Discursive Incarceration: Black Fragility in a Divided Public Sphere

Abstract: The expression of fragility has always been a difficult and complex matter for African Americans, for the discourse of mainstream media is set up to sustain their fragility while at the same time misrecognizing it. Even though the black public sphere split off from the dominant public sphere after the Civil War to enable distinctive forms of expression, the “practiced habits” of which Coates speaks continued in the structures of the dominant discourse. My essay will analyze the structure of America’s indifference to fragility in six parts. In the first section, I will introduce a normative problematic that can track how the hegemonic public sphere uses the rhetoric of formal equality to subordinate and silence African Americans speech while it also opens a space for black speech to be heard rather than dismissed. Sections two and three examine the historical separation of the black public sphere from the dominant public sphere, tracing the silencing structures that haunt us today back to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, for this “progressive” decision provided a template for what can be said and cannot be said. The fourth section analyzes how Ralph Ellison thematizes and revises the encounter between the black and dominant public spheres. Sections five and six discus the ways that Ta-Nehisi Coates exposes the contemporary forms of these discursive structures that undermine progress toward equality and the resistance to such exposure in the media.