Binding a Future of Violence: A Semiotic Reading of Race in Supreme Court Cases

Abigail Moore, Wake Forest University

Much has been written about racial inequality in the criminal justice system, ranging from structural disadvantages for non-whites, to differences in case outcomes, to statistical likelihoods of ending up in court in the first place. However, in order to more holistically understand the role of the criminal justice system in the Racial State, we need a semiotic analysis of how racial signs are constructed and interpreted in the Courts. Specifically, I argue that the State does not hold a monopoly on legitimate violence so much as the monopoly on the interpretation of violence, able to declare some violence legitimate and some illegitimate, according to the court’s own definition of violence, and its interpretation of the circumstances-- and that these interpretations have deep racial histories. In this paper, I examine several Supreme Court cases involving cross burning and its use by the KKK, and as a tool of racist intimidation. The oral arguments of these cases are rooted in the semiotic: what is signified by the sign of the burning cross? Are there multiple possible signifieds, and if so, what are their differences, and by what characteristics and circumstances can they be distinguished from one another? To understand these cases, the court’s decisions, and the phenomenon writ large, I propose the concept of historical semiotic mass, and distinguish between three distinct understandings of “symbolic violence”: that of Bourdieu, that of Girard, and a third, performative, meaning that I argue is absent from the first two conceptions. I argue that court cases do not only interpret the violence of the past—they create predictable interpretations of future violence, thus “binding the future” via performative acts of Butlerian iteration.

See paper

 Presented in Session 234. Gender, Race and Immigration