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It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.
The investigative journalism series that started it all — that changed or at least, at long last, confirmed the way all of us think about the war on drugs, the CIA, and U. But why would the prospect of their own government helping pump a deadly narcotic into their communities res- onate with Black Americans? Perhaps the quintessential example of government-sanctioned violence against African Americans other than, of course, slavery is the Tuskegee experiments in which government doctors left Black syphilis patients untreated in order to study the natural trajectory of the disease Jones, However, stories with weak, or no, foundations in fact also resonate among many African Americans.
For instance, legend has it that Black physician Charles Drew, who pioneered blood plasma transfusions, died after being refused treatment at a White-only hospital. However, Drew actually passed away in spite of the efforts of several White surgeons who worked Downloaded By: [Western States Communication Association] At: 6 September to save his life.
Although such narratives conform to the genre of conspiracy theories, I worry that reading these stories as conspiracies does not sufficiently account for their circulation among many Black Americans. While this may be true of stories that have long resonated with many African Americans, it is the common element of extermination that unifies them within an historical pattern of experience i.
Conspiracies can take on any host of forms, but the threat of destruction by a hostile and typically powerful enemy carries a unique set of political implications.
The common theme that ties the murder of Black Panther leaders by law enforcement, the belief that carbonated beverages were concocted to stunt the regeneration of the African American community, and the theory that the federal government allowed a disastrous drug to decimate the inner city is an underlying narrative of a government invested in the liquidation of a people.
Accordingly, I believe that structuring these stories around the representative anecdote genocide better engages the essential characteristics of conspiratorial narratives reflecting a perpetual state of existential crisis. The political and rhetorical character of genocide is itself a source of heated historical debate. Instead, Lemkin observed genocide taking place in political, social, economic, and cultural arenas. Genocide, thus, entailed any attempt by a sovereign to eliminate the constitution of a people.
For example, the dele- gates removed cultural genocide from the equation altogether, limiting the phenomenon to attacks on the physical essence or reproductive capacities of a Downloaded By: [Western States Communication Association] At: 6 September people United Nations, The assembly also made the controversial choice of stipulating that genocidal acts must be intentional.
In other words, genocide could only exist where the extermination of people was an end in itself. Mass exter- mination for reasons other than the most pathological bloodlust could not satisfy this legal definition. Since the unanimous ratification of the Convention on Genocide, several scholars and activists have highlighted the problematic implications of this narrow conceptualization.
Jean Paul Sartre , for instance, argued that the U. Ward Churchill has noted how a broader conceptualization of genocide would necessitate affixing the term to Native American removal not only as a form of physical genocide, but also social and cultural genocides unfold- ing to this day. Thus, while the discourse of genocide has traditionally been understood as a tool of the powerful, it has also functioned as a rhetorical weapon of the weak.
By assembling their collective relationships to the brute structures of exploitation and oppression around the anecdote of genocide, marginalized peoples and their advocates have sought to confront their plights with a heightened urgency and, potentially, enhanced arsenal of legal recourse. Regardless of how the litigious dimensions of prosecuting genocide might manifest themselves, the rhetorical implications of imaging shared experiences as genocide are both profound and appealing.
McCann Gary Webb believes the American government had a hand in prescribing to some of its most historically oppressed citizens. Furthermore, it resonated with the nightmares of erasure circulating among many African Americans that I document above. Few organizations recognized and exploited the rhetorical force of this story more than the NOI. This conceptuali- zation of members of the African Diaspora constituting a coherent nation is, of course, an important precondition for functioning within the anecdotal form of genocide.
One must be a people in order to experience the threat of erasure as such. Using the tenets of Islam as its basis, the NOI preaches doctrines of self-improvement and self-determination to African Americans, while also adopt- ing a political posture against White supremacy and in favor of Black autonomy. Theirs is a decidedly separatist political program. No stranger to controversy, the NOI has been criticized for inflammatory statements about Jews, as well as staunch conservatism on issues of gender and sexuality see Curtis, ; Gardell, ; Walker, Staging many of its interventions within the walls of American prisons, the NOI also confronts Black drug use Curtis, ; Gardell, We turn to drugs and alcohol seeking an escape from the hell that the White Man has trapped us in here in America.
We know no way out. So, this is a false escape. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is offering a real escape. The NOI engaged history as they found it and offered a theological-nationalist adjustment to the problems of African Americans. The central thesis was simple: White America will not help us. Indeed, it seeks to destroy us. We must be our own salvation. The anecdotal form of genocide offers insight into how the NOI circulated this central argument.
Although Farrakhan has made some appeals toward the political mainstream in recent years, his politics remain primarily radical and nationalist in character. During his major speech at the Million Man March, Farrakhan argued that White supremacy in America has succeeded by encouraging distrust among African Americans: We as a people now have been fractured, divided and destroyed, filled with fear, distrust and envy. Therefore, because of fear, envy and distrust of one another, many of us as leaders, teachers, educators, pastors and persons are still under the control mechanism of our former slave masters and their children.
Farrakhan, , para. Webb did not believe the CIA deliberately intended to poison Black youth with crack cocaine in the s. His qualifications here and above are instructive given his audience. Because The Final Call is directed at potentially sympathetic layers of the Black community and is entirely under the editorial control of the NOI, readers can expect a more faithful articulation of NOI ideology within its pages.
Journalist Anthony Samad describes this very dynamic in a Final Call editorial. What, for Webb, was the unfortunate collateral consequence of U. But why would the U. At the core of this narrative is the belief that crack cocaine constitutes a new tactic in a centuries-old offensive against African Americans and other people of color.
Such an enactment of existential dread represents a calculating federal government unleashing political, cultural, economic, and physical genocide upon the African American community. It also allows the NOI to link the crack crisis, which was hegemonically blamed on Blacks, to horrors in which they were clearly the victims.
The NOI, thus, locates the horrors of Black urban life within the anecdotal form of genocide. But what possible corrective might exist amid such a devastating and all- encompassing program of attempted extermination? However, while the Black community must act in its own interests, the NOI also makes very clear demands for justice from the United States government.
Specifically, the NOI posits the scourge of crack as one more argument in favor of monetary reparations from the federal government for violence against African Americans. By invoking the move- ment for slavery reparations and broadening it to include the crack epidemic, the NOI articulates crack to the entire enterprise of state violence against Blacks. This is, after all, an all-out war drawn upon racial lines. It enables the NOI and its suppor- ters to hold the U. Crack joins slavery as but one component of the always and already looming specter of erasure in the Black community.
He notes the deep historical Downloaded By: [Western States Communication Association] At: 6 September link between genocide and reparations. Indeed, as Kuper would argue, intention- ality simply may not matter. The genocide anecdote reveals how, amid the his- torical onslaught of the American criminal justice system against Black Americans, rhetors such as the NOI use stories of existential threats to challenge the racist discourses that so often sustain mass incarceration.
Identifying crack as one of the most potent among these weapons, he encourages a revival of nationalism and faith for his audience. Farrakhan calls upon Black families to produce offspring toward the constitution of a community—even a righteous army—capable of combating erasure.
For the controversial minister, salvation rests not in dependence on the White supremacist state apparatus of the United States. Thus, the representative anecdote encompasses the broader messianic political program of the Nation of Islam, calling Blacks to faith in Allah and membership in the Black Nation.
By viewing genocide as a representative anecdote, I have noted how existential dread functions as a source of rhetorical invention and political practice. An audacious anecdote such as genocide can certainly encompass a broad range of devastation from slavery to crack cocaine, unifying them within the common thematic of erasure. In this final section of the essay, I discuss the ramifications of genocide as a representa- tive anecdote, highlighting its capacities to reach far beyond the chronology of Black struggle in America.
Furthermore, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell recognized that such discourses provide marginalized populations the opportunity to locate themselves within a vast and proud nationalist tradition. In other words, Black Nationalism has had a remarkable ability to function as a tool for rhetorical invention and political organizing at times of acute racial tension and devastating institutional violence.
By imagining racial identification as the moment of politics, Black Nationalism simultaneously subordinates stratifications within the African American community and forecloses possibilities for interracial solidarity also see Anderson, ; Shawki, Thus, while the discourses of NOI and other Black Nationalist tendencies pro- vide an understandable and occasionally expedient form of politics, it nonetheless fails to sufficiently articulate phenomena such as the drug trade and mass incarcer- ation to social structures other than race and racism.
These important limitations of Black Nationalism also highlight the shortcomings of political projects operating within the anecdotal form of genocide. Activists should seek ways to situate the specific violence of crack cocaine within the broader Downloaded By: [Western States Communication Association] At: 6 September trajectory of race, crime, and capital in the United States see, for example, Davis, ; Robinson, ; Simon, An alternative narrative of crack cocaine must have the simplicity to resonate with those who have experienced its wrath, while pos- sessing the complexity to account for the many tentacles—narcotic, legal, cultural, and otherwise—of our carceral society.
They were almost entirely poor and working class, African American, and possessed some degree of experience with the devas- tation of drugs, violence, and incarceration during the s and s. However, largely because of the limitations of nationalist discourses I describe above, political actors who are not marginal in any proper sense of the word often deploy the rhetoric of existential dread.
Indeed, Louis Farrakhan occupies a significantly different social stratum than those poor and working-class African Americans he seeks to represent. He observed how a nationalist movement might produce an elite class that subjugates its national brethren in a manner eerily similar to that of the colonizer. Thus, the solidarity emerging from the genocide anecdote is capable of both producing and obscuring troubling power relations within the nation form itself. In other words, the leader who can successfully maintain order through recourse to an always and already present threat of erasure is truly sovereign.
Schmitt, himself, was a leading political theorist and supporter of the Third Reich, highlighting the perilous consequences of a political program founded on existential dread and supported by the apparatuses of the state. McCann populations or governments genuinely confronting the horrors of extermination to be persuasive.
Rather, they must persuasively arrange the current conditions of living within the formal parameters of looming erasure—whether amid mass incarceration or a languishing postwar economy and national identity. Such is the contingency of marginality. Given the potential perils of such discourses, critics should be mindful of the material conditions that contextualize rhetorics of existential dread. One need not believe that these conditions are entirely self-evident or immune to the workings of the symbol using and misusing animal to recognize the plain fact that rhetoric has real-world implications.
The threat of extermination cannot help but arouse indignation and action among a people. The devastation of crack cocaine and the broader violence of the prison system have exercised a brutality on Black minds and bodies that demands rhetorical and political practice.
The NOI has his- torically answered this call with a political theology of looming erasure. However, after he took the organization in a more mainstream political direction and changed its name, Farrakhan broke with him and reformed the NOI with a renewed allegiance to Black Nationalism and Muslim orthodoxy Walker, References Alonso, A.
Racialized identities and the formation of black gangs in Los Angeles. Urban Geography, 25, — Anderson, B. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso. Asen, R. Representing the state in South Central Los Angeles. Brouwer Eds. Western Journal of Communication Bates, B.
Audiences, metaphors, and the Persian Gulf War. Communication Studies, 55, — Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Braun , John F. Kerry , Jerry Ceppos , Jack A. This collection of texts, images, and audio files is a copy of the online "library" that accompanied the publication of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series and his follow-up reporting for the San Jose Mercury News from about the CIA's role in the crack cocaine epidemic in the s.
It provides a rich collection of primary sources that Webb used as the basis of his stories. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review.
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