ABSTRACT
It is no secret, especially after the Los Angeles uprising-or what Mike Davis calls the “L.A.Intifada” (Katz and Smith 1992) —that the whitecontrolled media (often backed by victim-blaming white social scientists) have ignored the economic and social conditions responsible for bringing about in African-American communities what Cornel West has called a “walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential r ise in suicide” (cited in Stephanson 1988b:276, emphasis in original). They have additionally ignored or sensat ional ized social condi t ions in Lat in and Asian communities, pol-emicizing against their value systems and representing them as teleologi-cally poised to explode into a welter of rioting and destruction. Such communities have been described as full of individuals who lash out at the dominant culture in an anarcho-voluntaristic frenzy in a country where there are more legal gun dealers than gas stations. In this view, agency seems to operate outside of forces and structures of oppression, policing discourses of domination and social relations of exploitation. Subalternized individuals appear politically constituted outside of discursive formations, are essentialized as the products of their pathological “nature” as drug or alcohol users and as participants in crime, and forced to take early retirement from cultural worth and historical agency.
