ABSTRACT

President Trump’s 2016 electoral victory prompted a series of journalist inquiries into the pain of white Rust Belt voters. Imploring readers to heed their cries for help, profiles of “Trump Country” suggested that declining physical health and economic anxiety explained Trump’s success more so than racism and xenophobia. This essay argues that the rhetoric of white working-class pain reproduces what Franz Fanon called a historical-racial schema: a corporeal grid of intelligibility that prefigures how racialized subjects perceive their bodily sensations and movements in relation to others. Building on critical race scholarship on personhood, I contend that public pain is rhetorically constructed along a racialized continuum from fully actualized (white) humanity to (black) insensate flesh. As a result, profiles of the white body-in-pain implicitly register as uniquely worthy of public sympathy, particularly when juxtaposed to the black working class whose flesh bears the marks of historical racial violence.

摘要

特朗普总统在2016年的选举胜利中引发了一系列记者对白锈带选民痛苦的调查。《特朗普国家》（Trump Country）呼吁人们注意寻求帮助的事实，表明身体健康状况和经济焦虑的下降比种族主义和仇外心理更能说明特朗普的成功。本文认为，白人工人阶级痛苦的言论重现了弗朗茨·范农（Franz Fanon）所说的历史种族图式：通俗易懂的形体网格，预示着种族化的对象如何感知自己相对于其他人的身体感觉和动作。我基于对人格的批判性种族奖学金，我辩称，公共痛苦是从种族化的连续体（从完全实现的（白人）人类到（黑人）肉体的种族）的修辞学上建构的。结果，白色痛苦的身影暗含着独特的值得公众同情的印象，特别是当与黑人工人阶级并列时，后者的肤色带有历史种族暴力的痕迹。