Racial Optics of Escalation

Abstract

The invocation of escalation in police-civilian encounters, national protests, and presidential rhetoric exposes how white supremacist ideologies permeate the institutional and interactional distribution of harm, rights, accountability, and responsibility. The racialized onus of managing the violence of behavioral expectations in public domains is exposed by flipping assumptions about talk as inherently cooperative to instead look at how it is seeped in conflict within white supremacist spaces. Thus, escalation is not a result of an interaction in itself, but a product of the broader interactional momentum emergent across communicative events. Interactional momentum reveals the ways ideologically produced and discursively circulated stereotypes of racialized personae inform how those in power interpret the behavior of Black, Indigenous, and Brown civilians as a threat that needs to be managed before conflict scales up to violence and warfare. This temporalized and racialized logic of escalation is mediated by surveillance video technologies that facilitate the white supremacist optics of Black fugitivity, forcing acquiesce of marginalized civilians to the social norms and laws that harm them. Examining the repression of free speech and free assembly rights to Black persons and Black-aligned voices elucidates the mechanisms by which language and technology asymmetrically mediate race relations in American society.