The Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University

What I plan to discuss during my presentation at the Center for “Race” and Social Justice colloquium invites readers and listeners to consider the questions, “Is there a bad way to condemn race terror?” and “Who is allowed to condemn it in what ways?” My essay Blame, Shame and Race Terror considers these questions, albeit narrowly. More precisely, my project looked at epideictic rhetoric, or what is often described as ceremonial rhetoric, to interrogate what can be learned in an incident involving a white opponent of racism who produces a publicly commissioned mural featuring the mob at a Marion, Indiana lynching in 1930, during which Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were murdered. In sum, I maintain it certainly wasn’t what the artist had to say with the mural, but how he “said” it. His mural failed both in terms of muraling’s conventions, but also the conventions of epideictic rhetoric. On May 17th, 2016 two young men walking through a pocket park in Elgin, Illinois recognized the mu...