(from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow) "What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than the language we use to justify it..... We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."
Michelle Alexander also quotes Dr. Loic Wacquant (Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America) when she writes in her The New Jim Crow journal (Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law) "Mass incarceration is a misnomer, since it implies that nearly everyone has been subject to the new system of control..... It was estimated several years ago that, in Washington, D.C. three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) could expect to serve time in other communities of color across America."
... and the entire COINTELPRO and what it has been all about.
There are several concepts that need to be contemplated upon here. One is the concept of language as carrier of [multiplicities of] meaning, and of power and control. For example, what if language, as the architect of all the metaphorical concepts we all live by (to borrow from Lakoff and Johnson), actually structures our lives and way of thinking? A well-known conceptual metaphor (analyzed in Metaphors We Live By) is the Argument as War: "your claims cannot be defended", "he attacked every weak point in her argument", "if we use this strategy, we will win the argument", "I've never won an argument with that man", and so on. Equally, how "good" is "pure as snow [white]" or how "bad" are your "darkest secrets", or "the Black Plague", or, alas, white angels and dark demons? How would we utter all these in any of the Inuit languages/dialects, where there are no transitive or action verbs?
Another concept is the one of power itself, and how we confront this concept: is power possessed or rather exercised? Can be historicized, under- or over- historicized? "I call the discourse of power any discourse which engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient" said Foucault... (remember, in the readings, the sense of shame, the taboo of the "un-talkable" even among communities that virtually everybody have their own [usually colored] "criminal"). Thus, this object in which power is inscribed, "for all its human eternity" Eco has claimed, IS language, or to be more precise, "its necessary expression: the language we speak and write; the given language." (from Eco's Travels in Hyperreality) And given language, although coercive, never appears, pops up from an individual decision, or from some undefinable "center of power". It is a social product, originates as thoroughly constrictive through our general, collective assent.
A third concept is the one of Reason; which since the Greeks, and later Kant, and even the deconstructive post-modernists, still means the same thing: the recognition of limits. How does this work in the communication process today? When data bits of information circulate ad infinitum in a virtually limitless Space? In "real" time? But I have run out of space.
1. Cornell West and the "Niggerization of America"
2. (from last Friday's episode of Real Time With Bill Maher)
Michelle Alexander also quotes Dr. Loic Wacquant (Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America) when she writes in her The New Jim Crow journal (Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law) "Mass incarceration is a misnomer, since it implies that nearly everyone has been subject to the new system of control..... It was estimated several years ago that, in Washington, D.C. three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) could expect to serve time in other communities of color across America."
... and the entire COINTELPRO and what it has been all about.
There are several concepts that need to be contemplated upon here. One is the concept of language as carrier of [multiplicities of] meaning, and of power and control. For example, what if language, as the architect of all the metaphorical concepts we all live by (to borrow from Lakoff and Johnson), actually structures our lives and way of thinking? A well-known conceptual metaphor (analyzed in Metaphors We Live By) is the Argument as War: "your claims cannot be defended", "he attacked every weak point in her argument", "if we use this strategy, we will win the argument", "I've never won an argument with that man", and so on. Equally, how "good" is "pure as snow [white]" or how "bad" are your "darkest secrets", or "the Black Plague", or, alas, white angels and dark demons? How would we utter all these in any of the Inuit languages/dialects, where there are no transitive or action verbs?
Another concept is the one of power itself, and how we confront this concept: is power possessed or rather exercised? Can be historicized, under- or over- historicized? "I call the discourse of power any discourse which engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient" said Foucault... (remember, in the readings, the sense of shame, the taboo of the "un-talkable" even among communities that virtually everybody have their own [usually colored] "criminal"). Thus, this object in which power is inscribed, "for all its human eternity" Eco has claimed, IS language, or to be more precise, "its necessary expression: the language we speak and write; the given language." (from Eco's Travels in Hyperreality) And given language, although coercive, never appears, pops up from an individual decision, or from some undefinable "center of power". It is a social product, originates as thoroughly constrictive through our general, collective assent.
A third concept is the one of Reason; which since the Greeks, and later Kant, and even the deconstructive post-modernists, still means the same thing: the recognition of limits. How does this work in the communication process today? When data bits of information circulate ad infinitum in a virtually limitless Space? In "real" time? But I have run out of space.
1. Cornell West and the "Niggerization of America"
2. (from last Friday's episode of Real Time With Bill Maher)
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