I therefore reserve the term "direct interpellation" for those speech acts aimed at a specified "you", where the speaker's intentions can be linked to the normative function of the act. Rather, as in the second diagram, Hearer 2 understands (at least) two normative functions of the speaker's utterances. The indirect address is derived from the audience (ie the social context of the utterance) rather than the speaker's intentions in this case.
Approaches to Second-personhood
Understanding Oppression via Darwall’s account of Second-Personhood
Either second-person forms of address occur between interlocutors who are unequally situated under conditions of structural white supremacy, or they do not. According to Darwall, then, second-person forms of address do not create or adopt racial norms under conditions of structural white supremacy. In my view, second-person forms of address thus create or adopt racial norms under conditions of structural white supremacy.
Developing a Situated Account of Second-Personhood
Code's analysis of otherness then serves as a critique of moral theories that take self-sufficiency and independence as key features of moral and epistemic agency. Indeed, he seems to regard the dependence he describes as a universal property of all forms of moral and epistemic action. Despite these concerns, Code's account is an important theoretical springboard for my non-ideal and situated account of second personhood.
Neo-pragmatist Approaches to Second-personhood
- Understanding Second-personhood through Neo-Pragmatism
- Langton and Visual Scorekeeping
Agent-relative speech acts depend for their normative acceptance on the individual character of the speaker's positioning within a given social order. Or as Fanon puts the matter: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (Ibid., 90). With regard to Kukla and Lance, my analysis in the remaining chapters attempts to address the material dimensions of the normative power of racial interpellations.
Racial Interpellation in Context
Banning Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District
In December 2010, then-Superintendent Tom Horne filed a motion to determine that the Tucson Unified School District's (TUSD) Mexican American Studies program was in violation of the Arizona statute enacted from HB 2281, A.R.S. In June of 2011, newly elected Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal issued another finding, again saying that TUSD violated the new state statute. The concern raised by Horne and Huppenthal was that the district taught the Mexican American Studies program, also known as "La Raza Studies."
One of the main textbooks for the Mexican American studies program was Paul Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a classic text in the discipline of critical pedagogy that discusses how to reshape educational models to emerge from the realities of the lives of those facing oppression. Such books were removed from classrooms and banned from being taught in district schools. Interestingly, Horne and Huppenthal's complaints only targeted the school district's Mexican-American studies and did not affect other curricula that included material on African-American, Asian-American and European history.
Since the 2011 ruling, supporters of MAS have tried to revive parts of the program, but Huppenthal remains skeptical of the program's ability to meet the mandates of A.R.S. That is, many of Horne and Huppenthal's concerns about Mexican American Studies in the TUSD often refer to contemporary immigration debates within the US. At one point in Horne's findings, he states that books taught in the MAS program "revel in the difficulty we have in controlling the border," suggesting that the MAS program is wrongly teaching students to be disaffected. feel with the current immigration policies of the US.
In this document, a federal judge ruled in favor of the constitutionality of A.R.'s language and mandates.
Anti-Latina/o Racism and Structural White Supremacy
Huppenthal and Horne argue that teaching students to support forms of ethnic and racial solidarity and further promoting programs that examine historical analyzes of oppression in the United States is the first pillar of the amelioration of people of color and especially the amelioration of black peoples through the brutality of the Middle Passage, the violence and exploitation of African peoples and peoples of African descent in slave economies in the Americas and the Caribbean, the regulation and control of black Americans through Jim Crow laws, and the continued criminalization of black Americans within the current era of mass incarceration. The third pillar of white supremacy, "Orientalism," here derived from the work of Edward Said, designates certain peoples or nations as "inferior and as those who pose a constant threat to the welfare of the empire" (Ibid).
The logic of these three pillars of white supremacy serve to reinforce each other and often effectively separate communities of color that may be clearly affected by some specific form of racial oppression. She argues that resistance to only one logic of white supremacy makes this form of resistance complicit in the structural dominance of other groups influenced by the remaining logics of white supremacy. By referring to structural facets of white supremacy, I argue that racism is not an individualistic set of biases or beliefs about people of different racial groups.
Against this view, I argue that what makes white supremacy structural in nature are the material differences between racial groups in terms of rewards and harms punished through institutional social practices. Or put differently, following Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, we can consider the development of racialized social systems that provide material advantages to whites as a social group against a background of racial hierarchy as the structural feature of white supremacy (Bonilla-Silva 2001, 44). ). Anti-Latina/o racism thus functions under multiple logics of white supremacy, and as Smith argues, “These logics can affect people differently depending on whether they are Black, Indigenous, Mestizo, etc.” (Smith 2010, 3).
The targeting of MAS in Tucson, while unfairly targeting Mexican Americans and by extension other Latinos/us more broadly, reinforces white supremacy via the perpetuation of the logic of Orientalism or what I will refer to more broadly as nativism - a racialized view of a group as alien and inherently inferior because of characteristics of that group.
Nativism and Racial Interpellation
This form of racial discrimination targets Latinos as outsiders who cannot support and uphold the country's democratic values (Alcoff 2007, 176). As I will argue in a moment, some normative salutations socially locate Mexican American peoples and cultures as potential threats to the nation's order. Before turning to these texts, we can briefly revisit some views on the pragmatic functions of speech acts in order to identify some of the potential normative dimensions of language that I will analyze in the documents that led to the MAS ban.
Through this lens, I suggest that third-person addresses in the context of Tucson's MAS ban include second-person addresses of various racial groups. Consider, for example, Gloria Anzaldúa's discussion of the Americanization program she endured during her elementary school education in the South. This was especially important because the dropout rate among students enrolled in the 1C program never fell below 60 percent in its 47 years of operation, and because the dropout rate remained high after the development of the county's Department of Bilingual Education in 1969.
Due to growing dissatisfaction with the treatment of Mexican American students in the district, a series of audits were conducted during the years 1997 and 1998 by three different subcommittees that would address the status of the Department of Bilingual Education. Finally, in 1999, at the request of the relevant subcommittees, the district established its first Latin American Studies department, which included a project for a new curriculum that would focus on primary and secondary education in the district (Ibid.) . Although the proposal was approved by 63% of the state's voters, the document assumes that knowledge of English will be a strong enabler for success in the US.
Moreover, this disregard for language coincides with claims about “authentic” forms of American identity, which, as I discuss in the next section, require a form of liberal individualism.
Individualism and Racism without Racists
Following this claim, we can mine the "rhetorical mine" of the MAS ban in Tucson to uncover second-person vocatives that create racial norms. That is, the rhetoric of individualism found in the legal documents of the MAS ban in Tucson denies forms of dependency and shared vulnerability among non-white citizens. Addressing the "citizens of Tucson," he assumes that if the "facts" of the program were made clear to his audience, they too would feel the call to end the program.
In a subsequent paragraph of the document, Horne writes that “the evidence is overwhelming that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District is teaching a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism that the citizens of Tucson should no longer tolerate” (Horne 2007, 2). The “evidence” that Horne then cites includes criticism of the name used for the program (“La Raza Studies”), the textbooks the program uses, and some of the materials used in activities related to program. Consider the low graduation rates that Gómez and Gabaldón mention in their analysis of the history of the 1C program in the Tucson school district.
Kymlicka's version of liberal multiculturalism, then, relies heavily on a distinction between different minority groups within the state, a distinction that corresponds to the distinction Horne makes in the documents he proposes calling for the end of the Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson. The voluntariness of migration patterns, Kymlicka argues, denies the rights of self-governance to polyethnic groups. However, given the involuntary, and therefore unjust, nature of the existence of national minorities, such groups should be granted special rights for self-government within the state.
This is because the political demands of the Chicano rights movement, for example, were never preceded by a view about the indigenous status of Mexicans in the US.
The Latino Threat and Responses to the Banning of MAS
Horne does not refer to these forms of testimonials for the success of the program. Interestingly, the campaign responded effectively to the implicit hail of the racial speech of Horne et al. Finally, in the final section of the chapter, I turn to the field of social medicine to link Fanon's analysis of colonial medicine more directly to contemporary forms of microaggression and racism.
For example, they consider the uses of the first name by White Southerners in the USA. Sue's insight here is that some of the most ubiquitous forms of racial injustice occur through everyday interactions. North African Syndrome,” the colonial impact on the epistemic and hermeneutic dimensions of the relations between colonial medical personnel and colonized patients.
In his earlier writings in the 1980s, Waitzkin developed a sustained analysis of the effects of capitalist forms of health care systems on health and disease rates. To unite Coyolxauhqui”, which is one of the stages of conocimiento, requires a desire for new personal and collective forms of self-knowledge/ignorance. Her discussion of her family and their history of immigration to the United States also recapitulates the ambiguity of loss and interruption of self in creation.
Namely that the normative recording of our speech is not in the individual's control.
Racial Interpellation in the Second Person
- Understanding Power, Authority, and Microaggressions
- Racial Interpellations in the Clinical Encounter
- Social Medicine, Interpretation, and Interpellation
Racial Interpellation in the First Person
- Self-Knowledge, Self-Ignorance, and Shared Epistemic Responsibility
- Theorizing Autohistoria and Self-Interpellation
- Vilar and Impossible Interpellations
- Writing Self, Writing Others/ Escribiendo nos/otras
