Abstract
In this article, I consider the political ramifications of the Kansas shooting—specifically, a Republican politician’s uptake of Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, to support broadly anti-immigrant policies—as a form of rhetorical “brownwashing.” Racist violence is written into the deep structure of the U.S. settler colonial state, and we cannot neatly periodize it within presidential administrations. That being said, . . . “brownwashed” conservatism in the aftermath of the Trump era reveals the contradiction between conservative understandings of “acceptable heterogeneity” and violent, racist acts that do not discriminate between different members of “heterogeneous” racialized peoples. Rhetorics of acceptable difference perpetuate ideologies that make racist, violent acts possible.
- Journal
- Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society
- Published
- 2021-06-22
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- Open Access
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