“Oh say can you ___”: Race and Mental Disability in Performances of Citizenship

In light of the US Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to eliminate key components of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law intended to defuse racist exclusions in democratic practices, a discussion of the ways in which we understand and represent fit citizenship is more urgent than ever. To interrogate the systematic practices of exclusion inherent in US democracy, the article explores how mental disability is visually constituted in media and performance, and how this visual rhetoric directly influences who is deemed civically fit. The article begins with the politically themed performances curated by disc jockey and television star Howard Stern and concludes by invoking the court testimony of Rachel Jeantel in the 2013 murder trial of George Zimmerman. Rather than simply critiquing the exclusion of people of color and people with disabilities in terms of democratic ideals, the article uses these test cases to argue that the imbricated issues of race and disability fundamentally challenge the fantasy of democratic citizenship.