Abstract
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. […]. But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Between June 25 and August 28 2013, the theme of the post-racial returned to the headlines. What 5 years ago, after the election of Barack Obama, seemed a figment of pundits’ imagination was deployed in two juridical statements recalling the Civil Rights victories of 50 years ago. On June 15, the US Supreme Court decided on the unconstitutionality of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, on Shelby County, Alabama v Holder, Attorney General et al., on the basis that the “entrenched racial discrimination in voting” are no longer a reality (570 US, 2013: 1), accepting Shelby County’s argument that “Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented level” (p. 14). On August 28, in his March on Washington speech, US President Obama called for economic opportunity for all US Americans. Each official statement on the “transcendence of race” declared unnecessary two chief juridical mechanisms—the 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1964 Civil Rights Act—for racial redress.
During the 5-week interval between the Court’s decision and the President’s speech, two other events circumscribed this “transcendence,” that is, exposed their overdetermined nature: the Florida jury’s acquittal of the killer of Trayvon Martin (authorizing vigilantism) and the US President’s threats (acting as global law enforcer) to attack the Syrian government for using illegal (chemical) weapons. Each reflecting the work of racial violence at the level of the statement, that is, authorizing deployments of “law enforcement” against racial/global subaltern populations (Ferreira da Silva, 2009). For, when addressed as statements in the same racial text, all four articulate the political significance of the Shelby County v Holder et al. ruling’s statement that the legal, protective measures devised to bring about racial equality were “extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem” (p. 1). Rehearsing the colonial (total) violence refigured in the arsenal of raciality, each (the decision, the speech, the acquittal, the threat) exposes the limits of the liberal conception of racial justice—and its underlying logic of exclusion—whether as formal equality in the juridical (right to vote) or substantive equality in the economic (opportunity to compete) spheres.
“How the system works”
Locating the post-racial announcement in the register of racial violence (Silva, 2009), this issue exposes the limits of the liberal account of racial justice. Beyond arguing about the end of racial discrimination (racial difference, race relations), these essays assembled here describe how the logic of obliteration operates mostly unchallenged even in the markers of the end of race. To be sure, in these past weeks, a few US Black public intellectuals, politicians, and activists came close to a total rejection of the liberal desire and its impossible dream of racial equality. For instance, President Obama (2013a), who first said about the Zimmerman’s acquittal that this is how “the system works,” later added that “there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.” Why the “system works” this way—that is, as a mechanism of racial violence—Roslyn Brock (2013), chairwoman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), answers when she says, “five mothers, can’t find it within the justice system to see that a life has been taken, that Trayvon Martin’s life had value,” and Cornel West (2013) underlines when he calls the US President “a Global George Zimmerman because he tries to rationalize the killing of innocent children, 221 so far, in the name of self-defense.” In the catalog of how “the system” works, Robin Kelley (2013) states,
Unless we challenge the entire criminal justice system and mass incarceration, there will be many more Trayvon Martins and a constant dread that one of our children might be next. As long as we continue to uphold and defend a system designed to protect white privilege, property and personhood, and render black and brown people predators, criminals, illegals, and terrorists, we will continue to attend funerals and rallies; watch in stunned silence as another police officer or vigilante is acquitted after taking another young life; allow our government to kill civilians in our name.
Throughout post-slavery Americas, the architecture of law enforcement (laws, policies, courts, jails, prisons, parole system, etc.) has been the biopolitical apparatus specifically designed to deal with Black populations. Focusing solely on the criminal justice system, however, misses how the logic of obliteration governs the whole liberal juridical (legal) architecture—including all three branches of government: making (Legislative), enforcing (Executive), and administering (Judiciary).
By focusing on the juridical and economic dimensions of racial subjugation, this volume exposes the limits of the liberal formulation of racial justice, and its attendant logic of exclusion. Each does so, not through a listing of counter-evidence but by describing juridical and economic instances of symbolic and total racial violence that abound in this “post-racial present.” By foregrounding obliteration, they experiment with critical analytical or interpretive moves that crash the narrative of racial progress as articulated, for instance, in President Obama’s (2013b) statements that those marching on Washington 50 years ago “were seeking jobs as well as justice—not just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic opportunity” and that “Dr. King explained that the goals of African Americans were identical to working people of all races.” This conflation of jobs and justice in Obama’s speech exemplifies how the liberal grammar efficiently translates demands for racial justice back into the logic that renders any mechanism deployed to bring it about—such as affirmative and voting rights—into something extraordinary, that is, beyond the usual, regular, and established, in short, exceptional and temporary. Each essay highlights the fissures in the liberal understanding of racial subjugation and shows that far from extraordinary, when framed by the logic of obliteration, racial subjugation and its indices are rather ordinary aspects of the liberal social configurations.
Insurrectional reading
Each essay refuses the premises (liberal ethics and truths) of the question of the arrival of the post-racial era. Highlighting overdetermination, each finds in ordinary specimens and scenes of racial subjugation—acts of self-defense against the Black criminal and the brown terrorists or “rogue states”—raciality performing its role. That is, each traces raciality authorizing instances of total and symbolic violence, which ensure capital’s access to the total value produced by affectable persons and places (Ferreira da Silva, 2009).
Focusing on carework, and related concepts such as affect and precarity, Hua and Kay expose the internal fissure in the universalizing claim of species and racial transcendence. When attending to statements that “humanize” the nonhuman animal, by attributing to them legal and moral status, they show how those who care for the human animal, namely, yesterday US Blacks and today’s immigrant domestic workers, have their “humanity” delimited by how raciality—and preceding colonial expropriation—produces them as economic subjects (workers) on the margins of the scene of (labor) rights. In doing so, they indicate why a social justice program that follows President Obama’s call for jobs and economic opportunity will most certainly fail to correct, and in many cases further accentuate, the effects of racial power. That is, it will re-produce an unresolvable (racial/cultural) differentiation in the core of the “universal” notion of humanity.
Further exposing how raciality re-produces the effects of colonial (total) violence at the level of signification, the following two essays deploy methodological tactics that undermine narratives of racial progress. In his piece, Rodriguez indicates how the post-racial announcement constitutes but an articulation of the desire that guides the logic of obliteration, which is the elimination of the racial subaltern. He finds in Barry Goldwater’s archive erasures of racial difference, which expose racial violence at work in the very desire for the disappearance of the racial. Mapping this desire onto the 2011 hunger strike in California prisons, the sites of juridical death constructed to house those fallen to the textual and procedural tools of law enforcement (drug laws, etc.), where he reads an insurrectional subject, who denounces “the system” not by demanding freedom but by forcing attention to how incarceration is a proper juridical descriptor of US Blacks’ and Latinos’ subjugation. Reading the Oprah phenomenon, Hester-Williams highlights how her media empire re-produces liberal (symbolic) specimens, aiding the dismantling of the welfare state, through gendered tales of Black success as the result of the action of the self-sufficient (self-determined) entrepreneur, of those who do “work hard and get ahead” and who did not merely “desire for government support” and used “the bigotry of others … [as] reason to give up on [themselves] (Obama, 2013b). In the film Precious, she finds an instance of Oprah’s contribution to the post-racial discourse, she positions the original account in Push, Saphire’s Black feminist novel, where she shows the erased Black feminist “ethics of care and communal responsibility.”
Feminist ethics and political practices also figure in the critiques of the post-racial speech introduced in the last two essays, which interrogate the post-racial truisms and expose raciality’s working in Africa and the Middle East, respectively, in support of global capital’s expropriation of economically dispossessed Black urban populations and of imperial forces of law enforcement. Returning to the historical archive, guided by three post-Apartheid novels, Herard offers a corrective to the literature anti-privatization and anti-globalization movement in South Africa, which fails to identify how these local struggles redeploy organizational strategies Black South African women devised in the fight against apartheid. Now in the new South African (human rights) state, these continue to be deployed against global capital’s new mechanisms for expropriation, such as water taxes and prepaid access to service. Her discussion of the ibandla (religious–political meeting spaces) highlights how historically female-led communal practices (financial, healing, etc.) have enacted the kind of radical alternative to global capital now promoted by movements such as Occupy Wall Street. Taking us beyond the “war on terror” headlines and the distant images and sounds of US imperial (and Israeli) missiles firing upon populations in the Middle East, Naber and Zaatari engage the post-racial speech through an analysis of conversations with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) and feminist organizations in Lebanon, which responded and resisted the US-backed Israeli invasion. Focusing on the impact of this enactment of racial violence upon the Lebanese social movements, they expose how total violence also opens the way for other nonhierarchical political practices of resistance. Having to attend to the basic necessities of life their interviewees tell us does not lead to de-politicization. Instead, their interviewees articulate conceptions of life and dignity beyond the meanings these terms have in the liberal vocabulary and grammar.
Extraordinary times
A little over 100 years after Du Bois (2007) declared that the “problem of the twentieth century will be the problem of the color line” (p. 15), the US Supreme Court adds a juridical statement on the post-racial era, when deciding that the color line was an “extraordinary problem,” which has now been resolved. In conjunction with President Obama’s March on Washington speech on economic opportunity, this decision (against the 1965 Voting Rights Act) rehearses the truth deployed in the decisions (against the 1965 Civil Rights Act) authorizing the dismantling of affirmative action in university admissions. What is it? That the social scientific concept of racial discrimination, its juridical correspondent the notion of equal protection before the law, and its ethical partner equality of opportunity have similar political effect, which is to render extraordinary any demand for racial redress which violates the ruling liberal value, that is, freedom. Since the value of freedom resides in its being a descriptor for the self-determined White/European subject, as far as the racial subaltern, the affectable subject, is concerned, freedom has no value, because it always already exposes the ruse of freedom.
Not because (as Hegel postulated) the racial subaltern mind cannot contemplate such high abstraction, but because racial knowledge has produced the racial subaltern as the type of human being whose existence threatens to expose the fallacy of (freedom as) self-determination. Put differently, the problem Du Bois announced is an ontological one (Chandler, 2008): the color line embodies the very conditions of possibility for modern existence. Put differently, as the essays assembled here indicate, the color line is the founding political (at once juridical, economic, and ethical) problem (a hitch) of postcolonial configurations because it marks the failure to extinguish the racial subaltern, after capitalism could do without the actual expropriation of the enslaved body’s productive capacity and had ensured (through settlement or contract) ownership of native lands. Precisely because existing juridical mechanism for racial redress addresses that which (racial discrimination, segregation, etc.) covers up this failure, equal protection of the law (14th amendment) and equality of opportunity (1964 Civil Rights Act) are nothing more than “extraordinary measures” to address an “extraordinary problem,” which is the fact that the descendants of enslaved and conquered native populations, despite considerable efforts, refuse the mandate for their obliteration.
Tainting the order, the liberal order, in which they have no place, US Black and Asian populations did, according to the sociology of race relations, institute racial discrimination in an otherwise free social order. Not surprisingly, President Obama and Oprah Winfrey climbing to the top of the political and economic ladders are useful extraordinary instances, because they fulfill the task of reminding their Black brothers and sisters that they (in their failure to emulate White US Americans) are the problem. For this reason, as long as our programs for racial redress insist in ignoring that, according to the liberal grammar, Black folk threaten the liberal order of things, we will find ourselves repeating what so many said in the wake of the Zimmerman trial, and wonder when the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” will become a reality to all in the United States. Let me repeat the point: official announcements of the post-racial (the end of racial discrimination) refer neither to the end of racial subjugation nor to a moment when racial justice measures (designed to increase access of US Blacks to the higher planes of the liberal existence, such as the university) will no longer be seen as (extraordinary) violations of freedom.
These are, however, extraordinary times! Under the watch of a Black President of the United States (the prompt for the post-racial announcement), events authorizing racial violence (Zimmerman’s verdict and the threats to Syria) expose the operating logic of obliteration and reveal that the liberal grammar, and its juridical architectures offer nothing toward racial redress. Perhaps now, it is possible to confront the failure inscribed in the very juridical mechanism of “humanization,” the function of which is to realize justice. And, inspired by the California’s and Guantanamo Bay’s prisoners’ hunger strikes, US Black feminist ethics, South African Black female activists, and Lebanese feminists and LBGTQ’s emergency activism, we might turn to other ethical–political bases for projects of racial emancipation, which attend to both the protection of our lives and an untethered horizon for our dreams.