The Violence of Organized Forgetting by Henry A. Giroux

Author:Henry A. Giroux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

The actions allegedly committed by the Boston marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, were heinous. [Three] people dead and more than [260 injured], some with shredded and amputated limbs. But Londoners, who endured IRA terror for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston. They’re right—and then some. What we saw was a collective freak-out like few that we’ve seen previously in the United States. It was yet another depressing reminder that more than 11 years after 9/11 Americans still allow themselves to be easily and willingly cowed by the “threat” of terrorism.28

Some would argue that locking down an entire city because a homicidal killer was on the loose can be attributed to how little experience Americans have with daily acts of terrorism—in contrast to Baghdad, Beirut, and other cities which are constantly subject to such attacks. While there is an element of truth to such arguments, what is missing from this position is a different and more frightening logic. Americans have become so indifferent to the militarization of everyday life that they barely blink when an entire city, school, prison, or campus is locked down. In fact, as part of the national indoctrination of lockdown, American school children are now subjected to lockdown drills, a normalization process which the New York Times describes as “the new fire drill.”29 In a society in which everyone is treated as a potential suspect or criminal “to be penalized, locked up or locked out,” it is not surprising that institutions and policies are constructed that normalize a range of antidemocratic practices.30 These include everything from invasive body searches by the police and the mass incarceration of people of color to the ongoing surveillance and securitization of schools, workplaces, social media, the Internet, businesses, neighborhoods, and individuals, all of which signify major government overreach that mimics the tactics of a police state.31 At a time when prison, poverty, and a culture of cruelty and punishment inform each other and ensnare more and more Americans, the “governing-through-crime” complex moves across America like a fast-spreading virus.32 In its wake, Mississippi schoolchildren are handcuffed for not wearing a belt or having the wrong color shoes;33 young mothers who cannot pay a traffic ticket are sent to jail;34 and, according to Michelle Alexander, “more African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.”35

These examples are not merely anecdotal. They point to the alarming degree to which lockdown has become a central tool and organizing logic in controlling those growing populations now considered disposable and subject to the machinery of social and civic death. The racist grammars of state violence that emerged during and after the lockdown of Boston speak to a connection between the violence of disposability that haunts American life and the state’s increasing reliance on the use of force to implement and maintain its structures of inequality, abusive power, and domination. Its

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