Common sense racism: the rhetorical grounds for making meaning of racialized violence

One can likely walk into any business, home, or hangout within any state, city, town, village, or township within the United States and find that most everyone in the room will claim at least a basic understanding of or have strong opinions about racism. Everyone knows what it looks like, where it is, and when it was still a real, sustained problem in this country, and rarely is it ever believed to be sitting right in one's own backyard. Even when instances of overt racialized violence do occur in public culture—such as black church burnings, instances of police brutality, lynchings, or opportunities to confront past histories of racialized violence—rarely, if ever, do these events stir the white public to take notice, take a position, or take a stand. Instead, as I demonstrate in this dissertation, these events more commonly mobilize feelings, discourses, and beliefs within civil society that these ongoing forms and legacies of racism are someone else's problem, or that they perhaps do not have anything to do with racism in the first place. What are the logics and intensities, dispositions and rationalities, forms of knowledge and meaning-making that justify this ultimate refusal to engage the ongoing problem of racialized violence? What cultural forces motivate civil society's refusal to care about, believe, or otherwise recognize the differential mattering of black life?

This dissertation serves as a response to these problems and questions. Across three case studies, a theoretical chapter, and an introduction and conclusion, I argue that the problem with the United State's inability to grapple with the ongoing nature of racialized violence against black communities is the result of a deep-seated form of unconscious knowledge—what I call "common sense racism"—that shapes and informs the manner in which white civil society thinks about, makes sense of, and comes to interpret these histories and events. I argue that this form of common sense is an ever-evolving product of a long history of white people's domination, colonization, massacre, enslavement, torture, exclusion, and containment of black people that has over time created a culture infused with implicit justifications and rationalities for these forms of violence. As a result, any efforts to confront the broader problems of racialized violence in the nation through persuading the broader white public to take notice or take a stand is essentially, and from the outset, bound to fail because of how this form of unspoken community knowledge sits at the very foundation of the country and shapes how the nation imagines itself in relation to black communities as not responsible, culpable, or complicit in their continued suffering.

Thus, although there is still a need to confront and study explicit and overt forms of racism, my dissertation responds to the perhaps more pressing need to confront the common sense racism that operates more dangerously, because insidiously and pervasively, across a broad range of institutional and everyday sites of rhetorical production. And although my broader argument is premised on a deep pessimism, I also demonstrate how everyday black citizens work within the margins of these dominant modes of common thinking in order to create opportunities to imagine and enact a better possible world, and how white anti-racists can contribute to these efforts through revising the logics that inform common sense racism.