Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of black church burnings

Abstract

ABSTRACTI theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the “undercommonsense” to form a survival discourse and what possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, “root”) meaning-making practices may hold. This essay advances communication studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology, and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil society’s material rhetorics that mask the material realities of racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these dynamics and how it might be revised or contested.