Jewel on See[ing] That In a Small Town: Visual Rhetoric, Race, and Legal History in Tennessee @ljewel @UTKLaw

Lucy A. Jewel, University of Tennessee College of Law, is publishing See That in a Small Town: Visual Rhetoric, Race, and Legal History in Tennessee in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives (2023). Here is the abstract.

Jason Aldean’s music video for “Try That in a Small Town” aptly illustrates the thesis of this article, which is that when it comes to racism and the law, visual rhetoric has played and still plays an outsized role. The video shows Aldean and his band performing in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. This is the same courthouse where, in 1918, a white mob violently lynched a young Black man. The song recounts a laundry list of dog whistle topics relating to urban crime, mentions a gun given to me by my grandfather, and then warns the audience “Well, try that in a small town.” The Country Music Network quickly took down the video after complaints that the subtext was undeniably racist and violent. Within Aldean’s video, the Maury County Courthouse stands as a warning of the lynching that occurred outside its doors and as a reminder that while the courthouse visually represents justice, that justice is not for everyone. When it comes to race, racism, and white supremacy, the United States is polarized about what we want to see and not see. Three recent Tennessee legal controversies illustrate how visual rhetoric, which carries so much persuasive power, has been deployed for evil, to staidly symbolize white supremacy, but also for good, to propel society toward racial justice and equity. The first controversy involves the display of Confederate memorabilia inside the jury deliberation room in a small Tennessee town. The second controversy illustrates how Tennessee’s heritage protection law prevents local citizens from removing Confederate monuments from public property. The third example explains how, under Tennessee’s divisive concepts acts, conservative parents censor truthful imagery depicting U.S. history regarding race. Just as Aldean’s video struck a chord nationally, the issues boiling up in Tennessee are broadly relevant because what is happening in Tennessee maps onto national jurisprudential and cultural trends. Many states have similar heritage protection acts that prevent the removal of Confederate monuments. And, many states have enacted anti-CRT, divisive concepts bills. This article will uniquely analyze these trends from a visual perspective. Drawing upon the disciplines of legal rhetoric and visual rhetoric, Part One explains the rhetorical concepts that apply to Confederate imagery in the courtroom, on the courthouse lawn, and in textbook illustrations. Part Two delves into the Confederate Jury Room cases, discussing the cases as well as interdisciplinary explanations for what these Lost Cause symbols mean historically and what they do to observers psychologically. Part Three will address Confederate monuments in Tennessee, explaining how Tennessee’s Heritage Protection Act (amended many times in a reactionary fashion) operates in a highly undemocratic fashion, preventing local citizens from exercising control over public spaces and reinforcing toxic and traumatic narratives that reinforce white supremacy and denigrate Black experiences. This Article argues that Congress should declare all Confederate monuments on public land to be a badge of slavery within the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment. In so doing, various state heritage protection acts would be preempted by federal law, allowing local citizens to remove these statues. Finally, Part Four will address Tennessee’s anti-CRT, “divisive concepts” acts, particularly analyzing the role that visual rhetoric plays in these attempts to stifle truthful portrayals of history. This article will conclude by drawing together the threads and patterns contained within each scene.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.