2022 Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture

November 18, 2022 • New Orleans, LA
Ronald L. Jackson, II, University of Cincinnati
"Antiracism and the Complexity of Woke Politics"
There is no easy way to say what needs to be said in a speech like this. While there is a necessary shifting between theory and emotion as I unravel a range of narratives, let there be no confusion that a lecture on racial trauma from the standpoint of one who has experienced racial trauma first-hand comes with a necessary re-traumatization. In fact, that is why it has taken me over six months to prepare this lecture. I do not relish the thought of reintroducing trauma; yet the stories herein need to be told; the experiences need to be understood. I will speak from my own positionality, so you will hear me talk a lot about African Americans or Black identities, but please understand that racism in America extends far beyond Black and White people. Black identities have just become the world’s primary racial target, a foundational part of the manufactured social logic upon which racism rests.
What you will witness today is an unveiling of my truth, the interspersing of my voice with others in order to get at my experience. To be clear, that is essentially what all scholarship tends to be at the end of the day -a reflection of our own individual interpretations of our social realities. The approach is phenomenological and the work you will see may be characterized as counter-disentanglement, a neologism I am defining as an intentionally defiant process of not losing one’s voice while trying to disentangle enough information to share a larger grand narrative about structural inequalities.