Racist knowledge enters mainstream as commonsense once crafted by recurring strategies

Evidence

Here, Professor Capers suggests that within texts there are underlying assumptions and reliance on commonsense anti-Black ideas. Because they are commonsense, everyone knows them, and they do not have to be stated. The problem for raced groups is that these assumptions make the law’s complicity in their subordination seem entirely logical. What Professor Capers terms “reading Black” is a particular deconstructive move that, in this article, is analogous to distilling the racist tropes and discursive strategies from the text. It is the practice of reading for the underlying armature of inequality, subordination, racism, and racial sexism, homophobia, and more. “Reading Black” renders the anti- Blackness or the erasure of race in the legal text more visible; this article’s method renders any specific racism more visible by showing the similarities in the abstract. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 368 (#builds-on, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Commonsense racist assumptions make legal complicity in subordination seem logical — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 368; Reading law oppositionally reveals how contested ideas harden into normalized racial commonsense — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 364; Racism is learned through discourse, beginning in school textbooks — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1108 (+1 more)