Queer and Racialized Paranoia: Civic Reasoning From Marginalized Publics

• In Event: Whose Knowledge Is Valued in Public? Taking a Critical Intersectional Approach to Youth Civic Reasoning

Abstract

As a New York City public school teacher, I have had to sign for the truancy police to release my students into school because they were coming late back from lunch. My black and brown students are targets of surveillance. Victor Rios’ (2011) documentation of the school-to-prison pipeline exposed how the school as surveillance system is both a part of the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser, 1971, p. 143), as well as the Repressive State Apparatus (Althusser, 1971, p. 145) through cooperation with the police and prison system.

This paper rethinks civic reasoning from a position of marginalization. McGrew, Breakstone, Ortega, Smith, and Wineburg (2018) found that “[c]ivic online reasoning consists of three primary constructs: Who is behind the information? What is the evidence? What do other sources say?” As a fourth generation Japanese American from Oregon whose family was interned, my civic reasoning is shaped by a distrust of the government, and paranoia towards surveillance. One of the main sourcing questions my 12th grade government students ask is, “what race is the author?” Many of them reference conspiracy theories, and express a distrust of the government. What role do racially marginalized students’ experiences with the government play in their civic reasoning? How do legacies of negation and exclusion shape these students’ sense-making?

I engage queer theory and ethnic studies to theorize a form of civic reasoning from a paranoid position reflecting systemic targeted oppression. Paranoid reading (Sedgwick 2003) is when you read the world with suspicion, when you see things going on in the world that the majority of society seems unwilling or unable to see.

Paranoia in certain bodies can be dismissed as overly emotional reactions, whereas for others, it feeds fruitful validated academic research (Ngai 2005). Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid (2008) addressed the black community’s relationship to the term “paranoid,” in light of historic cases leading to distrust of the medical system. Deeming black and brown people as paranoid carries this weight of mental illness that dismisses the broader racialized sociopolitical context. Jose Muñoz’ (2000) minoritarian theory of affect emphasized the relational aspects of emotion, moving beyond an individualistic Freudian psychoanalysis, to contextualize emotions within larger social and historical matrices. Racialized paranoia becomes a reflection of systemic relations, embedded within social hierarchies.

This work implies the need to contextualize students’ prior relationships to the government and media that legitimately shape who they trust to explain the way the world works. Black and brown students make sense of the world daily, and too often the teaching that goes on in classrooms does not help racially marginalized students to understand their lived experiences. However inaccurate, sometimes sources outside of school provide more ways of understanding students’ worlds than school does, because they directly speak to their experiences. This paper asserts that marginalized students’ critiques of society and their hermeneutics of suspicion are practices linked directly with civic reasoning. Schools ought to provide frameworks that explain phenomena students experience, to grapple with their distrust of the government and news sources.

Author

• Tadashi Dozono, California State University - Channel Islands