Racial Violence, Emotional Friction, and Epistemic Activism

By José Medina 

Racial Violence and the Multiple Faces of Racial Oppression

What makes violence a face of oppression is less about the particular acts themselves—though these are often utterly horrific—than the social context surrounding them, which makes such acts possible and even acceptable. What makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, rather than merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character and its existence as a social practice. (Young, Justice, 61–62)

Racial violence is a very important dimension of racial oppression; however, it typically does not operate—and cannot be properly understood—independently of the other key dimensions or faces of racial oppression. As Iris Marion Young has explained in detail, people are oppressed in different ways. Young recognized violence as one of five different faces of oppression: oppressed people can suffer from violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism.

It is at least in principle possible for each of these different kinds of oppression to appear separately and independently from the others. For example, a white male worker may be exploited without being marginalized, powerless, culturally subordinated, or particularly vulnerable to violence. However, these different forms of oppression often appear intertwined, reinforcing and transforming each other in complex ways.

In this essay, I will elucidate how racial violence, as a particular dimension of the oppression that a racial group can experience, relates to other dimensions of that group’s oppression. I will argue that there are specific epistemic and affective obstacles that make the complex phenomenon of racial violence particularly insidious and hard to uproot. In particular, I will argue that there are epistemic distortions that render phenomena of racial violence relatively invisible or excusable as unavoidable aspects of social reality, and that there are forms of social insensitivity and social paralysis fostered by the distorted and precarious social visibility of racial violence.

Furthermore, I will argue that resistance against these epistemic and affective obstacles—which I will subsume under the rubric of epistemic activism—requires that we pay attention to how racial violence relates to other faces of racial oppression, namely exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural subordination of racial groups.

The five faces of oppression that Young identifies are dimensions of structural oppression, which, unlike the old-fashioned oppression of a people by a tyrant or ruling elite, is not perpetrated by an individual or group of individuals consciously and intentionally. Instead, it is carried out by entire institutions, cultures, social arrangements, and the conditions of daily life. For this reason, as Young explains, structural forms of oppression—including structural violence—cannot be eliminated simply by purging a discrete number of individuals or structural elements involved in its production (e.g., “by getting rid of the rulers or making some new laws”), “because [these] oppressions are systematically reproduced in major economic, political, and cultural institutions” (41).

As Young points out, given the systemic character of structural oppression, a structurally oppressed group may not face a well-defined corresponding group of oppressors. Even when such a group is identifiable, there is a much more complicated story behind the production of structural oppression that is overlooked if we confine our analysis to the intentions and actions of a particular group. For example, the history of lynching in the United States contains a pattern of collective racial violence that goes deeper than the criminal activities of the Ku Klux Klan. As Young puts it: “While structural oppression involves relations among groups, these relations do not always fit the paradigm of conscious and intentional oppression of one group by another” (ibid.).

The key is not so much to identify a well-defined group of actors who maintain the oppression (“the racists”) but rather to identify the entire system of actions, social arrangements, and institutional and structural conditions behind a structural form of oppression (such as American racism) and the vulnerabilities of oppressed subjects. As Young remarks, the “actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing [structural] oppression, but those people are usually simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do not understand themselves as agents of oppression” (41–42).

Social movements for liberation fighting against structural forms of oppression understand this well: the problem goes much deeper than a few evildoers with nasty attitudes and no conscience. Anti-violence movements recognize that their task is not simply to combat those who perpetrate violence and those who instigate or tolerate it knowingly. They also need to address a silent majority that, through their apathy and inaction, become enablers. Anti-violence movements must confront and transform publics and institutions that are looking the other way or providing cover for the continuation of patterns of violence.

Promoting public awareness and creating a new kind of social sensibility regarding structural racial violence involves much more than changing the minds of a few “oppressors” and those who “agree” with them and tolerate their wrongdoing. These tasks require deep critical engagement with multiple publics and institutions, as well as society at large—engagements that are not only cognitive and argumentative but also affective, imaginal, and action-oriented.

As I will argue in the next section, this involves much more than simply “changing public opinion”; it requires the creation of new forms of social sensibility and new cognitive and affective attitudes that trigger new patterns of community responses to violence.

The core of my argument in what follows will be that, in cases of structural racial violence, the activism needed is an epistemic activism that can awaken people from their epistemic slumbers, calling attention to how they are complicit in vulnerabilities to patterns of racial violence and how they can disrupt their complicity. After elucidating in the next two sections the kind of critical public engagement needed for social movements of liberation (such as anti-racist violence movements), I will develop my case for thick forms of critical engagement and epistemic activism by examining a case study of structural racial violence. I will pay special attention to how anti-racist violence movements in the United States have worked effectively by promoting a particular kind of sensibility, and how this work remains unfinished and must be continued through epistemic activism today.

Political Engagement, Resistant Affectivity, and Epistemic Activism

What kinds of political engagements are needed to stop structural patterns of racial violence? What do individuals, groups, and social movements need to do to resist structural racial violence?

A dominant view in liberal political philosophy—exemplified in various accounts of deliberative democracy—holds that political engagement consists of giving reasons and responding to reasons in the public sphere. This dominant conception of political engagement often leads to an impoverished picture of our political lives by restricting what counts as political interaction to public deliberation in argumentative form. This view fails to acknowledge the unfair testimonial and hermeneutical obstacles that oppressed groups face, rendering them marginalized players in the game of “giving and asking for reasons.” Members of oppressed groups are typically rendered invisible and inaudible—or their visibility and audibility are precarious and constrained—and their epistemic agency is diminished in practices of public deliberation. They often find themselves as political subjects who cannot enter the political game of “giving and asking for reasons” on equal footing (if they can participate in that game at all) because their voices are systematically distorted or because they face significant obstacles and disadvantages (such as credibility deficits or a scarcity of accepted expressive resources).

Fortunately, political engagement is much more than a game of public deliberation or “giving and asking for reasons” about public affairs. The work of political resistance—and of what I call epistemic activism—involves much more than argumentation: it can include a wide range of activities, from shouting to painting walls, from stopping and disrupting public life to creating new narratives, memorials, and spaces. Most struggles for visibility and audibility that liberation movements engage in occur prior to and are relatively independent of practices of public deliberation; they involve forms of political engagement that happen outside the games of “giving and asking for reasons.” These thick critical engagements certainly affect the cognitive dimension of our political lives, but they also engage our affective reactions, our imagination, and our propensity to act or remain stuck in inaction. The goals of thick critical engagements that epistemic activism aims for include changing the cognitive attitudes and habits that mediate patterns of action and inaction; but they also encompass broadening our repertoire of affective responses, reconfiguring our imagination so we can understand, empathize, and act with others in new ways, and making available new forms of responsivity that can adequately address (proactively and preventively) people’s vulnerabilities to harm.

Iris Marion Young has contributed to broadening our conception of public engagement with her arguments for a new paradigm of communicative democracy and against influential accounts of deliberative democracy. She emphasized that what liberation of oppressed groups requires is not only that members of these groups be allowed to enter public deliberation and that their reasons be heard. Something deeper needs to happen in order to overcome oppression, for oppressed subjects continue to be excluded (or marginalized) even as they are included if they are simply allowed to enter the spaces of political engagement as these spaces have been set up, without any genuine transformation of these spaces and the communicative dynamics they allow. What oppressed subjects demand, what their liberation requires, is that their voices be heard on their own terms, that their silences be felt, and that their stories be engaged with. Young called attention to the expressive and political force of non-argumentative communicative styles such as storytelling; her arguments and suggestions for expanding what counts as political engagement can also extend to other forms of expression, including non-verbal ones such as photography, film, and performance art, as well as mixed forms that contain both verbal and non-verbal elements, such as street protests and photo and video activism that combines images and words.

There have been two interrelated philosophical biases in the dominant liberal paradigm that have led to the problematic reduction of the wide range of heterogeneous forms of political engagement to the formal game of giving arguments in public deliberation. A key bias behind this impoverishing distortion of our political life is political cognitivism, which posits that political engagement is first and foremost a form of cognitive engagement, meaning that it consists of engaging our minds intellectually with respect to our opinions concerning public affairs. A second key bias in the dominant liberal view of political engagement is deliberationism or argumentationism, the belief that the expressive form that political engagement must take is public deliberation or argumentation. In the final section of this paper, and through a case study concerning racial violence and movements of resistance against it, I will argue against these biases, showing that the impoverished view of political engagement promoted by these biases makes it impossible to fully understand the rich and diverse forms of activism that the fight against racial oppression requires.

Against political cognitivism, my case study will demonstrate that political resistance involves much more than cognitive engagement, as it requires political actions and interventions that engage the affective and embodied sensibilities of subjects, communities, and publics (and not just their “opinions”). And against deliberationism or argumentationism, my case study will show that political resistance involves much more than argumentation or deliberation, as it requires changing communicative dynamics and sensibilities at a deeper level and mobilizing ways of generating and sharing meanings through diverse forms of expression (engaging us not only cognitively and verbally but also affectively, visually, and spatially).

A key part of what I call epistemic activism consists of critically engaging with our political cognitive-affective attitudes and tapping into their transformative potential. I contend that the attitudes shaping our sensibility and mediating our actions are hybrid in character: they are cognitive-affective attitudes. However, I will focus more on the affective side of our political lives and the thick critical engagements that epistemic activism seeks to produce. I will concentrate on the capacity to connect affectively with the suffering of victims of racial violence and how certain forms of empathy can activate an entire repertoire of emotional reactions such as grief and anger (as well as elaborations of the latter in moral indignation or political outrage). My elucidation of epistemic activism will provide an analysis of empathy, grief, and anger as political affective reactions with tremendous critical and transformative potential. I will highlight the different ways in which empathy, grief, and anger can function as affective responses to social harms, stressing that although these reactions can sometimes be paralyzing and self-destructive, they can also be regenerative and transformative. By examining how empathy, grief, and anger figure in processes of communal mourning and social protest, I will bring to the forefront how affective structures and sensibilities can facilitate social repair (reparative justice), community reconfiguration, and even institutional transformation. In short, the next two sections will argue for empathy, grief, and anger as key political emotions with significant (and often untapped) transformative and liberatory potential. 

Changing Public Sensibilities and Engaging Emotions in Epistemic Activism

The popular phrase “changing public opinion,” often used to encapsulate social change, reveals the cognitivist and deliberationist biases that have dominated liberal societies in the Western world. The goal of liberation movements goes well beyond merely “changing opinions”; it includes transforming public perceptions, reactions, and ways of relating to one another within social groups and communities. Social movements for liberation aim to promote genuine social change, not simply to “convince” or “persuade” the public of certain views. I argue (and have previously argued) that a society can “change its mind” about racism—by purging specific beliefs about racial subordination—while still retaining a racist sensibility and tolerating racist practices. Deep and authentic social change is far more complex than a community merely changing “its mind” or its repertoire of “opinions.” It involves developing a new social sensibility, uprooting and displacing forms of insensitivity, and replacing them with cognitive and affective attitudes that facilitate healthier social relationships.

For this reason, emotions play a crucial role in liberation movements, particularly those dedicated to combating racial violence. Emotions are essential for awakening individuals from their racist slumbers, teaching them to recognize vulnerabilities to racial violence, mobilizing concern, fostering communities of resistance, and sustaining support networks for potential and actual victims of racial violence.

However, emotions can also serve the purposes of oppression and marginalization. While much has been written about the use of specific emotions, such as fear and hate, to create and maintain oppressive practices, less attention has been given to emotional failures—such as a lack of empathy and the desensitization of the public to the struggles of certain groups. I will focus on these affective failures and resistances that support insensitivity and complicity with racial violence, while also highlighting the liberatory emotional friction that must be mobilized to resist racism and patterns of racial violence.

I use the term “emotional friction” in both negative and positive contexts. “Negative emotional friction” refers to the emotional obstacles individuals face in overcoming complicity with oppression, such as antipathy toward oppressed groups or apathy regarding their struggles. Conversely, “positive emotional friction” pertains to the emotional attitudes and responses needed to resist oppression, including empathy, grief, and anger for the suffering of marginalized individuals. To disrupt the complicity of complacent and apathetic publics, epistemic activism seeks to eradicate negative emotional friction and promote positive emotional friction. In the context of racial violence in the United States, which will be the focus of my analysis, the epistemic activism evident in anti-racist movements has indeed functioned in this dual capacity—unmasking and uprooting the insensitivity of complicit publics while fostering positive ways of relating to victims of racial violence.

Through my analysis of racial violence in the United States, I aim to underscore the negative affective work performed by racist ideologies, as well as the positive affective work required by anti-racist movements. I am particularly interested in examining how racist ideologies not only motivate perpetrators of racial violence but also provide complicit publics with emotional support and justifications for their apathy, allowing them to evade responsibility for the brutal treatment of their fellow citizens. My reflections will highlight the negative emotional friction created by racist ideologies that inhibit complicit publics from condemning racial violence, alongside the positive emotional friction that anti-racist movements strive to instill in the public to galvanize mobilization against such violence.

Racist ideologies create vulnerabilities to racial violence that can be perpetrated with impunity in two primary ways: by stigmatizing and dehumanizing people of color, and by desensitizing mainstream publics to the violence inflicted upon them. Racist ideologies perform this dual function—stigmatizing and dehumanizing individuals of color while desensitizing the mainstream public—through both verbal and non-verbal means, encompassing cognitive and affective processes. Racist groups and leaders have effectively exploited this dynamic.

Consider the pro-lynching movement in the early twentieth century in the Southern United States. This movement mobilized a comprehensive propaganda apparatus that demeaned and dehumanized people of color through verbal means—in pamphlets, journals, and public speeches—as well as non-verbal methods, such as photography and film, which portrayed black males as criminals. This portrayal led white audiences to lose empathy for them, facilitating the normalization of racial violence against perceived threats to white society.

As Amy Louise Wood emphasizes in Lynching and Spectacle, lynching would not have become such a significant cultural phenomenon in post-Reconstruction America without a propagandistic apparatus that included the circulation and consumption of visual materials, especially photographs of lynch victims. These images were often shared and sold as postcards. Wood highlights how films contributed to the spectacle of lynching—both iconic feature films like The Birth of a Nation and numerous short films depicting lynchings that were readily available in public venues like train stations.

Wood’s analysis persuasively illustrates that lynching evolved into a visual spectacle. This spectacle, rather than merely an increase in lynching instances, explains how it functioned as a weapon of racial terror and social division—terrorizing people of color while positioning respectable white audiences in opposition to the black “criminal,” pressuring them into becoming spectators who accepted the normalization of violence against criminalized black bodies. As Joy James notes, lynching in the early twentieth century cannot be understood solely as punishment for perceived threats; it must be viewed as a terrorist campaign aimed at controlling an ethnic group subjugated as an inferior race. The power of lynching as a tool of collective political intimidation derived from its status as a spectacle, communicating visually to both local and distant audiences the criminalization and dehumanization of people of color in contrast to the respectability of white society.

As Wood explains, the communicative practices surrounding lynching photography developed in the early twentieth century trained white audiences to watch and participate in the spectacle. They learned to pose with the lynch victim, share those photographs privately, and circulate them as postcards. This propagandistic apparatus of lynching photography transformed numerous white audiences into spectators who actively participated in the spectacle, thus tacitly endorsing and disseminating the underlying assumptions of this spectacle through their spectatorship. 

As I have argued elsewhere (“Resisting Racist Propaganda”), the spectacle of lynching photography in the United States served two communicative functions: it was intended to stigmatize and terrorize people of color while simultaneously mobilizing a “respectable” white public in contrast to the image of the black criminal—the black menace to decent society. These photographs have been and continue to be traumatizing images for people of color, and revisiting this horrific spectacle is always problematic, even when done for critical purposes, as it recirculates trauma, forcing individuals to relive it. I will not reproduce any of these images here, but I will describe how one of them was turned against itself by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in a pamphlet that aimed to counteract some of the negative affective work performed by lynching photos on white audiences while simultaneously promoting a different kind of white sensibility—one that is no longer desensitized to black suffering and recognizes the ethical importance of being emotionally attentive to the suffering of other racial groups.

The prejudicial and stigmatizing views that associate blackness with criminality create an affective inability to properly understand and respond to the suffering and loss of black communities. This affective numbness is a crucial aspect of what epistemic activism against racial violence needs to combat. It is not enough simply to convince the public to repudiate racist beliefs, such as “all black males are criminals and rapists”; something beyond cognitive intervention is required. The anti-lynching movement understood this well.

Although the anti-lynching movement in the United States began in the nineteenth century, it became institutionalized with the founding of the NAACP in 1909. Working with the NAACP, Ida B. Wells delivered speeches and participated in creating pamphlets aimed at disarming the apathy of the general public and disrupting their complicity with lynching as a weapon of racial terror. The tactics and activities that Ida B. Wells and the NAACP employed to awaken people from their racist slumbers are paradigmatic of what I term epistemic activism. They involved denouncing the social invisibility of racial violence and promoting new understandings of the conditions that make people vulnerable to such violence, as well as the complicity of various publics and institutions in it. They also tapped into emotions that could foster empathy and motivate individuals to engage in reparative and preventive actions that address the vulnerability of minority groups to racial violence.

However, it is important to note that empathetic reactions may not necessarily lead to an affective restructuring or result in a political sensibility that interrupts complicity with oppression and compels individuals to engage in liberatory social struggles. So, what kind of empathy work should epistemic activism aim to promote?

Three important caveats from the literature on empathy can help illuminate the kind of empathy work that can be most politically productive and useful in struggles for social justice. First, following Max Scheler, Sandra Bartky distinguishes different forms of “fellow-feeling” or ways of “feeling-with,” emphasizing that not all of them bind us to others in morally and politically appropriate ways or facilitate our moral and political agency toward them. In particular, there are ways of “feeling-with” that are not conducive to dignifying, caring for, or respecting the other: for example, when we feel with the other simply because the same event evokes our feelings, or when we experience “emotional infection” (shared emotions through contagion—e.g., the mass panic of a crowd), or when we engage in “emotional identification” (a psychic contagion in which we project ourselves onto the other and imagine we can see and feel through their perspective).

It is especially important to avoid forms of empathy that are assimilative and appropriative, which Iris Marion Young (in Intersecting Voices) describes as “symmetrical reciprocity.” This occurs when we project our perspective onto that of others and imagine our positions to be reversible. Such perspectival projection and symmetrical reciprocity inflict epistemic violence on the other. In contrast to this kind of assimilative and appropriative empathy, Bartky underscores the importance of “genuine fellow-feeling,” which does not involve identification or projection but entails an emotional response to the feelings of others while remaining attuned to their differences and the distance between their positions and ours. Bartky’s “genuine fellow-feeling” can be understood as embodying what Young describes as “asymmetrical reciprocity”: moral respect afforded to others based on the recognition of their differences, which involves taking account of the other without assuming their perspective, grounded in the lack of reversibility of perspectives arising from different life histories and social positions.

Second, empathetic reactions can remain part of a fleeting affective reactivity and may not lead to any deep or lasting change in affective structure or sensibility. For this reason, it is essential to take seriously the temporal dimension of activism—the sustained cultivation of activist interventions over time until they leave a mark. Activism should aim not only to provoke emotional reactions in the public but also to trigger a complex process of emotional restructuring that unfolds over time. In this sense, I refer to “empathy work” rather than simply empathy or empathetic reaction. What I call empathy work aims at self-transformation (what Bartky describes as a self-knowing that transforms the self who knows) and at deep changes in our affective repertoires, leading to the development of a new sensibility.

Third, empathy can be exploited in indirect and implicit ways. Empathetic reactions and even habitual empathy can be managed in such a way that, far from disrupting complicity with oppression, they may actually serve an economy of exploitation. Carolyn Pedwell, in her critique of the romanticization of empathy in contemporary culture, offers a powerful analysis of how empathy is sought and deployed today as part of masculinized techniques for neoliberal subject-making and biopolitical governance aimed at creating and spreading wealth. In Affective Relations, Pedwell argues that while empathy is often assumed to be a stepping stone to global social justice, it is, in fact, instrumentalized by global neoliberal agendas that exacerbate inequality and oppression worldwide. Although this neoliberal form of empathy may motivate charitable giving, it does not encourage individuals to relinquish their privileges or cease participation in exploitative practices and policies. Despite this adverse contemporary climate and the corporate appropriation of the culture of empathy, Pedwell does not dismiss the political utility of all forms of empathy. In particular, she argues that what she calls “confrontational empathy” can help people recognize their complicity with oppression and motivate them to act and position themselves differently. Drawing on post-colonial feminists and anti-racist scholars, Pedwell characterizes “confrontational empathy” as an emotional connection that, instead of promoting emotional universality, is attentive to social positionality and acknowledges the specific vulnerabilities associated with different positionalities, as well as the unsettling awareness of power differentials. This is the kind of empathy that the anti-racist epistemic activism I will elucidate aims to promote.

Notably, the epistemic interventions of the NAACP sought to connect with victims of racial violence at an emotional level from multiple situated perspectives, inviting the public (including white audiences) to participate in processes of mourning and to share the grief and anger experienced by the families and communities of the victims. The anti-lynching activism of the NAACP raised the question of whose lives are grievable—a question that Judith Butler has placed on the philosophical agenda in her recent works (Precarious Life, Frames of War, Notes). Butler’s recent theorization of vulnerability, mourning, and grievable lives highlights how political affects constitute the demos. In Frames of War, Butler suggests that the question of who “we” are can be answered by examining whose lives are mourned and deemed valuable, and whose lives are regarded as disposable and ungrievable.

A deep interrogation of the affective constitution of a political community along these lines was enacted through the anti-lynching epistemic activism of the NAACP.  

Activists of the NAACP sought to interrogate what it means for differently situated citizens to be unable to mourn the victims of lynching. What does it signify for white citizens to be affectively numbed or desensitized to the harms of lynching that disproportionately target people of color? Into what kind of citizen does one grow up as a result of numbness or insensitivity to racial violence? As we shall see, drawing from discourses of citizenship and issuing a powerful social commentary on how emotions factor into citizenship, this is one of the key questions that an anti-lynching pamphlet poignantly posed, attempting to promote what Bartky calls “genuine fellow-feeling” or the kind of “confrontational empathy” that Pedwell emphasizes, which is critically aware of social positionality.

Pamphlets like the one I will examine in the next section invite the public to critically interrogate how their emotional reactions—or lack thereof—might lead to an emotional disablement that handicaps their moral and political agency as citizens. The anti-lynching epistemic activism of the NAACP targeted this emotional disablement, stressing that one’s moral and political character as a citizen becomes corrupted if one is desensitized and incapable of feeling certain emotions, such as non-identificatory empathy for others who are very different from us, grief, anger, outrage, and moral indignation at their unjust suffering, among others. 

Emotional Friction in Epistemic Activism Against Racial Violence

The anti-lynching movement understood that the fight against lynching required resisting the rhetoric of the pro-lynching movement and the visual spectacle of lynching created by pro-lynching publics. Ida B. Wells was the leader of the anti-lynching movement who most forcefully fought to undermine this visual spectacle. Under her leadership, the NAACP created pamphlets that turned lynching photographs and postcards against themselves, resisting and undoing the spectacle from within and prompting the public to cultivate a critical and resistant way of viewing this visual material.

Anti-lynching activists like Ida B. Wells recognized that the spectacle of lynching had to be not only interrupted but also disrupted—uprooted, disarmed, and neutralized—so that its mechanisms could no longer hold sway over people’s sensibilities. Instead, the spectacle could be turned against itself and redirected toward different affective responses and the constitution of a new kind of sensibility. The critical revisiting of lynch photographs and postcards in epistemic activism has, therefore, a twofold aim: (1) disarming the spectacular visibility of black suffering that instills negative emotional friction against empathy, and (2) promoting positive emotional friction (e.g., confrontational empathy and a range of complex emotions and fellow-feelings such as grief and anger) that could motivate the public to stand up against racial violence.

This epistemic activism exemplifies what I have called epistemic resistance, as it involves interrogating and mobilizing challenges against a sensibility in order to confront its limitations, blind spots, and affective numbness or insensitivity. Confronting a sensibility with its limitations and dysfunctions through epistemic friction (via the interrogation and challenges of alternative sensibilities) and prompting the expansion and cognitive-affective restructuring of that sensibility are complex tasks that are addressed in a sustained and organized manner in activist practices and epistemic activism.

Epistemic activism in communicative practices consists of creating epistemic friction that can unmask, displace, and uproot forms of insensitivity that limit our capacity to hear, understand, interpret, and critically engage. Concerted efforts at epistemic resistance of this sort can be illustrated by the critical interventions of the anti-lynching movement and the NAACP. Let’s examine more closely what it means to take control of the visual spectacle and to cultivate a critical and resistant way of viewing its stigmatizing and traumatic images.

Part of taking control of this visual material involved seizing these images, removing them from circulation, and creating an archive that would facilitate the articulation and sustenance of a critical collective memory surrounding the spectacle of lynching. This is, of course, a labor of epistemic resistance that continues today and should ideally persist in the future, as the task of maintaining a critical collective memory can always be improved and should never be abandoned.

In addition to the critical tasks of mourning and remembering initiated by the anti-lynching activists and members of the NAACP, their fight against lynching also included confronting white publics who participated in the visual spectacle of lynching.

A key component of anti-lynching activism was resisting what Saidiya Hartman has described in Scenes of Subjection as “the spectacular character of black suffering.” Hartman argues that the casualness with which images of black suffering have been circulated in American culture has created a spectacle that desensitizes the public: “Rather than inciting indignation, too often [images of black suffering] immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity.” The “routine display of the slave’s ravaged body” and the exhibitions of lynch victims, along with contemporary spectacles of police brutality, have fostered spectatorial attitudes, inhibiting rather than fostering a social sensibility that can yield adequate moral attitudes and prompt individuals to take political action.

As Hartman emphasizes, we must pay attention to “the ways we are called upon to participate” in spectacles of black suffering, as these spectacles lure the public to participate as “voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and suffering,” rather than as “witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror.” Participation in spectacles of racial violence in American visual culture has carried with it an “uncertain line between witness and spectator,” contributing to “the precariousness of empathy.” The consequence of this “benumbing spectacle” is “indifference to suffering.” It is precisely against these spectatorial attitudes and the lack of the right kind of empathy that the anti-lynching epistemic activism of the NAACP was directed.

In line with Hartman’s powerful analysis of the spectacular character of black suffering, NAACP activists recognized many decades earlier that spectacular visibility was a key aspect of the apparatus of racist terror that their activism had to combat. NAACP activists confronted white audiences, urging them to stop circulating lynch photographs and to look at these terrorizing images of black suffering not as mere spectators but as moral witnesses and citizens capable of genuine fellow-feelings and confrontational empathy.

They invited white publics to see in those images what black publics saw—or rather, to see those images alongside them, not in the privacy of their homes among like-minded individuals, but by engaging with the perspectives of people of color. Turning the spectacle against itself and compelling viewers to inhabit it differently and critically required devising methods that would encourage individuals to step outside the perspective of mere spectators and not remain content with their own limited views. This involved ways of decentering their gaze and prompting them to experience the viewing of traumatic images through the friction of other embodied perspectives or sensibilities—creating epistemic friction with those who have different experiences and viewpoints.

This approach to confronting people’s insensitivity and creating epistemic friction between sensibilities exemplifies epistemic resistance. It includes emotional friction, combatting the negative emotional friction (e.g., apathy or antipathy) that underlies the insensitivity of complicit publics while simultaneously promoting positive emotional friction (e.g., empathy and a range of complex emotions and fellow-feelings such as grief or anger) that could motivate individuals to speak out against lynching and fight against it.

This work of emotional friction can be seen in the anti-lynching activism of NAACP members. I will examine the kind of critical exposure and emotional confrontation that is evident in the epistemic activism of the NAACP through an analysis of one of its pamphlets, which critically engages with a photograph of the lynching of Mr. Rubin Stacy at Fort Lauderdale on July 19, 1935.

At the site of Mr. Rubin Stacy’s lynching, white middle-class families in their best clothes posed with his corpse. In the pictures taken at the lynching site, we see Mr. Stacy’s brutalized and murdered body hanging from a tree, surrounded by well-dressed middle-class white families with their children. For the white subjects participating in the creation and consumption of this gruesome visual spectacle, what was communicated was not a depiction of a brutal murder but rather a representation of the acceptable punishment of an intrinsically criminal and threatening black body, now neutralized and hanging inert.

The neatly dressed white families posing around Mr. Stacy’s desecrated body signaled that his killing had restored social order, allowing families to celebrate the event and enjoy social peace. The witnessing of these white families attempted to convey the acceptability of Mr. Stacy’s torture and killing by respectable white society. Their tacit approval significantly contributed to the normalization of racial violence through lynch photography. Resisting the visual propaganda exemplified by the photographs of Mr. Stacy’s body and the white families requires redirecting the critical gaze of the viewer to the margins and background of the photo, prompting them to interrogate the ideological role of the white families posing next to Mr. Stacy—all dressed in white and smiling, symbolizing restored purity and regained peace, thereby justifying the acceptability of lynching and lending it an air of respectability.

The intended racist message in lynch photographs was that lynching enabled respectable white families to smile again, to emerge and enjoy the restored “social peace” and leisure. The irony in these images is that their representation of social peace contained an image of torture and brutal murder at its very center. This irony was poignantly unfelt by pro-lynching publics. That was the propagandistic trick these images sought to perform: they relied on desensitization to human suffering. The epistemic resistance against these images needs to undo this trick: the process of desensitization that these images contribute to must be resisted.

It’s important to note that this desensitization can still occur even if the visual spectacle does not recruit the viewer for condoning lynching violence and does not manage to prolong the positive witnessing of lynching through viewers of lynch photography. Desensitization can occur by recruiting viewers as mere spectators who do not experience strong emotional reactions or can insulate such reactions without deeply affecting their overall sensibility. Hence, the affective numbing of spectator audiences must be addressed. The desensitization to racial terror must be resisted and reversed for both condoning witnesses and detached spectators. 

There are different ways in which the anti-lynching movement tried to mobilize the positive emotional friction of white publics against the visual spectacle of lynching. First, they sought to make them aware of how this spectacle was desensitizing them to the suffering of people of color, emphasizing the need to repair that affective relationship so they could feel grief and anger at the brutalization of Black bodies. Secondly, they aimed to illustrate what this disturbing spectacle was doing to themselves, their communities, and especially their children—vitiating their sensibilities and turning them into moral monsters. Anti-lynching activists insisted that even if lynching sympathizers did not care about the impact of this gruesome spectacle on their relationships with fellow citizens of color, they should at least care about its effects on themselves, eroding their moral sensibility and threatening to destroy it.

A clash of sensibilities existed in what people saw in lynch photos. While the gaze of the pro-lynching subject perceived moral monstrosity in the intrinsic criminality of the Black body, the gaze of the anti-lynching subject saw moral monstrosity in the perpetration of brutal violence against the Black subject and in the gleeful witnessing and condoning of such violence. This is what one of the anti-lynching NAACP pamphlets achieved by critically engaging with a photograph of Mr. Stacy and a white family. The front of the pamphlet reads, beneath the photo, redirecting the viewer’s attention in a critical way away from Mr. Stacy’s corpse and toward the white subjects on either side:

“Do not look at the Negro. His earthly problems are ended. Instead, look at the seven WHITE children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle. Is it horror or gloating on the face of the neatly dressed seven-year-old girl on the right? Is the tiny four-year-old on the left old enough, one wonders, to comprehend the barbarism her elders have perpetrated? Rubin Stacy, the Negro lynched at Fort Lauderdale on July 19, 1935, for ‘threatening and frightening a white woman,’ suffered physical torture. But what psychological havoc is being wrought in the minds of the white children? Into what kinds of citizens will they grow up?” (Wood 196).

This pamphlet invites viewers to consider how, by being forced to participate in the spectacle of lynching, these depicted children might be moral monsters in the making, handicapped in their civic sensibility and in their developmental capacity to become virtuous citizens. The pamphlet underscores the moral harms that the spectacle of lynching inflicts on participating white subjects and highlights how this harmful moral insensitivity seems to go unnoticed by the sensibility of these subjects and their elders (meta-insensitivity). If left unquestioned, this could lead to the development of moral monstrosity.

The NAACP pamphlet serves as a perfect example of epistemic resistance that creates friction with an uncritical attitude and a form of insensitivity that does not interrogate itself or its presuppositions. This pamphlet exemplifies an epistemic intervention that disrupts the uncritical consumption of such images and invites publics to cultivate a critical mode of viewing these images and others like them, allowing them to unmask and counter the racist presuppositions operating tacitly in the composition of the images and how their visual contents are arranged and transmitted. This involves critically inhabiting the image from different perspectives and through various sensibilities, cultivating a critical kaleidoscopic consciousness in the engagement with the image. In pamphlets of this sort used by the NAACP, we can see forceful invitations to become sensitive to cruelty and to develop affective capacities to feel empathy, grief, and anger, as well as the cognitive-affective capacities to understand the grief and anger of others. Pamphlets of this nature are paradigmatic examples of what I call epistemic activism in visual culture.

Although the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations in the United States no longer possess the power and influence they once had, and although the ritual of lynching lacks the social currency it previously held, collective and institutional racial violence still exists today. In fact, hate crimes against racial minorities have increased in recent years, especially during and after the last presidential election, and police homicides of people of color have reached alarming numbers in the twenty-first century. The work of epistemic activism to address the vulnerability of stigmatized racial minorities to racial violence, which Ida B. Wells and the NAACP initiated a century ago, must continue. Today’s epistemic activism includes highlighting the continuity between patterns of collective and institutional racial violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, calling attention to the complicity of various publics and institutions, remembering and honoring those killed or harmed with impunity due to racial bias and stigmatization, and maintaining the grief for these victims while energizing communities and institutions to prevent and protect against such violence.

This work has faced significant opposition in the Southern states of the United States, where local institutions and communities resist efforts to address the invisibility and oblivion surrounding the history of lynching. Even today, most counties in the South refuse to mark the locations of lynchings while often resisting the removal of plaques and statues commemorating Confederate victories during the American Civil War. In the Southern states, there are hundreds of markers commemorating the history of the Confederacy, but nearly none regarding the history of lynching.

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is one social justice organization actively engaged in epistemic activism to change this. One of EJI’s most powerful initiatives and critical interventions has been the development of a lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, which opened in 2018. This memorial is part of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which EJI describes as “the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence” (The National Memorial). The memorial is cleverly designed to pressure Southern counties to acknowledge the locations of past lynchings. It features an interactive element where plaques commemorating lynching victims are placed in a graveyard-like garden, encouraging counties to reclaim these plaques and display them where the lynchings occurred. If successful, the outside area of the memorial will transform, appearing less like a crowded cemetery. However, if counties refuse to reclaim these plaques and remain complicit in the invisibility of the history of lynching, the plaques will serve to shame them and remind us of their complicity.

The pressure that this interactive memorial places on regional institutions to disrupt their complicity and make visible the history of racial violence has the potential to reconfigure urban and rural spaces in the South, transforming them into sites for resisting oblivion and cultivating practices of mourning and remembrance that can be reparative and transformative. EJI’s lynching memorial invites the public to participate in collective mourning and channel their grief and anger in ways that remake public spaces, highlighting the open wounds of lynching history with the goal of regenerating communities, promoting new affective reactions to the collective harms suffered by African Americans in the United States, and fostering new forms of relationality among groups as well as new forms of institutional recognition and public visibility.

Through this case study of racial violence in the United States, I hope to have shown that fighting collective and structural forms of oppression—such as widespread patterns of racial violence—requires more than simply changing public opinion. It necessitates disrupting and transforming communicative attitudes and dynamics, regenerating public sensibilities, reconfiguring public spaces, and garnering institutional recognition and support. The deep critical engagements needed involve the sustained cultivation of emotional friction and complex forms of epistemic activism that critically engage with the affective responses (or lack thereof) of individuals and groups, as well as the affectively charged relationships between institutions and various publics.

In addition to transforming public sensibilities, grassroots epistemic activism aims to disrupt and uproot the complicity of institutions with structural racism by changing institutional attitudes and the relationships of institutions with vulnerable publics. Activist organizations such as the NAACP and EJI have pressured institutions, including state counties and police, to address the particular vulnerabilities of people of color to racial violence. Important sites of institutional transformation targeted by anti-racist violence epistemic activism include the creation of public spaces for mourning and remembrance, as well as the development of community involvement and outreach programs by state institutions like local police and non-state institutions such as churches, political parties, unions, cultural centers, and activist organizations. The fight against racial violence requires addressing the many facets of structural racism on multiple fronts, and I hope to have demonstrated the crucial role of affective and epistemic resistance in this complex and multifaceted struggle.

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