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.
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.
The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804795487 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2015 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Emotional Politics of Racism
How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness
By Paula Ioanide
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9548-7
CHAPTER 1
NEW YORK, NEW YORK: THE RAGING EMOTIONS OF WHITE POLICE BRUTALITY
On the fateful August 9, 1997, evening that Haitian immigrant Abner Louima suffered through the sadistic police brutality of the New York Police Department (NYPD), he had gone to see a popular Haitian band play at a club in East Flatbush. Club Rendez-Vous, located on Flatbush between Farragut and Glenwood, was one of the few places to go see live Haitian compas music. The Brooklyn neighborhood is home to one of the largest concentration of Haitians in the United States. The first Haitian newspaper in the United States, Haiti Observateur, was established here in 1971. Haitian restaurants infuse the air with the aroma of fried plantains and pork while animated discussions of politics are heard in Creole and English. Radio Soleil d'Haiti broadcasts news to Haitians from their studio at Nostrand Avenue and Tilden.
By the time Louima immigrated to the United States in 1991, several generations of Haitians had settled in New York City. Seeking reprieve from the political repression and violence of President François "Papa Doc" Duvalier's administration, Haitians used the family reunification pathways offered by the 1965 Immigration Act to bring their relatives to the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. As human rights violations, poverty, and oppression intensified after Duvalier's son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, took power in 1971, people left Haiti using increasingly desperate measures. The arrival of boatloads of undocumented Haitians on the shores of the United States created a refugee crisis throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike their Cuban counterparts, Haitian requests for political asylum were met with the highest rejection rate of any immigrant group. The refugees were routinely detained and deported by immigration authorities.
The U.S. rejection of Haitians at the end of the twentieth century has a long historical precedent. After enslaved people on the island of Santo Domingo (presently the Dominican Republic and Haiti) successfully overthrew slavery and established a Black republic in 1804, governmental and cultural depictions passionately warned Americans against the menacing ills of Haitian "contamination." At a time when slavery in the United States was justified through popular beliefs in Anglo-Saxon biological superiority, emancipated Black Haitians posed a remarkable threat to its neighboring nation. Their successful slave revolt irrevocably disputed ideologies of Black inferiority and severely ruptured the European worldview that could hardly fathom the possibility of a Black republic. To compensate for these incongruences in the European colonial imagination, the United States constructed Haitians as menacing threats. Officials warned of Haitian "contagion," projecting already existing fears of interracial mixing, or miscegenation, onto their newly emancipated neighbors. They warned that miscegenation would result in the white race's biological degeneracy. They implied that interracial sexual and social relations (particularly marriage) would grant Black people access to property controlled by whites—a threat that would undo the social and economic order of the United States. Taking these threats as real and possible, France and the United States punished Haiti by preventing the island's participation in international trade economies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In doing so, the imperial nations essentially guaranteed the Haitian people's impoverishment as a vengeful payback for daring to challenge European hegemony.
Almost 200 years later, U.S. governmental institutions, policies, and media discourses still considered Haitians threatening. Americans were warned that Haitians would infect them with disease, take their jobs, and deplete their social welfare resources. As a result of such ominous projections, among those seeking asylum in the United States, Haitians became the only national group required to take HIV tests. In 1983 Haitians were designated to belong to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called the Four H Club (homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians). In 1990 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibited Haitians from donating blood. A New York Times editorial maintained that the "priority" of keeping blood donations "untainted" ranked higher than preventing racial discrimination.
After being categorized as a high-risk group by the CDC and the FDA, Haitians living in the United States faced discrimination, which included losing work, being evicted, and experiencing racially motivated attacks. The George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations also fueled anti-Haitian sentiments when they instigated forced repatriations in 1991–1992 and 1994 on the basis that "boat people" were economic rather than political refugees. Rising fears over what was termed the Haitian stampede similarly justified the forced removal of Haitian refugees placed in custody at Guantánamo in March 1993.
Defiant of such stigmatizations, Haitians engaged in individual, collective, and political modes of resistance. Through public protests, cultural performances, religious organizations, and voudou rituals, Haitians consistently contested the U.S. government's derogatory and demeaning policies. In response to the FDA's stigmatization of Haitian blood, on April 21, 1990, 50,000 demonstrators marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, holding signs that proclaimed, "We're Proud of Our Blood." After similar demonstrations in several cities, including a march in Washington, D.C., from the Capitol steps to the FDA's headquarters, the U.S. government's ban on Haitian blood was rescinded in January 1991.
Cultural practices, music, and Afro-Christian religious rituals have been central to the development of Haitian collective resistance and democracy. Rara street festivals in Haiti bring rural peasant classes and the urban poor together at crossroads, bridges, and cemeteries to perform rituals for Afro-Haitian deities. The cast of characters who have a hand in the six-week-long event includes the captains, priests, queens, sorcerers, musicians, and armies of Rara members as well as the spirits of Afro-Haitian religion, the zonbi (recently dead), Jesus, Judas, and Jews. The festivals allow everyday people to bring their views on politics to public spaces.
The Haitian diaspora has recreated aspects of these musical and religious rituals in the United States. After the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted by a military coup in 1991, Rara musicians and their followers played for weeks at the United Nations and in rallies on Capitol Hill, protesting the attack on Haitian democracy. Rara bands gather regularly in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, using communally produced music and noncommercial performances to call for democracy in Haiti and justice in the United States. They create symbolic forms of opposition to oppressions, building Haitian resilience, survival, and collective solidarity.
When Louima's story of police brutality spread, Rara bands gathered in Prospect Park to stage performances that contested the violence of the NYPD against Haitians and other Black people. Their rituals challenged logics that justified police violence and harassment against Black people in general and Haitians in particular. In doing so, Rara participants in Prospect Park reclaimed spaces, places, and politics in order to assert the dignity and value of Haitian immigrants and other oppressed communities.
GIULIANI TIME
New York City's municipal policies and practices grew increasingly hostile toward people of color, poor people, and Haitian immigrants in the 1990s. Residents experienced significant shifts in policing once Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was elected in 1994. Giuliani largely reversed the governing approaches favored by David Dinkins, an African American mayor who had openly criticized police violence and instituted policies that demanded greater accountability. Only a few months into his term, Giuliani issued Police Strategy No. 5, a policy "dedicated to 'reclaiming the public spaces of New York.'" This policy was established when New York City was experiencing a crumbling urban landscape, abandoned buildings, and a reduction in housing, education, and health care services. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-abatement bribes were given to multinational corporations to move into the city or to stay. Everyday workers, on the other hand, confronted soaring unemployment rates up to 10 percent. As the city's housing became less affordable and work less available, public fears over losses in property, jobs, and security increased.
Giuliani skillfully used such social anxieties to pass increasingly punitive policing measures that protected the property interests of the wealthiest neighborhoods and corporations while further disenfranchising the most impoverished populations. Giuliani identified "homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee cleaners, squatters, graffiti artists, 'reckless bicyclists,' and unruly youth as the major enemies of public order and decency, the culprits of urban decline generating widespread fear." The cleanup of the city was to be accomplished by the police, who were encouraged to use proactive and zero tolerance methods. Constraints on police power were dismantled for the sake of reestablishing law and order. Rather than working to create opportunities for the city's most vulnerable populations, Giuliani redefined New York City residents' freedom to be "about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
Giuliani's rhetoric of law and order was coded to suggest that the presence of the culprits posed a threat to commodified or commodifiable property. To justify the culprits' removal, Giuliani and the police had to criminalize and refigure them literally as assaults on public space. As the culprits were criminalized, they became threats to those who had the power to commodify and control public space. The presence of the impoverished people, not their actions, was redefined as criminal. As one of Giuliani's aides argued, "I regard someone approaching someone else, putting them in fear of bodily harm as a criminal act.... The police will again be given discretion, trained properly, commanded properly, managed properly to stop that kind of behavior." In embodying a threat to public space, the culprits were systematically removed from what were deemed clean streets but permitted to stay in what the NYPD called dirty blocks or streets—spaces where illicit activities were purposely overlooked by the police. "The analogy is clear: the clean street, the clean body and body politic, clean white public space." The confluence of whiteness, wealth, and commodifiable space defined law and order, whereas the presence of people of color, poor people, and illegitimate immigrants defined criminality.
New York's homeless population (estimated at 100,000 in the 1990s) was cleared out in order to demarcate Manhattan as an attractive location for multibillion-dollar corporations such as Disney. The aggressive Welfare to Work Program cut off thousands of public assistance recipients. Between 1995 and 1998, 363,000 people were taken off the city's welfare roles; spending for child welfare was especially targeted, and recipients could receive checks only if they performed work, usually for the city government. The city replaced thousands of full-time workers with workfare recipients, whose payments translated into below-minimum-wage levels. In this general climate of dispelling populations through restructuring policies that favored the wealthy and big businesses, it was clear that the New York City police, the mayor, and those who supported the mayor's practices were set on applying various disciplinary mechanisms not only inside institutions such as prisons and asylums but also on the level of everyday life and civic space. As Allen Feldman argues:
This externalization of discipline can be measured in a wide variety of phenomena, including the development of what Mike Davis terms scan-scapes and social control districts and the emergence of the militarized, high technology office building and shopping mall and what are locally termed by the New York City police as safety corridors, which are, in effect, sites of police colonization in inner-city neighborhoods. Gounis also has noted the establishment of privatized and volunteer vigilante police forces that patrol such areas as Times Square, Grand Central Station, and the West Village.
A flood of police officers were sent to East Harlem, Hunts Point in the Bronx, Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn, and Guy Brewer Boulevard in Queens to close down various public drug markets. These operations, unlike past selective raids and arrests in drug operations, involved complex mechanisms of spatial and bodily control: cordoned street sweeps by police working with the warrant squad to arbitrarily stop and check individuals; temporarily detaining and searching young males found congregating on the streets or gathering in fast-food places; road blocks and checkpoints to stop vehicles; extensive undercover bicycle patrols; huge numbers of police units pulled from throughout the city to make the theatrical surveillance of the state perfectly clear.
This omnipresent surveillance of poor people and of communities of color endorsed by Giuliani's rhetoric of clean public space affected every aspect of daily life for those whose racial identities or class status marked them as assaults. Like African Americans, Haitians and other Black immigrants were constantly imagined as criminals and often presumed as such by the police. Haitian bodies were part of a semiotics that identified them as threatening people who were intent on taking over public spaces presumed to belong to white people and/or American citizens. A 28-year-old Guyanese musician keenly summarized such normalized policing projections as follows:
I am so tired of riding the train, walking down the street, or just standing still, and if cops are around, they will always ask me what I'm doing ... like I'm bothering them. I would ask them why they are harassing me, but I know that they need very little motivation to shoot me. Giuliani has showed us over and over again that police have the right to shoot black men in open daylight for no reason and that they can get away with it.
These shifts in the political geography of New York City had significant effects on the ways that police officers performed their duties and the ways that they understood the limits of their power. Certainly, not all police officers used Giuliani's zero tolerance methods as an excuse to abuse their authority. But such punitive methods encouraged NYPD officers to feel as though their power should not be challenged. Moreover, such methods fostered a police culture that was increasingly unaccountable to people's integrity and dignity. As Louima recalled, one of the police officers who brutalized him at the 70th Precinct declared, "It's Giuliani time, not Dinkins time."
THE CASE THAT SHOOK THE CITY
Louima and his cousin, Jay Nicholas, had just seen King Kino and the Phantoms play at Club Rendez-Vous. Louima had seen the Phantoms numerous times, and the compas band members knew him by name. The band was important to the Haitian community, particularly following the 1992 release of their song "Cowboy." The song's unabashed critique of right-wing paramilitary troops in Haiti became widely popular, and eventually Kino was forced into exile in the United States. When Kino returned to Haiti in 1993, the Phantoms played to an audience of 60,000 Haitians, and the audience collectively sang "Cowboy" with a little help from its creator. That night, Haitians in Flatbush welcomed the Phantoms, participating in a long collective tradition that testified to Haitian people's resistance to oppression through music.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Emotional Politics of Racism by Paula Ioanide. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Facts and Evidence Don't Matter Here chapter abstractThe introduction theorizes how and why emotions play a central role in fostering people's investments in oppressive institutional practices in the United States and globally. It argues that hegemonic fears, resentments, and stigmas attached to criminality, terrorism, welfare dependency, and undocumented immigration make beliefs and stereotypes about Black, Latino/a, Arab and Muslim people intransigent. Psychoanalytic and social psychological frameworks help explain how affectively charged ideologies tend to diminish people's receptivity to facts and evidence that challenge their beliefs. The introduction argues that understanding gendered racism through purely cognitive frameworks of racist intent or ignorance limits our ability to account for people's unconscious, unintentional and embodied investments in oppression. Understanding how unconscious affects structure people's ideological fantasies, identities, and political purpose increases our ability to create counter-cultures of ethical witnessing and effective antiracist feminist strategies.
Part I: "Criminals" and "Terrorists": The Emotional Economies of Military-Carceral Expansion chapter abstractPart I offers a broad overview of the apparatuses that helped construct public desires for the unprecedented expansion of the military-carceral state since the 1980s. It outlines the national political discourses, media representations and state policies that helped construct emotional economies of fear and aggression about "criminality" and "terrorism." Color-blind and racially coded discourses and representations encouraged U.S. constituents to support forms of punishment and containment that targeted Black, Latino/a, Arab and Muslim people through the War on Drugs, immigrant detentions, and the War on Terror. Part I pays particular attention to socially shared emotional economies attached to the ideological fantasies of law and order and American exceptionalism. These hegemonic emotions reward people who identify with being law abiding (through racial appearance, behavior, style or speech) with an affective sense of superiority over those who are assumed to be criminals and terrorists.
1New York, NY: The Raging Emotions of White Police Brutality chapter abstractChapter 1 investigates the 1997 case of police brutality against Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant. It offers a localized reading of the ways dominant stereotypes and feelings about Haitian immigrants and Black "criminality" in New York City helped structure NYPD police officers' violence toward Louima and other Black residents. Officer Justin Volpe and the other white police officers involved in Louima's brutalization employed historically haunting scripts of anti-Black sexualized violence to recuperate their sense of patriarchal white dominance. This instance of brutality was part of a continuum of police violence and harassment encouraged by Mayor Rudolph Guiliani's "zero tolerance" measures, which popularized emotional fears that Black "criminality" and Haitian immigrant "contamination" posed threats to (implicitly white) property, bodies and space. The chapter explores multi-racial alliances that protested police brutality after Louima's case was publicized.
2Abu Ghraib, Iraq: The Evasive Emotions of U.S. Exceptionalism chapter abstractChapter 2 analyzes liberal and conservative responses to the tortures against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The case examines the ways dominant stereotypes and feelings about "Arab terrorism" manifested in sanctioned expressions of sexualized racial violence in the U.S. military. Liberal frames of reception that expressed sympathy, shock, and shame generally continued to remain wedded to orientalist projections and the ideological fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism. Both liberal and conservative American publics expressed affective investments in notions of "justice" predicated on bodily punishment, incarceration and obliteration. The War on Terror extended the logics of domestic mass incarceration and U.S.-Mexico border militarization into the global arenas of the Middle East. The chapter considers how the Abu Ghraib tortures ruptured investments in U.S. exceptionalism and 'benevolent' U.S. imperialism, opening possibilities for ethical solidarities and affinities that challenge the expansion of U.S. militarism.
Part II: "Welfare Dependents" and "Illegal Aliens": The Emotional Economies of Social Wage Retrenchment chapter abstractPart II outlines the macro-political, economic and emotional processes that garnered public support for social wage divestment in the post-civil rights era. It outlines how political discourses, media representations, and institutional policies that worked together to popularize resentments and stigmas toward welfare recipients and undocumented immigrants. Colorblind, gendered and racially coded discourses and representations encouraged publics to invest in the ideological fantasy of economic self-reliance and to direct their anxieties about economic, demographic and cultural shifts toward poor Black people and Latino/a immigrants. Projecting these demographics as "taxpayer burdens" encouraged dominant majorities to invest in hostile privatism and defensive localism. Stereotypes about Black and Latina women's "hyper-fertility" and "sexual non-normativity" offered affective rewards to those invested in normative family ideals and sexuality. Such projections and emotional economies supported broader neoliberal privatization and divestment from public goods that worked against most American people's economic interests.
3New Orleans, LA: The Demolishing Emotions of Neoliberal Removal chapter abstractChapter 3 examines the emotional and property interests that led to the 2007 demolition of thousands of public housing units in New Orleans even though Hurricane Katrina had created a crisis in affordable housing. The circulation of racial stereotypes about Black "welfare dependence," "family and sexual deviance," and "criminality" amplified emotional economies that stigmatized and demonized impoverished people. Though liberals and conservatives in New Orleans expressed stereotypes and feelings about public housing differently, they shared affective attachments to white spatial, sexuality, familial, and property ideals. Both liberal and conservative public feelings resulted in housing policies that accelerated the organized abandonment of working and workless people in New Orleans and accelerated neoliberal privatization. Grassroots organizing challenged the paternalist and neoliberal logics that dominated discussions of spatial reconstruction in New Orleans through Africanist blues epistemologies that favored people over property.
4Escondido, CA: The Exclusionary Emotions of Nativist Movements chapter abstractChapter 4 interrogates a municipal ordinance in Escondido, California that sought to deny undocumented immigrants rental housing. It argues that nativist emotional economies encourage exclusionary measures and hostility toward Latino/a immigrants as a way to encourage Latino/a "self-deportation." Projecting Latino/a immigrants as "taxpayer burdens" that cause "overpopulation" in the U.S., nativist organizers reconfigure emotional stigmas attached to Black "welfare dependence" and "hyper-fertility" to Latino/a immigrants. The anti-Latino/a housing ordinances in Escondido and other locales were justified through color-blind arguments about "legality" as well as paleoconservative arguments about "mongrelization" and "Mexican reconquest." Mass pro-immigrant mobilizations in Escondido and across the nation asserted the significance of Latino/a immigrant labor and culture in the U.S. by foregrounding emotional economies that honored workers' dignity and human rights under the banner of "No One Is Illegal."