Screening - "Control, Containment, and Surveillance: Naming and Resisting the Politics of Fear Mongering" (Plenary Four)

Join the screening of the fourth plenary session from AAPF's 2021 Critical Race Theory Summer School: "Control, Containment, and Surveillance: Naming and Resisting the Politics of Fear Mongering"

Followed by a talkback and Q&A.

Session summary:

The moral hysteria driving efforts to suppress voting, protesting, and learning about racism, which were reviewed on Day Three, can be understood as the Jim Crow faction’s panic over the increasing number of Americans who are turning to CRT-inspired explanations of our nation’s persistent racial disparities. But what explains the extraordinary speed and power of Jim Crow’s reaction? This session will examine how centrist and liberal criminalization policies and political arguments have helped give rise to a broad carceral model of containment and surveillance of nonwhite populations. This system is rooted in longstanding moral panics assailing Black and nonwhite populations, and continues to reflect the powerful legacies of settler colonialism. Under this state-driven model of containment, coercion, and control, the forces of retrenchment continually frame marginalized communities as outliers in need of surveillance, punishment, and withdrawal of resources. This divide-and-conquer consensus has, in turn, prepared the ground for the present moment of racial retrenchment on the right. We will explore the deployment of school discipline as one key factor in this shift, via gendered behavioral crackdowns in the schools and the school-to-prison pipeline. The “superpredator” framing of the war on drugs has also played a powerful role in galvanizing this political consensus—as has the recent fear mongering over immigration on the Trumpian right. All these forces operate an additional, longstanding drive in policy making circles to stigmatize and criminalize Black women—an issue that is front and center in the #SayHerName campaign.

Session panelists: Theresa Rocha Beardall, Bennett Capers, Devon Carbado, Jennifer Chacón, Mark Rosenbaum, David Stovall, and Gary Peller (Moderator).

Email crt@aapf.org with questions.