CHAPTER ELEVEN Organic Intellectuals or Traditional Intellectuals: Critical Discourse for Whom? CHRISTIAN W. CHUN INTRODUCTION Those in power have long sown divisions among people by co-constructing inter-effecting economic, racialized, gendered, and sexual hierarchies. However, there have been numerous popular-led movements throughout history that have transformed—or at least attempted to do so—political, economic, and societal structural relations in the name of equality, freedom, justice, and liberty for all. These movements were enacted through discursive practices defying the beliefs that had become hegemonic in their times. Some of these beliefs, held by particular segments of the populace and which were circulated by institutions such as the state, school, religion, and the media, perpetuated the notion of specifically targeted humans as being (much) less “worthy” than others, thus justifying an ideologically socialized order of humanity at historical junctures. Throughout centuries, slavery was viewed and enabled by racist and white supremacist discourses as being a natural and necessary condition for a society to exist and thrive. And yet, after millennia of enslavement, it was -1 0 +1 9781350098237_pi-282.indd 253 9781350098237_pi-282.indd 253 30-Sep-21 06:30:33 30-Sep-21 06:30:33