José Medina - Protest, Silencing, and Epistemic Activism

>> Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to the Social Media, Race, and Community Knowledge Practices Conference. My name is Sherri Irvin and I'm a professor of philosophy here at OU and one of the organizers. Dr. Kim, I'll let you introduce yourself. >> Well, mine is Jeong-Nam Kim, I'm teaching at Gaylord and I'm walking on several projects with Sherri and Carlos. I'm very happy to participate here as a part of a moderator team. [LAUGHTER] >> If you all are just joining us, you can find more

information in the chat. We are in our final afternoon here, next to last session, but we certainly welcome you if you wish to share information about the conference with folks who may be interested in this session or the next one to send them the conference website. We invite you to engage on social media with the hashtag that you'll find in the chat. We invite you at anytime to enter questions in the Q&A or the chat as you prefer because we will have a Q&A session here at the >> end of this se

ssion. >> Our next presenter is Dr. Jose Medina. Dr. Medina is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University with affiliations in African-American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese. His latest book, The Epistemology of Protest, silencing epistemic activism and the communicative life of resistance, came out with Oxford University Press this year. He's going to speak to us about protest, silencing, and epistemic activism. >> Also the comments

will be offered by Lawrence Ware, and he has joined us as a moderator for several session already. He's teaching Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of African Studies at Oklahoma State University. He also write frequently about film and culture. I envy you for venues such as New York Times and Slate and Huffington Post. Now we will turn it to Dr. Medina. >> Thank you so much. Let me start by thanking Sherri and Carlos for the invitation and for organizing this wonderful con

ference. I want to thank everybody who has been involved in the organization, and let me share my screen. Let me see if this works before I start. It look like it's working. Yes. Can I move? Yes. Fine. The presentation I'm going to offer you today draws from the book that Sherri mentioned. It will trash on how protesting voices are silenced in many different ways and how we can resist those silences. That's where my proposal about epistemic activism common saying. That forms of communicative res

istance, epistemic resistance are crucial for liberation movements when oppressed groups try to protest. They need that kind of epistemic activism as a crucial part of the liberation struggles. I will present in things that are part of the book, but I'm actually also including new material and new thoughts because I'm working now on brief figurative politics, how liberation movements prefigure new different kinds of society. That will be also the focus of my talk today. I'm going to divide the t

orque in >> three different parts. >> The first part, and I'll try to be brief and go fast so they cover all of this, is just a brief summary of my own account of protest as a mechanism of self-empowerment and group formation. Because the standard view in political philosophy and political theory in political science is that protest is mostly a mechanism for public persuasion. That's what protest is. I disagree with that, of course, protests can persuade the general public and the institutions.

Some protests can be used in all kinds of ways. But fundamentally, the most important thing is that protesting has to do with forming a counter-public. Even the first talk that we have at the very beginning of the day yesterday by Dr. Ristill also have an account of the formation of counter-publics, counter-communities of resistance, as I'm going to call them. That's actually the core of my account. Then in the second section, I'll talk about a specific ways in which protesting voices are silenc

ed. I'm not going to cover all of them, I'm going to focus on two of the different kinds of silencing that I go over in the book. But so that you can see the >> magnitude of the problem and >> the diversity of ways in which silencing has to be resisted. Then that will lead into epistemic activism, the resistance of the social sciences and the social invincibility session of protesting voices and how that works in liberation movements and communities of resistance, how the creation of a countercu

lture is crucial and the cultivation of our first system imagination is crucial for that. Then finally, the staff on prefiguration that I was already alluding to, that has to do with how social movements can anticipate with their performance social change. The first part, what kind of thing is protest? What kind of communicative mechanism it is? I want to emphasize, and this is a huge part of my motivation from the beginning when I started working on protests more than 10 years ago, there is thi

s very naive idea that, well, protest is something that everybody can do in a liberal democracy because we have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and it's something that people cannot do in non-liberal democracies, which is not only empirically inadequate because, of course, in dictatorships, non-democratic governments, people protest all the times in all ways. But it's also inaccurate and problematic because it's not true that just because you live in a liberal democracy and >> you hav

e >> the formal freedoms of assembly and expression, you can just simply protest. It's up to you and others like you if you want to just take to the streets and >> protest. >> Well, actually that is not true. There are all kinds of ways, formal and informal ways in which people cannot gather, people cannot protest, and moreover, even when they try, they are not heard. They are not found credible, they are discredited, they are not given uptake. All these things, the roadblocks to the act of prot

est, to begin with, the ways in which even when protests happens, it is discredited, it is not given uptick. All of these are very important ways in which protest is being silenced. The first crucial thing is to give an account of how to overcome those well-entrenched social silences and those forms of social invincibility and the ability. There you have the communicative and >> epistemic obstacles >> that I want to focus on. They include what we call today in the literature, epistemic injustice

s that have to deal with people giving testimony and >> not being believed. >> People trying to speak in public, and not being heard at all, or being found nonsensical or not making any sense, just making noise. All of that is crucial. Then the second part is that it is also a naive to think that groups are there already just waiting to speak if they saw shoes, but they are already there fully formed. Of course, part of protest movements is creating a counter-public, as Dr. Ristill was also addr

essing yesterday. It is about social mobilization. It is about the creation of a community, the creation of a public. That's a crucial component of every liberatory movement that you can think of in the last two or three centuries, probably going even beyond that time period. But my focus has been in the book and in my current and ongoing work on anti-racist social movements from abolitionism to the present, and also queer movements, especially from the 1960s on. But also, I've written on the wo

men's movements and other movements as well. In all those cases, part of the struggle is to become socially visible to begin with, to become audible, to develop a voice, to have your perspective properly considered. That actually is not something that the standard views in the literature give an on account of or even address. The formal view you talks about just the formal freedom of assembly and expression. The instrumental view talks about protesting as an instrument for public persuasion. I c

laim that we have to go beyond that, that we need a non-formal view that looks at actual material practices of resistance and how they go through a difficult struggle in order to be able to protest at all. Also, I take issue with the instrumental view unclaimed that we need a non-instrumental view in which we look at the intrinsic value of protesting. It's not just about whether or not you're gonna be successful in persuading the public and persuading the institutions, it is whether or not it is

worth protesting, worth taking a stance, worth engaged in protests because you want to create a community, an alternative community, a community of descent or counter-community, and you want to cultivate that community. Even what the voice said against Booker T. Washington saying that protesting is not only not self-limiting because we're not bleeding and asking for anything, it's actually necessary for dignity, and it's something that we do for our own sake. Even [inaudible] have remarks on >>

protests are crucial for >> me because that's exactly what I want to get at. That there is an intrinsic value in engaging in protests for the group. That becomes the protesting public, the counter-public. I actually focused on a performative view of protests that focuses on liberty performance of protests and the intrinsic value that the performance has and how that act of protesting can be self-empowering for the people engaged in protests and community constituting so that it becomes part of

the creation development constitution. >> Preservation of the community. That is for me, the primary function of protests, creating and sustaining communities of resistance, and it involves all things, but in particular, the constitution of the community of resistance, the group constitution. But also the pre-figuration of other publics, so the creation of a sensibility that is typically not out there from the beginning. People are not ready to hear the protesting voices. They are not even equip

ped to hear the protesting voices and give uptake. Part of the act of protest and sustain protest actions is creating dances that sensibility, so I described protest as always being in search of an audience, and recreating that audience. That does say, either by transforming the contemporary audiences or by looking into the future and hoping that with their work, future generations or future configurations of the present people will actually be different and will be part of the sensibility that

can respond to the protest, so it is about transforming sensibilities and transforming the political imagination in a >> complex way. >> All those things are crucial, and of course epistemic activism in fighting against silencing and in fighting against communicative and epistemic obstacles will actually contribute to all of this as we will see >> I hope. >> It is about cultivating resistance subjectivities through protesting practices. It is about cultivating a counter imagination so that we im

agine the social world differently, even what Marianne Ortega was telling us about broadening perception. What do you see? Broadening your affective reactions so that you are able to feel things that you were not able to feel before. But what is crucial is that I'm claiming that protest is transformative because that is achieved and that actually emerges from the acts of protest. It's not that there is already a fully formed counter public that has all these emotions and all these capacities and

this resistance subjectivity, and then they decide to speak up is that in cultivating for a protest, I'm protesting practices, those forms of subjectivity, those new sensibilities, those counter imaginations emerge. I want to give us an example, and I have many more, but for the sake of time, I'm going to go fast. I'm just going to use one example which is disability actions that happened, for example, in the queer movement that happened with Queer Nation and one of the visibility options was s

taging kiss-ins what was called a kiss-in, so that same-sex couples would come out, and they would kiss in public and that happened a lot actually started to happen in the '80s and even before that, there are some kiss-ins already, but it happened even more frequently in the '90s with Queer Nation. You have here an image in San Francisco from the 1980s. I liked this image in particular, I have many more like this. You can see that the activists kissing in public are pretty diverse, racially dive

rse, gender diversity also is represented. There are indications of class diversity and all of that is great, so you have these very diverse group of activists getting together. Staging these kiss-in in Welsh, this is part of what is going on. They feel safe because they are doing it in numbers, kissing in public, while at the same time, of course, they were being harassed when they have any display of affection or any expression of their sexuality. Now they felt safe. They also felt proud. They

could feel proud in public about their sexuality. They were not going to hide it anymore. All of this was happening, of course, in the formation of this queer groups, but also in the very acts like this visibility action that they stage so that they could do it and they could realize they could actually instantiate if only in a corner in San Francisco, if only for a moment a social world that was a little bit different. A world in which they could kiss in public and be safe and feel proud, and

at least for a moment, not feel harassed or even if they did feel harassed by the people around them, they could protect each shoulder. There was like a moment of a queer community, a queer Walt like in that corner at the time. Another happened in many cities in North America, not only in the US, but also in the image in Toronto. Notice the Toronto image you have in front of you is not as diverse, is only men and only white men. We can come back to issues of this kind later in the >> Q&A, >> but

I don't have time to go over that, but that's just part of what I want you to pay attention to. There are many protests. Of course, visibility actions are just one kind, but it changes visual communication, it changes visual dynamics it changes what is visible and invisible and of course, even though I'm not dealing with social media in this talk, even though I do in the book, The Epistemology of Protest. Of course, the are images that come out of this visibility actions like these photographs

are part of the >> legacy of the protests, >> and are part of the visual intervention. Now we have social media, of course, that amplifies that. Let me go to the second, and I'll try to go faster to the second part of the target, which I want to talk a little bit about the different kinds in which protest is silenced. I actually have a full catalog of different silencing that I'm not going to go over because I don't have time. I'm going to focus only on the first two types of silencing. Prelocat

ionary silencing, which happens before the locution before the speech shag. What does that mean? It means that it's a preemptive silencing, so people are being silenced even before they try to protest. What does that mean? It means there is a climate, there is an atmosphere, there is a culture that makes sure that certain voices don't even try to protest. Then I'm going to focus also on a second type, illocutionary silencing which happens when the speech act is there when an act of protest has t

aken place, but the performative force of that act is undermined, is reversed so that the act of protesting is silence as well. There are other kinds that I'm not going to go into including locutionary silencing. The second talk today by Dr. Blabbing, talking about the response, All Lives Matters to Black Lives Matters is actually one of the primary examples of locutionary silencing. We can come back to any of these types. I'm not even going to say anything right now about perlocutionary silenci

ng just for the sake of time but let me just highlight that silencing begins in a preemptive way, even before the act of protest gets off the ground, with explicit prohibitions, but also with intimidating, threatening inhibitory communicative climates. That happens in many ways. Sometimes it happens in very subtle ways. For example, a stigmatizing the group. The ways in which queer people were stigmatized for centuries, so that they should be ashamed of who they were they should be in the closet

, they should not speak up. It happens also in more explicit and obvious ways, including here in this example in Ferguson, but also they are very similar images that I have also from the 1960s in which this happened exactly in the same way that during the day there was this disproportionate display of police force on a military force. >> Because demonstrations and protests had taken place previously and they were likely to take place again and they will want to make sure that people were intimid

ated. People didn't feel safe on the streets and people felt like if you protest or if you try to protest, it's going to be perceived as I arrived and it's going to be perceived as an act of disturbing the peace and we're already. This thing already preemptive silencing and pre-illocutionary silencing. But then, of course, illocutionary silencing is more interesting because it happens even when people are protesting. Notice, sometimes they're protesting voices are undermine and their illocutiona

ry force of their act is nullified to the point that they are not even perceived as protesting at all. They are perceived as rioting, for example, and looting. Even if there is some violence in the midst, that eclipses completely what people are doing when they start a protest. There are many famous examples of that, including the Rodney King uprising, the LA uprising in 1992, more recently, the Ferguson protests in 2016. In these cases, we have clear examples of that, before the protests starts

, the institutions already warning people that they shouldn't protest. If the police officers in the Rodney King case were to be exonerated, they shouldn't take to the streets. Then even when they did saying, well, if you are on the streets, you should go back home because you are probably threatening public safety and social peace, and so on and so forth. Of course, there is a famous tweet by the then President Donald Trump saying, "these thugs are dishonoring the >> memory of George Floyd, >>

and I'm not going to allow that to happen, they are facts and when the looting starts, the shooting starts". I have already published previously in the late 2010 precisely an account of that phrase when the looting and starts shooting start. We can go back to that, but that's a clear case of illocutionary silencing. What happens here is that the protesting voices are completely eliminate it so that there is a case of disabling the illocutionary force of the act of creating an illocutionary flip

ping so that you are trying to do something protesting and then it flips into intimidating insulting orders or rioting. You have here, for example, a way of thinking about this, which is under the category of discourse of injustice. Quill Kukla says, "Discursive injustice. I'm claiming this is an instance of that occurs when members of a disadvantaged group faces systematic inability to produce a specific speech acts that they are entitled to perform like protesting, profusing. In particular, wh

en those attempts result in, they're actually producing different speech art, that further compromises social position and agency". In this case, people of color, brown and black people they try to protest, which is a speech act they're entitled to do. But very often when they do so, they end up being perceived as doing something else entirely, not the speech act of protesting, but the speech act of threatening, intimidating, uneventful rioting, and looting. I wanted to at least get this part of

the analysis given that I don't have time to go over all the details, and I'm focusing on prelocutionary silencing and illocutionary silencing that here you have two different silencing. The first kind that happens before they attempt to protest, the pre-illocutionary silencing, I claim it's an ontological silencing. A silencing with ontological consequences, which has to do with being impossible for a group to form, to get together, to be articulated, to develop. Making sure that the group doe

sn't even access, that a counter public is not formed or it's blocked, and that I call communicative group murder. The second illocutionary silencing in which people do protests. They do gather and they do engage in protests, but they are not heard at all as protesting. There is an agential silence, their own communicative agency is taken away from them, it's robbed, is distorted, is co-opted. That I call a communicative kidnapping so that you are there and you have agency, but your agency is ta

ken from you in a way you are kidnapped from the public sphere. Your visibility as a protestor is taken from you. There are all these things going on and there are all different defective uptake and recognition failures that happen. There are ways of blocking people's expressive agency, ways of disrespecting their agency, displaying insensitivity with respect to their voices and meanings. There is what I call expressive closed-mindedness. This inability, but also unwillingness to engage with pro

testing voices. This is what I call expressive closed mindedness, which is a big part of my account. It involves all things, but especially the three things that I have there being an attentive, not paying attention, being insensitive to protest invoices, to protest movements like Black Lives Matters. Also refusing to engage, even if you are a minimally aware and pay some attention but you don't engage. But also it has to do with the terms of the engagement. Refusing to take a slogans like Black

Lives Matters in their own terms and in their self-interpretation of the people who give these slogans, refusing to make space for new meanings. For example, now, gender pronouns, expressions like mispronouncing, transphobia. Of course, there are so many examples before this decade about new meanings being blocked or people being unwilling to use them, or new forms of expression or new styles or new communicative dynamics. All of that has to do with >> expressive closed mindedness. >> What epis

temic activism does is precisely to fight against all of this, to fight against an oppressive closed mindedness, to fight against communicative inattention, to fight against communicative insensitivity, to fight against dynamics that refuse >> proper engagement, >> and to create new forms of engagement. That's what I focused on. Epistemic activism is the activism that tries to change the epistemic dynamics, the way in which people understand, imagine, see the social world and >> the protesting v

oices within it. >> I'm claiming that that's crucial for >> liberation movement. >> It has always been grouped crucial and it's a big part of creating and sustaining a community of resistance. There are some normative claims that I'm interested in making. I don't have time obviously to go over these in detail or even to give a full argument, but I do have arguments for these claims. Some of those arguments are already in the book, The Epistemology of Protest. I'm also working on additional argum

ents because I do think that those of us who think ourselves as members of a free community, those of us who think of ourselves as members of a democratic society and culture we do have the obligation, not only to protest injustice, but also to help protesters to fight against the ways in which protests is silence. We do have an obligation to resist the silencing of protest. When we don't fulfill this obligation, when we're not active in fighting against the silencing of protests either as indiv

iduals, as members of groups or also as members of institutions like our universities. When individuals, publics, or institutions do not resist the silencing of protests in an active way, they are complicit. At the very least, they are passive bystanders that >> tolerate that silencing. >> But very often actually they are very clear ways in which people become active enablers so that they contribute to the silencing of protests, they contribute to the inattention, to the lack of response, to the

lack of engagement or the dysfunctional engagement with a protest. There are all these different ways of resisting protests that I categorize that have to do with the different ways in which protest are silenced, but I'm not going to go into that for the sake of time. I'm just going to highlight some things about epistemic activism that have to do with those three things that you have there. It has to do with activating the radical imagination, a counter imagination, a way of calling into quest

ion, interrogating established ways of imagining the world. >> Providing alternative ways of looking at the shoulder, looking at the social relations, looking at the world. I'm prefiguring a different society. That's why I'm so interested in prefigurative politics. I'm part of that is leaving counterfactually, leaving us if we were in a different world, even though we know we're not, we still live in a racist society. We still live in a homophobic society. We still live in a transphobic society.

But of course, the Kourosh, the transformative power of activism is precisely for those activists to say, we're going to live as if we could live safely and proudly as if we were already in that world that we want to achieve. We're going to realize a little bit of that world are ready with our protesting practices. That radical imagination in action involves that. A departure from established ways of thinking and ways of talking, established meanings, established social hierarchies. That's the

negative part, but the positive part is, it involves also a way of remaking the world and creating new walls, creating new relations, intimate relations, sexual relations, creating new communities, new socialist places, new social dynamics, new presents and futures. That is what I call counter practices of resistance. Those practices that do exactly that. They involve putting their resistant imagination in action, and they involve the performative anticipation, which is what I call prefiguration

of a world that is different and that does not include the injustice in question. Of course, I turn in my recent work through prayer figurative politics because I realized I was aware of this literature, but I haven't really used it a lot in my own work. But I realize, well, there are all these neo-Marxist that from the '70s have been talking about doing that, not waiting for the revolution to happen, but actually developing alternative practices, an alternative communities in which a new world

, a different world, >> a counter world is created on display. >> These pre-figurative politics involves disrupting the social world as it is, that's the negative part, but also creating a new world and a new form of community building. It has the negative part, the departure, but it has the other worldly orientation. I'm particularly interested in this second part that involves alternative wall making, the development of new forms of sociality, the idea of the pressing in the future that comes

from the Afro-Caribbean political theorists CLR James. He talks about that the future is in the present as a form of prefiguration, prefiguring in a new society or performative anticipation, not a prediction at all is the outpost of a new society, he says. That was taken up in queer theory by Jose Muñoz. They offer that Marianne Ortega was drawing from, I'm talking about in her talk. He talks, there are moments in queer practices in which you have outpost of a new society, outpost of a queer wal

t. I'm claiming that happens exactly that way here in the example I gave you earlier, invisibility actions, visibility protest actions such as the case ends. It happened here as well as I said, although in a more limited way. Then I want to show you to move to the conclusion just quickly if I have one more minute, I know I'm running out of time. I want to show you, in this image that which is much later, is from the '90s, that here you have something that may look like, an instance of the same t

hing, or even the success of the key scenes >> before they started >> to disappear because they became more numerous, more accepted. This is in New York, this is the late 90s. But it's problematic because this could be like a Calvin Klein ad. It becomes very white, it becomes very middle-class, it becomes very commercialized. It becomes part of the commercialization of queer life and the co-optation of the queer liberation agenda. We can come back to that. But there are two aspects to resistant

imaginations, inactions, the oppositional aspects, the experimentalist aspect. An entire literature in that, that I engage with. I don't have time because I already run out of time pretty much. I do have things to say about the notion of leading counterfactually because I use it a little bit different than Asha Bhandary, although I take it from her, but she claims, as you can see in the quote, those actions of living as if the world were otherwise living counterfactually ultimately don't have on

tological weight because that possible world doesn't exist. I take issue with that because I think that that wall doesn't fully exist in the sense that we still live in an oppressive society. But there is a little bit of that wall that you are already enacting. That will become shared and shareable by the people engaged in the counter community, in the counter public, and it becomes actualized at least a little bit. There are examples of that in the works of Saidiya Hartman than what she calls b

eautiful experiments of living, these communities of resistance that live underground, but they live in a very different way and according to different norms. That creates a different world, a different society. That we're here in the form of prefiguration. That has ontological consequences. The creation of a counterculture, the creation of a new world, even though it is limited, because not everybody is part of that world. There are still blockages for the world to flourish, but there are new w

ays of relating to each other, some new ways of living that become possible. I want to just connect. This is my last slide. Reparative justice and prefigurative justice so that our protest movements and our protests actions are not only backward-looking and reparative, doing reparative work with respect to harms. We need that. We need the paradigm of reparative justice, but we need more than that as well. We need to look forward, we need to not only repair harm, but create conditions under which

those harms will not be possible anymore. Prefigure new social walls, new social relations and new societies so that we combine reparative justice with brief, figurative and transformative justice, and we create communities of resistance, are protect the shudder, and are engaged in the creation of alternative walls. With that, I'll stop. Thank you. I'm sorry for being over time. >> Let me stop sharing. >> That was a great [LAUGHTER]. Now we will have a few minutes of commentary by Professor Lau

rence followed by discussion and some questions. >> This was a wonderful presentation, a wonderful paper. I really enjoyed going back-and-forth to you via email and looking at your presentation and looking at your paper. Honestly, just on a personal level, I was really happy to see you Ciara James, he's a thinker who has newly not enough philosophical engagement. I've written about him in a number of different places. I'm really happy that you use, I pretty like your point of community kidnappin

g. I had a whole formal thing that I was going to do. But since the time, let's get across the field here and get to this. I know you talked about this already, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to speak about it more broadly. As I was reading your paper, listening to your presentation, something happened in my thinking and my mind went to two places. One was Charlottesville in 2017, when the Whites in premise had their unite the right gathering, if you remember that. Very dark time, very

difficult time. During that weekend they protested to be sure and to their mind, they were in their mind repairing an injustice. Similarly, in 2021, on January the 6th, those individuals did not see themselves as white supremacy. Now, I will argue they're adjacent [LAUGHTER] white supremacy, but they didn't see themselves as white supremacist. Yet they engaged in protests to be sure and they were in their mind attempting to repair an injustice. Ultimately, I would like to hear your comment on th

at. How do these examples adhere to what you presented and how do they diverge? I think that's a really interesting place to begin. Further is there a danger in those protests that we saw in 2017 and the protests that we saw on January the 6th in 2021. Do they do the exact things you mentioned? But for a markedly less free world. That's the first question I'll let you to hear, then if we don't have anymore, I got more going on. But your question you respond to their first. >> Yeah. Thank you so

much, Laurence. I mean, that's obviously a very important question and a huge question. I do have a section in the book in which I taught precisely about that. It's a section on White Rage. Actually, there are two places in the book, the epistemology of products >> in which I have the rest of >> the first places that remarks on white rage and they unite the right, Charlottesville. Then the other one is precisely what you said >> January 6. >> I have different things to say about that. One thing

to say, and you're absolutely right. Some of the resources that we have and that we highlight for protesting self-empowerment, creating alternative communities. Also saying that we have been excluded, we have been invisible as we have been abandoned, are taken up by this very conservative groups. They become co-opted and used for entirely different purposes. The issue of co-optation already came up a bunch of times during these today's already yesterday, but also this morning with Dr. Richardson

's talk in the discussion. That's exactly right. >> This is always open to co-optation >> and it is open to being used by all kinds of groups. But there are important differences here. I talked from beginning to end in the book, but also in my presentation about liberatory movements, inclusionary movements, democratic movements. all the movements that are not about inclusion, they're not able to include in people, they are not about becoming more democratic. They are actually about imposing limi

ts on democracy are actually not part of this story. Even if they want to hide themselves or cover themselves or pretend themselves to be part of this story. Notice one of the thing that happens that is obviously very interesting and it's very obvious to all of us here, right in this workshop, but not to everybody that, it is precisely when it becomes hard for white supremacist groups to intimidate and terrorize others with impunity. That then they started abusing the democratic mechanism of pro

tests. The KKK started protesting in is Cauchy and many other places with a permanent and saying that that was a democratic process and they should be allowed to do so. But actually, they did pretty much the same thing they were doing before. They were still intimidating and terrorizing people, but now claiming that they were protesting. In my own account as an abuse of the democratic communicative mechanism of protests. Because you are still doing what you were doing before. You were protesting

, you are intimidating others, you are stigmatizing people, you are inciting violence, but now you are turning that down. I'm using everything that we do when we protest so that it looks like a protest so that it has to be accepted, so it becomes normalized. I do take issue with that because it is a co-optation of democratic mechanisms. But then also as you know there are protests including united rights protests in Charlottesville saying use will not replace us. That are explicitly exclusionary

. They are not trying to fight for more rights, for more inclusion, for more empowerment for people, they are literally trying to exclude people. For me, that creates an important difference. Even in the expression of political emotions such as anger and rage, it is not the same. When black lives matters protestors came out to the streets after the killing of Briana Taylor or George Floyd and they're angry and they're outrage and they express rage. That is not the same as white rage. There are a

ll kinds of differences, but one is also that you're right, Laurence, they may claim that they are oppressed. They may feel like I feel is silence and I feel invisible eyes and I feel excluded. But actually there is some important confusion there because they may be excluded for class reasons, for all kinds reasons. But it's obviously not true that when white males still have the majority of their resources, economically, politically, educationally, and when they are always represented in every

walk of life, they really don't have a claim in saying we are marginalized or oppressed because they are still overrepresented and they still have privileges over other people. There are all kinds of things. There are ways in which white race is misplaced, confused, distorted, is manipulative, and there are all important differences. But I think you're right, this is a huge challenge for me and I think for any accounts really of protests as a liberatory mechanism. But I'll stop there because the

re is so much. Yeah. >> There's so much. Thank you so much. I think you did a wonderful job. I think there's other questions here, but thank you so much. You answered my question perfectly. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We do have a question in the Q&A and the question is, what signs of preload culinary silencing are you seeing that the transgender community today? >> Yeah. Thank you so much for that question. I mean, it's not that the silencing of the transgender community is something that is ha

ppening only now, it is actually that the silencing of attention community is now more visible and it's now more in the public eye and more people are aware of that silencing. But actually one of the things that I do in the book and I have done in some papers is to look precisely to all the phenomena and on all the interesting cases in which there was in-group silencing within queer activism, within the queer movement of trans-folks. That even though they were a huge part of the queer liberation

movement from the beginning, they were marginalized and they were silence and they were raised. Even a decade before the stonewall, a whole decade, literally 10 years before the stonewall the copper doughnut riot in LA happened with mostly black but also brown transgender folks demonstrating and rioting that almost became forgotten, invisible eyes, marginalized. Even in the Stonewall, not every participant of Stonewall but numerous ones actually where >> trans-people, >> mostly trans people of

color like Sylvia Rivera and many others who I haven't studied. Sylvia Rivera and others were silenced, they were not even allowed to speak. In a few years later, commemorating the Stonewall riots. There you have wasting which the trans agenda, the trans concerns, the trans identities even became invisible eyes, even within the queer community, even within the queer movement. That's a form of ingroup silencing. Then of course, there are all ways in which in recent years, and that may be changing

and that's great. People, even in liberal circles like some colleges and universities, people have not been receptive to use new practices like pronoun practices. People have not been receptive to facilitate students changing their names. Making sure I'm doing everything we can to engage in depth naming and things like that. That lack of sensitivity, that resistance to hear new concerns, new voices, that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the silencing of trans-voices, which is sti

ll ongoing, but has obviously a long history, both within the queer community and obviously in the mainstream society as well. I hope that helps. What part of that is pre? There are ways in which if you don't allow people to present themselves as they are, so that they emphasize their gender identity, their gender voices, their gender concerns. You're telling them you cannot protest. Sylvia Rivera was not allowed to speak in some of the commemorations of Stonewall. Even when she was allowed to s

peak, she was told not to say certain things. I mean, that is pretty locutionary silencing.. >> Dr. Eric Bayruns Garcia has his hand raised, so please ask your question. Dr. Bayruns Garcia >> Yes, so can you hear me? >> Yes, I can hear you. How are you doing? >> Good to see you Jose. I love this talk and my course. Since we don't have much time, I'll get right to it. I was wondering what if you could say a little bit more about the conditions you have to have when you have uptake of protest, the

n I'll say why I'm asking this. After the protests that followed George Floyd's murder, you had this little bit of shift >> according to many polls, >> about the number of white Americans who thought the US government had done enough to remedy racial injustice and the legacy of slavery. But then that number after a year went right back to where it was before the George Floyd murder. That's like a diachronic worry. Then does what I'll say, I'll call it like a synchronic worry across time where, o

ften people will accept maybe something that a protest is pushing some truth or some insight or some fact. But then they'll continue to believe all things say about black people, about people of color that are incompatible or they'll act in ways, that are incompatible with some truth that they maybe have accepted. People will act or believe in ways that are in conflict with distinct that >> they take themselves, >> have taken from a protest. That's motivating question. >> Thank you so much Eric.

That's a great question. Yes, in the book and the full account in epistemology of protests, I do lay out certain conditions that have to do with some of the things that you mentioned. There has to be a particular receptivity to begin with. Because if people are allowed to protest, but people are not open to hear the critique, the demand, then nothing is going to happen. But then even if there is that receptivity and this goes more to the core of your question I think, then there has to be some

epistemic conditions that have to do with the ways in which knowledge flows. Because if there is misinformation being circulated all the time, even if you were hurt. Even if people had the minimal receptivity to get your message, if they are going to be bombarded with information that undermines your message >> so that they get the impression. >> There was a little bit of racist policing going on or whatever. We thought a year ago that that was an issue that we needed police reform, maybe even p

olice abolition. But now I'm bombarded with all this information and I'm like, no, it's not that bad, or I can forget about it or. So yes. Propaganda, misinformation, epistemic bubbles, epistemic polarization, so that people only hear right extreme positions and there is no possibility to go from one to the other. I mean, all those are conditions that undermine the possibility of proper uptake. You're absolutely right. Proper uptake is incredibly difficult. That's why I'm interested in not only

in the silence that happens before the protests, what I'm calling relocation resiliency during the protest. As the protests takes place, elocutionary silencing the immediate reaction. But the proper uptake, the afterlife of a process, the communicative live for protects continuous, sometimes not in the best ways, and that has to do exactly with the question that you're raising. What are the conditions of proper uptake so that they have to be sustained in a temporal trajectory. Because otherwise,

if it is about a quick fix or giving some response, the institutions know that very well. Even corporations in 2020 as we all know, Uber and other corporations were like, we have to say something about Black Lives Matter is that we support Black Lives Matters. We just give this message, we support Black Lives Matters and hope for the best. But that's all we have to do. So that a year from now people forget about it. We're claiming we support black lives of others, but we're not willing to chang

e anything about how we treat people of color, how we pay people of color. We're really not willing to do anything other than make this statement precisely because of what you're erasing Eric, that they know that the conditions of proper uptake are going to change, and then they can withdraw for an engaging altogether. I have more to say, but if there are other questions, maybe I should stop here. But the perlocutionary one part let me >> just mention this. >> One part of the analysis that I did

n't have time to go into, which is perlocutionary silencing, which has to do with perlocutionary frustration so that you cannot achieve the ends of the protests has to do precisely with this. Ways in which people were saying, Well, Black Lives Matters is great. But police abolition are not actionable things. We don't know what that is. We cannot imagine that. That doesn't even make sense. That's part of in my view per location silencing. I hope that's enough for now. >> We're really close to the

end, but I want give Christiana a chance >> to ask her question. >> Hi Jose. >> Hi. >> I was wondering if you could say a little bit about the audience that protesters seeking specifically in regard to proper uptake. It seems like because silencing occurs through many failures of uptake and recognition that maybe come from dominant or dominating epistemologies. I'm wondering if or should protest, seek an audience that may be as inclined to give proper uptake? Or if sense, what protest is aiming

for is some figurative transformative change, isn't necessarily seeking a tweet from dominantly positioned knowers or a dominating epistemology, is that where it's seeking uptake from? >> Fantastic. Thank you so much for the question Christiana, you are giving me a gift because that enables me to highlight probably the most important part of my account, which is the radical pluralism of the protests. In my view, a protest is always polyphonic. It includes diverse voices. I have much more to say

about that, but also, this goes to your question. A protests always has multiple audiences. The pluralism goes in that direction as well. It's an address that is open to many audiences, and people have assumed in the standard literature that the primary audience is mainstream society, the dominant public, the institutions. I say exactly the opposite, that the primary audience is always the in group. There is always in group communication, the protesting public itself. There are other audiences

as well. Of course, that may include even dominantly situated publics and even the institutions. But it is always the case when you are talking about oppressed groups, mobilize them protesting that the primary audience is the group itself. It is about internal communication, and as you suggested, that becomes crucial for the issue of uptake and the conditions of proper uptake. But it becomes crucial also for prefigure politics. Why? Because even under the worst conditions, when you know, during

every graph receive proper uptake from anybody other than people like you. That people are going to demonize you even more, that they're not going to hear anything you're saying. That your life is even going to become more vulnerable and unsafe with respect >> to those people. >> Nonetheless, in all these liberation movements, people have mobilized and they have protested for their own sake. They knew they were not going to be understood >> by others. >> But they thought, wait, other people of c

olor will know, even if nobody else believes us, that this is going on, and that we have to unite and we have to pay attention to this. In the queer movement, people knew, well, of course, dominant sensibilities are not going to be more open to non-heterosexual identities. But we need to do it for ourselves, we need to come together, we need to support ourselves. Act Up, which is the organization I haven't studied the most. I have written on that activism, the uncivil resistance of Act Up, act a

pnea, lock. We may not achieve much. People are going to hate us. We still have to take to the streets and say, we are going to go down yelling and screaming and protecting each other and creating a different community because we're not going to be silent when we're dying. By the hundreds and the thousands of during the aids pandemic, we're going to do something different. Then that's exactly what you said. Prefiguration is about creating as much as you can our community. Other people may not ev

en see it or understand it, or being open to that community, and that community may not even last, for all reasons, because mainstream society could make sure that it doesn't last. But it is worth creating that community for you, for your in group, so that you can enjoy it, even if it is a moment, even if it is a weekend, even if it is for some time. That becomes crucial in this liberation movements, the creation of these spaces, they prefiguration of a different, well, maybe not just for everyb

ody because not everybody is ready to be interested in that wall and investing in that world, but for us. Then maybe in the future, older audiences will be receptive. That's the beginning of the answer, but that's a great question, Christiana. >> Well, thank you so much Jose, for that wonderful presentation, and Professor, Weah Lawrence for your comments. We're going to take a short break. This is actually a great transition because what we have coming up next is our final presentation by Dr. Je

ssica Marie Johnson. She's going to be speaking on some themes that I think pick up very nicely, and some of what Dr. Medina discussed in terms of prefiguration and radical imagination. Her talk is titled Race imagination and black digital practice on social media, so we will see you back shortly.