Abandon Hope Ye Who Enter: Or, Who Has the Power to Enter and Emerge from Hell/History
When the writer Joanna Schroeder was driving her 11- and 14-year-old sons and their friends in the back seat of her car, and heard one of them shout “triggered” to the laughter of the others, she “almost lost control of the car” (Schroeder). She was stunned to hear that term, she writes, because she was aware of the alt-right’s use of it, along with the term “snowflake,” to “mock people who are hurt or offended by racism as overly sensitive” (Schroeder). In her 2019 New York Times opinion piece, “Racists are Recruiting: Watch Your White Sons,” she highlights how alt-right organizations target white males using social media so that they don’t understand they are using terms like “triggered” and “snowflake“ in similar ways that white supremicists use them. The words, then, proliferate without the speaker’s awareness of them. Schroeder’s son also liked a photo of Hitler on Instagram, without knowing it was Hitler. The groups target users who predominantly favor video games and other audiences likely to be composed of white males. The problem with this is not simply the lack of awareness that can be addressed with education; it is the algorithms that ensue from Instagram, YouTube, etc., pointing those who like or click to additional similar content, a twisted Hansel-and-Gretel breadcrumb trail that ends with children being consumed by white supremacists.
What does this have to do with the Middle Ages? Or as Heng puts it in her introduction to her edited volume The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages: Why this idea, why now? In her 2002 book cited by Miyashiro and Whitaker, and others we have read on critical race theory in the field of medieval studies so far in this class, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, Heng writes, “history has not, after all, come to an end; indeed, both history and the Middle Ages have returned, with a vengeance” (Heng, Empire, 354). One way in which the Middle Ages and history have returned is through race. Heng writes, “Ever a moving target, ‘race’ has emerged again—playing the role it had in the medieval literature I examine—as a thing that can be conferred on an individual by virtue of religious status, or membership in a community of culture, as much as by phenotype” (Heng, Empire, 379). A person’s “race” can be in the eye of the beholder. Racial “status” can be demarcated by one’s religion or culture and it isn’t determined by genetics.
Race, culturally constructed, nonetheless has very real implications for those marked by it and those doing the marking—that is to say, everyone. Heng’s “working minimum hypothesis of race” is “to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups” (Heng, “Beginnings,” 3). In “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage politics,” Miyashiro argues “recent discussions about race, white supremacy, and the Middle Ages overlook the relationship between Islamophobia, settler colonialism, and Indigeneity as a category” (1). If race is a moving target, then present-day Islamophobia, for instance, infuses race, white supremacy and the Middle Ages, even as—or because—it revives the Middle Ages’ habitus of assigning race based on myriad and confusing factors. Miyashiro examines how “medieval heritage” and the “concept of ‘Anglo-Saxon’” infuse the conspiracy theory of “white genocide” (1). For Miyashiro and Heng, Ahmed’s idea of “race as sedimented history” is key, the medieval past and its years of inherited sedimentation building up to create the discourse of race in the present.
Although many specialists have argued that radicalization of the alt-right via social media is a fundamentally technical problem, attributed to algorithms and incentives for shock-value content, it is also a “social problem” that would proliferate despite addressing the algorithms (Casey). The New York Times Editorial Board recently opined: “Social media has played a key role in the recent rise of violent right-wing extremism in the United States, including three recent incidents—one in which a man was accused of sending mail bombs to critics of the president, another in which a man shot dead two African-Americans in a Kroger’s grocery store in Kentucky, and a third in which a man is accused of conducting a murderous rampage at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.” The answer to this problem is not simply adjusting the algorithms—although that is necessary—because the fundamental tendencies have existed at least since the Middle Ages, and are nothing new, and the fact that people think they are new is a problem, as Heng addresses in Empire of Magic’s introduction. The modern crusades may be happening on the alt-right and within fundamentalist social media and Internet culture as this recent quote from the New York Times Editorial Board attests: “Jihadists and right-wing extremists use remarkably similar social media strategies.” These strategies include “dehumanization” of the “other.”
Building on Foucault’s idea of biopower, Mbembé articulates necropolitics as the ultimate power over life—the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (40). “The human being truly becomes a subject—that is, separated from the animal—in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death. … It is through this confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the incessant movement of history. Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death. To uphold the work of death is precisely how Hegel defines the life of the Spirit” (Mbembé, 14). Becoming a subject involves separating from the animal; it involves confronting death, moving into history, as Odysseus and Dante did in their spiritual descent into the underworld. Confronting death is not only the major plot-point for romance, from the classical to the medieval to the renaissance period; as Heng and other literary/cultural scholars show, the romance reflects and drives our cultural fears and aspirations.
Mbembé argues that necropolitics blurs the “lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom” (40). This echoes the emphasis on resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom in the alt-right and jihadist social media strategies. Returning to Schroeder’s cautionary tale that “Parents need to understand how white supremacists prey on teen boys, so they can intervene,” while the algorithms and technology are new, they are magnifying tendencies that have far deeper roots, and it will require more than an adjusted algorithm to address the sedimented history of racist discourse and its use to determine who is worthy of life, that is to say, who has the power to ascribe the condition of death, or animal or below-human status. Thus, terms like “snowflake” and “triggered” do more than make fun of the “liberal, sensitive elite”; discourse, whether it be in a medieval romance such as King of Tars or on Instagram and YouTube, has the power to “move” us, forward, backward, or both.
Works Cited
Articles
Ahmed, Sara. “Response Essay: Race as sedimented history.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2015): 94-97.
Heng, Geraldine. “Beginnings: Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds: Why This Book, and How to Read a Book on Medieval Race.” The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press (2018): 1-14.
Mbembé, “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (2003): 11-40.
Miyashiro, Adam. “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage politics.” Literature Compass (2019): 1-11.
Newton, Casey. “How White Supremacists Are Thriving on YouTube.” Theverge.com (2018).
The New York Times Editorial Board. “The New Radicalization of the Internet.” Nytimes.com (2018).
Schroeder, Joanna. “Racists are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.” Nytimes.com (2019).
Books
Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
