De-whitening consent amidst COVID-19 rhetoric

ABSTRACTThis article exposes four white-supremacist tactics embedded within extant consent discourse that became increasingly mobilized through the COVID-19 pandemic. These tactics include discourses of militarism as well as the dismissal of Black autonomy, reproductive access, and disability within existing consent rhetoric. We argue that these tactics create renewed exigence for de-whitening consent, and we build such a de-whitened consent framework by applying rhetorical scholarship on sexual violence to the 2020 Michigan anti-lockdown extremist protests, which were largely undertaken by white men. By exposing the white-supremacist tactics visible in these extremist protests, we highlight how pandemic-related rhetorics of bodily autonomy apply differently to Black, Muslim, disabled, trans, and migrant populations, and thus offer a de-whitened consent framework as a tool to chip away at white supremacist discourse.KEYWORDS: Consentbodily autonomysocial-distancingwhite supremacist violenceintersectionality Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 Jeanie Stephens. “(Updated) Video: Wood River Officer Made Men Leave Walmart Because They Wore Masks,” The Telegraph, October 6, 2022, https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/article/Video-Wood-River-officer-has-men-leave-Walmart-15154393.php#photo-19209937.2 Ibid.3 James Auley, “France Mandates Masks to Control the Coronavirus. Burqas Remain Banned,” The Washington Post, October 6, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-face-masks-coronavirus/2020/05/09/6fbd50fc-8ae6-11ea-80df-d24b35a568ae_story.html.4 Samantha Tatro, “CBP Officer Received Sexual Favors for Allowing Undocumented Immigrants Into US: FBI,” NBC San Diego, September 8, 2016, https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/cbp-agent-received-sexual-favors-for-allowing-undocumented-immigrants-into-us-fbi-says/110589/.5 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).6 Usha Lee McFarling, “‘Which Death Do They Choose?:’ Many Black Men Fear Wearing a Mask More than the Coronavirus,” Stat News, June 3, 2020, https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/03/which-deamany-black-men-fear-wearing-mask-more-than-coronavirus/; Fernando Alfonso III, “Why Some People of Color Say They Won’t Wear Homemade Masks,” CNN, April 7, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/us/face-masks-ethnicity-coronavirus-cdc-trnd/index.html; Tracy Jan, “Two Black Men Say They Were Kicked Out of Walmart for Wearing Protective Masks: Others Worry It Will Happen to Them,” The Washington Post, April 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/09/masks-racial-profiling-walmart-coronavirus/.7 As an example, Black Chicagoans died at more than twice the rate of their white counterparts, and early in the pandemic U.S. physician groups began to call for race and ethnicity data revealing such disparities to facilitate race-informed medical care. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline, August 16, 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html.8 Karma R. Chávez and Annie Hill, “The Visual and Sonic Registers of Neighbourhood Estrangement,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 42, no. 1 (2021): 68–83.9 Ibid, 2.10 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000).11 bell hooks, Cultural Criticism and Transformation, Media Education Foundation, 1997, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLMVqnyTo_0.12 Following the lead of the Southern Poverty Law Center, we refer to the riots as “extremist protests” through the rest of this paper.13 Stephanie R. Larsen, “‘Everything Inside Me Was Silenced’: (Re)defining Rape Through Visceral Counterpublicity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 125.14 Ibid.15 Stephanie Tillman and Amber Johnson, “Abortion Language, Nesting Dolls Theory, and an Autoethnographic Plea for Radical Transformation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, no. 4 (2022): 436.16 Kate Lockwood Harris, “Yes Means Yes and No Means No, but Both These Mantras Need to Go: Communication Myths in Consent Education and Anti-Rape Activism,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 2 (2018): 155–178.17 Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith, “Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal,” Discourse and Society 10 (1999): 293–317.18 Leland G. Spencer and Theresa A. Kulbaga, “Consent Education as Active Allyship: A Call for Centering Trans and Queer Experiences,” QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking 8, no. 2 (2021): 97–103.19 Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Picador, 2021): 1120 Armond Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women’s Mobility,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 122–6.21 V. Jo Hsu, “Voting Rights, Anti-Intersectionality and Citizenship as Containment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 3 (2020): 269–76.22 Matthew Houdek offers the term “racial sedimentation” to explain how anti-Black sense-making accumulate as discursive deposits and “bury” counterdiscourses. See “Racial Sedimentation and the Common Sense of Racialized Violence: The Case of Black Church Burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 279–306.23 As an example, see the NPR article by April Dembosky, “Starting a COVID-19 ‘Social Bubble’? How Safe Sex Communication Skills Can Help,” National Public Radio, July 8, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/886541838/starting-a-covid-19-social-bubble-how-safe-sex-communication-skills-can-help.24 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “The U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee,” https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm.25 We must make note of Nassar’s abuse of Simone Biles, a Black woman and top U.S. gymnast who Nassar assaulted when she was a child. Later, Biles was reviled by Conservative white men for withdrawing from the Olympics due to mental health concerns, and these critiques ignored Biles’s accumulated trauma from sexual assault, continuing the pattern of dismissing sexual violence against Black women and children and minimization of Black disability.26 Santhosh Chandrashekhar, “Doing Intersectionality under a Different Name: The (Un)intentional Politics of Refusal,” in De-Whitening Intersectionality: Race, Intercultural Communication, and Politics, ed. Shinsuke Eguchi, Shadee Abdi, and Bernadette Marie Calafell (New York: Lexington Books, 2020).27 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).28 Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender, and Bodies Out of Place (New York: Berg, 2004).29 Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 155.30 Lamiyah Bahrainwala, “Blind Submission,” Communication, Culture, & Critique 12, no. 4 (2019): 519–34.31 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Fawcett Books, 1975).32 Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 151.33 Lauren Frayer, “In Iran, Women are Protesting the Hijab. In India, They're Suing to Wear It,” NPR, October 29, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/29/1131830324/india-hijab-iran-protests.34 Ben Quinn, “French Police Make Woman Remove Clothing on Nice Beach Following Burkini Ban,” The Guardian, August 23, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-police-make-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach#:~:text=French%20police%20make%20woman%20remove%20clothing%20on%20Nice%20beach%20following%20burkini%20ban,-This%20article%20is&text=Authorities%20in%20several%20French%20towns,terrorist%20killings%20in%20the%20country.35 Gregory Warner, Eleanor Beardsley, and Diaa Hadid, “From Niqab to N95,” National Public Radio, May 27, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/04/28/847433454/from-niqab-to-n95.36 Miriam Berges, “Killing of Another Teenage Protester Gives Iran Uprising a New Symbol,” The Washington Post, October 10, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/10/iran-protests-sarina-esmaeilzadeh-hijab/.37 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).38 Kafer builds on bell hooks’ “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” See bell hooks, Cultural Criticism and Transformation (Media Education Foundation, 1997), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLMVqnyTo_0.39 bell hooks, Cultural Criticism and Transformation, (Media Education Foundation, 1997), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLMVqnyTo_0.40 ACLU, “Facts About the Over-Incarceration of Women in the United States,” November 2021, https://www.aclu.org/other/facts-about-over-incarceration-women-united-states.41 Tracey Tully, “Women’s Prison Plagued by Sexual Violence Will Close, Governor Says,” The New York Times, June 7, 2021.42 Ashley Noel Mack and Bryan J. McCann, “‘Strictly an Act of Street Violence:’ Intimate Publicity and Affective Divestment in the New Orleans Mother’s Day Shooting,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 334–50.43 See Beth E. Ritchie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012) and Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).44 See Elizabeth Bernstein, “The Sexual Politics of the ‘New Abolitionism’,” differences 18, no. 3 (2007): 128–51.45 See Amia Srinivasan’s discussion of the regulation of sex work in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Picador, 2021): 150–4. Srinivasan argues that even “progressive” models of sex-work regulation that criminalize buying but not selling sex places additional burdens on sex workers to ensure the privacy and safety of johns.46 Angelique M. Davis and Rose Ernst, “Racial Gaslighting,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 7, no. 4 (2019): 761–74.47 Ibid.48 See Erusla Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 443–58; and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); among many others.49 Sherene H. Razack, “Sexualized Violence and Colonialism: Reflections on the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 28, no. 2 (2016): 1–4.50 Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Picador, 2021), 8451 Several communication scholars have critiqued these bathroom bills, for example Mia Fischer, “Piss(ed): The Biopolitics of the Bathroom,” Communication, Culture, & Critique 12, no. 3 (2019): 397–415.52 For additional discussion of consent’s individualism and heteronormativity, see Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer, Campuses of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019).53 Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 189.54 Lois Beckett, “Armed Protestors Demonstrate against COVID-19 Lockdown at Michigan Capitol,” The Guardian, April 30, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-protests-coronavirus-lockdown-armed-capitol.55 Ibid.56 Darcie Moran and Joe Guillen, “Whitmer Kidnap Plot: Possible Citizen’s Arrest Mentioned in March, Prosecutor Says,” Detroit Free Press, October 23, 2020. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/10/23/whitmer-kidnap-plot-suspect-citizens-arrest/6010264002/.57 Tresa Baldas, “Whitmer Kidnap Case? ‘This Was a Huge Setback’,” Detroit Free Press, April 10, 2022, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2022/04/10/feds-throw-towel-whitmer-kidnap-case/9521317002/?gnt-cfr=1.58 Gregg Krupa, “Whitmer Seeks Culture Change to Fight Campus Sexual Assault,” The Detroit News, December 3, 2019, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/12/03/whitmer-addresses-campus-sexual-assault/2589333001/.59 Lois Beckett, “Armed Protestors Demonstrate against COVID-19 Lockdown at Michigan Capitol,” The Guardian, April 30, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-protests-coronavirus-lockdown-armed-capitol.60 WXYZ Staff, “Ax-Wielding Man Removed from Michigan Anti-Shutdown Protests, but No Citations or Arrests Made,” WXTL Tallahassee, May 14, 2020, https://www.wtxl.com/news/coronavirus/ax-wielding-man-removed-from-michigan-anti-shutdown-protests-but-no-citations-or-arrests-made.61 Niraj Warikoo, Kyla L. Wright, and Angie Jackson, “Capitol Hill Rioters Treatment Draws Cries of Hypocrisy from Minorities in Metro Detroit,” Detroit Free Press, January 6, 2021, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/01/06/capitol-rioters-treatment-draws-cries-hypocrisy-minorities/6570335002/.62 Lois Beckett, “Armed Protestors;” Bryan Armen Graham, “‘Swastikas and Nooses:’ Governor Slams ‘Racism’ of Michigan Lockdown Protest,” The Guardian, May 3, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/03/michigan-gretchen-whitmer-lockdown-protest-racism.63 See Robert Cox and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2015), among others64 Richard Morris and Phillip Wander, “Native American Rhetoric: Dancing in the Shadows of the Ghost Dance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 2 (1990): 164–91.65 Valerie N. Wieskamp and Courtney Smith, “‘What to Do When You’re Raped’: Indigenous Women Critiquing and Coping through a Rhetoric of Survivance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 72–94.66 Ibid.67 Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).68 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Fawcett Books, 1975).69 Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 147, emphasis in original.70 Catherine R. Squires, “N-Word vs. F-Word, Black vs. Gay: Uncovering Pendejo Games to Recover Intersections,” in Critical Rhetorics of Race, ed. Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 70.71 Hannah Brenner, Kathleen Darcy, and Sheryl Kubiak, “Sexual Violence as an Occupational Hazard and Condition of Confinement in the Closed Institutional Systems of the Military and Detention,” Pepperdine Law Review 44 (2017): 881–956.72 Clark Mindock, “Trump Sexual Assault Allegations: How Many Women Have Accused the President?” Independent, November 6, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-sexual-assault-allegations-all-list-misconduct-karen-johnson-how-many-a9149216.html.73 Louis Nelson, “Trump: ‘I Am the Law and Order Candidate,’” Politico, July 11, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-law-order-candidate-225372.74 Ivan Pereira, “Michigan Judge Sides with Governor in Lawsuit over Coronavirus Shelter-in-Place Order,” ABC News, April 30, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/michigan-judge-sides-governor-lawsuit-coronavirus-shelter-place/story?id=70425957.75 Graham, “‘Swastikas and Nooses.’”76 University of Michigan School of Public Health, “A National Hotspot: Coronavirus in Detroit, Q&A with Paul Flemming,” Michigan Public Health News Center, 2020, https://sph.umich.edu/news/2020posts/a-national-hotspot-coronavirus-in-detroit.html.77 Squires, “N-Word vs. F-Word,” 66.78 Associated Press, “Trump and Protestors Pressure Governors to Start Reopening the States,” CNBC, April 18, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/18/trump-and-protesters-pressure-governors-to-start-reopening-the-states.html.79 Pitofsky, “Stylists Ticketed.”80 Freedom on Tap with Jon Caldara, “Steve Moore,” April 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7czFYx6-s&t=910s.81 Tolouse Olorunnipa, Shawn Boburg, and Arelis R. Hernández, “Rallies against Stay-at-Home Orders Grow as Trump Sides with Protestors,” The Washington Post, April 17, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rallies-against-stay-at-home-orders-grow-as-trump-sides-with-protesters/2020/04/17/1405ba54-7f4e-11ea-8013-1b6da0e4a2b7_story.html.82 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).83 Associated Press, “Trump and Protestors Pressure Governors.”84 Graham, “‘Swastikas and Nooses’.”85 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and more recent work on white womanhood by Megan Armstrong, “From Lynching to Central Park Karen: How White Women Weaponize White Womanhood,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal, 32 (2021): 27.86 Marcie Bianco, “COVID-19 Mask Mandates in Wisconsin and Elsewhere Spark ‘My Body, My Choice’ Hypocrisy,” Think: NBC News, August 3, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/covid-19-mask-mandates-wisconsin-elsewhere-spark-my-body-my-ncna1235535; Jeremy W. Peters, “How Abortion, Guns, and Church Closings Made Coronavirus a Culture War,” The New York Times, April 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/us/politics/coronavirus-protests-democrats-republicans.html.87 For example, Dorothy Roberts, “Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights,” Dissent (Fall 2015). https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reproductive-justice-not-just-rights; and Stephanie Tillman and Amber Johnson, “Abortion Language, Nesting Dolls Theory, and an Autoethnographic Plea for Radical Transformation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, no. 4 (2022): 438.88 Loretta Ross, “Understanding Reproductive Justice: Transforming the Pro-Choice Movement,” Off Our Backs 36, no. 4 (2006): 14–9.89 Andrea Smith, “Beyond Pro-Choice Versus Pro-Life: Women of Color and Reproductive Justice,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 1 (2005): 128.90 Guilia Afiune and Claire Allbright, “Federal Appeals Court Blocks Undocumented Teen's Request for Immediate Abortion,” The Texas Tribune, October 20, 2017, https://www.texastribune.org/2017/10/20/pregnant-undocumented-immigrant-abortion-friday/.91 A widely known statistic estimates that Black women in the United States are 3–4 times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts. Additionally, before the SCOTUS ruling on Roe v Wade, migrant children were regularly denied access to abortion due to their age and residency status.92 Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, “US Racial Inequality May Be as Deadly as COVID-19,” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 177, no. 36 (2020): 21854–6.93 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities Continue in Pregnancy-Related Deaths,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0905-racial-ethnic-disparities-pregnancy-deaths.html.94 Andrew Mark Miller, “‘The Government Is Not My Mother’: Michigan Barber Who Defied Lockdown Rallies Crowd of Protestors,” The Washington Examiner, May 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/the-government-is-not-my-mother-michigan-barber-who-defied-lockdown-rallies-crowd-of-protesters.95 Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender, and Bodies Out of Place (New York: Berg, 2004).96 “Michigan Barber Shop Reopens Despite Shutdown: Gov. Whitmer Is ‘Not My Mother’,” Detroit Free Press, May 6, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfKmeGOf3CA.97 Miller, “‘The Government Is Not My Mother.’”98 Malachi Barrett, “Sexist Attacks Cast Michigan Gov. Whitmer as Mothering Tyrant of Coronavirus Dystopia,” MLive, May 22, 2020, https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/05/sexist-attacks-cast-whitmer-as-mothering-tyrant-of-coronavirus-dystopia.html.99 Patricia Berne, Aurora Levins Morales, David Langstaff, and Sins Invalid, “Ten Principles of Disability Justice,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 46, nos. 1–2 (2018): 227–30.100 Jack Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser, “From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism,” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 5003–27.101 Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Picador, 2021), 76102 Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom, “Critical Disability Studies, Brexit, and Trump: A Time of Neoliberal-Ableism,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 23, no. 2 (2019): 236.103 For example, Phillips and Griffin discuss the erasure of Black women in Joshua Daniel Phillips and Rachel Alicia Griffin, “Crystal Mangum as Hypervisible Object and Invisible Subject: Black Feminist Thought, Sexual Violence, and the Pedagogical Repercussions of the Duke Lacrosse Case,” Women’s Studies in Communication 28 (2015): 36–56.104 Leland G. Spencer and Theresa A. Kulbaga, “Consent Education as Active Allyship: A Call for Centering Trans and Queer Experiences,” QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking 8, no. 2 (2021): 97–103.105 “8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, with Fears of Anti-Asian Bias,” The New York Times, March 26, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shooting-atlanta-acworth.106 Andrea Salcedo, “Racist Anti-Asian Hashtags Spiked after Trump First Tweeted ‘Chinese Virus,’ Study Finds,” The Washington Post, March 19, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/19/trump-tweets-chinese-virus-racist/.107 Natasha Ishak, “In 48 Hours of Protest, Thousands of Americans Cry Out for Abortion Rights,” Vox, June 26, 2022, https://www.vox.com/2022/6/26/23183750/abortion-rights-scotus-roe-overturned-protests.108 Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).109 Taida Wolfe and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, “Abortion during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Racial Disparities and Barriers to Care in the USA,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 19 (2022): 541–8.110 Katy Backes Kozhilmannil, Asha Hassan, and Rachel R. Hardeman, “Abortion Access as a Racial Justice Issue,” The New England Journal of Medicine (2022, September 7); Christine M. Slaughter and Chelsea N. Jones, “How Black Women Will Be Especially Affected by the Loss of Roe,” The Washington Post, June 25, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/25/dobbs-roe-black-racism-disparate-maternal-health/.