Civic Reasoning Through Paranoid and Reparative Reading: Addressing Conspiracy Theories Within Racialized and Queer Publics

• In Event: Education and the Political: The Possibilities of Civic Education in an (Un)Democratic World

Abstract

When classrooms fail to provide racially marginalized students with frameworks that explain their daily experiences, some students turn to conspiracy theories, however inaccurate. Conspiracy theories can provide racially marginalized students a means to make sense of things they experience, but for which there is no room to discuss in the classroom, especially in classrooms that purport to help students understand the role of the government in their lives. Although conspiracy theories are increasingly prevalent in the media and political landscape, they remain outside the purview of standard k-12 civics curricula. How might civics teachers address the turn to conspiracy theories particularly within racially marginalized communities? Through queer and critical race theory, this paper offers practices within civics classrooms to address marginalized students’ turns to conspiracy theories, rethinking civic reasoning from students’ paranoid positionalities as targets of systemic oppression. These practices stem from my teaching a twelfth-grade civics course which centered conspiracy theories, and students’ distrust of the government and media.

The first section establishes critical race theory and queer theory as frameworks for reorienting civics to be accountable towards marginalized students’ paranoid readings of the world. When civics courses remain silent on systemic marginalization by the government and only present whitewashed norms of civic reasoning and engagement, then it makes sense for urban students of color to be suspicious of both the government, and how it is being taught. Queer theory frames paranoid reading as reading the world with suspicion, because the things you see happening in the world are dismissed by the societal majority. When experiences of systemic marginalization remain shrouded under the cover of benign civil discourse, it can result in racial paranoia, a distrust of the government and an awareness that systems have been put in place to work against Black and Brown communities. Deeming Black and Brown people as paranoid carries this weight of mental illness that dismisses the broader racialized sociopolitical context. Such paranoid readings must be understood not as individual disorder, but contextualized within broader social disorder of racial marginalization. Racialized paranoia becomes a reflection of systemic relations, embedded within social hierarchies. Reparative reading is complementary to paranoid reading: repairing through a practice of meditation with the text, pushing aside what one wants it to mean and allowing one to be surprised through listening closely to texts.

The second section puts theory into practice, drawing from my experience of teaching a twelfth-grade civics course on conspiracy theories. Recommendations for practice include providing terminology and documentation of marginalization; defining the line between conspiracy and conspiracy theory, science and pseudoscience; embracing fallibility as analytic virtue; and repairing students’ relationships to science and sources.

By balancing paranoid reading with practices in humility and fallibility, those paranoid tendencies can become a useful method for approaching all sources. Engaging civic reasoning through racial paranoia requires encouraging students to be ok with not fully knowing, to embrace the tools for inquiry we have, and to appreciate how that one percent of doubt actually opens up future knowing and inquiry.

Author

• Tadashi Dozono, California State University - Channel Islands