Equity & Excellence in Education | 2019
Beyond the Politics of Inclusion
Abstract
Short news cycles have become the norm in U.S. media production and consumption. These cycles have a way of dictating public discourse and shaping how formal political leaders frame or construct arguments for change. In this current political climate, critical scholars, activists, and organizers are left to navigate difficult terrain. It is particularly difficult when political systems of representation, interpersonal violence, material inequities, increased measures of surveillance, media bias, historical amnesia, and state-sanctioned violence and rhetoric are historically rooted in ideologies of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Such publicly-ingrained historicity begs the question: What bends political will toward transformative change? Over the summer of 2019, Democratic presidential candidates organized campaign rallies and public forums and participated in nationally televised debates. Among the various issues and policies that candidates addressed were questions about policing, reparations, and economic justice and restructuring. While the candidates’ responses and recommendations fell short of the necessary visioning andmeasures to generate paradigm shifts and alternatives to existing institutions and structures, the visible dialoguewas due, in large part, to ground-level organizing by Black Lives Matter activists and TheMovement for Black Lives policy platform (see www.policy.m4bl.org). The robust, multi-dimensional activism was cultivated during the start of the decade and has resulted in a political climate where formal political leaders and institutions are being pressured to reckon with the violence done to Black lives as well as the socioeconomic injustices that low-income and communities of color face (Garza & Perez, 2017). Consequently, national stages and media platforms are not immune to the subversive efforts of activists and community organizers. Chants of “Fire Pantaleo” at the Detroit Democratic Presidential Debate remind us that the officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner was on paid “desk duty” for five years, and annual remembrances of Black people murdered by way of state-sanctioned violence serve as counternarratives that defy mainstream discourse and neoliberal media production. In other recent news, the back-to-back mass shootings at El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, are a stark reminder of how gun violence breeds generational trauma and how the general public can often overlook what is at the root of such tragedies. Similar to public perceptions of gun violence in low-income communities of color, shootings are often depicted as individual heinous crimes, detaching it from rooted patterns of violence that can be traced back to systemic racism and pervasive toxic masculinity. To be clear, this point is not an attempt to directly link these mass shootings with the type of violence that sometimes happens in distressed communities and is put on display for deficit-based consumption. What we are highlighting is an approximation of root causes of violence that are often dismissed, contorted, or simply ignored. In the case of El Paso and Dayton, when political leaders contribute to harmful discourse that conflates people with disabilities with people who subscribe to explicit doctrines of white nationalism, their unwillingness to address how such ideology is preserved and integrated into our social order becomes evident. Despite mainstream conservative efforts to disassociate individual acts of violence from rhetoric and policies, a comprehensive understanding of white supremacy recognizes how it blurs notions of U.S. citizenship, border protections, American exceptionalism, American democracy, and gender norms (Cohen, 2011; Grande, 2004/2015; Melamed, 2011). It might not take the form of an individual mass shooting, but white supremacist ideology is at the core of many institutions that have accumulated power both domestically and globally. This gives credence to those willing to defend it. The most recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in Mississippi is another example of such blurred lines that works in tandem with a divisive model-minority narrative that is becoming normalized across various social institutions EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION 2019, VOL. 52, NOS. 2–3, 145–150 https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2019.1688460