The Emotional Politics of Racism

How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness

Paula Ioanide

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804795487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly supported intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support "colorblindness" and racial equality. With this book, Paula Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence. How U.S. publics dominantly feel about crime, terrorism, welfare, and immigration often seems to trump whatever facts and evidence say about these politicized matters.

Though four case studies—the police brutality case of Abner Louima; the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib; the demolition of New Orleans public housing units following Hurricane Katrina; and a proposed municipal ordinance to deny housing to undocumented immigrants in Escondido, CA—Ioanide shows how racial fears are perpetuated, and how these widespread fears have played a central role in justifying the expansion of our military and prison system and the ongoing divestment from social welfare. But Ioanide also argues that within each of these cases there is opportunity for new mobilizations, for ethical witnessing: we must also popularize desires for justice and increase people's receptivity to the testimonies of the oppressed by reorganizing embodied and unconscious structures of feeling.

PART I

CRIMINALS AND TERRORISTS: THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMIES OF MILITARY-CARCERAL EXPANSION

Who wishes for law and order? Who fears losing safety and protection? Who desires to bring “democracy” to other nations through occupation and military invasion? Who is anxious about losing national power? One of the paradoxes embedded in powerful nations and dominant people is their perpetual insecurity and anxiety. One would think that—precisely because of their economic, racial, national, and/or gender dominance—such nations and people would rest contentedly in their power, prosperity, and authority. After all, Eurocentric cultural dominance in the United States automatically endows white Americans with entitlements that others have to work hard to earn or never even imagine obtaining. Those who unquestionably belong to the nation and possess U.S. citizenship are granted global privileges irrespective of whether they desire them: entitlements such as not being presumed an illegal alien or a potential thief at the supermarket; privileges such as not being stopped by the police because you are driving while Black or not being searched by the TSA airport security officer for the billionth time because you look Muslim.

It seems that those who possess dominance, despite their veneer of authority and entitlement, are simultaneously fearful of losing the coordinates through which they secure their power. Popular complaints about reverse racism against white Americans or the impending decline of the United States as a global superpower give us insights into the ways people and nations at the top construct their value, meaning, and purpose. If they describe themselves as disempowered, it is because they remain constantly vigilant about potential threats to their power and status. Sensing symbolic and concrete shifts in the tide—racial demographics moving toward the browning of America, China and India’s economic ascent, immigrants gaining rights, the effects of affirmative action policies, diversity training, Spanish-speaking families, Muslim mosques—they seek ways to restore their power.

Have they actually lost power? It doesn’t matter much. Their feelings and beliefs warn them that they have or that, if they don’t do something, they will soon lose all the signposts by which they have constituted the value of their properties and personhoods. Sure, according to all sociological indicators, white men are still dominant, and the United States is still a global superpower. But will this always be true? Those who do not experience the automatic entitlements, unearned social privileges, and wealth advantages of the dominant U.S. publics look at their flamboyant emotional claims of disempowerment in dismay. How can people who possess so much believe themselves to be victims?

In this part, I broadly outline two ideological fantasies in the post–civil rights era that were central in aligning the desires of dominant majorities in the United States with the state’s unprecedented expansion of militarism and incarceration since the late 1970s. At stake in these ideological fantasies were real and imagined losses in dominance and power. The projected losses were psychological and affective as much as they were economic. Domestically, I explore how dominant majorities’ identification with the ideological fantasy of law and order helped forge widespread support for the expansion of prisons and policing. In the global domain the reorientation of the ideological fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism toward the threats of Arab terrorism helped secure public support for proliferating military apparatuses and permanent warfare.

Dominant public identifications with law and order and U.S. exceptionalism were not natural or inevitable. Nor were these identifications secured through the same ideas, feelings, and practices of former eras. Rather, they had to gain their legitimacy above and beyond a range of other possible identifications, desires, and political futures. Further, whereas one might expect public feelings about military-carceral expansion to be focused on macropolitical issues such as preserving national security and stable economies, it turns out that the most powerful fears and desires focused on distinctly sexualized and racialized matters. Concerns over whether Arab men are hyperpatriarchal and hyperviolent were somehow critical to whether the United States would gain any ground against terrorism. Fears over Black men’s presumed hyperviolent threats preoccupied those who called for more incarceration. Anxieties over undocumented Latino/a families being too large or Latina women being hyperfertile were central to whether people legitimated a new Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) detention center or advocated for deportations. Such normative preoccupations with race and sexuality indicate that Americans continue to articulate political matters in distinctly familial terms. These racial, sexual, gender, and propertied norms are experienced as deeply important issues through which America’s national future is envisioned and struggled over.

THE PUNITIVE EMOTIONAL ECONOMIES OF CARCERAL EXPANSION

The 1960s–1970s era, much like today, was characterized by crises. Global decolonization movements and domestic freedom struggles forced the U.S. state and dominant white society to make significant adjustments.

Counterinsurgencies irrevocably delegitimized and outlawed explicitly white supremacist laws and discourses in the United States. Mainstream institutions in the South and North, previously set up to exclude people of color through legalized and de facto forms of exclusion, had to adjust their policies and practices. In an intense era of urban riots between 1965 and 1968 following the assassinations of such political figures as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., numerous cities were set ablaze, warning people of chaos and disorder. Simultaneously, a global economic recession in the mid-1970s was creating rising inflation, stagnant wages, and unemployment in the United States.

The counterinsurgencies that struggled for racial and feminist justice throughout these eras triggered intense fears and insecurities in dominant white majorities. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s such fears motivated white people to move to the suburbs en masse. Taking their wealth and resources with them, they left inner cities to dilapidate and experience the recession in heightened ways. Politicians who witnessed the rise of these fearful emotional economies—and who were themselves furious over the victories they were forced to concede to civil rights activists—saw a moment of opportunity to reexcavate an old American ideological fantasy, one that promised the restoration of law and order in a time of racial chaos.

This ideological fantasy has long historical precedents. During slavery, it was used to legitimate the violent suppression of slave rebellions in law and practice.¹ Throughout the period of territorial expansion westward, a paternalistic version of law and order justified Native American removal and genocide on the grounds that the indigenous were savage and unwilling to conform to the propertied and market relations of liberal individualism.² Post-Reconstruction, vigilante mob violence and lynchings against Black, Mexican, and other nonwhite people, particularly against men of color, also claimed to be enacted in the name of law and order. Eliminating and controlling the putatively hyperviolent and sexually predatory nature of people of color was deemed critical to the stability of the U.S. nation.³ Similarly, the convict lease system that emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War, whose convicts rapidly became disproportionately Black, depended on the ideological fantasy of law and order to secure its legitimacy. As the nation’s territory and economic power increased in the mid-nineteenth century, the persecutory enemies who were presumed to steal the peace, security, and prosperity of American law and order from dominant white majorities also increased. From Mexican banditry, disease, predatory sexuality, gang violence, and territorial reconquest in the Southwest, Texas, and California;⁴ to constructions of Asian “yellow perils” intent on “contaminating” and “subverting” the U.S. empire from within;⁵ to Arab sheiks and Islamic fundamentalists intent on swindling Americans out of wealth and power,⁶ the ideological fantasy of law and order was yearned for yet always out of reach.

Reformulating Racial Struggles as Crimes

The conservative congressmen of the 1970s who had experienced huge psychological and legal losses to racial justice organizers were confronted with a core challenge in their reexcavation of the law and order ideological fantasy. Old versions of the fantasy almost always identified their enemies in unabashedly racist ways. The moral delegitimation of fascism and racism won by the anti-racist freedom movements of the post–World War II era meant that dominant U.S. majorities could no longer define their goodness through white supremacist advocacy. The tide that swept the nation reformulated American goodness as something predicated on racial tolerance, equal opportunity, and fairness. Because changing social warrants no longer allowed dominant U.S. majorities to feel good and righteous about endorsing a type of law and order that was overtly white supremacist, post–civil rights law and order had to be expressed using distinctly color-blind terms.

The conservative congressmen overcame the challenge of reformulating the ideological fantasy of law and order in color-blind ways by introducing what Vesla Weaver calls a “frontlash” of legislation tied to crime. Rather than waiting to respond to the growing momentum of civil rights and feminist gains with backlash legislation, the congressmen’s frontlash legislation on crime sought to prevent any more losses to white patriarchal dominance. This issue-based strategy “relied on two mutually reinforcing elements: (1) depoliticization and criminalization of racial struggle and (2) racialization of ‘crime.’”⁷

The association between racial justice struggles and criminality had historical precedents in the sedimented emotional economies of white majorities, and the congressmen who initiated the frontlash on crime knew this well. The frontlash movement “became preoccupied with showing that racial discord was neither motivated by police brutality nor did its origins emanate from racial discrimination; rather, it was criminality, pure and simple.”⁸ The depoliticization of racial struggles meant that people of color’s militant protests against exclusion and exploitation in the domains of housing, education, employment, and transportation were reformulated as acts of crime against the nation.

The same actors who had fought vociferously against civil rights legislation, defeated, shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Fusing crime to anxiety about ghetto revolts, racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—was redefined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.⁹

Rather than allowing emotional economies to continue aligning with the plight of disenfranchised people of color and women, the frontlash legislators exacerbated white public fears over losing cultural and economic dominance by fostering public perceptions that militant organizing movements (e.g., the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the American Indian Movement, the Brown Berets, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Red Guard Party, I Wor Kuen) were actually criminal thugs.¹⁰ This criminalization of antiracist struggles depended on concealing the legislators’ explicitly racist motivations through color-blind talk about crime. As Julia Sudbury argues:

While overt Jim Crow racism had waning public acceptance in this post–Civil Rights era of Martin Luther Kingesque integrationist policies, criminalization provided a new camouflaged racist language in which code words such as “criminal,” “drug dealer” and “welfare queen” could be used to refer obliquely to the racialized “enemy within.”¹¹

On first view this discursive shift from explicitly racist political discourses to covert and coded discourses may seem trivial. But it arguably solved two significant political problems for the right-wing frontlash congressmen. First, color-blind discourses helped these political actors avoid accusations of state-sponsored white supremacy at a time when such discourses and practices had been widely discredited. Second, color-blind discourses that criminalized racial struggles facilitated a fundamental shift in the ways that dominant white majorities understood the cause of existing racial inequalities.

In 1965 it was still possible for President Lyndon B. Johnson to openly admit that white racism and discrimination had crippled the life chances and opportunities of people of color and to argue that the state should take affirmative action to redress these past wrongs.¹² Only fifteen years later, the criminalization of racial struggles essentially rendered such political honesty inconceivable. The legitimate grievances of Black, Latino/a, and other communities of color over the ways that U.S. society had socioeconomically excluded and marginalized them for centuries had gradually been converted into illegitimate pleas for special handouts and irrational insurrections against order and authority. State and media discourses that criminalized racial struggles converted urban ghettoes that had been impoverished by racially discriminatory policies and practices into spaces of “cultural pathology” or neighborhoods where people of color’s “behavioral deficiencies” were responsible for perpetuating cycles of poverty. The causes of racial inequalities in wealth, income, education, and employment were no longer attributed to the historical patterns of white exploitation and exclusion; rather, they were overwhelmingly ascribed to people of color’s “deficits.”¹³

Conservative politicians began promoting these reversals in historical realities as early as Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Although Goldwater’s campaign failed because public sentiments were still supportive of civil rights struggles, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who deployed the law and order ideological fantasy in subsequent political platforms, regularly won. Increased public identification with law and order propelled Reagan to the governorship of California in 1966 and Nixon to the presidency in 1968 over Lyndon Johnson. Their insistence that tough-on-crime policies would work to address civic unrest much more efficiently than purportedly soft antipoverty programs began persuading U.S. constituents who feared the spike in urban crime rates between 1960 and 1975 and the political riots that affected numerous cities in 1965–1968.¹⁴

Capitalizing on Democrats who also favored law and order over antipoverty and racial redress programs, Reagan advanced the next stage of the frontlash movement on crime. Having successfully criminalized racial struggle, Reaganism went on to racialize crime by repeatedly demonizing impoverished Black and Latino/a people. Whereas in the 1960s impoverished communities of color possessed the moral authority of people who were struggling for racial liberation and economic equality alongside third world decolonization movements, by the late 1980s their bodies and faces symbolized the incorrigible criminal enemies of law and order. George H. W. Bush’s infamous use of the Willie Horton ad in his 1988 presidential bid against Michael Dukakis refurbished old white fears over Black...