by Dylan Rodriguez
about Dylan Rodriguez
Dylan Rodríguez is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside. He is the author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Welfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide; Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime; and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition. He is the current President of the American Studies Association.
Criminal
The figure of “the criminal” permeates the symbolic, ideological, and militarized racial-economic foundations of the U.S. nation-building project. Gendered racial notions of criminality permeate the foundations of U.S. modernity, structuring the primary power relations of chattel enslavement, (conquest and settler) colonialism, global imperialism, and variations of domestic warfare (from Manifest Destiny to the War on Drugs). While religious and (proto)juridical discourses of crime and the criminal can be traced to multiple points of civilizational origin, the U.S.—and hemispheric “American”—case furnishes a paradigmatic example of the structural interdependence between two methods of conceptualizing/inventing the criminal that guide its deployment across geographies and moments. First, the legal-cultural creation of the criminal as an abstracted category of human social deviancy contextualizes the overlapping, interdisciplinary emergence of criminology, early-twentieth-century eugenics, and contemporary “racial profiling” (as both de facto forensic practice and police tactic). In this sense, historically specific conceptions of the criminal rely on changing, though always generalized, classifications of specific behaviors, traits, movements, and physiological comportments (including gender presentation, racial signification, and disability) as pathological, dangerous, antisocial, and/or violent. Second, the creation of these abstract, generalized notions of criminality enables a focused, period-specific militarized imagination of the criminal that mobilizes normalized regimes of...
Critical
The discursive time in which we find ourselves is particular but not unprecedented; in fact, the vitriolic sputtering of conservatives in response to the straw person of "Critical Race Theory" (CRT) is but the latest incarnation of ideo-warfare against the dispossessed. We should be clear: the recent attacks on Critical Race Theory are not exclusively---or even primarily---about [CRT as a specific field of study](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003111399-5/critical-race-theory-patricia-hill-collins). Some of the loudest in the anti-CRT lynch mob have demonstrated little to no understanding of [CRT's primary tenets](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/) and are [entirely unapologetic in their declarative ignorance and dimwittedness.](https://flux.community/samuel-hoadley-brill/2021/07/chris-rufo-obsessed-critical-race-theory-he-also-doesnt-understand-it) This ([multiculturalist](http://216.92.121.75/racewire/archives/2008/11/the_dreadful_genius_of_the_oba.html)) white nationalist mobilization seems to have less to do with Critical Race Theory than it does with the fundamentalist impulse to raise Confederate statues rather than raze them. The anti-CRT movement contributes to a [rich history](https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/archives/exhibits/mccarthyism/) of [right-wing reaction](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/09/26/illiberal-education-an-exchange/) that periodically garners [cooperation and participation](https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/18/closing-american-mind-20-years-later) from [self-identified liberals](https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-have-the-honest-liberals-gone-11602025882). This movement signifies a much broader aspiration to incite a populist repression of *critical thought*---that is, to marginalize, defund and otherwise destroy the robust, dynamic fields of knowledge, research, art, curricula, and intellectual infrastructure that demystify, analyze, and potentially intervene on relations of power, dominance and oppressive violence. In this sense, the recent emergence of the anti-CRT...