The Violence of Organized Forgetting. Henry A. Giroux
behind bars . . . has increased 600 percent.”76 It is estimated that in some cities, such as Washington D.C., 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison. Michelle Alexander has pointed out that “one in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).”77
Young people of color in America have an ascribed identity that is a direct legacy of the society created by generations of white enslavers. Black men are particularly considered threatening, expendable, and part of a culture of criminality. They are deemed guilty of criminal behavior not because of the alleged crimes they might commit, but because a collective imagination paralyzed by the racism of a white supremacist culture that can only view them as a disturbing threat. Clearly, the real threat resides in a social order that hides behind the mutually informing and poisonous notions of colorblindness and a post-racial society, a convenient rhetorical obfuscation that allows white Americans to ignore the institutional and individual ideologies, practices, and policies that support toxic forms of racism and destroy any viable notions of justice and democracy. As the Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis cases made clear, when young black men are not being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are being targeted by vigilantes and private security forces and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous—or in Davis’s case because he was playing loud rap music.78 This medieval type of punishment inflicts pain on both the psyches and bodies of young people as part of a public spectacle of domination and subordination.
Anyone belonging to a population identified and treated as disposable faces an existence in which the ravages of segregation, racism, poverty, and dashed hopes are amplified by the forces of “privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization,” fashioning a new architecture of punishment, massive human suffering, and authoritarianism.79 Students being miseducated, criminalized, and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in prison-type schools provide a grim reminder of the degree to which the ethos of containment and punishment now creeps into spheres of everyday life that were largely immune in the past from this type of state violence. This is not merely barbarism parading as reform—it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing most of its population.
Widespread violence now functions as part of an antiimmune system that turns the economy of sadistic pleasure into the foundation for sapping democracy of any political substance and moral vitality. Democracy in the United States is increasingly battered by a collusion between financial elites and a surveillance state that de-prioritizes their “complex” crimes of economic mass destruction.80 An American disimagination machine producing civic death and historical amnesia penetrates into all aspects of national life, suggesting that all who are marginalized by class, race, and ethnicity have been permanently abandoned. But historical and public memory are not merely on the side of those enforcing domination.
Anthropologist David Price asserts that historical memory can be a source of renewal within the “desert of organized forgetting” and suggests a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth, and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a “reawakening America’s battered public memories.”81Against the tyranny of forgetting, educators, young people, social activists, public intellectuals, workers and others can make visible and oppose the long legacy and current reality of state violence and the rise of the punishing state. Such a struggle suggests not only reclaiming, for instance, education as a public good but also reforming the criminal justice system and removing police from schools. In addition, there is a need to employ public memory, critical theory, and other intellectual archives and resources to expose the crimes of those market-driven criminogenic regimes of power that now run the commanding institutions of society and that have transformed the welfare state into a warfare state.
The consolidation of capitalism, counterintelligence, and the carceral state with their vast apparatuses of real and symbolic violence must also be situated and understood as part of a broader historical and political attack on public values, civic literacy, activism, and social justice. Crucial here is the need to engage how such an attack is aided and abetted by the emergence of a poisonous neoliberal public pedagogy that depoliticizes as much as it entertains and corrupts. State violence cannot be defined as simply a political issue. Also operating in tandem with politics are pedagogical forces that wage violence against the minds, desires, bodies, and identities of young people as part of the reconfiguration of the social state into the punishing state. At the heart of this transformation is the emergence of a new form of corporate sovereignty, a more intense form of state violence, a ruthless survival-of-the-fittest ethic used to legitimate the concentrated power of the rich, and a concerted effort to punish young people who are out of step with official lists, ideology, values, and modes of social control.
Making young people bear the burden of a severe educational deficit has enormous currency in a society in which existing relations of power are normalized. Under such conditions, those who hold power accountable are viewed as treasonous while critically engaged young people are denounced as un-American.82 In any totalitarian society, dissent is a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engaged citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of genuine education with job training. Edward Snowden, for one, was denounced as being part of a generation that combined being educated with a distrust of authority. It is important to note that Snowden was labeled as a spy, not a whistle-blower—even though he exposed the reach of the spy services into the lives of most Americans. Of course, these antidemocratic tendencies represent more than a threat to young people: they also put in peril all of those communities, individuals, groups, public spheres, and institutions now considered disposable because they are at odds with a world run by bankers and the financial elite. Only a well-organized movement of young people, educators, workers, parents, religious groups, and other concerned citizens will be capable of changing the power relations and vast economic inequalities responsible for turning the United States into a country in which it is almost impossible to recognize the ideals of a real democracy.
Learning to Remember
The rise of America’s disimagination machine and its current governing-through-punishment operating system suggest the need for a politics that not only negates the established order but imagines a new one, one informed by a radical vision in which the future does not imitate the present.83 Learning to remember means merging a critique of the way things are with a sense of realistic hope or what I call educated hope, and transforming individual memories and struggles into collective narratives and larger social movements. The resistance that young people are mobilizing against oppressive societies all over the globe is being met with state-sponsored violence that is about more than militant police brutality. This is especially clear in the United States, where the shift from social welfare to a constant warfare state has replaced a culture of civic responsibility and democratic vision with one of cruelty, fear, and commodification. Until educators, artists, intellectuals, and various social movements address how the metaphysics of casino capitalism, war, and violence currently permeate American society (and societies in other parts of the world) along with the savage social costs it has enacted, the forms of social, political, and economic violence that ordinary people are protesting against, as well as the violence waged in response to their protests, will become impossible to recognize and counteract.
If acts of resistance are to matter, demonstrations and protests must give way to more sustainable organizations that develop alternative communities, autonomous forms of worker control, universal forms of health care, models of direct democracy, and emancipatory modes of education. Education must become central to any viable notion of politics willing to struggle for a life and future outside of predatory capitalism and the surveillance state that protects it. Teachers, young people, artists, and other cultural workers must come together to develop an educative and emancipatory politics in which people can address the historical, structural, and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state as well