“We Have More to Fear than Racism that Announces Itself”: Distraction as a Strategy to Oppress
“We Have More to Fear than Racism that Announces Itself”: Distraction as a Strategy to Oppress
In this chapter I will engage a long-standing pattern of victim blaming and the challenges it poses in the twenty-first century for asserting black humanity and acquiring justice and equal treatment under the law. I will refer to this pattern of victim blaming and related forms of displacing blame for white supremacist oppression onto blacks as the “discourse of racial distraction.” Further, I will consider the ways that blacks have (unwittingly) dignified or reinforced this discourse and, conversely, the ways that blacks have successfully exposed and exploded it.
Keywords: disenfranchisement, Trayvon Martin, institutional racism, structural inequalities, Frederick Douglass, Ferguson, Barack Obama, Michael Brown, War on Drugs, Dylann Roof
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