Histories of Violence: Life in

Zones of Abandonment: A Time to

Break the Spectacle of Ignorance
and Violence
Brad Evans interviews Henry A. Giroux

HIS IS THE 31ST in a series of dialogues with artists, writers, and

critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is with
Henry A. Giroux, a renowned public intellectual, author, and critical
educator, who currently holds the McMaster University Chair for
Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University. Giroux is
the author of many books, including, most recently,American
Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (2018) and The Terror of
the Unforeseen (2019), just out from LARB Books.
¤
BRAD EVANS: Henry, it’s wonderful to once again be in your
intellectual company and have the opportunity to discuss
your important work. I’d like to also congratulate you on
another book publication, The Terror of the Unforeseen,
which has just been released by an imprint of the Los Angeles
Review of Books. We have talked at length about global
issues of power, politics, and violence, but I’d like to turn in
this interview to questions of a more biographical nature. You
often write about “youth” being targeted and yet overlooked
in critical analysis, so can you tell me more about your
“formative years”?
HENRY A. GIROUX: I understood from a young age that schools
could be a form of pedagogical violence. This began when I was high
school student and stood out as a particularly oppressive episode in
my life. School was a form of dead time, marked by racial and class
segregated pedagogies that were mostly disciplinary and repressive.
My educational (or should I say “correctional”) facility, ironically
named Hope High School, was segregated along class and racial lines.
Poor white and black kids were placed in the “junk” courses, played
sports, and were labeled largely through what was defined as their
deficits, which included their manner of speaking, dress, and other
aspects of their cultural capital. Most of us entered the school through
the back entrance and played on various sports teams. Within the
space offered through our participation in a high-powered basketball
team, we forged strong bonds across racial lines that offered a sense
of solidarity and protection from the worse effects of school
disciplinary measures. Yet, this space of marginal privilege never
offered up the language or modes of resistance that would allow us to
fully understand or escape from a ubiquitous hidden curriculum of
racist and class violence that we experienced every single day, in the
corridors, at lunch time, and in the not so subtle message that we
were not wanted at the social events organized by kids from the
upper middle and ruling classes in the school. We had no language to
resist our own erasure. While some of us were valued for our abilities
to play certain sports, this was mere tokenism, as outside of the
acknowledgment — to perform without being heard (except in our
physically exhausted states) — we were unknowable. Schooling for us
was not a place where we realized our capacities to be engaged
citizens and as such suffered the violence of being rendered voiceless
and thus powerless, at least in terms of being able to narrate our own
needs, desires, and hopes. We were defined by what was lacking and
paid a price for our status as kids marginalized by class and color.
Being unrecognized or treated as unknowable, our sense of
subjectivity was not merely in doubt, it was erased.
The school didn’t however operate according to some special rules.
The same racial and class registers were at work outside its walls and
the latter worked in tandem with how the school was organized into
protected spaces for the white rich kids and zones of danger and
neglect for the rest of us. The racist and class violence of schooling
was reproduced seamlessly, externally and internally, adding to its
false facade of normalization. It was hard for me to miss the class and
racial dimensions of all of this, especially since I had ample
opportunity to play in the gyms in black neighborhoods in Providence,
Rhode Island. Visiting the neighborhoods of my black friends and
playing in gyms on their turf was easy, but they could not come into
my neighborhood without suffering the indignities of racial slurs or
the possibility of a brutal assault. It was then I learned you cannot talk
about race without class, or class without race, since both shared the
violence of being judged as inferior, outside of the bounds of a quality
education, and subject to forms of social abandonment. Something
too many liberals have failed to grasp with their warped notions of
individual agency.
In school, we shared the oppression of being disposable, and that
became evident in the dropout rates, suspensions, and criminalizing
of behavior organized along class and racial lines. School for me was
a blunt instrument of social and cultural reproduction, a pedagogical
weapon whose aim was to serve the elite through a smoothly
functioning social cleansing machine done in the name of
meritocracy. School was a place and space where our social and
political agency was denied. My sense of education as a tool of critical
awakening, one that was refiguring my sense of agency, first began
at that moment when the lived experience of solidarity and loyalty
rubbed up against my own unquestioned racism and sexism, which
had a long history in the daily encounters of my youth. Sometimes
the contradictions between solidarity and loyalty were tested within
contradictions that unraveled the common sense of racism and
sexism as filtered through the class lens and woven into the fabric of
everyday struggles. Treating people as objects or understanding them
through established stereotypes was being constantly enacted as I
moved through high school, and would be firmly challenged as I met
black men and women who refused those stereotypes and had the
kindness and intelligence to open my eyes through both their own
lived experiences and their access to a critical language that I lacked.
My encounter with pedagogy was through the eyes of the lived
oppressed. But I didn’t need to “learn it,” I knew how it felt, I just
lacked the critical language to explain its conditions. As I look back on
that history, I believe that school as a tool of repression and
segregation has in fact intensified even though (prior to Trump at
least), masked by the myth in which it claimed to be more
“progressive.” The hidden curriculum of racism and class
discrimination is no longer hidden and is on full display in the
increasing criminalization of student behaviors, the emergence of
zero-tolerance policies, the increased policing of schools, the ubiquity
of a surveillance culture, and the massive underfunding of public
education.
Given this history, when did you first become aware of the
importance of education and for its liberating potential to be
robbed in the active production of compliance? I am thinking
here about your personal decision to take up the pedagogical
challenge yourself.
My initial theoretical and political understanding of education as a
moral and political practice, as a struggle over assigned agencies and
as a mode of organized resistance or, if you will as a practice of
freedom, had its roots during my years as a high school teacher. A
more sophisticated understanding of the pedagogical imperative as a
political force only emerged while I was in college during the latter
half of the ’60s. I must admit that my first interest in critical pedagogy
grew out of my teaching experience as a secondary school teacher in
Barrington, Rhode Island. Despite the imposing structure, teachers
then at least had certain autonomy in shaping their approach to
classroom teaching. At that time, I taught a couple of seminars in
social studies and focused on feminist studies, theories of alienation,
and a range of other important social issues. While I had no trouble
finding critical content, including progressive films I used to rent from
the Quakers (Society of Friends), I did not know how to theorize the
various progressive approaches to teaching I tried in the classroom.
All the while, my pedagogical approaches were being constantly
questioned by other conservative teachers as well as by a military-
styled vice principal who believed that students should sit up straight
and simply allow knowledge to be drilled into them.
My lack of a theoretical language came to an end when I was
introduced to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and from
then on, my interest in radical pedagogy began to develop rather
quickly. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1977, I
became deeply influenced by the work being produced at the
Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies as well as the educational
work being done around the sociology of education in England. In the
United States, the work of Paul Goodman, Samuel Bowles, and
Herbert Gintis on the political economy of schooling as well as the
theoretical work developed by Martin Carnoy had an important
influence on me. While I learned a great deal from these radical
theorists, I felt they erred on the side of political economy and did not
say enough about either resistance, critical pedagogy, or the
importance of cultural politics. The structural nature of this work was
gloomy, over determined, and left little room for seizing upon
contradictions, or a theory of power that did not collapse into
domination. Moreover, they had a limited sense of how to theorize
forms of domination, if not resistance, as not only economic and
structural but also intellectual and pedagogical — that is, through the
realms of the symbolic and pedagogical.
Hence, I began to look elsewhere for theoretical models to develop a
more comprehensive understanding of schooling and its relationship
to larger social, economic, and cultural forces. I initially found it in the
work of Stanley Aronowitz, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse and
work of the Frankfurt School. I drew upon this work to challenge the
then-dominant culture of positivism as well as the radical educational
theorists’ over-emphasis on the political economy of
schooling. Theory and Resistance in Education was the most well-
known outcome of that work. In the 1970s and 1980s, I also
developed a friendship with Donaldo Macedo and Paulo Freire.
Freire’s work was especially crucial in using pedagogy to open up a
space where the private could be translated into larger systemic
considerations and through which individuals could imagine
themselves as critical and engaged social agents. For me, critical
pedagogy was essential for addressing the power and necessity of
ideas, knowledge, and culture as fundamental to any viable definition
and understanding of politics. Pedagogy was the crucial political
resource in theorizing the importance of establishing a formative
culture conducive to creating the critical and informed citizens
necessary for sustaining a substantive democracy. My interest in
critical pedagogy took a turn as I started focusing on youth and media
studies.
Pedagogy for me was no longer limited to schooling, and I started
focusing on its role as a force shaping and being shaped by broader
cultural apparatuses such as the internet, alternative screen cultures,
mainstream newspapers, and journals. In this instance, cultural
change is a precondition for changing consciousness and is
constitutive of political change. I also became concerned with how the
pedagogical workstations of diverse cultural apparatuses such as the
mainstream and digital media produced a variety of pedagogical
messages in keeping with dominant ideologies regarding the
normalization of torture under the Bush administration, the refusal to
name capitalism as a central reason for the chaos following the
effects of Hurricane Katrina, the failure to name neoliberal racism and
its ruthless search for profits and disregard for black people as an
important factor resulting in the poisoning of the water in Flint,
Michigan, and the failure to name and analyze ongoing
neoliberalization of the university as an attack on democracy itself. I
also theorized the importance of connecting the pedagogical
imperative to a discourse of militant and educated hope, one which
would provide the capacities, knowledges, and skills that would
enable individuals to speak, write, and act from a position of agency
and empowerment.
I am sure most working-class people who enter into academia
will very quickly identify with the structural forms of
exclusion you highlight. In my experience, especially in
certain quarters of academia, these attempts at policing
thought and to make you “play the game” (to my mind one of
the most intellectually violent phrases deployed in an
intellectual setting), with its normative codes and hierarchical
rules, have been imposed with just as much ferocity by those
who self-identify with the liberal left than the conservative
right. I am reminded here by a wonderful quote by John
Lennon, who wrote in his song “Working Class Hero,”
“There’s room at the top they’re telling you still, But first you
must learn how to smile as you kill, If you want to be like the
folks on the hill.” How do those lyrics speak to your
experience in academia?
The university has always been for me a difficult site to work in given
its often-ruthless attacks from those who follow the established script
of mediocrity and neoliberal discipline. Of course, many academics (a
term which is quite problematic, after all what we do should never be
“academic”) are completely disempowered by virtue of being
relegated to a contingent labor force. They are overworked, are paid
low wages, and live in fear of being controversial, which amounts to a
direct assault on academic freedom. Those dwindling few who have
tenure are often comfortably entrenched in the university and more
than willing to be seduced by the few privileges they have. Power is
seductive, and many academics would prefer to be clever and “play
the game” than stand up and fight within and against the university
as an adjunct of corporate power. I have felt the consequences too
often in my long vocation as an outspoken academic. But we need to
remember the power of the university is about more than governance
or what Foucault called “governmentality.” It also reaches deeply into
the desires, values, and identifications of the people who work in
higher education. Moreover, while many try to struggle with its
impositions, higher education can be a most depressing space
because its daily assaults are about more than policy, they are also
experienced existentially every day as emotional body blocks which
wear away one’s sense of agency, hope, and willingness to struggle
against forms of domination, especially as they emerge within the
university. My resistive strategy has been to have one foot in and one
foot out of the university. I work hard to produce scholarship that
matters and do the best I can in my teaching. At the same time, my
educational skills are put to work in forms of accessible scholarship
aimed at a much broader public. In the end, these forms of
pedagogical imperatives richly inform each other. What is crucial to
learn here is that the task of working in a neoliberal-dominated field
of higher education cannot succumb to a kind of careless and self-
defeating cynicism. The university is a crucial public sphere and must
be viewed as an important site of struggle and criticism, in spite of its
over-determining mechanisms of control and mediocrity. History has
to remain open on this question.
I’d like to press you further on the relationship between class
and race as it appears in these troubling political times. If we
can talk of updated forms of fascism, it seems to be working
through the cracks in the crisis of white male subjectivity and
the mobilizing of such devastated communities against those
who have even suffered more from the politics of
disposability. How do you understand white anger or
resentment today?
This new updated fascist politics and capitalism, which I label
“neoliberal fascism” in The Terror of the Unforeseen, has its roots in a
long history of market-driven policies that have waged war against
public goods, civic culture, the welfare state, minorities of class and
color, and democracy itself. Neoliberalism has produced immense
misfortune through its elevation of a savage capitalism to a national
ideal that governs not only the market but all of social life. We now
live in a society marked by massive levels in inequality, a landscape
of deserted manufacturing jobs, the erosion of social provisions, the
harsh imposition of austerity measures, the rise of mass
incarceration, and a full-fledged attack on the welfare state. This has
resulted in a culture of fear, anxiety, and populist anger that feeds
regretfully into the neo-fascist celebration of a toxic masculinity,
white supremacy, and ultra-nationalism. At the heart of this merger
are elements of a fascist politics and a war culture that produces,
sustains, and reinforces a venomous, racist, and militarized white
notion of masculinity that has a long legacy in the United States.
In the past, this notion of white masculinity with its racist subtext,
misogyny, and warrior mentality was coded and relegated to the
margins of American political culture. Under Trump, it has emerged as
a badge of honor and has moved from the margins to the center of
power. The loss of privilege and eroding economic status by white
males as Jason Stanley points out is manipulated as a form of
“aggrieved victimhood and exploited to justify past, continuing, or
new forms of oppression.” At its heart, the alignment of white
masculinity with the racist discourse of hate and xenophobia has to
be condemned while also understood as a mode of depoliticization. As
a mode of depoliticization, this script of victimhood robs poor and
middle-class whites of their sense of agency and possibilities for
individual and collective resistance against the very forces of
structured inequality and economic and social abandonment
produced by neoliberalism.
This mammoth neoliberal assault on public life and the planet has
produced widespread suffering and misfortune through an expanding
network of disposable populations that work in tandem with a culture
of fear and the collapse of traditional forms of community, solidarity,
and civic identity. People increasingly feel isolated, experience forms
of social atomization, and inhabit a crippling loneliness that make
them susceptible to the lure of polarizing discourses, the rhetoric of
hate, and appeals by alleged self-proclaimed strong men who claim
that they alone can solve the problems of those living under the
weight of death-dealing forms of exploitation, depression, and
exclusion. Bernie Sanders is right in stating that authoritarian leaders
such as Trump “redirect popular anger about inequality and declining
economic conditions into violent rage against minorities — whether
they are immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities or the LGBT
community.” This is particularly true for segments of the white male
population who are constantly being told that they are the victims of
a society that increasingly privileges racial and ethnic minorities.
Susceptible to calls by demagogues to express their anger and
resentment at the societal selfishness, greed, and materialism that
surrounds them, many white males have found a sense of
identification and community in the racist, sexist and xenophobic
appeals of a range of current demagogues that include Trump,
Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Erdoğan. While I don’t want to excuse the
poisonous politics at work here and its dangerous flirtation with a kind
of fascistic irrationality and the toxic pleasures of authoritarianism,
the white males seduced by the pleasures of a toxic authoritarianism
need to be addressed in a language that not only speaks to the roots
of their fears and economic securities, but also as Michael Lerner has
brilliantly noted, to those fundamental psychological and spiritual
needs that have been hijacked by a ruthless capitalist disimagination
machine. The underlying supports and backdrop for this racist,
militarized, and toxic masculinity that appears to easily to inhabit the
abyss of racial purification, social cleansing, and a hatred for the
other must be understood against a neoliberal worldview that
celebrates greed, elevates self-interest to a national ideal, privatizes
everything, and enshrines unchecked forms of individualism and a
ruthless survival-of-the-fittest ethos. There is no room in this
ideological straitjacket for compassion, social responsibility, solidarity,
or a respect for others and this is precisely where the neoliberal
machinery of death joins hands with the white supremacist and ultra-
nationalist rhetoric of fascism.
The pain and suffering of different groups under neoliberalism has to
be understood not through shaming whites or other supporters of a
fascist politics, but through efforts to unite these disillusioned groups
across race, gender, and class divides. Those groups victimized by
neoliberalism share decades of practice in which wages have been
gutted, job security disappeared, finance capital emptied towns and
cities of jobs and drained industries and saw the promise of a better
future evaporate for their children, if not themselves. This shared
suffering has to be mobilized through a new language of critique and
hope, one that aims at building a mass social and political movement
that rejects equating capitalism with democracy and embraces a
democratic socialist project in which matters of freedom and justice
become inseparable from matters of equality and economic justice.
White racism, ultra-nationalism, and the politics of disposability are
the hallmarks of a neoliberal fascism that feeds on hatred and
polarization of which the consequence is a social system marked by
economic and political inequality and chaos. The racism and anger
fueling a white version of hyper-masculinity is a symptom not a
cause, and the latter has to be understood and addressed by
analyzing the merger of neoliberalism and a fascist politics that is
spreading across the globe.
I’d like to conclude with a personal question, which I hope
doesn’t sound too Freudian! If you would go back in time and
put your arm around a 14-year-old boy called Henry Giroux,
who is practicing alone on that basketball court, what advice
would you give him?
I would tell him that growing up in a neighborhood in which the body
is the primary resource for surviving will teach him many lessons
about what it means to confront a myriad of struggles, but that it is
the connection between his mind and body that should be valued as a
source of strength in the world he will confront. I would also tell him
that education takes place not only in schools but in the wider society
and that he will have to learn how to cross a number of borders by
mastering a diverse number of literacies extending from print culture
to screen culture. I will emphasize that developing his sense of
agency will take courage and a willingness to take risks and to learn
how to think otherwise in order to act otherwise and that he must not
fear taking a strong moral and political position, though he will often
meet with unwavering and sometimes brutal resistance. Equally
important, I would tell him that his own formation and sense of
agency in a world filled with danger and corruption will depend not
only on what he learns that will be meaningful, critical, and
transformative but also what it means to unlearn certain regressive
behaviors, ideas, habits, and values that the dominant culture
imposes on him as second nature. I will emphasize that growing up in
a society poisoned by hatred and addicted to violence necessitates
that he be vigilant in refusing the seductions of power and he will
have to be focused and disciplined in order resist those forces that
will relentlessly work to diminish his capacity to be a critically
engaged subject. I will tell him that in order to narrate his own sense
of agency, he will not only have to understand the symbiotic
relationship between intelligence and self-determination. He will also
have to reclaim a sense of history, open the door to dangerous
memories, and take risks that enable a new and more radical sense of
his own identity and what it means to be in the world from a position
of strength. He will certainly have to learn what it means to live with
dignity, to embrace a compassion for others, to define his life through
his willingness to be a moral witness and a willingness to fight for
economic and social justice. I would also tell him that he can never
forget that trust and dignity can only come with a respect for and
embrace of solidarity with others. I would emphasize that he the
greatest joys in life can be found in working with others to make the
world more just, open, and democratic. I would make clear that he is
not alone and cannot act as if major social problems are at heart a
matter of individual choice and responsibility. He must be willing to
connect knowledge to power and embrace a sense of civic courage,
as James Baldwin said, “for the sake of the life and the health of the
country.” I would end by telling him he must learn to love with
courage, reject the power of fear, and embrace his life as a journey
filled with dreams of a more just and equitable world.
¤
Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who
specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of
the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base
covering 143 countries.

RELATED
 Histories of Violence: What Does an Anti-Fascist Life
Actually Feel Like?
By Brad Evans
 The Violence of the Algorithm
By Brad Evans
 Histories of Violence: The Tragedy of Existence
By Brad Evans
 Histories of Violence: The Expulsion of Humanity
By Brad Evans
 Without Exception: On the Ordinariness of Violence
By Brad Evans
 Histories of Violence: The Violence of Art
By Brad Evans
 Histories of Violence: Violence to Thought
By Brad Evans

MOST READ ARTICLES

 Evening Wood
By Paul Morton
 Daring to Hope for the Improbable: On Bernard
Stiegler’s “The Age of Disruption”
By Leonid Bilmes
 Necessary Trouble: A Conversation with Poet David
Whyte
By Lois P. Jones
 Beginning with Abortion
By Fran Bigman
 Capitalism Is a Mental Illness: “Hustlers,” “The
Known World,” and a Failed TV Project
By Annie McGreevy