Criminal InJustice† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.
Criminalizing President Obama
by Kay Whitlock
The 2012 presidential election will not turn on facts, figures, and reasonable arguments. Nor will the undue and terrible influence of huge amounts of right-wing/corporate money determine the outcome – though the flood of cash will be a malevolent and destabilizing influence.
Rather, it is the power of Story, the compelling nature of narrative, that will – together with the successes or failure of Get Out the Vote (GOTV) and voter suppression efforts, both from the left and the right – determine the outcome. And it will do so because Story embodies and conveys layers of meaning – spiritual as well as political; emotional as well as intellectual – in ways cold facts and figures cannot.
And when we talk about the power of Story, we mean the narrative arc that embodies – to varying degrees – collective hopes, dreams, possibilities, terrors, resentments, and rage. The power to stir powerful unconscious associations by evoking archetypal images and messages. (For a useful discussion of criminalizing archetypes, including their racialization, see
Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.) The invitation Story extends to discover within ourselves compassion, generosity, and possibility or cynicism, fear, and loathing. We mean the depictions of what’s at stake, for whom, and the blatant as well as more coded signifiers, of the worthiness – or expendability – of various lives and communities.
This year, opponents and harsh critics of President Obama, especially from the right, but also, regrettably, from some within libertarian and liberal/progressive/left ranks, will rely significantly on criminalizing narratives that tap deeply into this country’s well of racist criminal archetypes. Beyond the presidential contest, these narratives will also be deployed to further polarize – and paralyze – other races for national and state office, voter initiatives, and more, not only by associating liberals, progressives, and leftists with criminal action and intent, but triggering waves of both conscious and unconscious racism.
Here, we briefly review the various kinds of anti-Obama criminalizing narratives that have been circulating for some time, anticipate their expansion and deepening, and analyze their meaning. All build on historical racist narratives; all of them embody snarling accusations of racial insubordination.
Among them:
President Obama as a welfare queen/thief/lazy black person
President Obama as a rapist/thug/violator of men, women, children, and the entire nation
President Obama as a deceptive, dishonest, secretive, untrustworthy “sleeper cell” Kenyan/Muslim, bent on the destruction of this country.
And we say clearly that it is critical for all of us to not only challenge these narratives and the larger Story they seek to tell, but also to understand why it is essential to the future of progressive politics to undermine all criminalizing narratives. In the run-up to the 2012 elections, CI will be alerting you to and commenting on varieties of criminalizing narratives being used to strategic purpose nationally and in the states.
Whether you enthusiastically support President Obama’s re-election, do so only tepidly, or are trying to decide whether you’ll vote for him, if you care about confronting and dismantling systemic racism in this country, you should be speaking up and out against these narratives.
(Full disclosure: this commentator does not always agree with President Obama, but strongly supports his re-election.)