Year of Graduation

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Major

Sociology

Directing Professor

Jon Bohland; Glenn Bracey II

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the exploration of state-sanctioned violence against Black radicals and radical Black organizations and the essentialism of cooptation, deradicalization and renormalization as a fundamental part of white racism. The thesis further explores the ways in which Black radicals and Black social movement organizations from the height of the Black civil rights movement (1964-1969) were de-radicalized and stripped of their intellectual and social property by the effects of power exhibited by the state. Concurrently, I also argue that these same radicals and organizations would later have many of their “radical” practices, culturally co-opted / appropriated by the white legal structure. I explore what Foucault writes as the state's attempt to reanimate what is useful and what Bell describes as white and Black “interest convergence”. Both theoretical viewpoints though traditionally not used together, complement one another. Foucault gives us why the state is attempting to create docile bodies, where Bell explores who is affected because of the state’s co-option of ideas for the greater white state.

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