html?_r=0. As Monica Bulger and Patrick Davison observe, “media literacy has become a center of gravity for countering ‘fake news,’ and a diverse array of stakeholders—from educators to legislators, philanthropists to technologists—have pushed significant resources toward media literacy programs.” Monica Bulger and Patrick Davison, “The Promises, Challenges, and Futures of Media Literacy,” Data & Society (2018): 3.
11 Stanford History Education Group, “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning” Stanford, 2017.
12 Sean McElwee, “Trump’s Supporters Believe False Narrative of White Victimhood—and the Data Proves It,” Alternet, http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trumps-supporters-believe-false-narrative-white-victimhood-and-data-proves-it.
13 Kent A. Ono, “Postracism: A Theory of the ‘Post’- as Political Strategy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2010): 227.
14 Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 1987/2001), 2257–66.
15 Ibid., 2260.
16 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24. As Flores argues, although the field of communication has produced numerous, important works on race and racism, “years of prolonged absence and sporadic presence are telling, markers of a disciplinary gaze that overlooks and erases” (5).
17 Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, ed. David W. Blight (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1852/1993), 145.
18 Although written in 2004, Ralph Keyes’s writings on the post-truth are important for two reasons: (1) it serves as an early precursor to more recent post-truth literature; and likewise (2) it illustrates much of the same historical amnesia that plagues current post-truth literature. Ralph Keyes, “The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life,” ralphkeyes.com, http://www.ralphkeyes.com/the-post-truth-era/.
19 Cited in Paula A. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of Aids (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 236.
20 Starbird, “Information Wars.”
21 Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002); Robert Mejia, “A Pressure Chamber of Innovation: Google Fiber and Flexible Capital,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2015): 289–308.
22 Rhana Gittens, “Dave Chappelle, Alternative Facts, and the Reinforcement of Racist Ideas,” In Media Res, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2017/02/05/dave-chappelle-alternative-facts-and-reinforcement-racist-ideas; See also Robert Mejia, “Post Truth, or the Cultural Logic of Late Racism,” In Media Res, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2017/01/28/post-truth-or-cultural-logic-late-racism; Roopali Mukherjee, “Power-Knowledge in a ‘Post-Truth’ World,” https://www.flowjournal.org/2017/03/post-truth-world/.
23 Here, we echo Dana Cloud’s criticism of the tendency among communication scholars “to overemphasize consciousness, speech, and text as the determinants of [social] change,” and deemphasize “economic forces and relations of power [that] motivate discourses that justify, obscure, or mystify the workings of powerful interests and structures of power.” Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 145; see also Dana L. Cloud and Joshua Gunn, “Introduction: W(h)ither Ideology?” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 407–20.
24 Caroline Jack, “Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information,” Data & Society (2017): 3.
25 Robyn Caplan, Lauren Hanson, and Joan Donovan, “Dead Reckoning: Navigating Content Moderation after ‘Fake News,’” Data & Society (2018).
26 Although post-truth critics may contest this characterization, the fact that 2016 has been established as the beginning of the post-truth era lends credence to our interpretation.
27 Tommie Shelby, “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory,” Philosophical Forum 34, no. 2 (2003): 170.
28 Ibid., 183.
29 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Routledge, 1974/2005).
30 Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 28–44.
31 Ibid., 41.
32 Ibid., 42.
33 Shelby, “Ideology,” 183.
34 Ibid., 184–5.
35 Bulger and Davison, “The Promises,” 3.
36 Ibid.; Caplan, Hanson, and Donovan, “Dead Reckoning.”
37 Dana L. Cloud, “The Matrix and Critical Theory’s Desertion of the Real,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 4 (2006): 331.
38 Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 362–87; Cheryl I. Harris, “Finding Sojourner’s Truth: Race, Gender, and the Institution of Property,” Cardozo Law Review (1996): 309–409; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005).
39 In Alex McVey’s otherwise positive review of Infoglut, he nonetheless critiques Mark Andrejevic for “some totalizing tendencies.” For example, “While Andrejevic is right to argue that surveillance practices have taken on new forms in an era of modern infoglut, it would be a mistake to overemphasize these new forms as breaks from previous surveillance strategies. Doing so would miss the way in which surveillance still works to disproportionately target differently racialized, gendered, and abled bodies.” Alex McVey, “Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know,” Surveillance & Society 11, no. 4 (2014): 526.
40 Schudson, “Here’s What.”
41 This often is done by failing to account for how race and ethnicity affect fake news reception or presuming that the failure of people of color to vote for Hilary Clinton is evidence of a post-truth effect. For examples, see Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2017): 211–36; Richard Gunther, Erik Nisbet, and Paul Beck, “Trump May Owe His 2016 Victory to ‘Fake News,’ New Study Suggests,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/trump-may-owe-his-2016-victory-to-fake-news-new-study-suggests-91538.
42 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1980/2006), 170, 172.
43 See the following sources for insight into how race and racism affects contemporary politics: CNN, “Exit Polls,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls; Matt Barreto et al., “The Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS),” Los Angeles, CA, 2017; McElwee, “Trump’s Supporters”; John Blake, “The Cruel Double Standard That May Have Saved Obamacare,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/politics/obamacare-double-standard/.
44 Rachel E. Dubrofsky, “Authentic Trump,” Television & New Media 17, no. 7 (2016): 663–66.
45 David R. Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (London: Verso, 2008); Kent A. Ono, Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); Lowe, Immigrant Acts; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012).
46 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998/2006), vii.
47 Ono, Contemporary Media, 2.
48 Alexander, The New, 28; see also: Lisa Marie Cacho, “The Presumption of White Innocence,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 185–90; Jody D. Armour, “Race Ipsa Loquitur: Of Reasonable Racists, Intelligent Bayesians, and Involuntary Negrophobes,” Stanford Law Review 46, no. 4 (1994): 781–816.
49 See: Mark Andrejevic, Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know (London: Routledge, 2013); Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php; Bulger and Davison, “The Promises”; Caplan, Hanson, and Donovan, “Dead”; Jayson Harsin, “Regimes of Posttruth, Postpolitics, and Attention Economies,” Communication, Culture & Critique 8, no. 2 (2015): 327.
50 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 302.
51 Ibid.
52 Julie Netherland and Helena Hansen, “White Opioids: Pharmaceutical Race and the War on Drugs That Wasn’t,” BioSocieties 12, no. 2 (2017): 217.
53 Benjamin D. Steiner and Victor Argothy, “White Addiction: Racial Inequality, Racial Ideology, and the War on Drugs,” Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review 10 (2001): 469–70.
54 Ibid.; Noble Safiya Umoja, “Teaching Trayvon: Race, Media, and the Politics of Spectacle,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 1 (2014): 12–29; Kerry O’Brien et al., “Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 10 (2013).
55 Steiner and Argothy, “White Addiction,” 450.
56 Ibid.
57 Netherland and Hansen, “White Opioids,” 236, 235.
58 Roediger, How Race, 152; Steiner and Argothy, “White Addiction.”
59 Audrey Redford and Benjamin Powell, “Dynamics of Intervention in the War on Drugs, the Buildup to the Harrison Act of 1914,” Independent Review 20, no. 4 (2016): 512.
60 Ibid.; see also: Hamilton Wright, “Report on the International Opium Commission and on the Opium Problem as Seen within the United States and Its Possessions” (Shanghai, 1909), 1–83; Carl L. Hart, “How the Myth of the ‘Negro Cocaine Fiend’ Helped Shape American Drug Policy,” The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/how-myth-negro-cocaine-fiend-helped-shape-american-drug-policy/.
61 Wright, “Report,” 49.
62 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso, 1999), 71.
63 Quoted in Rudolph Gerber, Legalizing Marijuana: Drug Policy Reform and Prohibition Politics (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 9.
64 United States Government, “Congressional Record—Senate,” 8247-441: United States Government, 1986: 8291, 8294.
65 Barnie Day, “It Happened to a Bright Kid Like Ian,” The Roanoke Times, http://www.roanoke.com/webmin/opinion/ithappened-to-a-bright-kid-like-ian/article_dbdb0437-c827-525f-9221-8d8f2731d5e3.html.
66 Randy Billings, “Lepage in Spotlight for Saying Drug Dealers Impregnate ‘White Girls,’” Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com/2016/01/07/lepage-accused-of-making-racist-comment-at-bridgton-meeting/.
67 Doris Marie Provine, Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 113–4.
68 Jeff Sessions, “Attorney General Jeff Sessions Delivers Remarks at the 30th DARE Training Conference,” The United States Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-delivers-remarks-30th-dare-training-conference.
69 Block and Obioha, “War”; Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout; Hart, “How”; Netherland and Hansen, “The War”; Redford and Powell, “Dynamics”; Steiner and Argothy, “White Addiction.”
70 Gittens, “Dave Chappelle”; Mejia, “Post Truth.”
71 This equation of the post-truth as being about racial nostalgia does not preclude the post-truth from affecting other marginalized subjectivities. Indeed, black feminists have long argued “that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-kyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2010), 13. See also: Brittany Cooper, “Intersectionality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Hawkesworth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016). Nonetheless, we find consistent evidence that race has emerged as the central fissure around which post-truth rhetoric and criticism are organized.
72 For a critical overview, see Bulger and Davison, “The Promise.”
73 Denise DiPasquale and Edward L. Glaeser, “Incentives and Social Capital: Are Homeowners Better Citizens?” Journal of Urban Economics 45, no. 2 (1999): 354–84; Brian J. McCabe, “Are Homeowners Better Citizens? Homeownership and Community Participation in the United States,” Social Forces 91, no. 3 (2013): 929–54; J. Eric Oliver and Shang E. Ha, “Vote Choice in Suburban Elections,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (2007): 393–408.
74 McCabe, “Are Homeowners,” 941.
75 Ibid.
76 DiPasquale and Glaeser, “Incentives,” 366.
77 McCabe, “Are Homeowners,” 937.
78 Ibid., 941.
79 Ryan D. Enos, “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us About the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior,” American Journal of Political Science 60, no. 1 (2016): 123.
80 Mick Dumke et al., “The CHA’s Great Upheaval—a Sun-Times/BGA Special Report,” Chicago Sun-Times, https://chicago.suntimes.com/chicago-politics/the-chas-great-upheaval-a-sun-timesbga-special-report/.
81 Crystal Thomas, “Displaced Bodies and Governmentality: Lessons from the CHA Website,” in New Times: Making Sense of Critical/Cultural Theory in a Digital Age, ed. Cameron McCarthy, Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer, and Robert Mejia (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 248.
82 Ibid.
83 Oliver and Ha, “Vote Choice.”
84 Ibid.
85 Johnny Miller, “ Roads to Nowhere: How Infrastructure Built on American Inequality,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/feb/21/roads-nowhere-infrastructure-american-inequality; see also May E. Triece, “Constructing the Antiracial City: City Planning and Antiracialism in the 21st Century,” Western Journal of Communication (2017): 1–18.
86 Mejia, “Google Fiber”; Jennifer Medina, “Website Meant to Connect Neighbors Hears Complaints of Racial Profiling,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/website-nextdoor-hears-racial-profiling-complaints.html; Caroline O’Donovan, “Racial Profiling Is Still a Problem on Nextdoor,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/racial-profiling-is-still-a-problem-on-nextdoor?utm_term=.faYRMg1nx#.wiMrMvBG7.
87 ACLU, “Picking up the Pieces,” ACLU, https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/picking-pieces.
88 Myria Georgiou, “Conviviality Is Not Enough: A Communication Perspective to the City of Difference,” Communication, Culture & Critique 10, no. 2 (2017): 275.
89 Brendesha Tynes, Joshua Schuschke, and Safiya Noble, “Digital Intersectionality Theory and the #Blacklivesmatter Movement,” in The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online, ed. Safiya Noble and Brendesha Tynes (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 21–40.
90 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/; Gotham, “Race”; Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/.
91 Enos, “What.”
92 Ibid., 139.
93 Josh Pasek et al., “What Motivates a Conspiracy Theory? Birther Beliefs, Partisanship, Liberal-Conservative Ideology, and Anti-Black Attitudes,” Electoral Studies 40 (2015): 488.
94 Pew Research Center recently reported that 75% of current Republicans believe that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.” Pew Research Center, “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider,” Pew Research Center (2017): 34.
95 Pasek et al., “What,” 486.
96 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” 169.
97 Coates, “The Case”; Gotham, “Race”; McCabe, “Are Homeowners.”
98 Pasek et al., “What Motivates,” 483.
99 Angharad N. Valdivia, “Amnesia and the Myth of Discovery: Lessons from Transnational and Women of Color Communication Scholars,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 2/3 (2013): 329–32; Christian, “The Race”; Renato Rosaldo, “Whose Cultural Studies?” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3 (1994): 524–29.
100 Valdivia, “Amnesia,” 330.
101 Dan Diner, “Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as Epistemological Vantage,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 128–42.
102 Mejia, “Post Truth.”
103 Emily Witt, “Calling B.S. In Parkland, Florida,” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/three-days-in-parkland-florida. See also: Roxane Gay, Twitter, https://twitter.com/rgay/status/966381473317117952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw; P. R. Lockhart, “Parkland Is Sparking a Difficult Conversation About Race, Trauma, and Public Support,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/2/24/17044904/parkland-shooting-race-trauma-movement-for-black-lives-gun-violence.
104 Matthew Yglesias, “The Parkland Conspiracy Theories, Explained,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/22/17036018/parkland-conspiracy-theories.
105 Daniel Arkin and Ben Popken, “How the Internet’s Conspiracy Theorists Turned Parkland Students into ‘Crisis Actors,’” NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/how-internet-s-conspiracy-theorists-turned-parkland-students-crisis-actors-n849921; John Kruzel, “How Russian Trolls Exploited Parkland Mass Shooting on Social Media,” Politifact, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/feb/22/how-russian-trolls-exploited-parkland-mass-shootin/.