Color Marks the Site/Sight of Social Difference

Abstract

Though racism in the form of blatant de facto and de jure policies and domestic terrorism is no longer the law of the land as was the case before, and during the Civil Rights Movement, an intensified dysconscious and color-blind racism has propelled itself in the post–Civil Rights United States, particularly in this “Age of Obama”; one that manifests in semantically slippery and rhetorically convoluted discourses. Consequently to illuminate this specter of American racism, critical race theory and spoken word performative poetics join forces here in an interpretive conarrated description of rhetoric that has recently emerged in the mainstream media—a discourse that attempts (a) to deny Black persons the right to human dignity; (b) to distort and invalidate Black persons’ ideas, thoughts, and feelings; and (c) to deny one’s right to claim and affirm one’s personal identity.