Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

This article was downloaded by: [Swinburne University of Technology]
On: 11 March 2011

Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 907689623]
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713649113
White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Paul Barrett
To cite this Article Barrett, Paul(2006) 'White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand
Theft Auto: San Andreas', Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 28: 1, 95 119
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10714410600552902
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714410600552902
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Downloaded By: [Swinburne University of Technology] At: 01:04 11 March 2011
The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

and Cultural Studies, 28:95119, 2006
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online
DOI: 10.1080/10714410600552902
White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race,

Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies
in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Paul Barrett
In the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the player is
invited to step into the world of Carl Johnson, CJ, as he returns to
his hometown of San Andreas. Modeled after South Central Los
Angeles and set in the early 1990s, San Andreas might be described
as an interactive Boyz n the Hood. It offers the player the opportunity to act out popular-culture fantasies of middle-class youths
through the representation of poor, inner city, African-American
existence. While the intentions of the game are primarily to offer
a fun experience, which it undoubtedly does, there is a great deal
of learning that goes on in playing the game. Both in the very structure of the game and within the subtext of San Andreas, there is a
glamorizing, and even spectacularization of violence, a marking
of young black bodies as disposable, an insistence on a culture of
cynicism as well as a particular formation of African-American
experience that is extremely problematic. Furthermore, there is a
sense of the public sphere as a site of danger and a withdrawal from
any commitment to political or collective social agency that runs
throughout the game. Taken together, these undercurrents in the
games environment and narrative serve to naturalize and reinforce
(as well as justify) neoliberal policies that divest power from politics and collapse public concerns into private worries. Similarly,
the ideology of the game provides, and operates in tandem with,
the necessary ideological conditions for both the U.S. war on
terror and the war against Iraq.
In his text on the pedagogy of video games, Jim Gee argues,
amongst other things, that video games offer an opportunity for
players to be involved in very sophisticated role playing, allowing
95
96
P. Barrett
people to understand the world from multiple perspectives. He also

claims that good video games (he describes a good game as one
which makes me think new thoughts about what I value and what
I do not) reflect, in their design, good principles of learning1
and can present gamers with a wide range of challenges which call
for active, critical learning and lead to the development of important
problem-solving skills. He argues that these games are an important
form of education that deserve further attention. Gee is certainly
right in saying that these games are important forms of education that
deserve further critical attention, but his analysis is limited in that he
is concerned primarily with how concepts, identities and politics are
represented in video games, paying little attention to what is being
represented in these games. While it is true that video games offer
players an opportunity to role play and understand the world from
another perspective, an analysis of that perspective, how it is scripted
and what it excludes, seems essential to understanding what sort of
pedagogical work a particular game does. These games do, after all,
present stories that, while they typically do not claim to be factual,
do play a socially formative role and have consequences that reverberate in larger political spheres. Video games offer narratives that
are formative in terms of individual and social understandings of
race, youth, and citizenship in the modern, neoliberal, globalized
world. They allow players to step into a new identity and perform
the world from the perspective of an other, so the way in which that
world, as well as that other is constructed is extremely important.
Questions such as what these games have to say about notions of
agency, democratic participation, the role of public, democratic
spheres and so forth are all essential to understanding how these
games function as cultural, pedagogical machines.
One of the most concerning pedagogical implications of Grand
Theft Auto: San Andreas is the way that the game represents blackness as inextricably reduced to the body. The importance of CJ as a
body is stressed throughout the game, as there are multiple ways in
which the player can tailor CJs appearance to best suit their sense
of how he ought to look. In the early stages of the game, the player
is informed that not only must CJ exercise routinely in order to
avoid getting fat (the game makes no apologies about multiple fat
jokes), but he must also work and eat to gain muscle, and thereby
have the muscular, masculinized body that accompanies his gangsta persona. As part of the game, the player must take CJ to the
gym and perform routine workout tasks such as weightlifting,
Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies
97
boxing, and so forth. These physical actions take precedence over

the players ability to engage CJ in any form of dialogue. Where
the player is able to attack other characters in a variety of ways
kicking, punching, shooting, as well as a variety of special movementsdialogue is limited to only two options: talk positive
response and talk negative response. The player is not able to select what the character will say, but instead presses a button to
choose either a generic negative or positive response. The very
act of speaking then becomes a mechanical, reflexive, bodily action
where what the black character actually says is not important. In
this sense, the black male becomes defined primarily as a body.
In insisting on the black agent as something strictly physical, there
is a disconnect between any sense of personhood from the physical
makeup of the individual. Of course, CJ is an automaton, controlled
by the player, but this acts only to further mark the black male as
primarily a body, disconnected from notions of autonomy and
agency. Paul Gilroy takes up this question of the representation
of the black body when he explains that,
associating blackness with intelligence, reason and the activities of the
mind challenges the basic assumptions of raciology [. . .] whereas giving
The Negro the gift of the devalued body does not, even if that body is
to be admired. The black body can be appreciated as beautiful, powerful,
and graceful in the way that a racehorse or a tiger can appear beautiful,
powerful, and graceful.2
The representation of people as something strictly corporeal

marks them as subhuman and strips them of political agency.
Any agency they might possess is physical, typically sexualized,
and rooted strictly in the body, as is the case here. Furthermore,
racism as well as a fascism underlies this representation; it disconnects actors from their own agency: they are solely physical beings,
controlled by some external power or logic. This is certainly true in
San Andreas where the black male is strictly a body who literally is
controlled by some external authority. These images of black people
as nothing more than bodies recalls the scenes of abuse at Iraqs
Abu Ghraib prison, where black bodies are shown in demeaning,
dehumanizing poses with their faces covered, or as an array of faceless torsos and ligaments stacked atop one another. Judith Butlers
notion that those who have no chance to represent themselves run
a greater risk of being treated as less than human3 seems particularly relevant when one considers these images alongside news
98
P. Barrett
footage of black males robbing convenience stores, faces obscured

with ski masks or pantyhose (a style that many rappers have taken
to wearing in music videos), and the images of black bodies, faces
covered with black hoods, shackled and pinned down at the
Guantanamo Bay prison facility. Understanding these images as
they contribute to a dominant representation of black bodies as disposable, one begins to see the way in which black bodies are constructed as non-persons. The black body becomes commodified
and compartmentalized: a body without agency or personhood,
present only from the neck down.
This question of the black body, particularly in its relation to the
white video gamer, takes on another dimension when one considers
that during much of San Andreas the white player is commanding his
black avatar to shoot black characters. A great deal of the killing in
the game is black-on-black, creating a strange pedagogy of black-onblack or white-on-black violence. Chuck D notes a similar situation
at a Snoop Doggy Dogg concert: he describes the video prelude to
the concert, set in a liquor store, where Snoop, holding a gun on
a black manturns to the camera and asked the audience should
he smoke this nigga? 11,000 people, 75% being white, [started]
screaming, smoke that nigga!4 Add to this the fact that black
culture has become such a central part of white youths consumption habits, and one begins to get a sense of the precarious way in
which black life is marked as disposable and dangerous, not only
according to white perspective, but in popular culture as a whole.
Consider, for instance, the cover of 50 Cents Get Rich or Die Trying
which depicts the rapper behind a glass shield riddled with bullet
holes, the target of anonymous violence. From rap videos to video
games to mainstream cinema, images of blacks running, being shot,
shooting at one another and so forth accumulate within public consciousness to mark the black agent as primarily a body, and the
black body as both the source and the target of anti-social violence.
Kardinal Offishal speaks to this hip, pedagogical aesthetic of seeing
the black body as riddled with bullets, being chased and generally
threatened or killed when he says, Little kids talking bout they
wanna feel a [gun]shot cuz they love 50 Cent.5 Consider, for
instance, the image of the black male in the Ghostface Killah song
Run where the chorus is:
Run! If you sell drugs in the school zone = Run! If you gettin chased with
no shoes on = Run! Fuck that! Run! Cops got, guns! = [. . .] Run! If you aint
99
do shit, you it = That next felony, nigga, its like three zip = So, run! Hop
fences, jump over benches! = When you see me comin get the fuck out
the entrance! = Run! Fuck that! Run! Cops got guns!6
The video for the song is packed with images of black bodies being
chased through poor, urban environments resembling a live-action
reenactment of San Andreas. Similarly, the video contains images of
groups of black males, tightly packed in housing project stairwells
and jail cells posturing threateningly towards the camera. This is,
of course, coupled with images of white police officers as correctional
officers and riot police. Gilroy speaks to this question of representation of black bodies when he describes the black public sphere as
an exclusively male stage [. . .] in which sound is displaced by vision
and words are generally second to physical gestures.7 The language
of blackness in popular culture becomes a language of physical gestures and masculinized posturing. The black male is seen both running from the police as well as stalking the corridors of the urban
environment, positioned within a strange duality as both the target
and source of terror and violence.
These repeated descriptions, and enactments of the stalking and
killing of the black body, typically set to the tune of thrilling hip hop
music and pornographically hyper-violent imagery and cinematography, marks the black body as disposable, as a non-person.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is no exception, as many of the missions in the game involve beating, shooting, killing and robbing
other gang members, who are typically black or Latino. Of course
one may end up killing some bystanders or police officers (the latter
of which are decidedly white, the former of mixed races), but this is
not the purpose of each mission and there is little reward for these
periphery activities. All of this action is set to hip hop music from
the early 1990s, and the PC version of these games typically allows
players to replay the action in slow motion, ensuring they can thoroughly enjoy the ritualized slaughter of gang members, the police,
and innocent civilians. This goes beyond, then, simply marking the
black body as something completely valueless and disposable, as it
couples the killing of black bodies with a pornographic, thrillinducing, aesthetic of hyper-violence.
The representations of black bodies as disconnected from any
sense of personhood or agency continue, as the player must take
CJ to the gym, changing his physical makeup depending on
which activities he performs. Similarly, CJs appearance can be
100
P. Barrett
customized in terms of attire and haircut. There is an array of typical black styles to choose from, ranging from baggy prisoner outfits, to black-power medallions to geri curls to Afros and so on. The
implication here is that blackness is a style, something that can be
taken on and off. Politics, whether in the form of Afrocentrism
or gang collectivities, are marked as outfits and appearances: the
histories and ideas that underlie these cultures are of no significance. The player, operating through CJ, can move through these
identities, sampling each of them as something strictly aesthetic,
with visits to the in-game clothing stores, barber shops, and gyms.
Black culture becomes nothing more than a commodified aesthetic,
with no associated political or social meanings. This total decontextualizing of the politics and culture of African-American existence
not only constructs a public memory that is absolutely depoliticized, as well as atomized, with no way of referencing collective
struggle or meaningful democratic participation, but it also feeds
directly into the white myth of identity as something completely
transformable.
White identity is constructed as a passport to cultural appropriation, where, in order to experience a cultural other, one need only
have the right style and accompanying persona. When African
American existence is represented as nothing more than a purchasable aesthetic, it can be experienced in its entirety by white people.
Whiteness becomes a cultural passport, translating Gees notion of
virtual identities8 into the depoliticized and decontextualized
thrill of racial slumming. White players can enter into black existence, which is marked here strictly as an aesthetic of fashion, street
language, and masculinized, sexualized physicality. Questions of
systemic discrimination and the everyday experiences of racism
are of no relevance here. This ignoring of histories of discrimination
and accumulated advantages9 of whiteness takes away the very
language of understanding the relationship between power and
race. In place of any political understanding of race is a particularly
constructed black aesthetic, suggesting that through the appropriation of these black styles, languages and postures, whites can
experience African-American existence. In paying no attention to
the impact that race has on both individual and collective political
agency, San Andreas reinforces neoliberal ideologies in that it naturalizes the conditions in which the black characters are placed.
When the game begins, CJ and the player are dropped into the
urban nightmare that is San Andreas. Driving along the wrong
101
street at the wrong time of day is reason enough for why CJ is suddenly shot at. Similarly, there is no explanation for the state of CJs
own neighborhood, a pseudo-shantytown literally under a bridge.
Nor is any explanation given as to why CJs friends are all unemployed, parentless gangbangers. Instead, the game begins with
these things as a giventhey are natural to the environment in
which the game is set. There is no sense that the violence in CJs
world has come from somewhere, that perhaps there are larger
social factors at work here. The game completely forfeits any discussion about how CJs neighborhood became a place of violence
and pathological behavior. Issues such as three-strikes laws, the
vast and disproportionate increase in the imprisonment of African
Americans since the early 1980s,10 the impact of neoliberal economic and social reform, or the collapsing of public concerns into
private interests are completely ignored. In place of a consideration
of larger social causes, one is left to imagine that either this violent,
unemployable, pathological behavior is the permanent, natural
state of African Americans, or that somehow CJ and his friends
have found themselves in this situation as a result of their own individual failings. There is, of course, a racism that underpins this
scenario, suggesting that the African Americans in CJs neighbourhood, the Latinos in the other poor neighborhoods and, of course,
the whites in the rich neighborhoods are in their positions strictly
of their own accord. By disconnecting the poverty that San Andreas
claims to represent from any historical context, the game, by
default, reinforces the neoliberal line of an absolutely isolated sense
of agency. The refusal to ask questions that might historicize this
poverty or add some sort of political context to questions of inner
city ghettos or black unemployment serves to naturalize this neoliberal view of the world, echoing Margaret Thatchers famous line
that There Is No Alternative. The racism that underlies this lack
of context stems from a complete dissolving of any sense of the
public: the histories, environments, and actions of the characters
in the game have no connection to any larger public history.
When the public is represented in San Andreas, it is configured as
a site of terror, insecurity, and uncertainty. The public arena is
marked as a site where violence is not only probable, but imminent.
Death occurs absolutely meaninglessly and indiscriminately. If one
could shift the narrative focus of the game from CJ to one of civilians, or any other non-player characters, the game would be nothing more than a countdown to a random, violent death. In
102
P. Barrett
designating the public as strictly a place of violence and fear, the

urban space is stripped of any potential to become a site of collective agency and democratic change, and instead becomes a stalking
ground for gang violence and black and Latino youths. This sense
of fear and the notion of any non-privatized or non-controlled space
as being imminently dangerous feeds directly into the ideologies of
neoliberalism and the privatization of public life. What argument
can be made for expanding public democratic spheres when they
are constructed as sites of fear and terror? Similarly, the configuring
of collective and individual insecurity and fear as something born
out of street violence, or the threat of terrorism, rather than as connected to the neoliberal, global order, the decoupling of politics
from power and the collapse of the public sphere provides a convenient way of blaming the victims as well as reinforcing the neoliberal order. Zygmunt Bauman speaks to this issue when he
explains that,
Threats to safety, real and imputed, have the advantage of being fleshy, visible and tangible; . . . [and that] the popular concerns about safety, nicknamed law and order, dwarf the popular interest in the productive
mechanisms of insecurity.11
This is particularly true in the post9=11 era (for lack of a better

term) where the threat of terrorism has been mobilized in the interests of an all-out assault on democratic, public life. The pedagogical
achievements of the repeated (ad nauseum) images of hijacked
planes crashing into the World Trade Center, in mobilizing a true
fear and distrust of anything public, uncontained or unscripted
are immeasurable. They are successful in not only drawing focus
away from neoliberalism as a source of insecurity but also further
neoliberal aims in their attack on the public sphere and its institutions. These images of fear, terror and of the dangers of public life
operate in direct tandem with the images of violence and the general worldview in San Andreas.
This Pavlovian repetition of images of terror, fear, and distrust of
the public, urban space is even more prevalent in another video
game: Manhunt. Created by the same company that produces San
Andreas, Manhunt has the player assume the role of a convict who
is thrust into a Running Man style urban nightmare where he
must make his way through ghetto streets and kill or evade everyone he meets in order to win his freedom. All of this is directed by
an overseeing warden of the ghetto, whose interest in snuff
103
cinema has motivated this experiment. Accordingly, the games

overseer presents the action from cameras positioned throughout
the abandoned ghetto alleys and neighborhoods. When the player
kills an enemy in a particularly brutal manner, such as strangulation from behind, the in-game camera shifts from an overhead
perspective, to one resembling a hand-camera. The picture is
grainy, unsteady and has the same attention to grotesque detail
as the worst snuff or slasher film. One game reviewer gleefully
describes it as a
great-looking video filter effect . . . [creating scenes that] are chock-full of
blood (which tends to gush right onto the camera), gurgling noises, and
pure shock value. The stylish, gory presentation of these sequences, combined with Manhunts surprising assortment of weapons and three executions per weapon, means that you wont grow tired of seeing these
despicable acts performed frequently throughout the game (that is, if you
can stomach them in the first place).12
Combining the spectacle of home video, performed for the viewing

and gaming public, with the pornographic, gritty stylizing of mass
killing gives a real sense of the culture of violence and fear that is
mobilized around public spaces such as the city street. The urban
center is a place of stalking terror, where black bodies are constantly on the prowl. While the main character in Manhunt is white,
many of the gang members he kills for his overseers pleasure are
not.13 The use of cameras in this game as the lens through which
the violence is narrated is particularly telling, as it suggests that
the gamer, the viewer, is away from the drama: the viewer is watching the spectacle as it is performed. In a perhaps unaware moment
of truthfulness, Manhunt speaks to the importance of the spectacle
of violence, but rather than connecting it to a mobilizing of fear
or a justification for war, it instead celebrates it as a triumph of
the ultimate bloody, visual experience.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation confirms this delight
in the spectacle of violence in her reaction to the attacks on the
World Trade Center. Her immediate response was that This is a
really strange art project. It was a most amazing sight in terms of
sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going
over someones head. She goes on to explain her reaction to the
feelings of horror and outcry that the attacks generated: I just felt,
like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it.
That part really annoyed me.14 Wurtzels sense that the spectacle
104
P. Barrett
of the violence overrides any sense of compassion for the victims or

anger over the atrocity, suggests an impossibility to understand
violence in any sort of political context. Political responses to mass
killing are forms of overreacting and a political discourse is seen
as going on about it. Instead, the implication is that one ought to
enjoy the violence for its explosive visual stimuli.
The insistence on violence as nothing more than spectacle, to be
viewed from the safety of a Manhattan apartment, or more likely a
gated suburb, implies that violence is both apolitical and natural.
Through this frame of representation, violence becomes a part of
everyday life, a law of existence unto itself. Furthermore, in the
absence of a political discourse on violence, a questioning of how
violence serves particular political interests, violence becomes a valid
political discourse in itself. Finally when violence is seen as natural
and unavoidable, power and violence both become self-justified
(violent actions and power justify themselves). Under this configuration of the political, agency becomes synonymous with violence
and politics becomes little more than a facade for exercising violent
power. The refusal to question the logic of violence, or the romanticism and sexuality that it is intertwined with, serves not only to
naturalize and thereby justify violent political actions such as the
U.S. led war against Iraq, but also to ignore the way in which violence serves power. Butler raises this issue when she describes the
violence in the frame in what is shown15 and how the shock
and awe strategy suggest that [the U.S. government was] producing a visual spectacle that numbs the senses and, like the sublime
itself, puts out of play the very capacity to think.16 The spectacularization of violence reduces the potential for critical response,
ignoring questions such as how violence might be contextualized,
how the state acts as a violent institution towards people of colour,
or how neoliberalism inflicts a systemic violence on those in the
economic south. In its place is the sheer glee of enjoyment in a
violent spectacle always out there, always happening to someone
else and always disconnected from any sense of politics.
The reduction of violence to nothing more than spectacle helps to
configure the public sphere as a perpetual Hitchcockian shower
scene, with the urban terrorist lurking behind every corner. This
is further supported by the representations of the state throughout
San Andreas. Within the game, the state has absolutely no presence
aside from that of a carceral role. Other than the police, the military,
the ATF and other similarly violent, disciplinary organizations, the
105
state is completely vacant from the game. There are no democratic

representatives, schools, community centers, city hall, civic buildings, or anything remotely resembling a democratic, public state.
There is no sense that the state can be used as protection, or offer
any assistance, against the oppression which CJ and his friends
are exposed to. There are no government representatives and no
larger social institutions through which to pursue any sort of assistance. Using Bordieus language, the left hand of the state, the set of
agents of the so-called spending ministries which are the trace . . . of
the social struggles of the past17 is completely absent, leaving only
the right, disciplinarian, side of the state. This shifting of the state
from a public, representative institution to a strictly carceral body
of management is directly in line with the neoliberal imagining of
the state.
This representation of the state is in direct contrast with the constant representations of the market which run throughout the game.
Not only does the player earn money for completing tasks, but
there are a wide range of shops and malls in which the player
can spend that money. San Andreas represents a sort of pure capitalism, or a realization of the neoliberal dream in which the market
becomes the apparatus around which all institutions are organized.
The ability of a player to take the car, money or gun of another
character, by any means possible, is justification enough to do it.
There is no social presence that mediates transactions, but instead
profit is the overriding imperative for all acts.
It is extremely telling that the reality that the game claims to represent is based so heavily on the market and so completely ignores
any role of the state other than that role in which it can oppress and
inflict harm. San Andreas seems to be organized according to the
principles that the saintly Alan Greenspan18 would approve of,
as it mirrors neoliberal guru Milton Friedmans claim that it is best
to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and
enforcing contracts.19 If liberalism is based on the idea of the social
contract, and neoliberalism on the stripping away of the social, leaving nothing but the contract, then San Andreas does an excellent job
of representing a pure neoliberal order, as any form of collective
social responsibility is subordinate to the profit motivation and
market law.
These representations of race, violence and the militarization
present in San Andreas are all part of a larger militarization of popular, particularly urban, culture. From rap music to sports utility
106
P. Barrett
vehicles to video games, both the public sphere and mass culture
are increasingly becoming imagined according to principles of militarization. 50 Cent confirms this trend when he gleefully describes a
newly purchased SUV as not only bulletproof but, Bombproof [. . .]
The president be riding around in shit like this.20 This is, of course,
necessary for the crack dealer-turned-rapper whose claims to being
shot nine times becomes a confirmation of black authenticity, and
thereby pop stardom. This presents not only a construction of the
black, urban male as one mired in a culture of violence, but also
a sense that the true experience of blackness, the authentic black
experience is one of crime, shooting and violence, naturalizing
and even sexualizing the violence many young black men experience. Furthermore, the depiction of 50 Cent on his The Massacre
album cover, as a cartoonishly-muscular warrior figure, not only
militarizes the public sphere but also links the black body to war.
The message is clear: black people are biologically predestined for
soldiering. Similarly, the urban environment that the black male
occupies, that is constructed as a site of excitement, danger and
uncertainty in film and music videos is also a site of violence, chaos
and generally pathological behaviour. This is in direct collusion
with the representation of blackness in San Andreas where violence,
a kill or be killed attitude, a hyper-masculinized sexuality and similar attributes that constitute the urban predators, are the central
traits of the games major characters.
Another instance of this increased militarization of popular culture is found in the advertisements for the Government Clothing
line that depict young, white hipsters, wearing designer fashions,
in Abu Ghraib-like scenarios. The print ad portrays a dingy shower
cell, stripped of its fixtures where one white youth is handcuffed
and hanging from a ceiling, while another is drinking from a toilet
as he is walked, on a leash, by a white guard. The hanging youth
has bruise marks around his eyes and an ammo clip around his
waist, the other youths have their faces turned away from the shot.
The type includes the word GOVERNMENT in bold block letters
and then some accompanying Arabic.21 In smaller type, the ad promises more prison pictures and movies on their website. The
website offers a similar array of images with white hipster
twenty-somethings posing in the clothing line as they reenact
scenes of interrogation, torture and abuse, set in dark dingy bathrooms, shower cells and on gurneys. Not surprisingly, the video
displays a series of similar images of torture in designer clothes,
107
all set to the tune of aggressive hip hop music. Drawing obvious
parallels with Abu Ghraib, the website explains that this is a sneak
peak into something thats happening somewhere in a far away
occupied land. . .22
In recreating the scenes of Abu Ghraib (the famous scene in
which an Iraqi prisoner is dressed up as a Christmas tree is
reenacted here with a handbag taking the place of the garbage
bag used to cover the prisoners face), these white fashion designers
and models claim that the political and moral aspects of these
images are of absolutely no importance. These images of abuse
and denigration become nothing more than pop culture imagery,
open to appropriation for the purposes of marketing and ironic
kitsch. One of the implications here is that not only can military
images be leveraged as marketing tools and as elements of popular
culture, but that there is an inherent sexuality in the abuse and military torture that these images reenact. In the print ad, we see the
pelvis and the underwear of the hanging model just above his
ammo clip. In other images, close shots of bulging male underwear
and military officers with open cleavage mingle sexuality with
images of abuse. These images both take on a desirable quality
and blur the lines between market and political realities. The ads
also suggest that it is reasonable for white people to step into these
roles and reenact these scenes of abuse. There is nothing restricting
white people from playing out these roles of abuse, as any notion of
the political culture or history that generates such imagery is completely absent. In its place is a slick, market driven sexualizing of
military torture.23
Another aspect of these advertisements, and a dominant trope in
popular culture more generally, is that young bodies are marked as
either threatening, disposable, or more typically, a combination of
both. While it is beyond the scope of this paper, there is a lot of critical work that describes the way in which youth is present [in
popular imagination] only when its presence is a problem, or is
regarded as a problem,24 and this is certainly true in the Government Clothing images. This sense of youth as aimless, lazy and disconnected from social, democratic life is only compounded when
dealing with urban youth, particularly young black men, as they
bear the brunt of not only a cultural attack on youth, but also on
people of colour. Consider the lyrics to a hit UK hip-hop song from
rapper Skinnyman, the chorus of which is, If I make it till tomorrow, Ill be surprised or the punk band, Millions of Dead Cops
108
P. Barrett
(whose name alone speaks to youth perceptions of the state), whose

song Born To Die that explains that, Im born to die = Im born to
fry. Ice Cube begins his verse on Straight Outta Compton with
When something happens in South Central Los Angeles, nothing
happens = Its just another nigga dead, Nas describes himself as
a menace, yo, police wanna murder me, and Public Enemy,
who describe America as a land that never gave a damn = about
a brother like me have the image of a black man in the crosshairs
of a snipers scope as their logo. Even the name, Public Enemy,
implies an awareness of black youth as being marked as enemies
of a white public. Needless to say, one doesnt need to look far in
popular representations of youth, particularly black youth, to find
images of young people, as both a target of violence and a source
of cultural anxiety. Young black men in particular routinely
describe themselves as a target of a systemic violence. Neither
San Andreas nor these Government Clothing advertisements do
anything to upset these themes of black representation as both
the source and target of the terror and violence of the public sphere.
Instead they both revel in these images, celebrating them as a
source of enjoyment and spectacle for a depoliticized public.
This militarization of popular culture is present in other video
games as well, such as Tom Clancys Ghost Recon or the US Army
sponsored Americas Army, to name only a few. The latest edition
of the Ghost Recon series is set in an aggressive, hostile North
Korea where a rogue military leader25 is armed with a nuclear
bomb.26 Americas Army, sponsored by the U.S. Army and available
for free download, and at army recruiting offices around the United
States, aims to educate [the player] about the U.S. Army and its
career opportunities and values.27 The game itself is a first person
shooter in which players take on the role of army soldiers in training scenarios and in online combat against other players. In order to
play, the user must register with a U.S. military gaming server,
which stores the users personal information, and tracks his or
her progress in the game. Having hundreds of thousands of young
people register in their servers is no doubt a dream come true for
Pentagon war planners, despite the claim that Recruiters will
not have any information about the players unless players purposefully identify themselves and request information.28 Similarly, the
U.S. Army hosts network parties where gamers can meet, at no
cost, and play the game over computers provided by the U.S.
Army, get free Americas Army t-shirts, and of course meet with
109
U.S. Army recruiters. One recruiter is described as having put up

fliers and made phone calls to offer free food and a day of free
Americas Army gaming to any interested boy, girl, man or woman
over age 13no commitments required. A khaki Humvee was
parked outside. The same recruiter makes the militarization of
popular culture all the more clear when he explains that, This isnt
some kind of psychological thing to brainwash anybody. . . . Its getting the U.S. Army name out there in a positive light. [. . .] Its like
Coca-Cola. [. . .] Its branding.29 While the game is certainly not a
direct path into military service, it imbues the player with a particular portrayal of the U.S. military as well as contributes to the blurring of military and popular culture and the acceptance of military
presence in everyday life. The familiarizing of the military, and the
portrayal of the military provided by this game, are far from apolitical acts. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the game in terms of its
pedagogical aims is that, while the game itself offers extremely
detailed and accurate weapons and combat scenarios, one element
of realism that isnt present in the game is any sort of bloody or
gory death. This is presumably in the interests of allowing the game
to be accessible to younger players (an Army recruiter explains,
with no sense of reservation or irony, that The game CD will only
be distributed to those individuals that can prove that they are over
1330) as well as to, obviously, sanitize the realities of death on a
foreign battlefield.
These are just two instances of a larger militarization of video
gaming culture in general. Other games such as Rainbow Six: Raven
Shield, SWAT 3, Operation Flashpoint, Delta Force 2, Ghost Recon,
Rogue Spear and many others all simulate and celebrate war, and
more generally, violence, as a masculine rite of passage. And of
course, these themes are mirrored in popular television and cinema
with programs and movies such as 24, Harts War, Gods And Generals, Band of Brothers, The Alamo, Alexander and Troy, to name only a
few. In this context of war as entertainment and military action as a
masculine rite of passage, the comments by U.S. Lt. General James
Mattis that its fun to fight people and that guys . . . that aint got
no manhood . . . its a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them31 become
acceptable and commonplace.32 War and entertainment occupy
the same ideological space and can both be understood in terms
of their capacity to provide the viewing public with a thrilling
spectacle. It is in this context that the human-rights abuses of
Guantanamo Bay are converted into fodder for a reality television
110
P. Barrett
program in which contestants are subjected to periods of

enforced nudity and religious and sexual humiliation.33 Similarly,
the FOX program 24, which gives a day in the life of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), represents an Amnesty
Global lawyers attempts to stop his terrorist-abetting client from
being tortured, as nothing more than an impediment to stopping
acts of terror (the human-rights lawyer is tipped off to the potential
torture by the lead terrorist in the program). Bauer explains to the
lawyer that, I dont want to bypass the Constitution, but these
are extraordinary circumstances to which the lawyer replies
The Constitution was born out of extraordinary circumstances . . .
this [interrogation] plays out by the book, not in a backroom with
a rubber hose. Bauer stares at the lawyer forlornly, saying only,
I hope you can live with that.34,35 The outrage over the use of torture and abuse, with obvious parallels to Guantanamo Bay and Abu
Ghraib, is recontextualized here as a sort of liberal blindness which
actually aids terrorists. The program also includes a Muslim-American family that is, in fact, a sleeper cell living within the United
States, planning to assassinate the president and detonate nuclear
weapons within American cities. War, torture, terrorism, patriotism,
and the creeping fascism of the Bush administration become
reduced to a form of entertainment absolutely disconnected from
politics or democratic agency. While clearly these are forms of entertainment, and are intended to be taken as such, they are also pedagogical vehicles that contribute to an ideological environment in
which war and neoliberalism become all the more justifiable. 24 producer Joel Surnow agrees that the show is conservative-leaning,
and his comments that Doing something with any sense of reality
to it seems conservative36 reveals the sort of reality that programs
such as 24 attempt to reproduce. The incapacity of these forms of
entertainment to challenge the neoliberal construction of reality is
indicative of the way that popular culture has been militarized
and dissent is being silenced.
This militarization of popular culture works in direct collusion
with the advance of the neoliberal agenda, the so-called war on terror and the war in Iraq. In the climate of such a militarized culture,
the red white and blue concrete highway barricades placed around
the Sears tower become a common occurrence, as do the presence of
paramilitary units on the streets of New York, surveillance planes
flying over London, and random road checks during times of
heightened terror alerts. The militarization of popular culture
111
contributes to a social environment where the perceived threat of

violence justifies an absolute privatization of agency. Collective
political agency becomes essentially ruled out when the public
sphere is configured as a site of constant fear and terror. In this
sense, then, the so-called war on terror, coupled with the politics
of neoliberalism, together wage a war against the very principles
of democracy and the democratic institutions that are necessary
for a functioning public sphere. Included in that war against
democracy and its institutions is a war against any sort of collective
political agency: a war against the American population itself. The
marking of young bodies as disposable and as sources of terror only
accelerates this process, a process which Donald Rumsfeld himself
confirms when, calling for a greater amalgamation of civilian law
enforcement agencies and the military, he explains that Terrorists,
drug traffickers, hostage takers and criminal gangs form an antisocial combination that increasingly seeks to destabilize civil societies.37 The implication is that not only is there a need for a greater
militarization of the public sphere, a move directly in opposition to
any notion of democratic public life, but that the special laws mobilized to combat international terrorism must now be applied
domestically to other anti-social elements. Read through the
euphemisms of drug traffickers and criminal gangs, and the focus
is clearly on people of colorblack youths within and outside of
America.
In many ways the war on terror translates, domestically, into a
war against young people in general. Consider the $237,000 spent
in Missouri to battle Goth culture.38 Missouri congressman Sam
Graves argued that Goths are preying on Missouri youth and
that they contributed to youth violence, youth drug use and other
serious problems.39 $132,000 of the grant was returned to the state
after no Missouri Goth culture could be found. Similarly, there is
the instance of the nine-year-old Tucson Arizona girl who ran away
from Arizonas Children Agency and was subsequently handcuffed
and shot by police with a Taser rifle.40 Or the use of a taser by police
to subdue a 130-lb 50 -600 female Florida teenager.41
There are countless other real-world instances demonstrating the
ways in which the culture of adult fears translates into an attack on
young people. The category of youth becomes a mixed category
mobilizing adult paranoia as well as adult distrust and what might
even be described as borderline hatred. Couple the representations
of youth with the divestment from those institutions that typically
112
P. Barrett
assist young people, and the increase in the institutional disciplining and imprisonment of youth, and one begins to understand how
notions of youth are formed in neoliberal culture. Youth are
marked, in popular culture and in the current political environment, as unworthy of investment, as a threat to the social order,
as a burden on the hardworking adult world, and most importantly, as throwaway bodies.
And of course the U.S. Army has taken advantage of this militarization of popular culture, and this marking of youth as dangerous
and disposable, as a means of increasing their recruitment numbers. The army has developed a series of vehicles that double as
entertainment and recruiting centers: the Army Cinema Vans,
the Army Cinema Pods, the Army Adventure Van, and the Navy
Exhibit Centers visit a total of 2,000 schools per year, presenting
their high tech educational shows to 380,000 recruitable students42 a year. Similarly, Two National Science vans, sponsored
by the military and the National Science Center, also tour the country. In each case, the Pentagons Recruiting Commands and local
recruiters use school grounds, school facilities, and school time to
glorify the armed forces and their version of history.43 The way
in which the public institution of the school becomes transformed
into a site for military recruiting purposes is representative of the
shifting role of the American state under George Bush. This is seen
again in Bushs No Child Left Behind Act, which is not only
severely underfunded and privileges an education measured
strictly by standardized testing,44 but also includes a provision, buried deep within the act, that requires schools, as a condition for
public funding, to provide the U.S. Army with a complete list of
students names, addresses, and phone numbers for recruiting purposes.
Coupling the attempts to draw students out of schools and into
the military with the serious funding crisis in which public schools
find themselves, and the way in which the bodies of youth are
marked as disposable, and youth themselves become constructed
as burdens, as unwanted persons, becomes all the more clear. This
marking of youth as unwanted and unnecessary feeds directly into
the new global neoliberal order which has created a mass of
unwanted persons. This superfluous population is unnecessary to
the neoliberal global order. For many youth in the economic north,
their role in this new global economy is peripheral at best (in many
ways this is true of the majority of the population, not just youth).
113
They are able to interact with it only insofar as they can staff its fast
food restaurants, work in its strip malls, and so forth. But to have
any meaningful authoritative role in this new order, and in the
future of the world more generally, is not part of this world economic plan. They are, in the neoliberal context, an unwanted, surplus
population. It is no surprise then that as of June 2003, 12.8% of the
African-American male population aged 25 to 29 was in prison,
compared to 3.7% of Latinos and 1.6% of whites.45 Similarly, under
George W. Bush, the African American incarceration rate is 5.7 times
higher than it was in South Africa under the apartheid regime.46
And of course, the United States stands in a strange coalition with
Saudi Arabia, Congo, Yemen, Iran and Nigeria, as the only countries
in the world that execute young offenders (China and Pakistan have
recently committed to ending the practice).47 The rise of the prison
population, as well as the rise in military recruitment48 all point to
a general need to dispose of young bodies, particularly young black
bodies. This need, endemic of the neoliberal global order, is reinforced by San Andreas in its representations of black youth.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas reinforces many of the ideologies
central to neoliberalism, as well as many of the representations of
identity and politics central to the war on terror as well as the
war in Iraq. The absolute privatizing of any sense of agency within
the game offers no structure or language by which to imagine any
sort of collective, or at least public response to the oppression that
the characters experience in the game. Baumans description of
public sphere under neoliberalism as emptied of its own separate
contents . . . it is now but an agglomeration of private troubles, worries and problems49 reads as though it were a description of the
public as represented in San Andreas. Any potential for a vocabulary
of resistance is completely absent, where the right of the individual
to accumulate wealth, through any form of self-justified power, is
seen as the greatest social freedom. In a game where the most basic
act of perhaps not killing your fellow citizen for his = her vehicle or
wallet is only considered an impediment to the accumulation of
wealth and power, questions of social agency or the responsibility
of democratic citizens are unimaginable.
In place of such questions is the neoliberal dystopia where the
rights of the individual trump any sense of the responsibilities of
the citizen, and the rules of the market are naturalized and universalized while the possible democratic role of the state or of other
collective institutions are completely erased from the games
114
P. Barrett
representation. In this sense San Andreas refigures agency as something completely privatized and atomized, echoing Margaret
Thatchers claim that there is no such thing as society.50 The public realm subsequently becomes a site of violence and terror, and
any considerations of a public good, or of democratic possibility
are totally absent. This decoupling of politics from power reinforces
a culture of cynicism where any form of public participation or
social change seems pointless. In place of any potential for meaningful, democratic citizenship is a worship of individualized, competitive forms of agency in which collective action or resistance is
impossible.
In this sense politics has no capacity to disrupt configurations of
power. In fact power and the public world of political change are
completely disconnected in the world of San Andreas. Power lies
in the market, in the repressive functions of the state and in the
capacity of the individual to commit violence and accumulate
wealth. Where a democratic, public sphere would offer an opportunity for social change, in the privatized world of San Andreas, selfjustified (in the sense that the capacity to do violence justifies that
violence), individual acts of violence become the only means of
exerting ones own agency. In this sense the drive-by shooting is
the closest representation of collective action in San Andreas.
The naturalizing of racist systems of social organization also
serves to justify neoliberal claims to the right of the economy to
operate unimpeded by such market irritants as affirmative action
or other policies that address and aim to correct the accumulated
disadvantage which African Americans experience. San Andreas
either completely decontextualizes or just outright ignores racist cultural practices that lead to African Americans being unemployed
more than whites, imprisoned more than whites, locked in racial
ghettos, and so forth. In ignoring questions of historical racism
and injustice, San Andreas suggests that the problems that African
Americans experience is due to individual failure. This failing of
the individual is further reinforced by the notion that the white person can experience, or step into, black identity. Histories of racism
and the accumulated effect of cultural intolerance are unimportant
and do not restrict the white consumer from entering into black culture. This further dehistoricizes racist practices and suggests that
any failings of individuals are strictly their own, with no connection
to any larger collective forms of discrimination. San Andreas naturalizes the values of neoliberalism, presenting ideologies of the market
115
and the spectacle of violence as universal and completely sutured.

Again, this question of the collapse of a public, collective oppression
into a private failing is central to neoliberal ideology.
Finally, the translating of violence into nothing more than spectacle, the way in which San Andreas (amongst many other popular
culture representations of violence) converts violence into a source
of entertainment, with no meaning other than its capacity to thrill
and entertain, both detracts from, depoliticizes and, of course,
ignores, the very real systemic violence that is done against real
bodies, through the policies of neoliberalism, as well as the war
on terror and the war against Iraq. Also, in reducing violence to
nothing more than visual pop culture fodder, feeding into an apolitical spectacle of fear and hate, the very real violence that is done
under the justification of the war on terror and neoliberal policies,
becomes all the more acceptable. This makes it simpler to mark
black bodies as humans who are not humans51 and enact very
real violence against those bodies. In decoupling violence from its
political causes, San Andreas acts to naturalize and, thereby make
more acceptable, the violence of the real world.
These criticisms understood, the question remains, what can be
done? First, critical analysis of cultural texts such as San Andreas
is essential to understanding the very real pedagogical and political
work that these texts do. San Andreas is both extremely fun and
extremely popular, and the notion that it is somehow below the
radar of acceptable critical analysis simply by virtue of it being
popular or vulgar misses an important opportunity for critical, public intervention. This sort of analysis, where questions of representation and politics are taken very seriously, and understood within
a specific context, are all the more important when the text being
considered is so immediately relevant. After all, this is a text which
is being read by a great number of people, most of whom are outside academia, and more importantly, it is a text that generates
meaning. It actively constructs a worldview that has implications
in the larger, political sphere. With this in mind, speaking back to
the text, and offering a critique of how it constructs these meanings
seems crucial to any public intellectual work.
But this is not enough. Critical engagement is important, but it is
not the final step in responding to a text like this. Rather, there must
be some sense of how to challenge or disrupt the ideological work
that San Andreas does. Alternative representations have to be generated that can historicize and politicize narratives like San Andreas.
116
P. Barrett
The stories of young African Americans are certainly worth telling,

even at the cost of discomforting some white liberals, but they ought
to be told within the context of larger structures of racial discrimination and connected to the broader political questions of a possibility for collective resistance: a politics of hope. The narratives
must explain how the world came to be configured in this way.
The divestment of the state from public life and the insistence of
market values as a reasonable model for all forms of social relations
must be put in the context of a war on the poor and on people of
color. In doing so, the stories of people who have been the victims
of brutal systemic racism and oppression might be told in their
appropriate contexts. Finally, it seems clear and essential to me that
these stories must be told, at least in part, by the people who live
them. This calls for a reconfiguring of the systems of learning and
production, and putting the means of producing such cultural texts
into the hands of anyone who would take them up. This not only
means offering people the necessary time to consider these issues,
but also giving them the vocabulary to engage these texts critically,
with questions of representation, the divestment of power from politics and social agency at the forefront of the discourse. It would
seem that democracy is difficult to imagine without democratic
forms of representation, and therefore, there must be an uncoupling
of individual wealth from the material capacity to produce cultural
texts, in all forms, and generate meaning. While I dont want to prescribe some kind of solution, or suggest that there is a single
approach to correcting these problems of representation, my sense
is that these suggestions will offer one way in which a meaningful
sense of political agency, as well as a reconsidering of the value of
the public, democratic sphere can occur.
NOTES
1. James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy
(New York: Palgrave, 2003) 59.
2. Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 174.
3. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004).
4. Chuck D, Four Oh? Available at http://www.publicenemy.com/index.php?page
page3&item 20 (Accessed 1 August 2000).
5. Kardinal Offishall, Kardis Korner. Unpublished.
6. Ghostface Killah, Run, The Pretty Toney Album, Def Jam, 2003.
7. Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186.
117
8. James Paul Gee What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy
(New York: Palgrave, 2003) 59.
9. Michael K. Brown et al., Whitewashing Race (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), 30.
10. Michael K. Brown et al., Whitewashing Race (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), 141.
11. Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),
49.
12. Greg Kasavin, Manhunt Review for Playstation 2 at GameSpot. Available at http://
www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/manhunt/review-2.html (Accessed 19 November
2003).
13. One might read this scenario of the white protagonist attempting to escape the
urban nightmare, while being pursued by gangs of masked youths (black and
white), as touching on the underlying fears of the inner city present in a great
deal of mainstream, white American culture.
14. No author, The Miramax Scared Shit List Available at http://www.lowculture.
com/archives/000258.html (Accessed 10 November 2003).
15. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004), 147.
17. Pierre Bordieu, Acts of Resistance Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The
New Press, 1998) 2.
18. Gerald Baker, Is This Great, Or What, Financial Times (31 March 1998).
19. Robert W McChesney, Noam Chomsky and the Struggle Against Neoliberalism.
Available at http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2001/08/14796.php (Accessed 1
April 1999).
20. Shaheem Reid, 50 Cent: Money To Burn Available at http://www.mtv.com/
bands/123/50 Cent/news feature 021203/ (Accessed 2 December 2003).
21. That the Arabic will be unintelligible to most viewers of the ad is of no consequence. It acts only as a token of style, a fashionable piece of design used to bolster the gritty political realism of the ad rather than as an actual language used
to communicate any particular message.
22. Government Prison Pics. Available at www.governmentclothing.com (Accessed 25
November 2004).
23. It is no surprise that these advertisements appear in Vice Magazine, a publication
which celebrates the reduction of political issues into questions of aesthetics and
individualized style. Using terms like sand nigger in an attempt to show race
irony and targeting homeless people in their Fashion Donts section, Vice
Magazine caters to a white, hipster demographic that forfeits political awareness
for ironic non-ideologies that, nevertheless, coalesce neatly with right wing ideologies of individualism, racism and the notions of the free market.
24. Henry Giroux, Doing Cultural Studies: Youth and the Challenge of Pedagogy.
Available at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/Giroux/Giroux1.html
(Accessed 9 December 2004).
25. Erik Wolpaw, Tom Clancys Ghost Recon 2 Review for XBOX at GameSpot. Available
at http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/tomclancysghostrecon2/review-2.
html (Accessed 22 November 2004).
26. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il takes the symbolic value of such games quite
seriously, as the game was banned by his regime, explaining that [Americans]
have shown everyone their hatred for us. This may be just a game to them now,
118
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
P. Barrett
but a war will not be a game for them later. In war, they will only face miserable
defeat and gruesome deaths. (see http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=
21777&category=gamers)
Scott Osborne, Americas Army Review for PC at GameSpot. Available at http://
www.gamespot.com/pc/action/americasarmyoperations/review.html
(Accessed 3 October 2002).
Americas Army Support FAQ. Available at http://www.americasarmy.com/
support/faq win.php?p=1#faq2 (Accessed 22 July 2004).
Jim Downing, Army To Potential Recruits: Wanna Play? Available at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002111412 wargames07e.html (Accessed
7 December 2004).
Americas Army Support FAQ. Available at http://www.americasarmy.com/
support/faq win.php?p=1#faq2 (Accessed 22 July 2004).
General: Its fun to shoot people. Available at http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/
03/general.shoot/ (Accessed 4 February 2005).
Lt. Gen. Mattis was not disciplined for his comments, but was told that he should
have chosen his words more carefully. It is not his love of slaughter that raised
any interest but his forgetting to couch his expression of the thrills of killing in
the appropriate euphemisms of the U.S. Army.
Dominic Timms C4 lines up Guantanamo-style torture show. Available at http://
www.guardian.co.uk/uk news/story/0.3604.1408237.00.html (Accessed 8 February 2005).
24 Executive Producer Joel Surnow, FOX, 18 April 2005.
In an earlier episode, when Bauers use of torture is questioned, a steel-jawed
Secretary of Defence chillingly explains, that we need men like that.
Christian Toto, 24: An hour of realism. Available at http://washingtontimes.
com/entertainment/20050427-085529-9412r.htm (Accessed 1 June 2005).
Jim Lobe, U.S. Media Miss Rumsfelds Dirty Wars Talk. Available at http://
www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1124-01.htm (Accessed 24 November
2004).
Harpers Index for August 2004. Available at http://www.harpers.org/HarpersIndex2004-08.html (Accessed 1 September 2004).
Steve Eder, Group criticizes federal funds to counsel youths against Goth culture.
Available at http://pub96.ezboard.com/fgothicchristiansunitefrm1.showMessage?
topicID=750.topic (Accessed 3 March 2004).
L. Anne Newell, Taser hit on girl, 9, stirs talk on ethics. Available at http://
www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/23559.php (Accessed 5 May 2004).
J. D. Gallop, Police Review Taser use on Student. Available at http://www.florida
today.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050602/NEWS01/506020326/1006
(Accessed 2 June 2005).
Army Adventure Vans. Available at http://www.objector.org/recruiting-vans/
army.html (Accessed 7 December 2004).
Army Adventure Vans. Available at http: == www.objector.org=recruiting-vans=
army.html (Accessed 7 December 2004).
Michael Dobbs, No Child Law Leaves Schools Old Ways Behind. Available at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=
A32348-004Apr21&notFound=true (Accessed 22 April 2004).
Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment. Available at http://www.
prisonsucks.com/ (Accessed 10 December 2004).
119
46. Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment. Available at http://www.

prisonsucks.com/ (Accessed 10 December 2004).
47. Death Penalty: USA only country to execute child offenders record denounced as truly
shameful. Available at http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/press/15118.shtml
(Accessed 21 January 2004).
48. Saeed Shabazz, The dirty world of military recruiting. Available at http://www.
finalcall.com/artman/publish/article 1502.shtml (Accessed 21 July 2004).
65.
30.

Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

Cargado por

Información del documento

Título original

Derechos de autor

Formatos disponibles

Compartir este documento

Compartir o incrustar documentos

Opciones para compartir

¿Le pareció útil este documento?

¿Este contenido es inapropiado?

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

This article was downloaded by: [Swinburne University of Technology]

On: 11 March 2011

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Downloaded By: [Swinburne University of Technology] At: 01:04 11 March 2011

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race,

Downloaded By: [Swinburne University of Technology] At: 01:04 11 March 2011

people to understand the world from multiple perspectives. He also

Downloaded By: [Swinburne University of Technology] At: 01:04 11 March 2011