"On Melancholia and White Pain" | CAS Inquire

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Casey Kelly's talk "On Melancholia and White Pain" on October 5 for the CAS Inquire series "Pain and Pleasure".

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[00:00:04.480]Well, good evening, everyone.
[00:00:08.480]My name is Dr. June Griffin, I'm associate dean
[00:00:11.480]for undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences,
[00:00:14.600]and I had the good fortune of of helping to create this,
[00:00:18.720]the College of Arts and Sciences CAS Inquire.
[00:00:21.760]Thank you all for coming tonight in person and via Zoom,
[00:00:24.960]just to attend the second installment of this year's Inquire lecture series.
[00:00:29.720]Pleasure and Pain.
[00:00:31.680]Although the topic for this series was chosen before the global pandemic,
[00:00:35.560]it's particularly apt given the changes to our lives these past 18 months.
[00:00:40.320]The Inquire program is structured around these lectures allowing students,
[00:00:43.960]faculty, staff and the wider public the opportunity to investigate
[00:00:48.120]how we as individuals and a society understand the concepts of pain
[00:00:53.360]and pleasure and how their perceptions shape human behavior.
[00:00:58.160]Additionally, it creates an opportunity to learn about the fascinating research
[00:01:01.960]faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences are conducting and enables
[00:01:06.160]students to see the various disciplinary approaches to the study of the topic,
[00:01:10.160]as well as the necessity of multi trans and interdisciplinary insights
[00:01:14.800]into in order to truly understand human actions.
[00:01:19.560]We're distinctive set of intellectually curious, inquiring students,
[00:01:23.800]inquire scholars the program, and that this program offers
[00:01:27.560]the chance to foster a meaningful academic engagement with the topic,
[00:01:31.560]their discussions with lecture faculty and yearlong research projects.
[00:01:35.640]They're aided along the way by peer advisers.
[00:01:38.760]Will the scholars and pure leaders please stand?
[00:01:46.120]Please join me in thanking these students
[00:01:49.160]for their participation in the program.
[00:01:57.280]Tonight's lecture by Dr Casey Ryan Kelly,
[00:01:59.720]professor of rhetoric
[00:02:00.680]and public culture in the Department of Communication Studies, explores
[00:02:04.480]how theories of pain and melancholia help explain rhetoric's of white victimhood,
[00:02:09.320]which rose to public consciousness
[00:02:10.880]during the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
[00:02:14.640]Dr. Kelly is the author of several books, including A Cop, Apocalypse Man
[00:02:19.120]The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood.
[00:02:23.000]After his talk, Dr.
[00:02:24.400]Kelly will take questions from the audience.
[00:02:26.440]Please raise your hand and Sammy will help one of our peer leaders in the program.
[00:02:31.200]We'll bring a microphone.
[00:02:32.680]If you're joining us via Zoom, you can submit your questions via chat
[00:02:36.040]and they'll be asked on your behalf. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Kelly.
[00:02:58.840]Before I begin, I would like to thank June Griffin,
[00:03:02.160]Taylor Livingston and the College of Arts
[00:03:04.080]and Sciences for the opportunity to be part of this lecture series.
[00:03:08.000]I'm honored to be able to present my work here on a very difficult subject
[00:03:12.440]whose pain matters as a communication scholar.
[00:03:16.120]I come to this question from the perspective that words
[00:03:18.520]and symbols that we use publicly to deliberate about whose pain
[00:03:22.560]and suffering matter shapes how we remediate and address that pain.
[00:03:27.480]Not only how it shapes the lives that are given priority in a culture,
[00:03:30.520]but more centrally whose lives register as lives.
[00:03:34.640]In this talk, I wish to explore the rhetoric of pain or public
[00:03:38.040]discourse and symbolic antagonism over whose pain and suffering
[00:03:42.720]makes them worthy of attention, resources and voice.
[00:03:47.360]I will argue that pain is political and ideological,
[00:03:51.320]meaning that we draw from preexisting cultural and historical frameworks
[00:03:55.000]to validate or deny the existence of another's pain.
[00:03:59.720]As a scholar who studies the rhetoric of white masculinity, particularly
[00:04:03.040]the politics of white victimhood that has intensified over the past decade,
[00:04:07.200]I have become particularly concerned with public narratives
[00:04:10.040]about the pain of the quote unquote white working class,
[00:04:13.520]which has become the dominant framework to understand the tectonic shifts
[00:04:16.680]in national politics following the 2016 election.
[00:04:20.320]Today, I am concerned with how President Trump's 2016 electoral victory prompted
[00:04:26.160]a series of journalistic inquiries into the pain of white rustbelt voters,
[00:04:32.320]imploring readers to hear their cries for help.
[00:04:35.800]Profiles of, quote unquote, Trump country suggested that declining physical health
[00:04:40.280]and economic anxiety explained Trump's success more so than racism or xenophobia.
[00:04:46.080]This narrative suggested
[00:04:47.160]that the 2016 election was a contest over whose pain matters.
[00:04:51.240]The abandoned white working class of rural America,
[00:04:54.000]or the pain of structural and systemic racism
[00:04:56.640]inflicted on the bodies and souls of people of color.
[00:04:59.960]It is not my goal to be
[00:05:01.200]clear to stage a contest between whose pain matters more,
[00:05:05.040]but instead to suggest that the game is already rigged in so far as we live
[00:05:08.800]in a culture that is overly sensitive to the pain of some subjects.
[00:05:12.720]So my objective is to explain the cultural frameworks we draw
[00:05:15.840]from when we contrast pain,
[00:05:18.280]historical frameworks drawn from the heart of philosophies of individualism,
[00:05:22.160]rights, the social contract and theories of humanism.
[00:05:26.240]Pain, I argue, played a central role in the 2016 election.
[00:05:29.800]There's no doubt about that.
[00:05:31.680]The populist rhetoric of the Trump campaign started with the premise
[00:05:34.440]that white Americans, white
[00:05:35.760]men in particular, were victims of social and economic changes.
[00:05:39.520]Everything from outsourcing to political correctness
[00:05:42.240]were responsible for their organized dispossession.
[00:05:45.960]They were being laughed at and humiliated by immigrants, foreigners,
[00:05:49.920]Democrats, feminists, black lives matter,
[00:05:52.800]globalists, the press and, yes, even fellow Republicans.
[00:05:56.960]The Trump campaign tapped into a boiling cauldron
[00:05:59.160]of rage and resentment and promised a nostalgic return to better days.
[00:06:03.960]Who could want more?
[00:06:05.640]Hence, I am concerned with pain in two senses, one physical pain,
[00:06:09.880]the kind of pain that wears on the bodies of the beleaguered and the forgotten,
[00:06:13.920]and also to psychological pain, which I would characterize as melancholia.
[00:06:18.760]A term I explain in a moment that refers to the compulsive
[00:06:21.600]returning to the scene of past traumas, but without adequately mourning them.
[00:06:26.640]Ultimately, the framing of the 2016 election as a call to heal
[00:06:30.040]the pain of the white working class reflects a racial prioritization of pain
[00:06:34.560]that devalues the suffering experienced by people of color
[00:06:37.840]and draws from cultural frameworks of the human
[00:06:40.720]that trace their roots back to American slavery.
[00:06:43.560]I conclude that for all the rhetoric about helping remediate
[00:06:47.080]the pain of white working class individuals.
[00:06:50.720]Relatively little has been done to actually improve their lives.
[00:06:54.040]Perhaps another rhetoric is necessary.
[00:06:59.320]To begin, allow me to set
[00:07:00.400]the stage of the contest of pain by returning to you
[00:07:03.680]to those sobering moments in The Hangover after the 2016 election.
[00:07:08.440]Donald J. Trump's seemingly improbable electoral victory
[00:07:11.520]in 2016 prompted the national press to travel to Rust Country counties
[00:07:16.480]to make sense of why the white working class had abandoned
[00:07:18.720]the Democratic Party is often called Trump Safaris.
[00:07:22.480]A flurry of postmortem dispatches to trump country spotlighted the pain
[00:07:26.080]and anxiety of white working class voters and implored their urban counterparts
[00:07:30.480]to suspend judgment and listen to their cries for help.
[00:07:34.200]Some journalists argued that racist and xenophobic
[00:07:37.120]were actually demeaning epithets that further progress
[00:07:40.760]SMALL-TOWN Americans who had become uniquely victimized by automation,
[00:07:45.000]outsourcing, overregulation and the service economy.
[00:07:49.080]Stories were littered with references to J.D.
[00:07:51.040]Vance's Hillbilly Elegy as a kind of prescient text that Intesa
[00:07:55.000]anticipated the barbaric yaap of the white rural underclass.
[00:07:58.960]Like anthropologists studying the rituals of remote cultures,
[00:08:02.400]the press crafted portraits of white working class voters as misunderstood,
[00:08:06.440]anxious and no longer complacent to suffer in silence.
[00:08:11.080]As Michael Lerner penned in The New York Times,
[00:08:13.800]the left needs to stop ignoring inner pain and fear.
[00:08:17.360]The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr.
[00:08:20.280]Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in
[00:08:24.040]a majority of Americans.
[00:08:26.200]If the left could abandon all its shaming,
[00:08:28.200]it could rebuild its political base by helping Americans see that
[00:08:31.200]much of people's suffering is rooted in the hidden injuries of class
[00:08:34.560]and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.
[00:08:39.440]These post-election reports corroborated the narrative that Trump understood
[00:08:42.800]the political establishment's indifference to the white working class.
[00:08:46.680]Compassionate profiles of white Trump voters asserted that class anxiety
[00:08:50.360]provided a more nuanced explanation of rural voting behavior
[00:08:53.880]than racial resentment.
[00:08:57.960]Journalistic analyzes of despair in Trump country
[00:09:00.480]are unified in their effort to comprehend the lived pain of white Americans.
[00:09:04.560]In an article entitled The Science of White Working
[00:09:07.280]Class Pain in Salon dot com, one author argues,
[00:09:11.040]quote, In attempt to understanding the forces that led to the election
[00:09:14.120]of Donald Trump Trump, it is vital to understand
[00:09:17.120]the world of pain in which many white working class Americans live.
[00:09:20.520]It is a world in which people are not proud of their jobs,
[00:09:22.840]not proud of their house, not proud of their future
[00:09:25.080]that they see for their children.
[00:09:26.760]As relatives of mine from Scranton put it, the authors, not mine a world.
[00:09:31.520]The drug makers continue to saturate with opiates, even as overdoses surge.
[00:09:36.320]This is a world that too many Americans do not seem to be interested
[00:09:39.640]in understanding and quote.
[00:09:42.160]The author argued that the industrialization and outsourcing
[00:09:45.240]created a culture of despair in which dwindling economic opportunities
[00:09:49.240]left the white working class with a sense of hopelessness about their future.
[00:09:53.120]He characterized the white working class as quote unquote, traumatized,
[00:09:56.520]even suggesting that they were victims
[00:09:58.040]of intergenerational grief, similar to people of color wrote tomorrow.
[00:10:02.160]The author lamented that simply saying
[00:10:04.240]that, quote, Trump won because of racism misses the bigger point.
[00:10:07.320]Instead of shaming Trump supporters for their potentially racist investments
[00:10:10.320]in their class status.
[00:10:11.440]Readers should feel their pain.
[00:10:17.720]In her recent study on the decline of the US working class, Jennifer M.
[00:10:22.040]Silva observes that the 2016 election was ostensibly a contest over
[00:10:26.040]pain management, noting that it was,
[00:10:28.200]quote, waged over the question of precisely who counts as valid
[00:10:32.200]and in need of government redress versus whose pain should be discarded
[00:10:35.400]as fraudulent and undeserving of public intervention.
[00:10:38.760]If it is the case, then that the pain of the white
[00:10:41.480]working class has been trivialized,
[00:10:43.160]then these accounts suggest that their suffering diminishes
[00:10:46.040]their culpability for racism and entitles them to the moral authority
[00:10:49.440]that one derives of being a victim.
[00:10:51.920]But to understand whose pain counts,
[00:10:53.960]we must first account for the publicly available frameworks
[00:10:56.680]that enable individuals to comprehend the pain of others.
[00:11:00.600]While the experience of pain is physical, emotional and psychological.
[00:11:05.560]How we make sense of pain is rhetorical.
[00:11:09.480]In a book, The Story of Pain, Joanna
[00:11:11.720]Bourke argues the pain is neither self-evidence nor subjective.
[00:11:15.680]Done badly, she explains.
[00:11:17.280]Attempting to read pain assumes
[00:11:19.040]that pain can be read transparently from various texts.
[00:11:22.880]The sensory experience of pain may be part of the human condition.
[00:11:26.080]But by no means does this make pain universally intelligible.
[00:11:29.600]Pain constitutes a public event when the subjective experiences
[00:11:33.560]of the body experiencing physical or psychological discomfort
[00:11:37.880]is translated into language and can therefore be named Olaine.
[00:11:41.880]Skari observes that
[00:11:43.040]because pain often has a language shattering effect on the body.
[00:11:46.920]It is most often constructed by people who empathize with the body in pain.
[00:11:51.520]But to acknowledge, represent or deliberate about a body in pain
[00:11:55.040]presupposes the belief in the ascensions or the aliveness of the subject.
[00:11:59.680]Contrary to pleas to heed white working class suffering, white pain
[00:12:03.400]already occupies a privileged place in our schemas of grief ability.
[00:12:12.400]Despite at times being
[00:12:13.840]private and ineffable, pain is an intersubjective experience.
[00:12:18.520]The International Association
[00:12:19.920]for the Study of Pain defines pain as an unpleasant sensory
[00:12:23.440]or emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage.
[00:12:28.560]However, clinical definitions are limited to the interiority of signaler
[00:12:31.880]responses between damaging stimuli and sensory neurons.
[00:12:35.960]The experience of pain is private, but only insofar as the body
[00:12:39.040]has a limited capacity to translate aspects into language.
[00:12:44.200]Sometimes pain is legible as a narrative representation or melodrama.
[00:12:48.880]Other times, pain enters public life as a scream.
[00:12:52.160]Yet even as a pre linguistic form, the expression of pain is social
[00:12:56.240]because it demands acknowledgment by others to recognize the body,
[00:13:00.080]and pain is to extend to another what communication scholar Michael J.
[00:13:03.280]Hyde refers to as the life giving gift of acknowledgment, an act that, quote,
[00:13:07.480]creates and maintains the moral ecology of human fraternity, unquote.
[00:13:12.200]Awareness of one's suffering evinces
[00:13:15.080]their sentience, which in turn demands compassion.
[00:13:19.280]As Elaine Skouris notes again, quote, The story of physical pain
[00:13:22.760]becomes as well as a story about the expansive nature of human sentience
[00:13:27.120], the felt fact of aliveness that is often surely happy,
[00:13:30.880]just as the story of expressing
[00:13:32.320]physical pain eventually opens into a wider frame of invention, unquote.
[00:13:37.520]While acknowledgment of the body
[00:13:38.920]in pain extends to it, the dignity of personhood
[00:13:42.760]acknowledgment also presupposes the humanity or aliveness of the subject.
[00:13:49.600]As scholars of race have argued, the history of American slavery, racialized,
[00:13:54.080]the concept of personhood and consequently the experience of pain in U.S.
[00:13:58.040]public culture in assembling a vision of blackness as diminished capacity
[00:14:02.320]for sentience and immunity to the institution of slavery disowned
[00:14:06.680]any relationship between blackness and humanness,
[00:14:09.920]according to African-American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman.
[00:14:13.240]The notion that the slave was infantile subservience, Num.
[00:14:16.720]content or indifferent
[00:14:18.320]to pain, excluded blackness from enlightenment, concepts of personhood
[00:14:22.520]in contrast to the slave, the white possessive individual
[00:14:25.840]of Euro American philosophy
[00:14:27.480]was thought to own an innate capacity for harnessing their labor power
[00:14:31.080]under conditions of accountability, self-control and freedom.
[00:14:35.240]As this contrast suggests, philosophical conceptions of personhood
[00:14:38.320]were neither equipped to address black trauma
[00:14:40.680]nor even conceive of black persons as subjects.
[00:14:43.560]Thus, the politics of pain are inextricably sutured
[00:14:46.680]to racialized conceptions of personhood that organize how
[00:14:49.480]we collectively adjudicate about whose pain matters.
[00:14:55.640]The concept of sentient personhood has been employed throughout American history
[00:14:59.320]to divide humanity into racial subspecies across the sliding biological continuum.
[00:15:04.880]The body in pain is forced to speak through an implicitly racialized schema
[00:15:09.280]that is more sensitive to the suffering of fully actualized human subjects
[00:15:13.000]or white subjects.
[00:15:14.040]In this case, though, Paich, the schema
[00:15:17.920]makes itself visible at life and death moments,
[00:15:20.400]just as when white police officers exhibit cruel indifference
[00:15:23.360]toward the haunting last words of Eric Garner and George Floyd.
[00:15:27.160]I can't breathe conceptually.
[00:15:29.680]This scheme illustrates the fundamental operation of racism is to organize
[00:15:33.440]and designated some bodies for care and others for disposability .
[00:15:38.440]As Jasper Poor observes, social pariahs, so-called
[00:15:42.760]degraded objects, racialized disabled bodies,
[00:15:45.760]those designated as lazy, criminal and burdensome, are a counterpart
[00:15:49.600]to those debilitated bodies that are elevated as objects of care,
[00:15:53.600]meaning that they are targeted
[00:15:54.800]for rehabilitation into the realm of productive citizenship.
[00:15:58.960]The debilitated white working class then transforms into an object of care
[00:16:03.120]insofar as it is named as deserving of welfare and attention
[00:16:06.960]from the very Bille political apparatus that produces the conditions
[00:16:10.440]of their debilitation.
[00:16:12.440]Although all precarious populations are open to being debilitated,
[00:16:16.200]the designation of populations as pariahs on the one hand or objects of care
[00:16:20.440]on the other orchestrates the policing and exploitation of difference,
[00:16:24.240]as if this split
[00:16:25.120]somehow reflected the kind of ontological or biological continuum of humanness.
[00:16:30.480]Put another way racism operates through logics
[00:16:33.000]of disposability whereby the privileges afforded to the category of human
[00:16:36.840]are fortified to the exclusion and sacrifice of others.
[00:16:40.400]As Fred Moten summarizes, quote, to be figured as the exemplary human
[00:16:44.760]and is the very opening through which access to the human is given
[00:16:48.120]is perhaps the greatest index of racism within the logics of disposability.
[00:16:52.680]Pain expressed by pariahs is both ideologically and ontologically. No.
[00:17:01.400]I contend that the rhetoric of pain necessarily draws
[00:17:03.920]from these cultural frameworks that might namely of personhood.
[00:17:08.120]And ENSO have inscribed the black body with that.
[00:17:11.720]Consider, for instance, how racism becomes particularly conspicuous
[00:17:15.120]in medical professionals treatment of pain.
[00:17:17.400]In 2016, a study published by the Proceedings
[00:17:20.040]of the National Academy of Sciences researchers found that reports of pain
[00:17:23.880]from black patients were significantly taken less significantly
[00:17:27.720]than the treatment received for their white counterparts.
[00:17:31.400]The study also found that disparities there disparities in both treatment
[00:17:34.760]and pain management,
[00:17:36.040]and that they were grounded in the belief that, quote
[00:17:37.800], the black body is biologically different and in many cases
[00:17:40.320]stronger than the white body, unquote.
[00:17:42.880]They reported that physicians adhere to myths derived from scientific racism,
[00:17:47.520]including that the black body has thicker skin.
[00:17:50.960]Their blood coagulates more quickly.
[00:17:53.040]They have a higher heat tolerance.
[00:17:56.760]All of that which have been derived from the history of biological racism,
[00:18:00.840]although slavery came to its formal end, its legacies live on in the rhetorical
[00:18:05.120]afterlife of inferential or common sense racism or racism that we don't recognize
[00:18:10.600]when it appears the racial disparity in pain
[00:18:13.360]management is a byproduct of this vast ideological reservoir
[00:18:16.600]of discourses that normalized racist beliefs in innate biological difference,
[00:18:20.840]common sense racism is no less malignant than overt racism.
[00:18:24.040]But it is, however, more difficult to identify
[00:18:27.800]the rhetorical construction of pain than is fraught with a series
[00:18:30.760]of underlying racist assumptions concerning the differential and innate
[00:18:34.080]capacities of bodies to experience pain as a public event.
[00:18:37.640]The body in pain is subject
[00:18:38.920]to a racialized hierarchy of appreciation, identification and sympathy.
[00:18:43.680]The racial disparities and pain acknowledgment reflect more broadly
[00:18:46.560]the historical racial exclusion of black subjects from the concept of personhood.
[00:18:50.800]The public acknowledgment of a group's pain presupposes
[00:18:53.800]that those subjects possess both consciousness and sentience.
[00:18:57.520]Under modern liberalism, these are the preconditions
[00:19:00.200]for the extension of natural rights
[00:19:02.120]and consequently membership in the category of human.
[00:19:05.640]Understanding expressions of pain from within this historical racial schema
[00:19:10.160]illustrates how narrations of the decline of the white working class
[00:19:13.520]include the pain inflicted throughout the history of white supremacy
[00:19:17.320]and disavows the political inertia of racism.
[00:19:20.040]There are a few frameworks publicly available for white publics to comprehend
[00:19:23.200]pain, and such frameworks are fraught by a racialized conception of personhood.
[00:19:30.400]What is white paint?
[00:19:33.000]Indeed. I want to acknowledge that white people do suffer
[00:19:36.240]and their pain does is deserving of acknowledgment.
[00:19:39.920]That's not at all relevant to my argument here. Rather, it is how it is.
[00:19:43.280]We privilege these pains publicly and how we put them in context with one another.
[00:19:48.200]In conversations about race and racism,
[00:19:50.640]the emotional and psychological sensitivity of white communities tends
[00:19:54.120]to predominate over the lived pain of people of color.
[00:19:57.200]This is a privilege.
[00:19:58.320]However, it is not necessarily beneficial to whites because it can be leveraged
[00:20:02.320]by populist movements to further entrench their own class exploitation.
[00:20:06.240]White fragility marks a public culture that is sensitive to the pain of whites
[00:20:10.520]when they encounter the same everyday hardships of people of color
[00:20:13.960]as objects of care.
[00:20:15.640]The struggle of the white working class is elevated
[00:20:18.880]by a sense that they have been uniquely marginalized under the late capitalism.
[00:20:22.720]White pain then denotes a hypersensitivity to white precarity, following
[00:20:26.960]what is really an uncommon period of economic prosperity, spanning
[00:20:30.080]from the end of World War Two to the beginning of the 1980s.
[00:20:33.760]For those who experienced this fleeting moment of upward mobility,
[00:20:36.840]there is a sense that they have been robbed of their personal dignity.
[00:20:40.520]Meanwhile, the Trump campaign successfully scapegoated foreigners
[00:20:43.280]and people of color for the austerity of neoliberal economic policies.
[00:20:47.400]And as I recently argued, President Trump's perpetual recirculation
[00:20:51.160]and rumination on the pain and suffering of his electorate
[00:20:54.160]was necessary to sustain the affect of intensity of being aggrieved.
[00:20:58.600]Yet for all the grievances lodged in their name and all the nostalgia
[00:21:02.240]for better days as populism actually made, anyone lives better.
[00:21:07.480]I argue that part of the answer
[00:21:10.560]goes to a peculiar psychoanalytical concept derived from the work of Sigmund
[00:21:14.240]Freud melancholy, Freud characterized Melancholia as a compulsive revisiting,
[00:21:19.600]but without adequately mourning a past loss or traumatic event.
[00:21:23.480]Freud observes in World War I, World War One soldiers, for instance,
[00:21:26.840]that they experience battlefield traumas
[00:21:28.560]not as something that happened in the past,
[00:21:30.720]but something that was happening to them in the present melancholia.
[00:21:35.000]The subject cannot move forward because they are attached to their trauma.
[00:21:38.800]Repeating it over and over again is the basis of their identity.
[00:21:42.560]Culturally speaking, Melancholia appears
[00:21:45.160]is a longing for a time when we were supposedly whole before.
[00:21:48.920]We are traumatized by dizzying social and cultural changes.
[00:21:53.080]We often ruminate on losses, traumas or pains that we cannot seem to get over.
[00:21:58.360]We cannot seem to overcome.
[00:22:00.440]Make America Great Again is a perfect encapsulation of melancholia.
[00:22:04.160]In the past, we were whole and complete traumatic changes
[00:22:07.080]rearrange the social order victimizing the innocent.
[00:22:10.280]And we must continually return to
[00:22:11.560]this wound as the basis for involvement in a political project.
[00:22:15.320]We compulsively repeat the wound so that we can stage an encounter
[00:22:18.960]with the object that we lost.
[00:22:20.480]You name it. The 1950s family, the 1980s economy, whatever it might be.
[00:22:26.280]Make America great again is an attempt to retrieve a lost object, something
[00:22:29.680]we cannot actually attain made possible by ruminating on the nation's wounds.
[00:22:35.400]The trick is we were never actually whole,
[00:22:37.880]and the past is merely an idealized space for us to play out our fantasy.
[00:22:42.480]This becomes important when we understand the racial scripts that govern
[00:22:45.560]the meaning and purpose of the 2016 election, whose wounds matter more.
[00:22:50.120]Indeed, I suggest that this is the wrong question to ask, but it is nonetheless
[00:22:53.520]shaped the narrative in such a way that remediating black pain is often
[00:22:57.400]constructed as mutually exclusive with the remediation of white melancholia,
[00:23:01.920]that longing for the fantasy of unending prosperity
[00:23:04.560]only experienced by a very limited few.
[00:23:08.600]In the remainder of my talk, I want to examine
[00:23:11.040]some of the racial assumptions
[00:23:12.240]that underline the prioritization of white working class pain
[00:23:15.480]in journalistic portrayals of, quote unquote Trump country.
[00:23:18.760]I selected a series of long form analysis, opinions and retrospective was published
[00:23:22.760]during the 2016 election and nationally syndicated news outlets and magazines
[00:23:27.080]that spotlighted the travails of Trump's white electorate.
[00:23:31.160]This analysis illustrates the rhetorical entailment of a historical racial schema
[00:23:36.280]in which the recency of white precarity takes precedence
[00:23:39.080]over the historical racial injuries suffered by people of color.
[00:23:42.560]The reports do humanize the white working class pain, which is the most important,
[00:23:47.440]but they do so by minimizing the racist consequences of electoral decision
[00:23:51.440]making and its consequences for people of color,
[00:23:53.760]particularly people of color in the working class.
[00:23:57.240]Many of these articles dismiss racism as if it were a red herring that obscures
[00:24:01.320]the underlying economic anxiety that accounts for white voting behavior.
[00:24:05.720]These stories discount the loss of white supremacy is part
[00:24:08.880]of the narrative of white victimhood.
[00:24:10.320]Insofar as white upper upward mobility has always been underwritten
[00:24:14.400]by structural racism and the exploitation of people of color.
[00:24:19.920]Journalistic analysis of the 2016
[00:24:21.720]election bear witness to President Trump's tale of American carnage
[00:24:25.800]in the American heartland, quote, rusted out factories scattered
[00:24:29.360]like tombstones across the great landscape of our nation and quote.
[00:24:33.480]Writing for The Washington Examiner, examiner
[00:24:36.120]Gabriel Rossman testified that, quote, The anguish
[00:24:39.560]white working class elected President Trump, whose inaugural address
[00:24:43.040]heavily emphasized Rust Belt despair and well
[00:24:46.280]citing in case and Angus Deaton sociological study Depths of Despair,
[00:24:50.840]a book that details the decline in white working class life expectancy.
[00:24:54.280]Rossman observed, quote, that the arc of the white working class
[00:24:57.800]fade over the last two decades is long,
[00:25:00.720]but it bends towards nihilism and an early great.
[00:25:04.240]This and similar grim pronouncements placed white
[00:25:06.280]working class pain at the center of Trump's electoral narrative.
[00:25:09.360]Simply put, white voters, quote, report more pain.
[00:25:12.640]Working class whites are not only dying more than college
[00:25:15.480]educated whites, they are aling more.
[00:25:18.760]In this narrative, the residents of Trump Country live in a world of pain.
[00:25:22.360]Their bodies ache from hard labor exposure to industrial pollutants,
[00:25:26.280]poor diets and lack of health care.
[00:25:29.160]Their minds are weary with the grief of witnessing jobs disappear
[00:25:32.760]and their hometowns atrophy,
[00:25:35.520]despair and hopelessness have driven them to opioids, alcohol and suicide.
[00:25:40.200]Their broken bodies are stand ins for the disillusion of the American dream.
[00:25:45.400]They are dying depths of despair.
[00:25:47.840]Reports dubbed this constituency, the so-called OXE electorate,
[00:25:52.160]a once prosperous demographic, now awash in pain
[00:25:56.000]and under the influence of powerful narcotics.
[00:26:01.040]Although the demographic data is undeniably bleak,
[00:26:04.000]Trump country exposes present depths of despair, as in a context
[00:26:07.440]the pince empathy towards white working class suffering against criticism
[00:26:11.600]of their adherence or complicity with Trump President Trump's racism.
[00:26:16.680]At best, these reports suggest an analysis of white and black paint
[00:26:19.560]are mutually exclusive analyzes of the Trump voters.
[00:26:22.640]Physical maladies ultimately depoliticize race relations
[00:26:26.200]by supplanting structural analysis of racialized class interests
[00:26:29.800]with an ethic of feeling
[00:26:31.480]that prioritize the comprehension of the white body and paint.
[00:26:34.960]As one reporter puts it, quote, Some can't find enough bad words
[00:26:38.560]in the dictionary to hurl at struggling white voters racist, xenophobic, sexist.
[00:26:42.600]But racial concerns aside, this is a moment not to judge, but to listen.
[00:26:47.280]This framing suggests that accusations of racism should be understood
[00:26:50.320]as somehow commensurate with the actual experience of anti black
[00:26:53.200]racism in terms of self other dialectics.
[00:26:56.560]This approach suggested here also entails that readers
[00:26:59.520]view racial considerations through white working class eyes.
[00:27:03.080]To be sure, Trump's election had consequences for the lived pain
[00:27:05.800]of all racial demographics that constitute the work the working class.
[00:27:09.920]If the focus on white paint extracts those class interests from the contentious
[00:27:13.600]politics of racism, insulating the white body and pain from racial culpability.
[00:27:18.960]For instance, one such retrospective published in The Atlantic asked, quote,
[00:27:22.720]So why are white Americans in downwardly mobile areas feeling a despair
[00:27:27.200]that appears to be a driving stark increase in substance abuse and suicide?
[00:27:32.680]The author notes that while they have encountered,
[00:27:35.160]quote, racial anxiety and antagonism, for sure,
[00:27:38.200]it is because things were much better in an earlier time.
[00:27:41.400]And no future awaits in places that have been left behind by Polish
[00:27:45.120]people in gleaming cities, unquote.
[00:27:48.480]The real reason that the Rust Belt adores President Trump is
[00:27:52.200]because of the, quote, demoralizing effect of decay
[00:27:56.120]that has produced a legitimate, quote, bitterness and primal scorn.
[00:28:00.040]These stories reframed
[00:28:01.160]Trump's racial appeal as merely sympathy for the pain of the white worker
[00:28:05.040]who has been historically excluded from conversations about victimization.
[00:28:08.920]Here, audiences are invited to sympathize with precarious white voters
[00:28:12.760]because they have been denied the class and racial future that they were promised.
[00:28:18.040]In another sense, these reports exonerate white racism by suggesting
[00:28:21.160]the Trump country voted under the influence of pain and painkillers.
[00:28:25.680]Some journalists asserted that Trump's election was merely the byproduct
[00:28:28.440]of an unattended public health
[00:28:29.800]crisis promulgated by the greed of corporate America.
[00:28:33.240]Moreover, these stories place voter motivations beyond scrutiny
[00:28:36.680]by foregrounding the constraining nature of pain, despair and addiction.
[00:28:41.680]Thought of this way, Trump not only identified with white voters
[00:28:44.720]pain, he archetypes them much in the same way that opioids
[00:28:48.600]activate receptors on nerve cells.
[00:28:51.640]Writing in The New Yorker, George Packer suggested, quote, These regions of white
[00:28:55.240]working class pain tend to be areas where Trump enjoys strong support.
[00:28:59.120]These Americans know
[00:29:00.160]that they're being left behind by the economy and by the culture.
[00:29:03.520]They sense the indifference or disdain of the winners of the prosperous coasts
[00:29:07.640]and the innovative cities. And it is reciprocated.
[00:29:11.000]Thus, he concludes, quote, Trump sense the rage
[00:29:13.360]that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.
[00:29:17.200]Note here that pain is not simply an ancillary effect of the industrialization,
[00:29:22.280]but a purposeful and well orchestrated abandonment of white America.
[00:29:26.320]The constraints that naturally inhibits their judgment.
[00:29:30.800]Other journalists suggested the pain remediation
[00:29:33.280]is a kind of colourblind, interest based politics.
[00:29:36.640]Such reports amplified correlative of arguments about the rates
[00:29:39.200]of opioid addiction and Trump's support, as seen in this graphic here.
[00:29:43.240]For instance, Harrison Jacobs characterized Trump's election
[00:29:46.120]as the revenge of the quote unquote, oxe
[00:29:47.880]electorate abbreviation for the narcotic painkiller OxyContin.
[00:29:52.320]Noting that, quote, obesity, heavy drinking and physical activity
[00:29:55.520]was the most accurate predictor of Trump's outperformance of Romney.
[00:29:59.520]Another author makes a similar claim more forcefully, quote, Trump
[00:30:02.880]also won the oxybate stand, a study at the Pennsylvania State University
[00:30:07.000]documented Trump's strong support in counties where opioid overdoses are rife.
[00:30:11.840]He quoted the study's author, Shannon Moaner,
[00:30:13.960]who argued, quote, It's depression, despair, distress and anxiety.
[00:30:17.880]That was the message that Trump was appealing to such a sense
[00:30:21.920]of hopelessness that it makes sense that they would vote for massive change.
[00:30:26.080]This correlative argument constructs a white public unified by their injuries
[00:30:29.960]and intoxicated by both opioids and Trump's appeal to their despair.
[00:30:34.800]According to the author, who could be blamed for simply
[00:30:38.000]seeking relief of their pain.
[00:30:40.600]In the author's words,
[00:30:41.520]CoHe Trump spoke in a matter that seemed designed to appeal
[00:30:45.760]to people in pain and gave that pain an immediate sense of context.
[00:30:50.280]He even likened Trump to a narcotic, noting he ease their pain
[00:30:54.520]if only momentarily like a pill.
[00:30:57.640]Indeed, these correlative arguments quickly morph
[00:31:00.160]into medicine, medicinal metaphors that recast Trump voters as bodies
[00:31:03.400]and pain, naturally seeking relief while depoliticizing Trump's appeals
[00:31:07.560]by characterizing his messages as a salve for their economic and physical maladies.
[00:31:13.360]At the very least, the addictive character of Trump's rhetoric discounts
[00:31:16.720]the racist appeals of nationalistic populism.
[00:31:21.000]The notion that there is a voting bloc under the influence of pain
[00:31:24.360]and painkillers suggests that Trump voters have a diminished capacity
[00:31:28.040]to appreciate the racial implications of their electoral politics.
[00:31:31.720]But what's particularly striking about these conflations, conflations
[00:31:35.160]and spurs correlations between chronic pain,
[00:31:37.720]economic dislocation, addiction and Trump's support
[00:31:41.160]is that since the inception of the war on drugs, politicians and the press
[00:31:44.680]have seldom represented drug use.
[00:31:46.280]And unemployment is anything other than moral failings, explaining the similarity
[00:31:50.480]between the opioid crisis and the crack cocaine epidemics of the 1980s.
[00:31:53.960]One journalist notes, quote,
[00:31:55.520]It is interesting that this crisis mostly hits white working, working
[00:31:58.840]class whites, just as the 1980s crack epidemic disproportionately
[00:32:02.800]hit working class blacks.
[00:32:04.400]But this mostly tells us that drug fads can be demographically specific.
[00:32:08.480]Occam's Razor suggests that the white working class is now dying
[00:32:12.040]of heroin and fentanyl overdoses because it first got hooked on OxyContin.
[00:32:17.240]What the report fails to note, however, is that the war on drugs
[00:32:21.120]demonize black crack cocaine users as monstrous predators,
[00:32:24.560]resulting in disproportionate and militarized law enforcement
[00:32:27.560]in black neighborhoods and massive racial disparities in sentencing .
[00:32:31.920]Affluent white users of powder cocaine escaped the worst consequences.
[00:32:36.920]Representations of the OXE electorate
[00:32:39.280]treat drug addiction in white communities with the kind of measured sympathy
[00:32:42.800]and careful analysis
[00:32:43.960]that has been rarely afforded black communities impacted by drug use.
[00:32:47.600]These portrayals of the OXE electorate evince a racial continuum of drivability
[00:32:52.800]from the white self to the black other, much like support for the president.
[00:32:56.800]White addiction is represented as an understandable
[00:32:59.280]result of structural inequality.
[00:33:01.080]By contrast, black addiction has historically inferred
[00:33:03.880]innate moral inferiority and intemperance of people of color.
[00:33:07.760]An acute sensitivity to pain garner sympathy and alleviates white
[00:33:11.000]working class voters from responsibility for any of their actions.
[00:33:14.760]The sharp turn in the cultural rhetoric's of addiction can be accounted
[00:33:17.720]for by the racial logics of personhood that underlie the rhetoric of pain.
[00:33:22.640]Indeed, these journeys throughout Trump country put a human face on white despair,
[00:33:27.000]but in such a way that testifies to countless promised lives
[00:33:30.280]imperiled by addiction, but not much help for anyone else.
[00:33:35.880]Another common way journalists elicit sympathy
[00:33:38.000]for Trump country is by framing racial anxiety as economic anxiety.
[00:33:42.000]I'm sure you're familiar with this narrative.
[00:33:43.960]These stories make sense of voting to suit voting decision making
[00:33:47.960]based on financial distress, detached from personal prejudice or structural racism.
[00:33:53.240]The term anxiety suggests that white voters suffer
[00:33:55.600]from inner emotional turmoil over anticipated future calamities
[00:33:59.720]that subsequently manifest in nervous habits or compulsive behaviors.
[00:34:03.640]Melancholia in turn, personal psychological
[00:34:07.040]distress demands that readers empathize with their plight.
[00:34:10.360]Throughout the coverage of Trump country, statements of white
[00:34:13.200]economic anxiety appear in close proximity to statements that immediately
[00:34:17.360]hedge or discount the role of racism in the 2016 election.
[00:34:21.760]Centering white economic anxiety
[00:34:23.560]in this manner minimizes serious concerns about racism
[00:34:26.680]as the simplistic and reactionary conceits of the coastal elites.
[00:34:30.800]In this way, class becomes a colorblind framework to explain all human motivations
[00:34:35.520]in terms of rational self-interest
[00:34:37.480]that rise above the fray of contemporary identity politics.
[00:34:40.160]We all know that people don't solely
[00:34:41.520]make decisions based on rational self-interest. Me included.
[00:34:46.320]Here I illustrate how white suffering captures journalistic attention
[00:34:49.400]because it is spectacularly incongruent with the rhetoric of the American dream.
[00:34:54.800]Racism, by contrast, references an unpleasant history of black pain,
[00:34:59.000]something which is ultimately more mundane, distant
[00:35:01.680]and routinized in American life.
[00:35:05.840]Trump country stories do not fail to mention bigotry.
[00:35:09.480]Instead, they simply acknowledge it in order to dismiss it.
[00:35:13.120]Writing for Barron's Joan Quiñones preface preface their survey
[00:35:16.480]of white Trump voters by quipping they Democrats got it wrong
[00:35:19.760]because they forgot the central animating principle of U.S. politics.
[00:35:22.640]It's always the economy, stupid.
[00:35:25.200]The introduces the article by quoting Joan C.
[00:35:27.440]Williams, white working class overcoming class cluelessness.
[00:35:30.640]Quote, The working class has been asked to swallow a lot of economic pain
[00:35:34.240]while elites focused on non-economic issues.
[00:35:37.000]In a similar essay in The Washington Post, Jeff goWe writes
[00:35:40.520]that, quote, The reason Trump ism equals racism argument
[00:35:43.280]doesn't ring true for me is that you can't eat racism.
[00:35:46.480]You can't make a living off racism.
[00:35:48.440]I don't dispute that.
[00:35:49.240]Surveys show that there's a lot of racial resentment among Trump voters,
[00:35:52.960]but often the argument just ends there. They're racist.
[00:35:55.600]It seems like a very blinkered way to look at the issue.
[00:35:59.720]The conventional wisdom then of such essays
[00:36:01.960]is that economic calculi always supersede personal prejudice.
[00:36:06.960]Only the avoidance of pain, not racism, factors
[00:36:09.840]into white Trump voters enlightened self-interest.
[00:36:13.840]In another study published by Politico,
[00:36:16.680]Susan Glasser and Glenn Thrush interview, none other than J.D.
[00:36:19.520]Vance to bypass questions of race altogether and characterize
[00:36:23.680]a more deeper understanding of what the white working class wants.
[00:36:27.000]When Thrush asked Vance, why don't Democrats, apart
[00:36:29.560]from Bernie Sanders, seem to get it? Vance responded as follows.
[00:36:32.840]I certainly think
[00:36:34.920]a lot of liberals are able to see that these people are
[00:36:37.200]what they're going through.
[00:36:38.400]But there is a weird obsession, a preoccupation with the belief
[00:36:41.280]that the Trump movement is all about racism.
[00:36:43.480]Trump's people are certainly more racist than the average white professional.
[00:36:46.200]But it does not strike me that this is the 1950s.
[00:36:49.200]There's a certain amount of racial resentment, but it's paired
[00:36:51.600]the economic insecurity and a willingness to believe Trump on a lot of things,
[00:36:55.280]he says, despite evidence that a lot of it isn't true.
[00:36:58.320]I really worry this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[00:37:02.640]Although stories such as these address racism is an important topic.
[00:37:06.120]They ultimately conclude
[00:37:07.280]that it's a poor analytical lens for understanding politics.
[00:37:11.160]In this passage in particular, racial analysis is likened
[00:37:14.240]to a paranoid reading strategy that includes the deeper
[00:37:17.440]and more complicated dynamics of economic insecurity.
[00:37:21.440]Wrote a tomorrow writing for Salon also turns
[00:37:24.720]to Vance once again to minimize racism in favor of personal financial security.
[00:37:29.160]He writes, quote, that Vance expressed a similar sentiment with economic pain,
[00:37:32.680]not racism, explains Trump's support among most of the white working class.
[00:37:37.760]He also quotes Vance again, quote, There are
[00:37:40.400]there are the David Dukes of the world, and then there are those
[00:37:42.920]who don't understand why
[00:37:43.760]people talk about the problems in black communities so much.
[00:37:46.880]Maybe they see a protester
[00:37:48.080]against police brutality and think those thugs need to go back inside,
[00:37:51.840]drawing on Vance as the authority in the white working class,
[00:37:54.840]the store, which as a hedge fund manager, I have my doubts.
[00:37:57.880]The stories infer that anything short of overt white supremacy
[00:38:01.320]is ultimately understandable and benign.
[00:38:06.120]Finally, Trump country essays represent
[00:38:08.480]the white working class is doubly victimized by racial stereotypes.
[00:38:11.560]On top of economic security,
[00:38:13.680]writing for The Washington Post, Gary Abernathy argues that the left was
[00:38:17.440]was unfairly caricaturing white Trump voters as, quote, racist,
[00:38:20.760]misogynist and uneducated.
[00:38:22.480]They expect the wall of Confederate flags, a KKK parade down Main Street
[00:38:26.080]and collections of hillbilly moonshine on the back porch.
[00:38:30.080]The solution then, they argue, is for the readers
[00:38:33.120]to take it upon themselves, to get to know the forgotten people of Trump country.
[00:38:36.920]Familiarity, Abernathy concludes, quote, leads
[00:38:39.480]to understanding and even friendship, if not agreement.
[00:38:43.120]These stories insinuate that Trump voters are the victims of reverse discrimination
[00:38:47.280]with empathy and compassion.
[00:38:48.480]However, we might overcome their political exile.
[00:38:51.800]The rhetorical invention of Trump Country as a place that exists in the world
[00:38:56.120]tends the wounds of the white electorate
[00:38:59.760]by drawing on a finite reserve of public sympathy
[00:39:03.440]that has been rarely afforded to other marginalized communities.
[00:39:10.120]Historian David Roediger
[00:39:11.400]observes that the hatred of slavery cultivated in white workers of disdain
[00:39:15.160]for the slaves themselves as affronts to the Republican ideal of free labor.
[00:39:19.920]This presentation suggests that the valorization of the white working
[00:39:22.920]class is tethered to this historical dialectic between free and slave labor.
[00:39:27.360]Whether the essays recognize this or not, between white personhood and black flesh,
[00:39:33.360]the collision of the black working class from these portraits continues
[00:39:36.720]a racial antagonism in which black labor lacks value insofar as their bodies
[00:39:41.240]are the forbearers of the flesh rather than personhood.
[00:39:44.320]Thus, the whiteness encoded into the concept of personhood
[00:39:47.440]allows for the privileging of white paint in narratives
[00:39:50.400]of the long struggle of labor versus capital.
[00:39:53.760]WFB Doire noted in reconstruction
[00:39:56.960]that inner interracial class solidarity had been precluded by the disparate
[00:40:01.400]treatment of black and white workers in every other facet of society.
[00:40:05.240]At this moment, the narrative of pain in Trump country asks
[00:40:08.480]audience to once again forsake the serious concerns of people
[00:40:11.560]of color to restore the health of the American dream.
[00:40:16.800]The object of this presentation, to be clear,
[00:40:18.400]is not to cast doubt on white suffering,
[00:40:20.880]to be sure, real workers of all races, white people included,
[00:40:24.360]they toil , suffer and die as a direct result of neoliberal capitalism,
[00:40:28.000]divestment from labor and the corporate plundering of the public coffers.
[00:40:31.840]Yet capitalist natural rights theories have always had a racial component to
[00:40:35.200]them, evidenced by the genocidal robbery of indigenous people and slavery's mandate
[00:40:39.560]that black foot flesh was naturally suited for perpetual servitude.
[00:40:43.840]The point I do wish to make here concerns the implicit racialization of pain
[00:40:48.000]and personhood that accompanies the development of racial capitalism,
[00:40:52.120]along with white public fragility and desensitization to anti black racism.
[00:40:57.120]This presentation also has illustrated, hopefully, how the national preoccupation
[00:41:01.440]with hearing the hurt of dispossessed
[00:41:03.000]workers has negated in silence criticisms of Trump's racist appeal .
[00:41:06.480]All the while, certainly helping white workers in any way.
[00:41:10.000]We should not ignore depths of despair, but rather consider how the racial
[00:41:13.880]and historical schema that desensitizes white publics
[00:41:16.760]to pain occlude or prevent interracial class solidarity.
[00:41:21.480]As Frantz Fanon attuned us to the racialized
[00:41:23.680]continuum of humanness in Wretched of the Earth.
[00:41:27.640]That race organizers how we heat and disregard bodies in pain
[00:41:31.200]bonanza insights should prompt rhetorical critics
[00:41:33.280]such as myself to consider the presumed self other.
[00:41:37.160]That is a part of national dialogs about pain and victim.
[00:41:40.400]In this case, readers
[00:41:41.400]are invited to filter the body and pain through white experience
[00:41:45.360]expense, understanding the historical legacy of racism
[00:41:47.960]and its ongoing consequences for workers of color.
[00:41:51.120]The scheme of pain is overly sensitized to the anxieties and hardships
[00:41:54.440]of the white working class
[00:41:55.920]who have been dispossessed of the rewards of their hard labor
[00:41:58.840]rhetoric's of pain, call upon common sense racism to make sense
[00:42:02.080]of whose lives are prefigured as lives and worthy of empathy. Empathy.
[00:42:07.320]As I conclude, I want to consider this for a second here.
[00:42:10.160]The self other kind of dialectic, what would happen if it were reversed
[00:42:14.000]and the improbable election of a young black president
[00:42:16.800]obligated conservative news outlets to rethink their assumptions
[00:42:19.840]about black identity, travel to where they live.
[00:42:22.560]Listen to their stories.
[00:42:23.960]And historicized the unfathomable toll of slavery and Jim Crow rhetoric.
[00:42:28.960]Scholars who have written about the racial politics of President Obama's election.
[00:42:33.160]Note something quite different took place in 2008.
[00:42:36.360]As Christian, he hearl argues it was both in the audience and my spouse
[00:42:40.680]that the press presented Obama's election not as a cry for acknowledgment,
[00:42:44.840]but for the black underclass, for the black underclass,
[00:42:47.160]but instead the culmination of Martin Luther King's dream,
[00:42:50.200]ostensibly signaling the end of the civil rights struggle.
[00:42:53.600]She contends that news fragments connected Obama to King's legacy
[00:42:57.040]to construct a myth of transcendence
[00:42:58.840]in which the traumas of racial injustice had been overcome.
[00:43:01.960]The election of the first black president provides
[00:43:03.800]the press with an exigence to commemorate racial progress and neatly in case
[00:43:07.520]the nation's legacy of racist violence into a selectively remembered past.
[00:43:11.640]Other scholars have noted that white conservatives constructed
[00:43:14.280]the president is a racist and racial threat.
[00:43:16.720]A Kenyan born outsider who secretly despised white people.
[00:43:20.680]While Trump's opponents are vocal about his coded racism,
[00:43:23.360]whiteness insulates he and his supporters from the racist
[00:43:26.080]assumptions made about Obama and his supporters.
[00:43:28.600]For instance, the press is not used.
[00:43:30.320]Never use Trump's election as evidence that white people had transcended economic
[00:43:34.240]inequality simply because the president is wealthy and shares their skin color.
[00:43:39.000]No one has asserted that Trump is a credit to his race
[00:43:41.160]or used his story as evidence that the American dream
[00:43:43.200]is accessible to white workers if they simply worked harder.
[00:43:47.120]Curtailed their reliance on government assistance.
[00:43:49.440]Quit using drugs and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.
[00:43:52.920]This exercise is meant to illustrate how historical racial schema,
[00:43:56.800]organized cultural narratives about the agency of race and class bodies.
[00:44:01.800]Note how one black person's success nullifies the entirety of structural
[00:44:05.480]racism, while one white person's failure becomes the responsibility of a nation .
[00:44:10.440]White paint is so far outside the norm that it demands
[00:44:12.920]careful attention, empathy and structural remediation.
[00:44:15.960]By contrast, philosopher Tommy Curry notes
[00:44:18.560]what pain is routinized by an infinite scroll of black death.
[00:44:21.920]From films about slavery to body cameras, shooting footage of police shootings,
[00:44:27.080]black pain is either mundane or addressed as a question of personal responsibility.
[00:44:33.600]As we are here, amid the COVID 19 pandemic,
[00:44:36.360]vulnerable populations are continually being asked to sacrifice themselves
[00:44:40.000]so that the private accumulation of wealth can continue unimpeded.
[00:44:43.680]This includes both working class whites as well
[00:44:46.200]as racial minorities disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
[00:44:49.720]Not to mention the disproportionate threat of police violence.
[00:44:53.120]This moment could instead reveal the possibilities of interracial worker
[00:44:56.280]solidarity that have been excluded by the common sense racism
[00:44:59.720]that underwrites the rhetoric of personhood from its inception.
[00:45:03.440]Unfortunately, both the white paint electoral narrative
[00:45:05.920]and Trump administration's rhetoric about the pandemic and Black Lives Matter
[00:45:09.160]illustrated the inner workings of a continuum of humanity.
[00:45:12.040]The organizers whose wounds are tended and whose lives don't count as lives.
[00:45:17.080]My hope is that a rhetorical of paint theory of pain
[00:45:19.920]brings us closer to dismantling the historical racial schema
[00:45:23.160]that organized the unequal distribution of empathy across the color line.
[00:45:27.600]To quote one of my favorite recording artists, Sam Cooke,
[00:45:30.920]I believe that a change is going to come. Thank you so.
[00:45:45.600]We have somebody with a microphone,
[00:45:48.240]if someone would like to ask questions.
[00:46:01.920]A great lecture, by the way.
[00:46:03.800]So my question is, do you think there's a fundamental difference in the pain
[00:46:08.880]between upper class white people or caused by people and people of color?
[00:46:15.920]I don't know if there is a biological difference in that suffering,
[00:46:20.280]but certainly if cultural frameworks
[00:46:24.880]with different communities have to interpret what counts as pain.
[00:46:28.920]I know that there are
[00:46:31.160]people who study the relationship between, for example, pain and genetics.
[00:46:35.640]The idea of that there's intergenerational grief
[00:46:37.880]that is quite literally pain is literally passed down.
[00:46:40.760]Traumas pass down through genes becomes an interesting way
[00:46:44.440]of making statements about intergenerational trauma
[00:46:49.080]as having both a biological basis, but one that can be rooted
[00:46:52.520]in a particular kind of experience with institutions of power and authority.
[00:46:57.920]And so I do think that pain is experienced differently.
[00:47:00.240]I call the class difference, I think makes a really important difference to,
[00:47:04.200]you know, the bodies of those who are on the frontlines of the pandemic,
[00:47:08.600]those who are members of the
[00:47:10.200]of the working class and the working poor in particular.
[00:47:13.840]Their experience of pain
[00:47:15.560]may be an experience of of chronic
[00:47:19.520]chronic pain that is the result
[00:47:21.760]of decades of hard labor and also lack of health care.
[00:47:26.960]And so there's an entire infrastructure, right.
[00:47:28.800]If you don't have access to health care
[00:47:31.840]and if you don't have a medical infrastructure around you
[00:47:34.600]and there's, you know, generational downward
[00:47:37.800]mobility, it produces a different experience of pain.
[00:47:41.080]It's not to also suggest that people who have money don't experience pain.
[00:47:44.200]They absolutely do.
[00:47:45.240]And their pain matters. But when you.
[00:47:48.360]My point has to do with the contrasting.
[00:47:50.120]Right, the putting those pain in contest with one another
[00:47:52.880]as the sort of fundamental moves that I see in this particular narrative.
[00:47:57.280]But thank you for your question.
[00:48:04.320]Thank you for the lecture.
[00:48:06.160]My question is, how do you distinguish
[00:48:09.200]resentment and resentment as it relates to white melancholia?
[00:48:13.920]That's a great question. Thank you.
[00:48:16.120]I've written an essay about race sentiment,
[00:48:19.040]which provides an analysis of Trump's discourse.
[00:48:21.440]And what I've made the argument was, is
[00:48:22.720]that resentment is not quite the act, the exact register that you
[00:48:27.040]I mean, certainly you can find resentment in terms of hatred towards others.
[00:48:31.880]But resentment is an interesting kind of psychological state
[00:48:36.840]where one feels completely powerless to enact their revenge on someone else.
[00:48:43.520]And so this is a paradoxical feeling
[00:48:46.640]of being disempowered to enact
[00:48:51.480]the sort of the changes and the enactments of power
[00:48:54.440]you wish to see in the world and to revisit your suffering onto others
[00:48:59.320]with the also the inclusion in a community structured around resentment.
[00:49:05.400]An interesting kind of tension that is in Trump's discourse
[00:49:10.000]actually speaks to this really quite well, which is on the one hand,
[00:49:13.440]he often characterizes his supporters
[00:49:17.080]as being completely disempowered.
[00:49:20.000]They've been victims of social change.
[00:49:22.520]There's really nothing that they can do about it
[00:49:24.920]other than write trust in him and him alone.
[00:49:28.600]And so he addresses them as being like completely
[00:49:30.720]agent lists and subject to these like large historical forces on the one hand.
[00:49:34.280]Yet on the other hand, he also tells them that he loves them
[00:49:36.920]and that they can do anything.
[00:49:38.400]And that is an interesting kind of conflicted place
[00:49:40.600]to be as an audience member. Part of what that does is resentment.
[00:49:44.120]Can we allow for a purging of anger?
[00:49:46.600]Resentment keeps it right.
[00:49:48.760]This kind of miasma of anger, sort of recirculating inside people
[00:49:53.400]and therefore produces constant antagonism.
[00:49:56.880]And that's, I think, why resentment is a is a better character
[00:50:00.600]than other kinds of populist discourses, because on the one hand, he's right.
[00:50:04.920]His audience is a part of the
[00:50:06.160]you know, he tells them part of the greatest movement
[00:50:08.280]in American history to take their country back.
[00:50:10.480]There's a lot of power in that.
[00:50:11.840]But then he also tells them that they are being humiliated
[00:50:14.920]by foreigners, that there's nothing that they can do about it.
[00:50:18.080]The only thing that they can do is give their agency over to him.
[00:50:21.800]And that's the only thing that's cultivating resentment.
[00:50:24.680]And a subject is precisely a way to disempower them. Right.
[00:50:28.280]Even though it may be might be empowerment discourses that surround it.
[00:50:32.000]Ultimately, it's about ceding power to someone else.
[00:50:34.480]They will take revenge in your name because you are powerless to do so.
[00:50:48.240]That's down for.
[00:50:51.680]So you focus a lot
[00:50:53.320]on the opioid epidemic as kind of like a contributing factor to this.
[00:50:57.600]So one of the questions that I was thinking through was.
[00:51:04.000]Why do like, you know,
[00:51:06.480]lower class white voters continue to vote for people,
[00:51:11.160]Republicans namely, that enable kind of like companies like Purdue Pharma
[00:51:16.240]and kind of the people that really like routed the opioid problem?
[00:51:19.720]Why is there continuing repetition of that rhetoric and also like at the polls?
[00:51:26.080]Yeah, I mean, that is an age old question.
[00:51:28.040]Why do people vote for things that are clearly not in their self-interest? Right.
[00:51:31.560]And this does speak to the idea
[00:51:32.760]that people, even though these reports tend to say that they're the decision
[00:51:36.560]making calculus, calculus of voters is totally based on like personal,
[00:51:40.280]enlightened self-interest. Right.
[00:51:41.520]That it'll bring back the jobs, it will bring back their dignity
[00:51:45.080]and their community and all those things, even though.
[00:51:47.680]Right. One one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing.
[00:51:49.880]The other hand is also right.
[00:51:51.480]Forging policies right behind their back that are meant to further impoverish them
[00:51:55.600]and bind the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, which while Trump
[00:52:00.760]did declare a national emergency when it came to opioids,
[00:52:05.480]not much has come of
[00:52:06.800]it other than the significant settlement rate that happened, which doesn't
[00:52:11.440]really account for those sort of untold damage that the opioids have done.
[00:52:16.840]I the heart, I mean, it's it's a tough question to answer because.
[00:52:23.120]Voters have investments,
[00:52:24.800]right, in things that are not rational and I don't mean them,
[00:52:27.080]that they are irrational.
[00:52:28.640]What I mean is that
[00:52:31.040]it is possible to think
[00:52:33.800]in and through the ideological perspectives of of other people
[00:52:39.760]so that you believe that your interests share in common
[00:52:42.560]and interest with someone else.
[00:52:44.840]I think what you know, starting with the sort of southern strategy
[00:52:49.680]in the 19th, you know, in the 1960s, you know, of sort of shifting
[00:52:55.600]the Republican base to rural southerners
[00:52:59.200]and making that a base for political power.
[00:53:01.480]It's always come down to generating
[00:53:04.320]a racialized investment in one's particular class status.
[00:53:09.080]And I think when you animate that kind of force and you bring it alive,
[00:53:13.840]it can it can overwhelm
[00:53:16.960]what you're perhaps what your mind is telling you.
[00:53:20.080]It can it can do really dramatic things right.
[00:53:24.440]To one's psyche.
[00:53:26.360]And so, you know, when it when an idea is a hegemonic win,
[00:53:31.000]the person that's most dispossessed by the idea is its most outspoken advocate.
[00:53:35.920]And so on the one hand, there's a national crisis on opioids being declared.
[00:53:40.080]On the other hand. Right.
[00:53:41.600]There are K Street lawyers that are also like, you know,
[00:53:45.280]lobbying very heavily to ensure that the crisis is dealt
[00:53:48.320]with in a way that is advantageous and beneficial to them.
[00:53:51.120]But I think that those kind of complicated answers
[00:53:54.840]are what is stripped out of any of the policy.
[00:53:58.440]Discourse rights, particularly from Trump, is that he doesn't talk about policy,
[00:54:01.760]you know, in his in his speeches, doesn't talk about policy very much.
[00:54:06.440]That's something that's sort of left up to his team behind the scenes.
[00:54:09.680]And that stuff happens in the White House, really outside of public view
[00:54:12.480]dictates are kind of handed down about new policy change that happen.
[00:54:15.280]But his rallies and his speeches never actually talk about them.
[00:54:17.720]And I think part of the reason is that what he's interesting is animating
[00:54:22.240]a kind of felt intensity.
[00:54:25.200]Right. What we might call affect this kind of like pre
[00:54:28.720]linguistic feeling that we tend to translate into language,
[00:54:33.400]that the the investment that people have is is a felt intensity rather than a
[00:54:39.400]a rational argument that I'm voting for this person
[00:54:42.440]because they're going to implement
[00:54:43.520]this policy that then will change and improve my life.
[00:54:45.800]Instead, it feels really good to be a part of a group, a part of a movement.
[00:54:50.960]Right. That is going to take one's country back, whatever that means. And it can.
[00:54:54.440]And the thing is that he doesn't have to define what that means.
[00:54:56.880]It's up to you to figure out what that is.
[00:54:58.400]It's going to be something that restores your past glory.
[00:55:00.800]It's going to bring back the days that were good.
[00:55:02.760]The mills will come back to your town.
[00:55:04.360]The the mines will reopen.
[00:55:06.280]Right. Unlimited prosperity will wash across the land.
[00:55:10.760]That's a that's that's a
[00:55:12.160]that's a narcotic to.
[00:55:18.840]So my question is very broad, so please feel free to narrow it
[00:55:22.440]however you see fit.
[00:55:25.960]What are you what are your or do you have any thoughts
[00:55:29.840]or observations on how you see these relationships playing out
[00:55:34.160]in maybe other forms of media like pop culture,
[00:55:38.840]film, television, whatever strikes your fancy, Casey?
[00:55:42.920]Huh. Interesting.
[00:55:45.000]A totally separate subject, right?
[00:55:46.840]Could be the way in which the 2016
[00:55:50.000]election made its way into cinema
[00:55:53.600]and the way that it is that Trump ism has been addressed.
[00:55:57.320]And I know you'll find this particularly interesting in horror films.
[00:56:00.680]I think that you can find places in the culture where in television
[00:56:04.520]and film, this this particular narrative is being grappled with.
[00:56:09.400]So let me just give you a couple of examples.
[00:56:12.400]So if you see a television show like Chernobyl,
[00:56:19.520]right, it's about the, you know,
[00:56:21.480]the Vladimir Lenin reactor accident that happened in 1986.
[00:56:26.600]Right in in Ukraine and all of the lies and, you know, propaganda
[00:56:32.640]that surrounded it, that basically suppressed knowledge of the event.
[00:56:35.960]And it did so in such a way that it was hard for me to watch it
[00:56:39.320]because it was right after it was right really in, you know,
[00:56:42.800]just in the aftermath of the election that hinged on a lot of disinformation.
[00:56:47.520]And so it was hard.
[00:56:48.560]I came back to what was able
[00:56:49.920]to watch it a little bit later because I had distance from it.
[00:56:52.920]But I could easily read that there was a likeness
[00:56:55.800]in structure between the way in which the Chernobyl disaster was being held.
[00:57:00.080]You know, being addressed, at least represented.
[00:57:03.400]And the way in which the COVID 19 pandemic was being addressed and similar
[00:57:08.080]logics of disposability were put at play there, whose lives counted as lives,
[00:57:13.720]you know, the politics of disposability kind of all over them, disinformation.
[00:57:17.480]And so I think popular culture very much pick that up, maybe not intentionally.
[00:57:22.360]I don't know what the makers of the of that.
[00:57:24.400]And that doesn't really matter. But
[00:57:26.840]certainly picked
[00:57:27.440]up that there is something resonating in the culture about massive disasters
[00:57:31.360]that cause widespread pain and anguish and how those are addressed.
[00:57:36.160]And so we're experiencing our own our own pandemic as we watch
[00:57:40.840]the same kind of discourses unfold there.
[00:57:43.760]I also think that the
[00:57:46.520]that there are a series of horror films that also picked us up as well.
[00:57:49.880]I think that, you know, more than any other director, Jordan
[00:57:52.480]Peel's works in Get Out was yet another prescient kind of film
[00:57:57.880]that I think also it it was so provocative
[00:58:01.800]and it did deal with questions of the black body and the white body
[00:58:05.320]in ways that are reflective of the kind of biological determinism
[00:58:09.720]that you find underwriting all of these articles,
[00:58:12.080]which is that you have basically a group of white people that want to be able
[00:58:15.400]to harness the black body because it has amazing capacities
[00:58:18.880]that the white body doesn't.
[00:58:19.880]And so they're quite literally doing brain transplants by picking black victims
[00:58:23.960]and then living in their bodies so that they can continue to live forever.
[00:58:27.640]So their aging body is, you know, their withered white bodies are then
[00:58:31.640]put into these fresh young black bodies with these amazing athletic capacities.
[00:58:36.040]And you see them play with the bodies.
[00:58:38.280]Once they're inside the bodies, they run and just enjoy the capacities of things.
[00:58:42.800]And so I think that Jordan Peele picks up on this dynamic of like,
[00:58:46.760]let's literalized the idea of both a
[00:58:50.600]a profound anti blackness and then also ambivalent desire to also then be black,
[00:58:56.200]which is a very you know, which is to say, if you see it in the case
[00:58:59.280]study here, which is the desire to identify as a marginalized community.
[00:59:03.520]Right. Because there is immense power in being able to identify
[00:59:07.280]with or be a victim. And so I think that
[00:59:11.080]you see that dynamic playing out.
[00:59:12.960]But I think then you see it kind of migrate and and get trans coded
[00:59:16.120]into cinema, too. So.
[00:59:23.440]This is from a person on Zimm.
[00:59:26.640]What theoretical work does the idea of occluding do to your analysis?
[00:59:34.160]And then why do you characterize the blockage stoppage
[00:59:38.440]or making or masking effect in this way?
[00:59:43.960]Oh, OK. So if I if I understand
[00:59:47.600]the question correctly, it's a question of why am I arguing that
[00:59:52.920]these narratives mask certain kind of underlying racial logics?
[01:00:00.600]That's kind of what I'm going to take care.
[01:00:04.080]I don't have an explicit theory of masking that I'm working with here.
[01:00:09.080]Rather, instead, I'm really more thinking in terms of negation,
[01:00:14.680]in the sense that
[01:00:17.160]there is a way in which affirming one's identity can be done
[01:00:20.240]in such a way that it necessarily negates another or creates a foil.
[01:00:25.160]That foil embodies all of the opposite attributes
[01:00:28.120]of the particular object of care that's being put forward here.
[01:00:32.040]And so I would say that probably Jasper Pajares work on the right domain
[01:00:37.920]is probably the most influential in understanding that insofar
[01:00:41.840]as we have a general working class
[01:00:45.920]that is debilitated by the fact that they work hard lives
[01:00:51.960]and that they don't receive the fruits of their labor,
[01:00:55.920]one way in which
[01:00:58.960]we divide up and we divide up that working class
[01:01:03.320]is to make some people into pariahs who are the foil to the objects of care.
[01:01:09.320]The object of care is is a group that is rehabilitated
[01:01:13.080]into the realm of productive citizenship.
[01:01:16.640]And my argument there is that
[01:01:19.600]there is an effect that whether it realizes it or not necessarily
[01:01:24.680]negates the history of the the image of the possessive white individual,
[01:01:30.840]even though it has been abstracted outside of its originary racial politics
[01:01:35.600]to be a more general equality
[01:01:39.200]based kind of or colorblind kind of mentality about the accessibility
[01:01:43.880]of rights and democracy and all those things. I,
[01:01:48.320]I think that the
[01:01:51.600]the argument then that I'm making is that there's baggage that comes with it.
[01:01:56.480]And if there is a possessive individual that is worthy of natural rights,
[01:02:01.200]there is also a foil that is not deserving of those rights.
[01:02:05.520]There's someone who is lazy or ignorant.
[01:02:08.360]Right. Or someone who just a higher tolerance for pain.
[01:02:12.320]All of these things
[01:02:13.080]were a part of rationalizations for why white labor was valued over black labor,
[01:02:16.920]at least in terms of how it was valorized and how it was paid a wage.
[01:02:20.400]And so it's not even though I use the word occlude,
[01:02:24.360]which means it does obscure to a certain degree,
[01:02:27.240]I would also try to place more emphasis on the negation aspect of it. Right.
[01:02:31.480]That there's affirmations that by virtue of what they don't mention
[01:02:36.400]or by virtue of the fact
[01:02:37.680]that there are some other foil that exist to, it can be a way
[01:02:40.720]of negating some other identity without ever having to reference it.
[01:02:44.040]And so there's not an explicit effort to demean people of color in these articles.
[01:02:48.880]Instead, what it is, is to say,
[01:02:50.520]yeah, we've talked all about racism and we know all about that,
[01:02:53.760]but what we don't understand is this particular figure.
[01:02:57.400]And so we need to hold them up as an object of care.
[01:02:59.520]And in doing so, we have inadvertently.
[01:03:02.640]Put a racial divide in the working class.
[01:03:04.280]First of all, as if the consequences election don't have an effect
[01:03:07.600]on all members of the working class,
[01:03:09.600]but also done so in a way that prevents I think
[01:03:13.200]and this has been the this has been the problem since reconstruction.
[01:03:16.680]I talked about is whiteness was
[01:03:19.840]what was paid a psychological wage
[01:03:23.880]and petty privileges, not a higher wage, but a
[01:03:27.480]a different wage, a psychological wage
[01:03:31.320]so that they could invest in their class status
[01:03:33.640]so that it would keep black and white workers divided from one another,
[01:03:36.800]which was ultimately beneficial to industry because it prevents widespread
[01:03:40.000]unionization, the
[01:03:41.000]possibility of a general strike, all of those things can be prevented
[01:03:45.120]if you keep black and white workers separate and thinking that white workers
[01:03:48.040]think they have no interest in common with the black workers.
[01:03:50.680]And I see that dynamic at play here insofar as the white working class
[01:03:54.320]has their racial interests,
[01:03:55.480]the black working class has theirs, and they're in contest with each other.
[01:03:57.840]Rather than saying
[01:03:59.080]there is a shared interests here, we are all being dispossessed
[01:04:02.120]by the same system just at different levels.
[01:04:05.400]There's something to be offered, I think, in overcoming that that negation,
[01:04:09.000]because I think that if I'm going to say something is masked
[01:04:11.280]is the possibility of a different rhetoric of pain that acknowledges
[01:04:15.040]a much more generalized sense that there is a shared interest
[01:04:19.120]that is outside of the
[01:04:21.240]sort of racial interests that are articulated, these articles
[01:04:27.440]. OK, thank you.

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"On Melancholia and White Pain" | CAS Inquire

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