RACIST VIOLENCE AND THE PLAGUE OF INEQUITY
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux
currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at
McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
He is the author of more than 50 books including The Educational
Deficit and the War on Youth and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing. He was recently named one of
the century's 50 most significant contributors to the debate
on education.
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YOUR
COMMENTSAs a renewed Black Lives Matter uprising fills
the streets following a spate of high-profile police killings,
the state-sanctioned killing of Black people continues on other
fronts as well, including public health and economic injustice.
In addition to protesting the widespread killing, activists
have called attention to the systematic abandonment of Black
communities as a function of both white supremacy and neo-liberal
capitalism. While some mainstream voices have focused on condemning
the looting happening in the streets, activists have called
attention to the much larger-scale looting perpetrated by casino
capitalism against marginalized communities.
At
this historic moment, the pandemic of racist violence cannot
be separated from the violence imposed by neo-liberal capitalism
and the pandemic of racial inequality. The walls and cement
barriers now surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump’s
White House signify both the infectious ruthlessness that produces
police violence at home and abroad, and the war waged on those
populations viewed as disposable. The paramilitary forces that
attacked peaceful demonstrators in the streets are inextricably
related to those economic forces driving a hyper-capitalism
and the politics of racial sorting, spiralling poverty and soaring
inequality. These rapacious economic structures extend from
a predatory financial sector to big corporations that produce
massive misery, engage in unchecked exploitation, plunder the
public sector, and concentrate wealth and power in the hands
of a ruling elite.
As
engaged citizens, it is crucial to examine how we address inequality
as an object of critique in an age of precarity, uncertainty
and the current pandemic crisis. This is especially true at
a time when a growing number of authoritarian regimes around
the globe replace thoughtful dialogue and critical engagement
with the suppression of dissent and a culture of forgetting.
How do we situate our analysis of racism as part of a broader
discourse and mode of analysis that interrogates the promises,
ideals, and claims of a substantive democracy? How do we fight
against iniquitous relations of power and wealth that empty
power of its emancipatory possibilities, and as Hannah Arendt
has argued, “makes most people superfluous as human beings?”
How might we understand how a society driven by the accumulation
of capital at any costs, with its appropriation of market-based
values, regressive notions of freedom and agency, uses language
to infiltrate daily life? How does a pandemic pedagogy produce
identities defined by market values, and normalize a notion
of responsibility that convinces people that whatever problems
they face they have no one to blame but themselves? Repeated
endlessly on right-wing media platforms, the underlying conditions
that disproportionately produce chronic illness among poor people
of colour disappear among a public distracted, if not persuaded,
by a pandemic pedagogy that celebrates unchecked self-interest,
disdains social responsibility, and turns away from the reality
of a society with deep-seated institutional rot.
How
might these global demonstrations against police violence and
unchecked racism transition from a pedagogical moment and collective
outburst of political and moral outrage to a progressive international
movement that is well organized and unified? Such a movement
must build solidarity among different groups, imagine new forms
of social life, make the impossible possible, and produce a
democratic socialist project in defence of equality, social
justice, and popular sovereignty. The racial, class, ecological,
and public health crisis facing the globe can only be understood
as part of a comprehensive crisis of democracy, if not the very
meaning of politics itself.
Immediate
solutions such as defunding the police and improving community
services are important, but they do not deal with the larger
issue of eliminating a market driven economic system structured
in massive racial and economic inequalities. David Harvey is
right in arguing that the “immediate task is nothing more
nor less than the self-conscious construction of a new political
framework for approaching the question of inequality (and racism),
through a deep and profound critique of our economic and social
system.” This is a crisis in which different threads of
oppression must be understood as part of the general crisis
of capitalism. The various protests now evolving internationally
at the popular level offer the promise of new global movements
for the struggle for popular sovereignty and economic, racial,
and social justice. In the current moment, democracy may be
under a severe threat and appear frighteningly vulnerable, but
with young people and others rising up across the globe —
inspired, energized and marching in the streets — the
future of a radical democracy is waiting to breathe again.
By
Henry Giroux:
Covid
and our Embattled Society
Trump
and the Corona Death Waltz
Neoliberal
Fascism
The
Terror Unforseen
Interview
of H.A.Giroux
The
Normalization of Fascism
The
Public Intellectual II
Bertrand
Russell: Public Intellectual
Thinking
Dangerously in Dark Times
Democracy
in Exile
Authoritarianism
in America
Violence:
US Favourite Pastime
Losing
in Trump's America
In
Dark Times Teachers Matter
The
Age of Civic Illiteracy
Exile
and Disruption in the Academy
What
Society Produces a Donald Trump
From
School to the Prison Pipeline
Orwell
& Huxely
American
Sniper and Hollywood Heroism
Selfie Culture
The
Age of Disposability
In
the Shadow of the Atomic Bomb
Killing
Machines and the Madness of the Military
The
Age of Neoliberal Cruelty
The
Politics of the Deep State
Challenging
Casino Capitalism
Crisis
in Democracy
America's
Descent into Madness
