Lyrical Fascism and Thinking Dangerously in a Time of Weaponized Ignorance

This chapter comments on Emmitt Till, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability, point to a different use of memory, one that engages in moral witnessing and tries to prevent justice from dying in each of us, in the public sphere, and in our relations with others. It is worth repeating as a counter-narrative to Lil Wayne's complicity with the modes of lyrical fascism that now circulates in the media like a poisonous toxin. The chapter focuses on ignorance not simply as the absence of knowledge, a kind of void of intelligence and information, but as something that is willed, systemically produced, and used in the interest of what can be called the violence of armed ignorance. Armed ignorance is no longer marginal to American society, but now inhabits the center of power and politics and will be used to weaponize knowledge, the social media, and the institutions in which knowledge is produced.