The Specter of White Mob Violence and the Spectacle of Black Suffering (My Thoughts on Capitol Violence, Delivered at Texas Woman’s University)

Thank you, Dr. Fehler, for inviting me here and thank you, Dean Tilton, and Dr. van Erve, for your introductions.  I also thank all of the Texas Woman’s University community for being with us this evening.

I acknowledge and honor the Wichita and the very land where I now reside as a newcomer to Fort Worth, Texas. The Wichita call on us to be better stewards of the land; I also hear that call as one that compels me to recognize my unique role as a descendant of enslaved Africans to disentangle white settler colonization from my imaginations and life-purposes.

I start by letting you know that I’m going to read my comments this evening. I have posted these comments on my blog for better accessibility. Parts of this text are also weblinked here if you want a closer look at the sources and events I discuss.

While there is much for us to think through and problematize about the white supremacy that we witnessed in the violence at the Capitol this past January, I want to focus here on the ways that white mob violence is a LONG-STANDING central praxis of white supremacy and is always anti-Black and anti-Semitic.  These are always co-functioning this way so it should “make sense” to us that the Capitol rioters costumed themselves in things like Camp Auschwitz garb and nooses, both of which are the most iconic symbols of the mass murder and violence against Black and Jewish peoples.

And while there was considerable conversation about the differences in the responses to white mob violence and Black peaceful protest, that is just part of the story. White mob violence is specter— and I say specter in the sense that it is truly a kind of reoccurring haunting.  It is often represented as a kind of merely unfortunate, albeit awful, historical event, so that overall white innocence can be maintained.  If you were shocked by what you saw at the Capitol, it means that you have ignored the historical record or have been lulled into thinking these were bygone days by dogma that presents whiteness as innocent.  Meanwhile, Black suffering is spectacle— the thing we are used to seeing as if it is just another segment on the nightly news (which most times, it is). [These circulations of white supremacy are so much more than merely a set of hypocrisies in relation to the over-policing, surveillance, and militaristic responses to Black protest.] 

To get at some of what I mean, I want to look at Bruno Cua today and then step back and look at one specific historical incident of mass violence and voting, namely the 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Florida.  

Though it is just one of many examples, I want to highlight the current case of the 18-year-old Capitol rioter Bruno Cua from Metro Atlanta Georgia. His parents are still pleading with a judge to release him from custody while he awaits trial; they are simply embarrassed that they believed what Trump was telling them about voter fraud.  That is literally the defense—that they are deserving of mercy and forgiveness because Bruno was naïve and they are all now embarrassed.  I’ll come back to this point about shame and embarrassment so just keep that part in mind.

The stories seem to all point to these events: Bruno’s parents took him to D.C. for the rally where Bruno stormed his way inside and shoved a police officer out of his way to get into the Senate chamber.  Bruno described clearly in social media posts what would happen on January 6.  After leaving the capitol, he posted again the next day on January 7, even boasting that the tree of liberty was thirsty for the “blood of tyrants,” namely those people he had singled out at the Capitol, and that he would not give a warning shot the next time around. The next day, on January 8, he was still posting, this time proclaiming that everyone in Congress deserved a public execution.

Bruno is amongst the youngest to have charges brought against him, if not the youngest.  It should go without saying here that every young Black man in America is profiled, harassed, imprisoned, and murdered with impunity for so much less than Bruno’s offenses. And while I don’t believe that the cage and shackle system of our criminal justice system is helpful in the service of justice, it will remain interesting to see just how innocent, forgivable, and deserving of mercy Bruno becomes. 

It is particularly interesting to see how Bruno is depicted as an isolated, naïve white teenager when the fact of the matter is that Bruno is from the Metro Atlanta area, a central Black, critical hub that overturned the white Republican face of Georgia’s politics with record Black voter turn-out in favor of a Democrat president and vice-president, a woman of color to boot, and the first Black and Jewish senators, all organized by Black women activists.  Bruno was not naïve and simple; he was deliberately acting from a place of whiteness that insisted did not need to believe or accept Black agency.  

In fact, this entire election was decided, in large part, by Black voters and Black women organizers in major cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.  The white rallying cry that depicted Black voters and Black cities and towns as thieves who had stolen American Democracy has been the same rallying cry for white supremacists since Reconstruction, including in these very same cities.[ I remind us here of the Black activist, Octavius Catto, who was killed on his way to vote in 1871 in Philadelphia; his murderer was never charged and the violent rampage against the Black vote and voice there were, in fact, aided by police.]  If you were shocked by what you saw at the Capitol, it might mean that you have ignored the historical record or have been lulled into thinking it was all just an unfortunate historical accident within the terms of a master narrative that presents whiteness, as a whole, as innocent. 

I also want us to remember the Ocoee Massacre in Florida in November 1920 which remains the largest election-related massacre. [There are, of course, multiple examples of this in relation to voting but sometimes just for living like this and this.]

The entire Black community of Ocoee was forced to flee the town when a prosperous Black farmer, Mose Norman, organized Black people to vote and went to vote himself in the national election in January of 1920.  When civil rights organizations called on Congress to investigate the massacre, they refused. The FBI also refused to act.  The leader of the white mob became the mayor.  After forcing all of the Black residents to leave town, these white insurrectionists stole the properties from this Black community which are collectively evaluated at ten million dollars today. There have been no reparations to these families.

In this 1920 white mob violence, white supremacists massacred what we think might be at least 50 Black people for voting, just 35 miles south of where Trayvon Martin was murdered making white men’s unpunished behavior merely the specter of Zimmerman’s (also judiciously-sanctioned) murder of Trayvon Martin.

I point out here that the insurrectionists at Ocoee celebrated their victory as has steadily been the culture of white mob violence, especially in relation to lynch law.  My connection to lynching if both literal and historical here since the insurrectionists erected a gallows to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence; lynchings were also a prime tool to block the Black vote and white people who deliberately intervened were threatened with death too.

We need to remember that lynching of Black Americans functioned as more than mere execution.  These were forms of entertainment, like the circus had just come to town. These were often large, festive events where white mobs often even erected stages with theater-styled seating. There were exciting advertisements beforehand; photos and postcards were sent to family and friends.  You’d be hard-pressed to find images of white lynch mob members looking ashamed or embarrassed about what they were doing: they are posing for the camera, often in special pre-planned attire, as whole family units.  They took trophies to commemorate what they stole on these “great days” and “wonderful evenings” (these could include chopped off body parts like breasts and phalluses).  These were, in sum, open and very public celebrations and were called acts of JUSTICE. We have to ask ourselves here: why was it so easy, almost automated, for the rioters at the capitol to look, sound, and act so much like a typical lynch mob from a century past?  It is telling here that for Bruno’s parents, and maybe even for much of America and the criminal justice system, their expression of regret and embarrassment, even when inauthentic, is treated as an extraordinary feat since it would be the one cultural practice different from the lynch mobs of 100 years ago. 

If we go back to the massacre at Ocoee in 1920, we see that these were white folx who had lived next to Black folx as neighbors for 30 years, but that didn’t stop them from brutalizing and stealing Black folx’s votes and homes.  So, as a way to wrap up here, I want to return to the fact that Bruno grew up in Atlanta and yet his defense, the commentary from seemingly everyone around him, and much of the public rhetoric right now, is that he had just never known anyone or anything else. BUT…..He. Lives. In. Atlanta…..  Metro Atlanta.  That’s a little over 6 million people and yet the salience of the deeply depressed, easily manipulated, rural white male loner is such a chronic trope of white supremacy that it can be called up anytime and anywhere to convey white innocence. If you listen to these accounts about Bruno’s isolation, you would think I am just acting like the little boy in that 1999 movie, The 6th Sense, that stars Bruce Willis as a child psychologist to a child patient (Haley Joel Osment) who can talk to the dead.  The child is absolutely bewildered by his ghostly talents and so whispers to the psychologist: I SEE DEAD PEOPLE. In my new 2021 version of the movie, I am the main child character who sees Black people in a sixth sense, like a great secret, where I have to walk around whispering “I see Black people”** because no one can see us, like Metro Atlanta ain’t even right there.  Though I might be making arguably an inappropriate joke here, it really is this absurd to me to act like Bruno didn’t understand the world around him and wasn’t acting within the terms of a white racist response to the political successes of a VERY Black Atlanta!  If we center Bruno as a misguided loner, we are in fact merely re-committing what we saw in 1920 Ocoee: no serious investigation, no commitment to act against white violence, an outpouring of forgiveness and understanding, open pathways to future success for leading agitators, and no acknowledgement of Black suffering. 

These new circulations of white supremacy at the Capitol this January will set off new legacies.  Our responses to this moment will put cultural practices in place that activists fifty years and one hundred years from now will have to agitate to undo, like we are doing now… about the 100 years before us… unless we seriously address AND REDRESS the spectacle of Black suffering that is so commonplace to us now as the specter of white supremacist mob violences continually haunts.

**PLEASE NOTE: Secretive whispers of “I see Black people” are something that I learned from Todd Craig in places like 4Cs, the writing center where we once worked, and all other kinds of academic spaces. This is his line, not mine, and so I give FULL CREDIT.

Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART I)

Thank you to Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal for publishing the earliest version of this reflective essay in their Volume 2 dedicated to Black Studies edited by Sherri Craig & Karrieann Soto Vega. I will be building on this essay throughout this year as part of a new project. This year is a crossroads for composition-rhetoric so I am listening and looking closely at those who really step up to the plate or miss the moment as has happened at every past Black Protest moment for this field. In the coming weeks, I am especially working towards framing composition studies as a place that does dynamic, on-the-ground work to transform the what, how, and why of university curriculum and instruction towards radical, anti-racist, intersected, Black feminist, fugitive goals.

I am a professor in the academy today because young Black people burnt off all of somebody’s edges to get me here.  Once upon a time, I was out there edge-snatching as a Black college student too.  It’s a Black intellectual inheritance.

Black studies and an ongoing radical Black presence in the academy are not the result of a conscientious and interested hiring committee, a department’s desire to represent African American content, a university’s commitment to a multiracial university, or a profession’s/professional organization’s vision of radical democratic relevance.  None of that truly exists in the academy.  Only the adoption of a bourgeois, white, cishetero, masculinist individualism would cause a Black scholar to think that they are here because of the quality of their work or their uncanny skills at navigating white supremacist institutions.  We are here because young Black people and their radical allies demanded it in cities and hamlets everywhere, burning it down when they had to. I am certainly talking about current contexts but I am also historicizing this all way back to the activism related to new visions of schooling in post-emancipation, ongoing into the early 1900s with the New Negro Movement. The Black college student protesters of the 1970s are legendary in how they heralded the multiracial diversity that we see at places like the City University Of New York and other universities today with racially/ethnically diverse student bodies.  These student protesters were the political heirs to Black students at HBCUs who designed their own practices in the Civil Rights Movement decades before.  These 1950s HBCU students can trace themselves back to the major wave of Black student protests at the HBCUs in the 1920s when their colleges’ administration and faculty were mostly white. These historical lessons have been well documented now by many scholars across the K-16 education spectrum, including myself, so I won’t delve deeper.  The point is this: If any aspect of what we do is not in alignment with this foundation on Black youth, then it ain’t Black studies.

As I reflect on the role of Black students in the academy here, I interrupt my own alphabetic text with Black undergraduate students’ visual work in my most recent classroom, Introduction to African American Rhetoric.  The class was interrupted by the Spring 2020 school shutdown under the Coronavirus resulting in a revised syllabus that I called The Spring 2020 Corona Remix. Many mainstream white students across the college were complaining that they wanted more synchronous access to everything and everyone, despite the fact that their socially marginalized peers were self-proclaiming that they were having issues around income, health, housing, food security, wifi access, and disability and so needed alternative accommodations.  Meanwhile, my own Black students were mailing visual projects to my home (an option rather than just digital assignments) that marked the Blackness of an engagement with COVID-19 in ways that will always stay with me.  Their work is centered here visually so that I can see them as I reflect forwards.  Visual work is always critical for me because Black Visuality is more than multimodality; it is an affective and spiritually redemptive space that continually re-processes the dignity of Black Life in a world that insists upon Black Death.  Such student work in my classrooms guides my visions of a Black Composition Studies for an anti-racist university.

Every university assignment that I have ever had is the direct result of these students’ Black insurgency which is always visible for me on the paper, canvas, and screen. Each of my tenure track jobs has given me a valuable lesson about the role of this Black insurrection and white colonization, lessons that form not only my intellectual and political relation to Black Studies and Black youth but also my daily reality. I relay these lessons here as a foundation to realizing a Black Composition Studies. Composition studies in the university today is fraught with a colonial history on so many levels. We are most often housed in English departments that overshadow our labor and intellectual work. We still most often function as the illegitimate stepchildren of literary theory which often imagines itself as the only critical space that only rethinks the world and as the only frontrunner of English studies. With literary studies lost in its own elitist self-delusions of bourgeois grandeur, composition studies inherits the daily legacy of what English departments actually do: maintain the colonial legacy of the English language. I could write books on the white settler colonial logic that I hear daily in English department to describe teaching (or rather, lecturing), students’ abilities, language variation, writing assignments, etc. Put most simply, composition studies is the space that focuses on language, particularly the teaching of writing while our cousins in communication studies (who left English departments long ago) focus in on speaking— in its most simplistic point of origins (we all do more than that). Together, we and our cousins confront the dailyness of communication systems in the western world that have annihilated non-white languages and therefore ways of being that do not conform to whiteness. We and our cousins therefore always sit at the crossroads: automate colonization as an institutional pedagogy and rhetorical apparatus… or overthrow it. Black composition studies goes for the latter and, as such, our close proximity to the non-compliant racial protests of Black students has to always stay central.

These are notecards that I received in the mail last spring as a reading response to the course assignment.

When I first began writing about insurgent Black students, I distinctly remember essay reviewers, especially men, arguing that my ideas of Black college students were romantic and essentialist.  In their minds (and ostensibly pedagogies), only they seemed to possess the answers to and practices of a radical protest and scholarly vision in the university.  This ongoing imagination of a university without Black students’ presence (or where they are merely the passive receptacles of the “expert” scholars of Black Studies and/or Composition-Rhetoric Studies) is an egregious form of white supremacist education.  Black students stay at the center of my presence in the academy and in the theoretical work that I do here, not as metaphor or cross to bear, but as the purveyor of a radical, literate/language alternative to who and what count here.

Here’s my first story that gets at more of what I mean. My first, tenure track job was at a Colonized State University in 2005.  They needed someone who could bridge what they called “developmental” writing, urban schools, the distrust of the surrounding Black community, low enrollments of students of color in the major, and attitudinal Black graduate students who were, at best, bored.  Them white folk at that college had been dragged so bad that they had to do something and so they hired me. I learned there that white racist resistance in universities takes the form of really slow or non-moving processes.  White faculty were always: scheduling meetings for discussions on how they feel, scheduling meetings to gauge their collective “temperature,” scheduling meetings to read the agenda out loud, reading the bylaws (most often out loud in meetings), revising the bylaws (read out loud all over again), thinking things over, looking into things, talking to you about your ideas and concerns, and planning to get back to you about your questions (which usually resulted in apologies for non-information and/or more unforeseen delays).  Every process took forever and ultimately went nowhere because white supremacy always takes up a whole lot of time, effort, and policy to stand still and stay the same.  These are not processes that are driven by Black folx or a vision for hiring them; it is Black protest that speeds up time and resets the energy in the academy. None of them meetings and discussions produced change and worked to stall Black freedom more than anything else. All of them folk at the Colonized State University are out here somewhere today, still meeting, revising them same bylaws (and probably still reading them out loud), discussing, thinking, looking into stuff, talking— yup, still doing all of that, and still accomplishing nothing of value for Black lives.  It’s not an accident. Black composition studies always recognizes the micro and yet overdetermined white supremacist processing of our schools and programs and imagines time, space, and possibility differently.

My next tenure track job was at a Colonized Religious University.  Before my arrival in 2008, the Black graduate students had showed all the way out, especially on online discussion boards I see you, Jessica Barros and Todd Craig, then and now Them white folk didn’t know what to do there either, except to hire me.  I learned about the racism of writing program administration there.  I also learned that I would walk alone in my field because I didn’t know a single professor in my profession who I would have truly called an ally or even friend back then.  It was a hard and lonely lesson, at first, but one that I am forever grateful for because it sharpened my lens on whiteness in my discipline.  The levels of anti-Blackness that I witnessed at the hands of my fellow writing program administrators (WPAs) were disgusting and no one— and I mean no one— was willing to even notice it, much less talk about it.  Anti-Black faculty were rewarded, awarded, buddied up, and promoted to next levels without hesitation. No one in my department—especially not the self-righteous, self-proclaimed-radical literature faculty, the dean’s office, or the provost’s quarters would address any of it.   And no one in the field was even acting like anti-Black racism was part of WPA.  It ain’t a coincidence that the WPA-Listserv remained so white and so racist for so long.  There is actually a whole stain of scholarship that suggests that WPAs are activists because they act in defiance against university systems that oppress student learning.  I read that stuff and can only ask: whatchu talmbout Willis? I have never witnessed such a WPA when it comes to anti-Black classrooms and the writers of those very same theories are as anti-Black as anyone else in the racist institutions that permeate the U.S.  Racist WPA work is not the kind of programming that is relevant to Black youth literacies or the work of Black education; this is not a space that prioritizes the hiring of folk like me either.  WPAs are only now getting called out and still today you simply need something labeled an anti-racist grading system or rubric and you too can continue to mete out anti-Blackness with your WPA work. It’s not like any of this is hidden from view or political dispositions, unless, of course, you refuse to see. Black composition studies is about a disruptive kind of vision and envisioning for schooling.

My next position was in 2013 at a Colonized City University with a student population that was 75% Black and Latinx.  It remains the whitest department I have ever worked in, with an incredibly self-righteously empty rhetoric of diversity and justice, often administered by a supra-white-wealthy elite.  They catch the heat, every once in a while, for all that whiteness given the history of Black and Latinx student protest in that system. And so they hired me.  I saw colonization most thoroughly there: a predominantly Black and Latinx student population with an abysmally low percentage of Black and Latinx tenure-track faculty.  It was a complete cocoon of whiteness.  Black presence was the pen-ultimate evidence of an awe-inspiring progress for which you were required to feel grateful, no matter how you were treated or marginalized.  When you were asked to do something by white administration, you were simply supposed to obey and sacrifice your own well-being because “these communities” needed you (never mind the fact that you and your family are “these communities”).  In my first year, the department even held an end-of-semester party to celebrate the retirement of two white women who study long-dead white people in Europe. The faculty came together in corresponding costumes and presented a well-rehearsed flashmob dance (that is what they called it).  There I was, in the middle of the city with the largest Black+Latinx population in the country, with the largest Latinx college student population in that area of the country (predominantly Dominican), with non-Black/non-Latinx folk dancing their hearts out in recognition of two white professors while dressed as Old English wenches, royalty, and fairies.  I’m not suggesting here that this event was evil.  Ridiculous?  Yes.  Harmful?  No.  The purpose of the event was certainly playfulness and jest, however, the spirit and politics of the mean-white-sorority-girl ethos from which this event was framed permeated the college. If nothing else, whiteness was quite steadfast.  These are not the bodies that centered my universe of being in the academy, not even for casual socializing or humorous encounters; it was the history of an alternative Black student universe that got me here.  At Colonized City University, whiteness remained centered (and often ludicrously so) no matter what else was going on around it. Black composition studies knows that white affect in schools is not neutral, safe, or accidental and so centers alternative embodiments and enfleshments.

And now?  As of 2019, I am at a Colonized Southern University where I see all of my previous colonial experiences cross-pollinating. Young Black women, both undergraduate and graduate, have been slicing and dicing white power everywhere they go on this campus. The penultimate expression is a lawsuit today that names all the names, insists on a trial, and will make history in ways the campus does not foresee.  The Black graduate women in the lawsuit are from my department and so, yup, they hired me (before the lawsuit, that is).  I don’t know exactly what is to come here, but I can certainly guess. I only know that I have learned the following rules about whiteness in the academy:

It will always put Black lives, urgency, and compensation on extended pause.

It will always be awarded, tenured, promoted, praised, compensated, elevated.

It will always present itself as right, just, and progressing forward (and sometimes even call itself critical and allied) for which Black folk are supposed to show gratefulness and awe.

It will always remain steadfast in how it centers itself everywhere all the time.

It will always ignore the deep damage and social deaths it causes.

It will always be contested.

It will always be unwritten.

It will never stop us.

I have yet to see anything different here. Black Composition Studies gives me this lens and critique but it also gives me the audacity to speak, fight back, and imagine an alternative way of thinking, being, and acting in the academy, in my classrooms, and especially in my field.

I am not suggesting that Black Composition Studies is only for Black folx. However, it ain’t for appropriation by folx in my field who continue to do stuff like write a Statement for Black Lives Matter in their departments and programs and not reference a single Black compositionist. Yall ain’t nowhere near ready and Black composition studies is here to let you know it. Black composition studies is not exclusive… but it is rigorous in the mechanisms and politics of its inclusions. 

Stay tuned for PART TWO…

Lessons from Kim TallBear . . . and the Tears Not Shed

Right after the announcement of Donald Trump as our next U.S. president, I got on a plane and came to Canada for the National Women’s Studies Association. I enjoy this conference for one reason: I see more women of color/gender-queer folk here than any other professional conference I attend. There are problems like with every other professional organization but at least I like who sits and fights at the table.

This year, I was grateful for the Black and Indigenous women in Canada who let us know at every turn that freedom ain’t up here. You can follow the drinking gourd, Underground Railroad, North Star, Black Moses and then wade in the water all you want: Black folk still ain’t free in Canada. Kim TallBear’s plenary talk was the highlight for me.

Continue reading

Black Language Matters: Hell You Talmbout? (Back-to-School in 2015)

Screen Shot 2015-08-22 at 12.32.40 PMOn August 15, 2015, Janelle Monae and her Wondaland labelmates gave a free concert in Washington D.C. that was only advertised on social media. Before the show, Monae and the Wondaland crew led a rally through the streets of D.C. that included a stop at the Capital. The rallying song/chant represented her new song, “Hell You Talmbout,” dedicated to the Black Lives Matter Movement, freely available to anyone on Soundcloud.  On her instagram page, Monae explained the message of the song: she channels and records the pain of her people, her own political convictions, and a challenge to those who remain indifferent.  I’ve decided to use this song as the soundtrack of the homepage of my fall 2015 English 101 course to capture how we will approach writing.

Continue reading