In Chapter 5 of her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander references “common sense” as a shared understanding within a community, which influences that community’s actions. Alexander introduces the term by explaining that Americans—a national community—find it easy to deny mass incarceration. Americans have, she explains,
“little reason to doubt the prevailing ‘common sense’ that black and brown men have been locked up en masse merely in response to crime rates” (Alexander 226).
Here, Alexander employs “common sense” to reference Americans’ perception of people of color. She then proceeds to clarify that policial, social and media structures influence American “common sense” about mass incarceration: for example, contemporary media makes it easy for Americans to “avoid” thinking about difficult issues like racism (273). It is thus also easy for them to adopt a common sense that criminalizes Black and Brown people rather than learning the complex truth about racism’s role in mass incarceration (273).
Alexander also describes Black Americans’ acceptance of “moral uplift ideology” and non-resistance to segregation during the mid-1900s as a “common sense” (266). This common sense, like mainstream American criminalization of Black and brown people, was heavily influenced by societal pressures: many Black people went along with segregation because “shame and blame [were] heaped upon” any Black person who did not cooperate with white norms, including segregation (267). Alexander’s examples demonstrate that, in these current and historical instances alike, common sense reinforces existing societal norms that separate and oppress Black people. It thus acts in opposition to efforts towards racial justice.
Savannah Shange, in her article “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship,” acknowledges Alexander’s understanding of common sense as harmful to efforts towards justice. For example, Shange quotes Kara Keeling’s reminder that “common sense contains elements that consent to dominant hegemonies,” echoing Alexander’s point that Black people accepted segregation because to do otherwise would be dangerous (Alexander 266-67; Keeling qtd. in Shange 42). Shange also makes it clear that Kairo and La’Nea understand their queer identities in relationship to a harmful common sense surrounding “normative gender” (42). However, unlike Alexander, Shange emphasizes common sense’s “aspects that are antagonistic to [dominant hegemonies]” more than its reinforcement of unjust power structures (42). Shange reiterates Keeling’s definition of common sense as
“a shared set of memory-images and a set of commonly habituated sensory-motor movements with the capacity to enable alternative perceptions and, hence, alternative knowledges” (Keeling qtd. in Shange 42).
Notably, this definition situates common sense not only within the context of shared socio-political “memory-images,” but also as a physical way of being in the world. For example, queer Black people share common sense because they share queerness and Blackness—qualities shaped at least in part by their bodies (Bowles, “Shange and Language;” Shange 42). Shange’s definition also expands beyond Alexander’s by suggesting common sense as a means to resist dominant hegemonies. For example, Shange points out that the common sense created through the “stud-femme sociality” she notes amongst her students and colleagues ultimately creates hopeful possibility (51). Common sense allows them to connect with each other and create community, pushing back against oppressive, divisive power structures—and the hegemonic structures that their mainstream American common sense instills within them (42).
