Browsing by Subject "Institutional racism"

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Radical dismissal : Stokely Carmichael and the problem of inclusion in public deliberation
(2020-08-13) Hatch, Justin Dean; Roberts-Miller, Patricia, 1959-; Longaker, Mark G.; Sackey, Donnie; Gilyard, Keith; Joseph, Peniel
“Radical Dismissal: Stokely Carmichael and the Problem of Inclusion in Public Deliberation” has two interrelated goals—first, to lay bare the rhetorical mechanisms by which those in power silence dissent, and, second, to view with greater clarity Stokely Carmichael’s rhetorical strategies and legacies. Toward those goals, I examine Carmichael’s words in the year following SNCC’s release of the slogan “Black Power,” and I look closely at the almost universally negative responses to them during the same period. While the terms—angry, hateful, demagogue, racist, etc.—that Carmichael’s critics use to dismiss him vary, they all direct attention away from his institutional critique toward his relationship to subjective norms of discourse. I open the dissertation by introducing Carmichael and relevant context and by developing the dissertation’s overarching theoretical framework. I borrow from scholars writing on “civility” to develop “civility policing” as rhetorical action that preserves unjust harmonies (Roberts-Miller, Deliberate Conflict 154), displaces blame from oppressor to oppressed (Welch 110), and silences dissent (Lozano-Reich and Cloud 223). Chapter One finds that Carmichael’s critics shaped his image and longer legacy by amplifying a distorted version of his message. An exploration of Carmichael’s words especially within a set of letters to Lorna Smith offers a corrective. Chapter Two explores the utility of two definitions of the term “demagogue” for distinguishing anti-racist rhetoric. While critics accuse Carmichael of being a “demagogue,” his words in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America not only contradict the claim, but also return the charge. Chapter Three builds on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “dissociation of concepts” and Janice Fernheimer’s “dissociative disruption” to better understand the adaptive rhetorical strategies Carmichael used in his most famous speech given at Berkeley. I offer the term “subversive dissociation” as a charge to discover the dissociative foundations of dominant racial narratives.
Seeking justice under archival erasure
(2021-06-28) Kovalyova, Natalia Vasilyevna; Trace, Ciaran B.
Records hold enormous power over people’s life and well-being, so does their absence. Withholding, destroying, or not creating records at all continues to be a major tactic of control. Yet, losing one’s records and having no records does not set a person free. Instead, it creates sprawling problems and sets up multiple barriers, but few take a recordkeeper to court to compel them to fix the system, particularly when the recordkeeper in question is the United States government. This study is about such a case. It examines the role of records and recordkeeping in upholding or suppressing social justice for a large group of Native American people using the legal documents of Cobell v Salazar — the largest class-action suit in the U.S. history – as an exemplar. It surveys deposition statements, Congressional hearings, witness statements, oral arguments, appellate court decisions, and legal opinions issued on the case in order to understand the summoning of Indian trust records at pivotal moments of litigation as evidence of the government performance of its duties or as evidence of its failure to performance such duties. It presents the findings in three vignettes, each dedicated to a specific aspect of the story — damage in archival storage; availability, access, and accuracy; and the impact of the colonial legacy on institutional recordkeeping practices. The narrative juxtaposes the imagined totality of the government archives with the realities of century-long mismanagement and poor recordkeeping that participated in the exploitation of Native Americans in the past and the present. The study concludes with a few propositions regarding the relationship between records, archives and governing and outlines several prospective avenues for future explorations of the co-evolving practices of recordkeeping, archiving, and governing.