Workplace hate speech and rendering Black and Native lives as if they do not matter: A nightmarish autoethnography

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has been met with resistance and hostility by many whites who do not see the need for assertions regarding the value and worth of Black lives. Those who seek to disrupt this emerging discourse tend to regard instances of white violence against Black people as individual incidents that do not reflect larger societal patterns. This paper addresses these assertions by drawing on discussions of slurs and other racially abusive language in the workplace. Using autoethnography, I provide rich descriptions of how hateful language circulates in whitespaces through both interpersonal interactions and through group-level consumption of racially problematic mass media creating organizations that are hostile to people of color, even in their absence. Major implications of this study include that the devaluation of Black and Native lives is pervasive within many predominantly white organizations and that this reality negatively effects both the life chances and the personal safety of people of color.

Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Southern Blues Violences

One of the most frequently quoted descriptions of the blues--“an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically”--was penned by Ralph Ellison in a 1945 review essay of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. This chapter uses Ellison’s formulation as an opening through which to explore the way in which three distinct but related modes of southern violence play significant roles in the major works of both authors. Disciplinary violence, including lynching, vagrancy laws, and prison farms, is white-on-black violence that aims to terrorize, immobilize, and punish. Retributive violence is black-on-white violence that resists or strikes back at disciplinary violence. Intimate violence is black-on-black violence driven by jealousy, hatred, and other strong passions. All three forms of violence show up in the blues tradition—and in Black Boy, where they help Wright craft a portrait of a blues-surcharged young Mississippian who, although bereft of the tools and training needed to express those blues musically, will ultimately find in literature, where words can be “weapons,” the outlet he so desperately needs. In Invisible Man and other texts, by contrast, Ellison employs the southern violences in ways that often heighten the comic element within blues’ tragicomic palette of emotions.

Bicycling, Birding and #BLM across America in a Summer of Chaos

From 6 June to 20 August, 2020, I undertook a 76-day, ~3800 mile bicycle trip across the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. In this talk I will share with you some of the amazing people, landscapes and birds I encountered, mostly in rural towns and along blue highways. The gradually changing birdscape, both in sight and sound, underscored the sensitive ecological gradients to which birds respond, as well as the ability of some species to thrive in agricultural monocultures. Rivers large and small regularly benchmarked my progress, as well as the western journey of Lewis & Clark over 200 years ago. The recent incidents in the US involving African Americans as targets of white violence inexorably caused me to festoon my bicycle with #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) signs and share my experiences on social media. I encountered a variety of reactions, often positive and occasionally sharply negative, in a sea of generosity and extraordinary kindness as I wheeled my way through towns on the brink of collapse, vast private ranches and the occasional city. Rural America exhibits an abundance of loyalty and empathy for local communities, yet it is sometimes hard for Americans – myself included – to empathize with people they have never met in person. Two imperatives I took away, with ramifications for both biodiversity and political stability, were the need to somehow bring divergent communities together and to encourage empathy at the national level, among communities that otherwise experience each other only on TV.

Whose Police?

Chapter three documents the cascade of white violence in the postwar era and the often-failing police response to it. During and after the Second World War, a second wave of the Great Migration began again in earnest. As hundreds of thousands of Black people moved to Chicago during this period, their need for housing provoked pitched battles between the forces of integration and segregation. In particular, white Chicagoans routinely rioted against Black newcomers seeking places to live in previously all-white neighborhoods. As they did so, the issue of police protection of Black life and property emerged as a central question for both civil leaders and Black citizens to confront. As white police officers and the department’s white leadership responded to white-on-Black violence half-heartedly or, on occasion, by sympathizing with the white perpetrators, fair policing emerged as a pivotal issue for 1950s-era civil rights campaigns in Chicago.

Negro Distrust of the Police Increased

The first chapter opens with scenes from Chicago’s Red Summer race riot in July of 1919. It explores the cascade of white violence that characterized the riot, as well as the armed self-defense that Blacks deployed in response. It also tracks the ways in which both police brutality and police neglect were features of how Black Chicagoans experienced the Chicago Police Department during those awful summer days in which thirty-eight Chicagoans in total were killed. From there, it shifts in the 1920s, when segregation in Chicago became more rigid, and explores how police corruption and political corruption worked hand in hand to shape the city’s Prohibition decade. It documents how politicians especially used the police department to their advantage, in particular by variously allowing vice operators to set up shop in less politically influential Black neighborhoods, and subsequently cracking down on low-level vice offenses by Black people. It also explores the long reach of police torture of civilians in 1920s Chicago.

Traumatic Victimhood or Black Rage? Contrasting Visions of Black Power

This chapter examines contrasting depictions of the Black Power movement in Hollywood film and television that either confirmed or resisted what Herman Gray refers to as the “civil rights subject.” The first half of the chapter explains how nineties-era movies Malcolm X and Panther presented affirmative images of radical black protest but anchored these images to traumatic counter-memories of black victimhood. The second half of this chapter critically reviews a variety of negative portrayals of the Black Panthers in media products between 1994 and 2013 including the movies Forrest Gump, Barbershop 2, and The Butler, the miniseries ‘The 60s, and an episode of the television program Law & Order to argue that Hollywood has routinely depicted black rage, not structural racism or white violence as the central problem requiring tough-on-crime solutions. The chapter interprets these portrayals in the context of the political backlash against civil rights gains and racial inequities within the criminal justice system.

Protecting the Household

Antebellum racial policing also extended to the household, as Chapter 4 demonstrates. Police reform was implemented in the name of property, and in a patriarchal world, households often counted as male property. Thus the new policemen were supposed to protect good householders. And they often did. But free black households fit into this system uncomfortably. Beliefs in black household disorder, and subsequent police regulations targeted at black families, combined with the prohibition of black testimony against white people both to undermine black men’s household autonomy and heighten white male power over black households. When a white person entered a black home, there was not much a policeman could do, even if he wanted to. As a result, free black Baltimoreans’ home lives were uniquely susceptible to white violence. Once again, policemen confirmed the disparity.