This event will be held on Zoom. A link will be sent out via email the day before the event.

FREE and open to all.

The Coloniality of White Rage: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine

Speaker: Dr. Sherene Razack, UCLA

On March 27, 2014, Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo woman was shot by Austin Shipley, a white male police officer, also 27 years old, who said he was trying to apprehend her for a suspected shoplifting. Shipley was never charged, and the Department of Justice declined to investigate the Winslow police on the matter. This article explores Shipley’s shooting of Loreal Tsingine and the police investigation of the shooting as a (gendered) expression of white settler rage towards Indigenous people. I emphasize the enduring coloniality of white rage and consider the aggrieved white masculine subject who is compelled to enact violence in the name of white supremacy. Police shootings of Indigenous people and the legal response to police use of force (along with everyday settler violence) are a part of the racial terror that is a central part of settler colonialism. These official narratives reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a settler state, a state that continually imagines and consolidates itself as a community of whites imperiled by ‘Indians’ among others. We see white rage on display not only in police shootings but also in the recent storming of the U.S. Capitol Building where white men and women, including members of Far-Right organizations to which Officer Shipley belonged imagined themselves as protecting and preserving white America. The presentation will consider why Canadians should not feel smug and exempt from these events and histories.

About the speaker:

Sherene H. Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network Racial Violence Hub (RVHub). Formerly a Distinguished Professor of Critical Race and Gender Studies in the Department of Social Justice, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (1991-2016), she relocated to the United States from Canada in 2016.

A feminist critical race scholar, Razack has published six single-authored books and three edited and co-edited collections, as well as over eighty journal articles and book chapters. Her publications illustrate the thematic areas and anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist scholarship she pursues. Her most recent book Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (2015) explores state violence against Indigenous peoples .