Abstract

On 13 July 2016, President Barack Obama delivered a speech memorializing five police officers slain during a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, Texas. Obama’s speech came on the heels of many other mass shootings, some associated with acts of racialized violence, during his administration. We argue that by deploying aporia, Obama addressed the conflicting constraints and exigencies exposed by the Dallas shooting and opened inventional possibilities that included virtuous behavior, commemorative speech, and dialogic-reciprocal encounters that also reappraised the concept of double consciousness. We conclude by exploring how aporia enables and undercuts discussions of complex social problems during epideictic encounters.