Engendering Silence Paper Proposal

In taking the idea of engendering silence with more of a political science flair, I was thinking about connecting Stanley's ideas about language being used to silence in a political setting to our discussions in Joel's class about The New Jim Crow.

In particular I'm interested in the section about silencing by denying access to vocabulary: "it is difficult to have a reasoned debate about the costs and benefits of a policy when one side has seized control of the linguistic means to express [...] claims". It seems like this manifests itself in two ways: silencing voices by controlling the language around a debate, and silencing voices by assigning language to a person/movement/group in order to discredit them. 

In Alexander's piece, she talks about the rhetoric of the war on drugs in the media and how it shaped debates and policies; the language and sensationalism around crack cocaine made it so that the government needed to respond, even if the epidemic they were addressing had little basis in fact. Similarly with the "getting tough on crime" rhetoric wrt to Clinton and others – if critically addressing these policies means one would be deemed ‘soft on crime’, where’s the space or incentive to voice a dissenting opinion? 

In talking with Anne she linked me an article by James Forman Jr. which discusses, in part, Alexander's own language in The New Jim Crow, especially the Jim Crow analogy itself; while I need to do a closer reading I think it may be valuable in adding another layer to this argument, seeing how she describes these acts of political silencing and may be participating in it herself in another way.

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4599&context=fss_papers

Sidenote: while I won't take it as a focus, this video about language and the Black Lives Matter movement inspired my thinking, as it delineates how media coverage uses language to stigmatize and deligitimize black protest.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/06/white-riots-black-protest_n_7672334.html