The Black Mohicans: Representations of Everyday Violence in Postracial Urban America

Abstract

This article compares two dominant representations of blackness conveyed via the media and state institutions: first, representations of exceptional, black, elected officials, athletes, entertainers, and honors students who demonstrate the success of the civil rights movement, and second, representations of black and Latino victims and victimizers of violence who are routinely politicized to represent the innate pathology of black and Latino communities writ large within cities like Chicago. This discursive contrast helps gloss over the pervasive economic inequalities that help produce urban violence. Additionally, it exacerbates and further normalizes a socio-logical architecture inherent to Enlightenment thought, that is particularly essential to/within settler colonial formations like the United States, and that is dependent on hypervisible images of helpless, bloody, and pathological masses of natives, who are popularly perceived as deserving of quarantine or obliteration.