The Armenian Genocide, AKA the Elephant in the Room

The summer of 2015 will perhaps be remembered as a watershed moment in the annals of racism in the United States. What had been normalized for decades by the southern states and giant retailers in postracist America was institutionally delegitimized almost overnight. Upping the ante, the department store giant Macy's announced it will discontinue Donald Trump merchandise because of Trump's racist remarks. A mere half century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in a perfect act of Foucauldian governmentality and market regulation from above, American business interests aggressively interfered in redefining the discursive and symbolic boundaries of the new mainstream normativity and truth in the United States. One can safely say that symbolic and actual denial of slavery and racist essentialism as normalized discourses in mainstream US culture and scholarship took another institutional blow, even though some reactionary book review here and there can still make its way into the mainstream, and even though defeating dog whistle politics is much more difficult than defeating outright racist symbols or speech. © 2015 Cambridge University Press.