Collective Turning and Modern-Day Persons Unknown: An Ideological Critique of White Supremacy in Public

• In Event: 42.029 - Then and Now: Grappling With Race in Psyche and Society

Abstract

This essay offers an ideological critique of what I term the “collective turning” of white supremacy. Establishing 20th-century spectacle lynching as public pedagogy, I consider these historical sites of terror as teaching/learning moments. I then focus on the modern classroom as a contemporary site of violence and draw connections between the ways educational structures, policies, and practices are complicit in sustaining white supremacy rooted in this violent past. Using Althusser (1970) and Zizek (2008), lynching which functioned to crystallize understandings of racial dominance/violence is shown to carry ideological/material implications of this past into contemporary contexts. Theorized as “collective turning” ideological (re)production is illuminated within modern-day learning situations and invites readers to imagine contemporary conditions which makes these theories concrete.

Author

• Courtney Cook, The University of Texas - Austin