To warrant the weakening of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has actively manufactured ignorance of racism in the realm of voting. Through an analysis of majority opinions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Abbott v. Perez (2018), and cases concerning states’ antivoting fraud restrictions, I demonstrate how considerable evidence of racial discrimination is deemed to fail the standard of proof imposed by the court. I offer the term postracial presumption to account for how dominant publics are empowered to reason as if the United States was beyond race, to employ postracial premises to warrant judgments for which there is insufficient evidence and, indeed, for which there is considerable disconfirming evidence. The essay demonstrates how presumption and proof burdens can be critical tools in the study of postracism and is suggestive of how racial ignorance cannot simply be rectified by more proof.

Abstract This essay analyzes arguments regarding race and U.S. felon disenfranchisement laws. In response to the denial of the vote to 6.1 million Americans in 2016, voting rights advocacy has helped spur a range of liberalizing reforms in states across the country. The essay attributes such policy victories to activists’ success in redefining felon disenfranchisement as a racial justice rather than criminal justice issue. It argues, however, that U.S. public discourse still does not reflect a clear or coherent understanding of how and why race matters in the context of felon disenfranchisement. Through a rhetorical frame analysis of media coverage in four newspapers over a twenty-year period, the essay identifies and evaluates the three most common racial frames, arguing that each adheres to prevailing logics of racial liberalism. While this adherence lends the frames some degree of persuasive power, this essay argues that it also causes dominant publics to misunderstand the racial character of felon disenfranchisement. The essay concludes that more substantial reform hinges on the ability of activists to transform public meanings to reflect their preferred understanding of the causes and consequences of racial inequality.

Between 2011 and 2013, prisoners in California's Pelican Bay Prison launched three collective hunger strikes protesting long-term solitary confinement. At the height of the third strike, 30,000 prisoners across the state refused food, ultimately forcing California to alter and limit its use of solitary confinement. Collective resistance of this scale is rare in prison, especially in supermax facilities, which attack prisoners' subjectivity and condition expressions of agency that are harmful to self and others. Through a rhetorical analysis of the imprisoned activists' accounts of cross-racial coalition building, I argue that prisoners found means to survive and resist social death by restoring a discursive space across cells and by claiming control of their bodies through regimes of self-discipline. I conclude by considering implications for mainstream prison reform discourse.

I argue for conceiving agency via dispossession rather than possession, specifically in the context of prison writing. While the study of prisoner discourse tends to link agency and resistance to the subject through what I term the recuperative narrative, I map out an alternative paradigm through an analysis of Nawal El Saadawi’s prison memoir and Václav Havel’s prison letters. I demonstrate how the prisoners write to retain their fundamental address-ability and response-ability that is the condition for any sense of self, and not (only) to reclaim a subject position and voice. I conclude by considering how this response-ability provides the potential for resistance, a kind of agency and resistance that does not rely on notions of the individual will. I argue that our primary dispossession can serve to redress the unequal distribution of forcible dispossession and that rhetoricians have a significant role to play in this project.