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You’ve been highly critical of QE in the past. Could you elaborate on some of its shortfalls?

The result of QE is that the central bank of a country owns debt issued by the government of that country. However, because the central bank is itself owned by the government of that country, then in reality the government owns its own debt.

The great quantitative easing experiment was a mistake. It's time central banks acknowledge it for the failure it was and retire it from their policy arsenal as soon as they’re able.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, an integral part of central banks' play book in the US, the UK and the European Union has been QE — the practice of buying up long-term bonds and mortgage-backed securities. QE is supposed to work by lowering long-term interest rates, which boosts demand and increases lending and risk-taking.

The new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has said that a Labour government would introduce “people’s QE”, that is to say, increased government spending, perhaps on infrastructure, financed with printed money.

What on earth are we to think about this, and indeed QE generally?

Cooper said: “Quantitive easing to pay for infrastructure now the economy is growing is really bad economics. History shows it hits your currency, hits investment, pushes up inflation and makes it harder, not easier, to get the sustainable growth in a global economy we need to tackle poverty and support our public services.”

Cooper’s point is not that QE is always bad economics. She could not possibly say that since she was a member of the Labour government that first adopted the policy in 2009. Her argument is that QE was a response to a dire emergency and that the economy does not need more of it at this time.

Jeremy Corbyn’s proposed “People’s QE” has provoked consternation in the academic and central banking world. Even Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has weighed in, despite the perils of central bankers speaking out on matters of political controversy. PQE has divided opinions in the economic commentariat, but it has united all in getting us extremely hot under the collar.

PQE involves the government instructing the Bank of England to print money (or rather, the modern equivalent, creating electronic reserves) to purchase bonds issued by a Corbyn-established National Investment Bank. This NIB would then use the money to fund public infrastructure projects, or, in fact, whatever the government fancied.

“When the next crisis hits, QE for the People – both helicopter money (or financing of the fiscal deficit) and investment bond buying – should clearly be the policy tool of choice. However, other policies have their place too, including QE for the Banks. When banks are damaged, and everyone is paying off debt and saving like crazy, both Main Street and Wall Street need new money, and central banks need to be able to use every tool at their disposal. Together, QE for the People and QE for the Banks make up ‘QE for Everyone’.

The primary argument against the use of helicopter money is perhaps as much about politics as economics. Helicopter money is essentially a merging of fiscal and monetary policy, because new money is being created by central banks but distributed in the form of fiscal transfers. Central banks lack the authority to cut taxes or increase government spending. In this regard, helicopter money could threaten the independence of central banks by giving politicians some control over the money supply and the ability to finance increased government spending by printing money rather than with present or future tax hikes. Even if helicopter money were promised as a one-time occurrence, politicians could always come back for seconds. Any short-run benefits of helicopter money could be greatly outweighed by the long-run harm of reduced monetary independence, which most economists strongly agree makes monetary policy less effective over time and creates inflationary pressures.

Additionally, helicopter money’s effects may be hard to predict because its success depends largely on its ability to shape consumer behavior and inflation expectations. If consumers see such a policy as a sign of desperation, they may actually lose faith in the ability of central banks to conduct effective monetary policy, leading them to save the money instead of spending it — making helicopter money a failure. On the other hand, helicopter money, through its effects on expectations, could end up raising inflation well beyond annual 2 percent inflation targets.

Helicopter money requires central banks to make choices they cannot make while undermining their independence and inflation-targeting mandate. Attempts at explicit fiscal coordination may not be feasible and may create unresolvable conflicts between central banks and political governments.

In the post-financial crisis world, unconventional monetary policy has become so mundane that the name is a contradiction in terms. Everybody does it, few know when they’ll stop it and it has probably been stretched beyond the scope of its abilities. The frustration brought about by the realisation of the latter point is such as to make it now popular to consider a more direct version of quantitative easing.

However, debt jubilee has some serious difficulties. Relieving debt distress among banks and corporations costs taxpayers billions of dollars. Relieving debt distress among mortgage holders could cost the same. It is difficult to see why a young person on a low income who is struggling to pay their rent should, through their taxes, pay off the million-dollar mortgage of a business tycoon. It is also hard to see why homeowners who limit their borrowing to what they can sensibly afford should receive less from the government than people who mortgage themselves to the hilt in the expectation that house prices will always rise. Debt jubilee could be very unfair to people who are too poor to have debts or too responsible to over-borrow.

There is a second problem with debt jubilee. For every debtor, there is a creditor; and creditors are savers. Writing off debts therefore means writing down the value of savings. But working hard and building up savings is widely regarded as virtuous. Imposing losses on people who have saved, to write off the debts of those who have not, would be very unfair. Somehow, a debt jubilee would have to avoid hurting savers.

There is no such thing as a positive aggressive strength, only a negative defensive one. Attackers always only attack themselves. We can truly approach another only in the experience of our mutual weakness. (This is something I’ve discussed over the years with Jaye Austin Williams, who is now teaching at Bucknell University. Her research and writing on black feminist playwrights Kia Corthron, Lynne Nottage, and Suzan-Lori Parks is animated, in part, by her own martial arts background. In addition to her work as scholar-educator, writer-director, and actor-singer, she’s also a 4th Dan aikidoist.) This is the crucial distinction: the baseless, centered outreach of tenderness, and the well founded, off-center overreach of aggression. Is it any surprise, in an anti-black world, that these gestures are confused by so many, those that mistake an invitation for a threat? How many have resented the invitation blackness makes and defended themselves against it with lethal consequence? The intensification of negativity is a way of thinking seriously with and through the various black colloquialisms to “break it down.” Blackness might be that spirit of inquiry and argumentation that, borrowing a phrase from Public Enemy, says “bring that beat back,” a gesture that says you didn’t really understand all there is yet to understand, feel all there is yet to feel, hear all there is yet to hear—within your own experience. We have no trouble seeing how black musical forms have not only done right by the diverse aesthetic practices they have engaged around the world, but have also often improved upon or enhanced the source material. They have at the very least made something else beautiful and discerning right alongside: complement, supplement, compliment. The global histories of jazz and hip-hop and the increasingly visible itinerary of black art song are just several of the more prominent examples. Could we develop a similar sensibility for appreciating how black thought attempts something kindred? So, too, black political movement. Sylvia Wynter (2006) has that fantastic line in her interview with the journal Proud Flesh: “When I write, I want to sound in theory the way Aretha Franklin sounds in song.” By that she means not only—only!—that she wants all that she writes to be liberating, but also that she wants to allow her thinking to unfold in a non-linear, creative fashion, as a poesis of thought. Many have waxed romantic about this poesis of late, but it is a process that involves all of the destructive and violent counter-forces of a peaceful martial art that can destroy your joints and break your bones and even end your life if you don’t figure out how to go with the flow. DB: “There is no such thing as a positive aggressive strength, only a negative defensive one.” This remark, as index of an aikido according to blackness, brings to mind a question you ask in one of your recently published articles: is there not a way to think … about a violence indifferent to hope, violence unmotivated by rage, violence irreducible to the dialectics of love and hate? Is there a violence that, as Nikki Giovanni once said, simply ‘cannot take the weight of a constant degradation’ (Fowler, 1992: 96), a violence that operates as a response per se, as what we might call defense without positive content? (2016a). I wonder whether it would make sense to connect the line of thought you’re pursuing here to the question of—the question that is—“the relation between defense and the outstretched hand.” I’m also struck by the resonance between your emphasis, following Wynter, on a mode of thinking that “unfold[s] in a non-linear fashion” and your articulation of negativity within the context of your writing. Such negativity is inseparable from the demand—which is “so much bigger”—in that it insists, amidst delimitative aggression, on this demand’s unfolding. If one means of delimiting this demand is imposed by the linearity of an “expectation of realization”—by investment in linear temporality, a horizon of the historically successive and successful—then negativity insists on, or as, a question of time. Specifically, it asks not whether the demand is realizable, but rather why the demand must be thought within, delimited by, the terms of realizability. In this moment, “the question posed by and as blackness” seems to emerge as the seeking, asking, desiring—the offering—of time itself. One of the ways in which I see your work posing this questioning of time, or offering this time of questioning, is through the motif of “interminability.” In fact, I sense that such interminability is at issue in what you’ve here described as “a ceaselessly universalizing universality” or, once again, as a demand in excess of any presently imaginable form of realization. The absence of a term adequate to the demand is also the absence of a terminus and of the calculability that such a point of arrival could claim to make possible. In this vein, you’ve described abolition as “the interminable radicalization of every radical movement” (2016b: 593) and invoked “an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement” (2016a). Your elaboration of this downward—one might say unfathomable—itinerary draws on an engagement with David Marriott’s account of the subjection of black persons to “the interminable time of meaningless, impersonal dying” (Marriott, 2007: 230; cited, with emphasis added, in Sexton, 2015: 168). I mention this particularly in view of your remark that the real according to which interminability unfolds is a matter of non-life. JS: I think you’re right to draw this link between “an aikido according to [or with] blackness” and my earlier, speculative thoughts on black feminist violence as a practice of “response per se, a defense without positive content.” We are, in a very basic way, always responding to the world, to ourselves, to the world in ourselves, to ourselves in the world, more than we are initiating, in thought and action. Any initiative or initiation would seem to be marked as such by a kind of permanent time lag or belatedness in which all thought is afterthought and all action is retroaction. But, then, we are also always active in that fundamental responsiveness, so much so that even passivity (whether waiting or resting or languishing) is a type of activity, that of our active being, that which brings forth life from the non-life with which it is commingled. Our being is active, but that doesn’t mean our being is always in-action. Why, in our political and intellectual circles, all the pointed concern about activity, why the worry, or fear, about being misunderstood as passive, individually and collectively? And why the close association between being passive and being victim or between passive-being and victim-being? Indeed, that tension between active/passive states provides the principal ground for the symbolic and material production of differences of race, gender, sexuality, class—all differently arrayed for different reasons, of course. I’m reminded, on that note, of a question Wilderson asked me years ago about an often overlooked passage in Fanon, from his critique of Octave Mannoni in Chapter 4 of Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon is meditating on the aim of his vocation as a politically engagé mental health clinician. (I have some thoughts, by the way, on what I think Fanon misses in his reading of Mannoni in my article, “Curtain of the Sky”). Here’s the passage: As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory whitening, but also to act in the direction of a change in the social structure. In other words, the black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear; but he should be able to take cognizance of a possibility of existence. In still other words, if society makes difficulties for him because of his color, if in his dreams I establish the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will not be that of dissuading him from it by advising him to “keep his place”; on the contrary, my objective, once his motivations have been brought into consciousness, will be to put him in a position to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict—that is, toward the social structures (Fanon, 2008b: 74-75). So, Fanon moves initially from this deceptively recognizable psycho-political activist guideline, where the unreason of alienated compliance gives way to the reason of disalienated resistance, to a parenthetical clinical modulation, where he no longer seeks to enable action per se, and action in a particular direction at that, but rather decision; decision in the proper sense, rather than the forced choice, the vel, of hallucinatory whiteness: “turn white or disappear.” No decision can be made within the terms of a forced choice, Fanon reveals, only a decision about the terms of its imposition. (Aside: the Philcox translation has it as: “whiten or perish.” I like the Markmann phrasing better here because it stays with the dynamics of hyper/in/visibility that Fanon is exploring, the peculiar problem of overdetermination from without, which is to say of anti-black racialization, of victimized appearance, but also of a certain ethics or aesthetics of disappearance that we can glean from a reading of Fanon. Kara Keeling (2007) and Huey Copeland (2013) and Simone Browne (2015) have elaborated on this nexus generatively in their respective work.) Wilderson’s question was to the effect of: What would a properly decided, freely chosen, passivity toward the social structure look like? Is there such a thing—ethically, politically—as radical passivity? (I ended my first book with a slightly modified reference from Thomas Carl Wall’s (1999) text bearing that very title. I wonder about this genuinely still and tend to think, yes, there is such a thing.) Žižek, to take another well-known example, has played on the pop psychological notion of “passive aggressive behavior” in his withering critique of so much leftist activism today. In The Parallax View, he writes: perhaps, one should assert this attitude of passive aggressivity as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard ‘interpassive’ mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make it sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change. In such a constellation, the first truly critical (‘aggressive’, violent) step is to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participate—Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ is the necessary first step which as it were clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation (Žižek, 2009: 342). Now, Zizek’s “Bartleby politics” are obviously not quietist, insofar as they are meant to prepare the way for a true political act. (Frédéric Neyrat [2014] has a related conception: “Rather than its heart, passivity should be the skin of politics. Without passivity, without a ‘negative capability,’ to refer to Keats’s notion, there isn’t any creative imagination, this chaotic imagination that generates the promises of new worlds.” And, not for nothing, Hortense Spillers (2003) makes another, earlier argument for “negative capability” in a pair of essays first published in the 1990s, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date” and “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race.” But the interregnum that opens up between the frenetic, aggressively passive “activism” of the current socio-ideological constellation—in which “the anxious expectation that nothing will happen” competes with “the desperate demand to do something”—and that new constellation brought into being by the introduction of some fundamental indeterminancy—a negativity that is, as you rightly note above, strictly unfathomable—that interregnum would seem to require the cultivation of an oxymoronic passive activity. Does it make sense to speak of a need for “passivism” (not to be confused with the homophonic term “pacifism”)? Think of the performative contradiction of trying to relax; the harder you try to attain it, the more it evades you. As every athlete worth their salt knows, your best performance requires your least effort. The more you relax, the more intensely you can exert yourself. In this scenario, you do more the less you try. It’s worth thinking about this seriously in the Trump era (using Trump here as a symbol for the consolidation of a whole post-civil rights, post-cold war, post-9/11 dispensation), given how greatly the ongoing reactionary campaign benefits from and requires any and all imagery of protest, political or pedestrian, as evidence—“alternative factual evidence”—supporting a narrative, ultimately, of white victimization and oppressive black power (and all the conflictual transliterations of this antagonism seen today—from the land and resource battles in the heartland to the travel bans at the borders). Given, that is, how frustratingly ineffective that protest seems to be in the face of an entire infrastructure that not only absorbs resistance, but solicits it too. It makes you nostalgic for the days of good old-fashioned repression and co-optation (days which, of course, never really existed in black), because at least then you knew you were on to something truly oppositional, subversive, alternate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, under such conditions, black (or blackened) artists are drawn with some regularity to paradoxical ideas about fighting anti-blackness by over-identifying with its desire to disappear or distort or disfigure blackness, essentially taking it over and enforcing it hyperbolically, satirically, even vindictively. I think Paul Beatty’s literature has done this to great effect for twenty years or more—from White Boy Shuffle (1996) to The Sellout (2015)—and you could add to that titles like Darius James’s Negrophobia (1992) and Kola Boof’s Sexy Part of the Bible (2011); consider as well the work of Betye Saar and Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles in the visual arts, the comedy of Dave Chappelle and Leslie Jones, or films like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (2005) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of the current conjuncture and lose track of the larger structural problem posed by blackness and anti-blackness, a problem that confounds the very distinction between structure and conjuncture in the first place. It is not just the exigencies of the present moment or the strategic and tactical challenges facing the Movement for Black Lives that raise the question of how to intervene, of how to introduce “invention into existence,” as Fanon put it. What I’ve called “a groundless or baseless politics that does not proceed from a margin of power, a politics with no (final) recourse to foundations of any sort, a politics forged from critical resources immanent to the situation, resources from anywhere and anyone, which is to say from nowhere and no one in particular” (Sexton, 2016b: 589); this approach to politics would seem to entail a total rejection of transcendence, a politics of pure immanence without the Archimedean point. And in one sense it is, but I am attuned to the difficulties arising from an abandonment of the negative in our enthusiasm for the affirmative, and so I want to think not so much about transcendence viz. immanence as about the various forms or modalities of transcendence and immanence that can be mobilized.

What I find most intriguing about the timbre of the argument of “The Case of Blackness,” and the black optimism it articulates against a certain construal of afro-pessimism, is the way that it works away from a discourse of black pathology only to swerve right back into it as an ascription to those found to be taking up and holding themselves in “the stance of the pathologist” in relation to black folks. I say this not only because there is, in this version of events, a recourse to psychoanalytic terminology (“fetishization,” “obsession,” “repetition,”), but also because there is at the heart of the matter a rhetorical question that establishes both the bad advice of a wild analysis and a tacit diagnosis affording a certain speaker’s benefit: “So why is it repressed?” The “it” that has been afflicted by the psychopathology of obsessional neurosis is the understanding, which is also to say the celebration, of the ontological priority or previousness of blackness relative to the antiblackness that establishes itself against it, a priority or previousness that is also termed “knowledge of freedom” or, pace Chandler, comprehension of “the constitutive force of the African American subject(s)” (Chandler 2000: 261). [21] What does not occur here is a consideration of the possibility that something might be unfolding in the project or projections of afro-pessimism “knowing full well the danger of a kind of negative reification” associated with its analytical claims to the paradigmatic (Moten 2004: 279). That is to say, it might just be the case that an object lesson in the phenomenology of the thing is a gratuity that folds a new encounter into older habits of thought through a reinscription of (black) pathology that reassigns its cause and relocates its source without ever really getting inside it. In a way, what we’re talking about relates not to a disagreement about “unthought positions” (and their de-formation) but to a disagreement, or discrepancy, about “unthought dispositions” (and their in-formation). I would maintain this insofar as the misrecognition at work in the reading of that motley crew listed in the ninth footnote regards, perhaps ironically, the performative dimension or signifying aspect of a “generalized impropriety” so improper as to appear as the same old propriety returning through the back door. Without sufficient consideration of the gap between statement and enunciation here, to say nothing of quaint notions like context or audience or historical conjuncture, the discourse of afro-pessimism, even as it approaches otherwise important questions, can only seem like a “tragically neurotic” instance of “certain discourse on the relation between blackness and death” (Moten 2007: 9).xiii Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak—as negation and impossibility—as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon’s sustained engagement finds Fanon situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic antiblack world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that “there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to ‘be’ black – in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of antiblackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world” (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to ‘be’ black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? [23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the antiblack world developed across his first several books: “Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies—they become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology” (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Moten’s contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and Language”: “A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment” (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—“above all, don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos.

Undoubtedly, history does matter in how we subjectively bear its weight, but the recording of history is also a subjective enterprise. What Head and Kennedy’s texts also demonstrate is the impossibility of comparative analysis of African and Black diasporic identity and Black (global) structural positionality since the former is multifarious and the latter is singular. However, both are the products of significant historical events underscoring what Anthony Paul Farley has described as “perfecting slavery”: “The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie...And slavery is death.”47 Achille Mbembe also posits that “[t]he slave trade had ramifications that remain unknown to us; to a large extent, the trade was the event through which Africa was born to modernity.”48 If one were to maintain that these texts were about the vagaries of specific events of twentieth century racial violence or the political status of Black people in the US and Africa, then Kennedy’s allusions to Africa seem as irreconcilable as Head’s reference to the KKK: “What did mothers, Black mothers, say to children whose fathers had been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in America? She had a picture of a Southern lynch mob, a whole group of white men and women. Two Black men hung dead from a tree. The lynchers were smiling.”49 Elizabeth’s question of the Klan’s presence in America is directly followed by reference to the Black woman she hallucinates, Medusa, as a displacement for the signifier of racial terror assigned to the KKK: “Medusa smiled like that [the lynchers] in her mental images, but Medusa was as close as her own breathing, and each night she looked straight into Medusa’s powerful Black eyes. It was tracing evil to its roots. The eyes of the lynch mob were full of comprehension, bold, consciousness, deliberate.”50 Kennedy’s inclusion of Africa, via one of the protagonist’s “selves” as Patrice Lumumba, his personification as the continent’s “jungle,” or the “ebony mask” with which he is bludgeoned links Africa and the US through the metaphysical properties of Blackness as Africanness. Throughout the drama, the long durée of racial slavery and its psychic afterlife appear on a continuum through the “libidinal economy”51 of violence. Funnyhouse of a Negro’s displacement of the sexual violence of miscegenation on the Black male figure of Patrice Lumumba and A Question of Power’s displacement of the racial violence of lynching (often a punishment over the perceived threat of miscegenation) onto the figure of Medusa demonstrate how the “epidermal racial schema” of Blackness, or its relegation to the physical alone, is auxiliary to the psychic fantasies in which Blackness, as a product of racial slavery, circulates. As such, I argue that we must investigate the Black psyche and the figurative registers of the lost archive of racial slavery therein to elucidate what is untranslatable in the magnitude of slavery’s breach. One such figuration, the semiotics of psychosis, illuminates Black anti-Blackness as a constitutive element of itself—a product of the white imagination within the foundation of the Black unconscious. This is recognition of one’s self as both double and split, a non-being (in relation to Human others) severed from a history one can’t quite remember but also cannot forget has been lost, what Brand describes as the “place which holds the before of history.”52 If slavery’s archive speaks through the living dead in these texts, it is through and against the language of history, the language of madness, that they attempt to speak “outside” of themselves.

For Black men’s access to these tools is in the first instance contingently granted only if it serves anti-Black interests, and in the second instance never bolsters any mode of Blackness into power. Rather, these tools are wielded to mete out punishment to Blackness that can never, and must never, be incorporated into hegemonic conceptions of what it means to be human or free, and what serves the interests of white patriarchal heteronormativity. Blackness yields no power within the state or within the intramural. Black social life “lived underground,” however, includes modes of psychic resistance we have yet to fully understand. This very resistance is inextricably linked to Black women’s (and other groups of Black people with less access to the instruments of “borrowed institutionality”) suffering made (il)legible within revolutionary movements. In fact, I argue that without devising proper analyses, discourse, and political strategies that understand the unique ways Black women’s, particularly poor Black women’s, suffering remains illegible within the intramural yet legible and malleable in the interests of anti-Blackness, we will fail in our attempts to unveil how the psychic afterlife of slavery persists within our most radical and revolutionary attempts to foment revolution and cultivate Black love: Black love for all positioned within the varied spectrum of subjectivities within Blackness.

I point to these practices of Black annotation and Black redaction as more examples of wake work. The orthographies of the wake require new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible. Redaction comes to us most familiarly through those blacked-out “sensitive lines” in certain government documents that contain information we are not allowed to read. Steve McQueen’s film End Credits (2012) consists of six hours of images and voiceover of the redacted FBI files of Paul Robeson. As I watched and listened, it again became clear to me that so much of Black intramural life and social and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures. [figure omitted] There is, in the Black diaspora (and I include the Continent here because of colonial histories and presents and trans*migration) a long history of Black life, of Black lives being annotated and redacted. There is, as well, continuous resistance to and disruption of those violent annotations and redactions. A 2015 conference on Black portraiture has the subtitle Imaging the Body and Re- Staging Histories. Each time I read that word imaging I read it doubly. That is, I read the word as imaging, “to make a representation of the external form of,” and also as imagining, “to form a mental image or concept of; to suppose or assume; the ability to form mental images of things that either are not physically present or have never been conceived or created by others.”12 If we understand portraiture to be both the “art of creating portraits” (image and text) and “graphic and detailed description,” how might we understand a variety of forms of contemporary Black public image- making in and as refusals to accede to the optics, the disciplines, and the deathly demands of the antiblack worlds in which we live, work, and struggle to make visible (to ourselves, if not to others) all kinds of Black pasts, presents, and possible futures? Much of the work of Black imaging and the work that those images do out in the world has been about such imaginings of the fullness of Black life. In Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Richard Powell (2008, xv) writes that “a significant segment of black portraiture stands apart from the rest of the genre, and not only because of the historical and social realities of racism. Rather, the difference often lies in the artistic contract between the portrayer and portrayed; conscious or unconscious negotiations that invest black subjects with social capital.” While Powell speaks here of Black artists and subjects’ negotiated and reciprocal imaginings, I want to think about those portraits outside of our own imaging and imagining in which, to borrow from Huey Copeland (2013), we seem “bound to appear.” There is a long history and present of resistance to, disruption and refashioning of images of blackness and Black people. There is a long history and present of imaging and imagining blackness and Black selves otherwise, in excess of the containment of the long and brutal history of the violent annotations of Black being: what Spillers, for example, called the hieroglyphics of the flesh; a history that is “the crisis of referentiality, the fictions of personhood, and the gap or incommensurability between the proper name and the form of existence that it signifies” (Hartman 2014). I am thinking here, ushering here, into the gap, Black annotation together with Black redaction, not as opposites, but as trans*verse and coextensive ways to imagine otherwise. Put another way, I want to think annotation in relation to the dysgraphia and the orthography of the wake; in relation to those photographs of Black people in distress that appear so regularly in our lives, whether the image of that suffering Black person comes from quotidian or extraordinary disasters, the photos of them often hit in the register of abandonment. The photographs do this even, or even especially, when they purport to “humanize” Black people—that is, they purport to make manifest “humanity” that we already know to be present.13 To be clear, just as I am not interested in rescuing the term girl (see “The Ship”), I am not interested in rescuing Black being(s) for the category of the “Human,” misunderstood as “Man,” or for the languages of development. Both of those languages and the material conditions that they re/produce continue to produce our fast and slow deaths. I am interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, and refuse it. I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror. By considering that relationship between imaging and imagining in the registers of Black annotation and Black redaction, I want to think about what these images call forth. And I want to think through what they call on us to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery—which is to say, in an ongoing present of subjection and resistance. Annotation appears like that asterisk, which is itself an annotation mark, that marks the trans*formation into ontological blackness. As photographs of Black people circulate as portraits in a variety of publics, they are often accompanied by some sort of note or other metadata, whether that notation is in the photograph itself or as a response to a dehumaning photograph, in order that the image might travel with supplemental information that marks injury and, then, more than injury. We know that, as far as images of Black people are concerned, in their circulation they often don’t, in fact, do the imaging work that we expect of them. There are too many examples of this to name: from the videotaped beating of Rodney King in 1991, to the murder of Oscar Grant, to the brutal murders of twenty-one trans women in the United States as of November 2015, to all of the circulating images of and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, to the ongoing deaths in transatlantic, trans-Mediterranean, and transcontinental crossings extending across the Black global diaspora. This is true even though and when we find images of Black suffering in various publics framed in and as calls to action or calls to feel with and for. Most often these images function as a hail to the non Black person in the Althusserian sense. That is, these images work to confirm the status, location, and already held opinions within dominant ideology about those exhibitions of spectacular Black bodies whose meanings then remain unchanged. We have been reminded by Hartman and many others that the repetition of the visual, discursive, state, and other quotidian and extraordinary cruel and unusual violences enacted on Black people does not lead to a cessation of violence, nor does it, across or within communities, lead primarily to sympathy or something like empathy. Such repetitions often work to solidify and make continuous the colonial project of violence. With that knowledge in mind, what kinds of ethical viewing and reading practices must we employ, now, in the face of these onslaughts? What might practices of Black annotation and Black redaction offer? What follows are three examples of what I am calling Black visual/textual annotation and redaction. Redaction and annotation toward seeing and reading otherwise; toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame; toward seeing something beyond a visuality that is, as Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) argues, subtended by the logics of the administered plantation. In “Home,” Toni Morrison (1998, 7) writes that she has consistently tried “to carve away the accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence embedded in raced language so that other kinds of perception were not only available but were inevitable.” I am imagining that the work of Black annotation and Black redaction is to enact the movement to that inevitable—a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see.14

If, as I have so far suggested, we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness) and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery. Dionne Brand does this wake work as she imagines otherwise in Verso 55, a verso in which she not only revisits A Map to the Door of No Return’s imagining of diaspora consciousness’s relation to that door as mythic and real location but also imagines an encounter between the returned from diaspora and those who were held in the cells of the forts.25 She imagines those who were held, reconfiguring—coming back together in wonder—the traces of their former selves rising up in greeting. Here the ancestors are like Marie Ursule, who, in At the Full and Change of the Moon, reanimates those Ursuline nuns who were her enslavers for the purpose of looking after her daughter Bola whom she dreams into a, into the, future. In Verso 55, Brand imagines that with the entrance of the pilgrims those who were held reconstitute from where they “lay in their corners, on their disintegrated floors, they lay on their wall of skin dust,” and stand to greet them; the ancestors, the only gods we had, their traces so much dust and haunt in those holding rooms. With these words Brand produces into the wake other than the “production of nothing—empty rooms, and silence, and lives reduced to waste”; she imagines other uses for “the scraps of the archive” (Hartman 2008, 4).26 Brand, like Hartman, encounters these rooms, this pain of and in the archive, but those rooms are not empty, and though the scraps of cotton, new world slave crop, may in fact be insufficient to our needs and to theirs, they are what we have to offer. And those dwellers of the rooms who had no thoughts of visitors, could not know, but might imagine, that anything, any part, of them would survive the holding, the shipping, the water, and the weather, drink those visitors in like violet tea and lemon air. Verso 55 is filled with the knowledge that this holding, these deaths, that shipping ought never to have happened, and with that knowledge and “the scraps of the archive” Brand imagines something that feels completely new. The rooms are not empty and the scraps are what we have to offer. But even if those Africans who were in the holds, who left something of their prior selves in those rooms as a trace to be discovered, and who passed through the doors of no return did not survive the holding and the sea, they, like us, are alive in hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon, in phosphorous, and iron; in sodium and chlorine. This is what we know about those Africans thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in Middle Passage; they are with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen. (Brand 2015) Brand does this in A Map to the Door of No Return as well, particularly with her “Ruttier for the Marooned in Diaspora,” which bristles with her refusal to think return, her dislodging of belonging, and her hard insisting on the facts of displacement and the living in and as the displaced of diaspora. NourbeSe Philip does this in Zong! through her destruction of the archive in order to tell “the story that cannot be told” but must still be told (Saunders 2008a, 65). We must be (and we already are) about the work of what I am calling wake work as a theory and praxis of the wake; a theory and a praxis of Black being in diaspora. I am trying to find the language for this work, find the form for this work. Language and form fracture more every day. I am trying, too, to find the words that will articulate care and the words to think what Keguro Macharia (2015) calls those “we formations.” I am trying to think how to perform the labor of them. Or what Tinsley (2008, 191) calls a “feeling and a feeling for” and what Glissant ([1995] 2006, 9) refers to as “knowing ourselves as part and as crowd.” This is what I am calling wake work. With Brand and Philip, I want to sound this language anew, sound a new language. Thinking, still, with Brand and Philip, who demand, always, a new thinking, I want to distinguish what I am calling Black being in the wake and wake work from the work of melancholia and mourning.27 And though wake work is, at least in part, attentive to mourning and the mourning work that takes place on local and trans*local and global levels, and even as we know that mourning an event might be interminable, how does one mourn the interminable event? Just as wake work troubles mourning, so too do the wake and wake work trouble the ways most museums and memorials take up trauma and memory. That is, if museums and memorials materialize a kind of reparation (repair) and enact their own pedagogies as they position visitors to have a particular experience or set of experiences about an event that is seen to be past, how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing? Might we instead understand the absence of a National Slavery Museum in the United States as recognition of the ongoingness of the conditions of capture? Because how does one memorialize the everyday? How does one, in the words so often used by such institutions, “come to terms with” (which usually means move past) ongoing and quotidian atrocity? Put another way, I’m interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to terror in the varied and various ways that our Black lives are lived under occupation; ways that attest to the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, and despite Black death. And I want to think about what this imagining calls forth, to think through what it calls on “us” to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery—which is to say in an ongoing present of subjection and resistance; which is to say wake work, wake theory. I want, too, to distinguish what I am calling and calling for as care from state-imposed regimes of surveillance.28 How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state? In what ways do we remember the dead, those lost in the Middle Passage, those who arrived reluctantly, and those still arriving? To quote Gaston Bachelard, whom I arrived at through Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s “Heavy Waters,” “water is an element ‘which remembers the dead’” (DeLoughrey 2010, 704). What, then, are the ongoing coordinates and effects of the wake, and what does it mean to inhabit that Fanonian “zone of non-Being” within and after slavery’s denial of Black humanity?29 Inhabiting here is the state of being inhabited/occupied and also being or dwelling in. In activating the multiple registers of “wake,” I have turned to images, poetry, and literature that take up the wake as a way toward understanding how slavery’s continued unfolding is constitutive of the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, and material dimensions of Black non/being as well as Black aesthetic and other modes of deformation and interruption. That set of work by Black artists, poets, writers, and thinkers is positioned against a set of quotidian catastrophic events and their reporting that together comprise what I am calling the orthography of the wake. The latter is a dysgraphia of disaster, and these disasters arrive by way of the rapid, deliberate, repetitive, and wide circulation on television and social media of Black social, material, and psychic death. This orthography makes domination in/visible and not/visceral. This orthography is an instance of what I am calling the Weather; it registers and produces the conventions of antiblackness in the present and into the future. A reprise and an elaboration: Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances, a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship (figure 1.4); the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)”; finally, wake means being awake and, also, consciousness. In the wake, the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee, to the regulation of Black people in North American streets and neighborhoods, to those ongoing crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, to the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school. As we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death. We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work; think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains in the form of the semiotics of the slave ship hold, the prison, the womb, and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake. At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as total climate. At stake, too, is not recognizing an insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being. How might we stay in the wake with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and live lives meant to be unlivable? These are questions of temporality, the longue durée, the residence and hold time of the wake. At stake, then is to stay in this wake time toward inhabiting a blackened consciousness that would rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and physical death. For, if we are lucky, we live in the knowledge that the wake has positioned us as no-citizen.30 If we are lucky, the knowledge of this positioning avails us particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imagining the world. And we might use these ways of being in the wake in our responses to terror and the varied and various ways that our Black lives are lived under occupation. I want In the Wake to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death: to think and be and act from there. It is my particular hope that the praxis of the wake and wake work, the theory and performance of the wake and wake work, as modes of attending to Black life and Black suffering, are imagined and performed here with enough specificity to attend to the direness of the multiple and overlapping presents that we face; it is also my hope that the praxis of the wake and wake work might have enough capaciousness to travel and do work that I have not here been able to imagine or anticipate.

Fanon (1968: 37) writes, “decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog—a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for “whoever says ‘rape’ says Black” (Fanon), whoever says “prison” says Black, and whoever says “AIDS” says Black (Sexton)—the “Negro is a phobogenic object” (Fanon). Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal—not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro” has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today—even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement—invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a “program of complete disorder.” One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one’s politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the word “prison” being linked to the word “abolition”? What are this movement’s lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say “gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all.” Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness—and the state of political movements in the U.S. today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: “geewhiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all.” Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of Black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society—with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If, through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, that work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject (whether a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of “absolute dereliction.” It is a “scandal” that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.

STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a re- lationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and structural violence. Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s disparate rela- tionship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists (or is perceived to resist) the disci- plinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples’ subsumption by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective and ob- jective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which is radi- cally di erent from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by violence when s/ he breaks with the ruling discursive codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the state’s disciplinary violence with the revolution- ary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective verti- go. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the struggles that arise from intra-Human con icts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movement’s demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain territo- rial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional’s (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But for the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual frame- works of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns. The structural, or paradigmatic, violence that subsumes Black insurgents’ cognitive maps and conceptual frameworks, sub- sumes my scholarly e orts as well. As a Black scholar, I am tasked with making sense of this violence without being over- whelmed and disoriented by it. In other words, the writing must somehow be indexical of that which exceeds narration, while being ever mindful of the incomprehension the writing would foster, the failure, that is, of interpretation were the indices to actually escape the narrative. The stakes of this dilemma are al- most as high for the Black scholar facing his/her reader as they are for the Black insurgent facing the police and the courts. For the scholarly act of embracing members of the Black Liberation Army as beings worthy of empathic critique is terrifying. One’s writing proceeds with fits and starts which have little to do with the problems of building the thesis or finding the methodology to make the case. As I write, I am more aware of the rage and anger of my reader- ideal (an angry mob as readers) than I am of my own interven- tions and strategies for assembling my argument. Vertigo seizes me with a rash of condemnations that emanate from within me and swirl around me. I am speaking to me but not through me, yet there seems to be no other way to speak. I am speaking through the voice and gaze of a mob of, let’s just say it, White Americans; and my efforts to marshal a mob of Black people, to conjure the Black Liberation Army smack of compensatory gestures. It is not that the BLA doesn’t come to my aid, that they don’t push back, but neither I nor my insurgent allies can make the case that we are worthy of our suffering and justified in our actions and not terrorists and apologists for terror who should be locked away forever. How can we be worthy of our suffering without being worthy of ourselves? I press on, even though the vertigo that seizes me is so overwhelming that its precise nature—sub- jective, stemming from within me, or objective, catalyzed by my context, the raging throng—cannot be determined. I have no ref- erence points apart from the mob that gives no quarter. If I write “freedom fighter,” from within my ear they scream “terrorist”! If I say “prisoner of war,” they chant “cop killer”! Their denun- ciations are sustained only by assertion, but they ring truer than my painstaking exegesis. No rewall protects me from them; no liberated psychic zone offers me sanctuary. I want to stop and turn myself in.

The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call “cruel optimism” for blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about redress, equality, freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that always lies beyond reach. The objective of the Political is to keep blacks in a relation to this political object—in an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is detrimental because it strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being. The pursuit of the object certainly has an “irrational” aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means without expectation; instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In other words, the pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the continued widening of the gap between historical reality and fantastical ideal. Black nihilism is a “demythifying” practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its fantastical object. Once we denude political hope of its axiological and ethical veneer, we see that it operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2) shielding this alternative [End Page 221] from rigorous historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an unknown future, 3) delimiting the field of action to include only activity recognized and legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different philosophical perspectives. The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of “happiness” and “life.” It terrifies with the dread of “no alternative.” “Life” itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternative—a discursive and political organization beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the binary “alternative/no-alternative” ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the onto-existential horizon. The terror of the “no alternative”—the ultimate space of decay, suffering, and death—depends on two additional binaries: “problem/solution” and “action/inaction.” According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of “the problem”; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegel’s aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the “problem” with the pristine being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach of hope’s solution—every problem is connected to the kernel of its own eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that the “solution” is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a “solution” is nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies on what we might call the “trick of time” to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time “not-yet-realized,” a future tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its “solutions” from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not subject to history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the “past” or “present.” Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreating to a “not-yet” and “could-be” temporality. This “trick” of time offers a promise of possibility that can only be realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined. In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of possibility, never to satiate or bring fulfillment. This politics secures its hegemony through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing) any other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant (re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions cannot really exist within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future tense. The “trick” of time and political solution converge on the site of “action.” In critiquing the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. “But we can’t just do nothing! We have to do something.” The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between action/ inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These exclusionary operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate action takes place in the political—the political not only claims futurity but also action as its property. To “do something” means that this doing must translate into recognizable political activity; “something” is a stand-in for the word “politics”—one must “do politics” to address any problem. A refusal to “do politics” is equivalent to “doing nothing”—this nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a “zero-state” as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). Black nihilism rejects this “trick of time” and the lure of emancipatory solutions. To refuse to “do politics” and to reject the fantastical object of politics is the only “hope” for blackness in an antiblack world.

I will set aside the pedagogical question of how an instructor should best handle classroom situations like the one created by both Brittney’s comment and my TA’s response to it. What I want to focus on here aresome of the ethical and epistemological issues surrounding Brittney’s belief that the image of black men as threatening and frightening is real—that is, more than a cultural stereotype—and she “knows” this because of her physiological, affective response to them. She really is scared when she encounters black men, as she might have said. She was not just making it up to try to discriminate against them, and her body proved it. Since nothing is more real or irrefutable than felt physiological responses—unchosen and unwilled, after all—then her body’s alarmed response to black men means that they are frightening. Philosophy has toreckon with that reality, Brittney might have continued, and if it cannot,vthen it is a load of politically correct crap that is not worth the bother.How should critical philosophers of race respond to claims such asvthese? More specifically, how might their responses help transform whitevpeople’s racist behavior and embodied beliefs, rather than encourage themvto cling defensively to the felt certainty of their white privileged experi-ence (as I believe my TA’s response to Brittney did)? This is a difficult taskvsince, as Charles Mills states in the epigraph, white people often arevincapable of understanding their behavior as racist due to the white ignorance required by the racial contract. I believe that Brittney genu-inely did not see what was morally objectionable about her fear of blackmen. This is not solely, or perhaps even primarily a cognitive difficulty,however, as I will argue. Like most contemporary white ignorance/ knowledge, her affective “knowledge” that black men are threatening operated primarily on a non-cognitive, bodily level. 1 While I do not agree with most of what Brittney said or implied, I thinkshe is right that philosophy (and critical race theory more broadly) mustreckon with the lived reality of human physiology and affects. And this isso even—or maybe especially?—in the case of politically charged subjectssuch as white racism. To be fully successful, critical philosophy of race and critical race theory need to examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of white racism, but also its physiological operations. In societies in which de jure Jim Crow has been eliminated, white privilege continues to operate as much, if not more through human biology than through mental beliefs, hidden and “invisible” because it is a product of gut reactions rather than conscious decision or choice. 2 In dialogue with Mills, I will argue that white ignorance is more physiological than cog-nitive and that philosophical appeals to human physiology and biology need not be reductive, as they often historically have been. Critically examining the physiology of white racism can help remove a weapon from the arsenal of white domination by invalidating commonplace and sim-plistic appeals to biology to justify white supremacy and white privilege. I realize that combining the topics of physiology and biology with those of race and white domination is dangerous. The Western world has a long, destructive history of using biology reductively to justify white supremacy and related forms of oppression. Nazi Germany often is a prime example,but it is important to remember that the United States and many othercountries were engaged in eugenics in the first half of the twentiethcentury (McWhorter 2009). And nineteenth-century scientific practicessuch as craniology were created precisely for the purpose of proving theinferiority of non-white races (Gould 1981). For these reasons, positive explorations of biology and physiology have tended to be out of thequestion for contemporary critical philosophy of race and critical racetheory. Even if we utilize contemporary medical knowledge of human physiology, we cannot be certain that we are not replicating racist and sexist biases embedded in our time and place. As valid as all these concerns are, however, it would be even more dangerous for critical philosophers of race and critical race theorists to refuse to engage with the disciplines of human physiology and biology. 3 To begin, it is not the case that the medical and biological sciences necessarily produce reductive understandings of human existence. The sciences increasingly are operating with sophisticated biopsychosocial understandings of how psyche, body, and environments transact to produce human health and disease (more sophisticated understandings than many philosophers work with, in fact). 4 It is also not the case that systems of white supremacy have always heavily relied on biological arguments. Formal apartheid in South Africa (1948–1994), for example,was far more dependent on manufactured beliefs about cultural differ-ences between whites and blacks than on alleged biological hierarchies(Dubow 2010). While it is undeniable that the discipline of biology, along with related fields such as anthropology and evolutionary theory, have a nasty history of promoting white supremacy and white privilege, it can be and sometimes has been untangled from them. In cases where white supremacy relies on alleged cultural or environmental differences, pro-ceeding as if white supremacy and biology are inseparable means that we might be waging the wrong fight. 5 And in cases where biology can help us uncover some of the hidden operations of white privilege, dismissing biology as reductively racist means that we might be overlooking a powerful ally in the struggle against white domination.The result of refusing to engage the biological and medical sciences is to concede the domain of human physiology to white racism, and this is a problematic concession to make. It is to give up on any sort of critical understanding of how a person’s physiological responses to the world are constituted, and thus also might be reconstituted for the better. It is, for example, to allow a white woman’s tensed, knotted stomach at the sightof a black man to stand as an allegedly apolitical and “natural” event.Brittney’s affective and physiological responses to black men were indeedreal: she felt them, and they should not be dismissed as if they did notoccur. She was right about that. But they are not any kind of proof of asupposedly inherent threat posed by black men. Critical philosophy of raceneeds to be able to explain how both of these claims are true, and doing so requires critically approaching rather than eschewing physiology andbiology.When trying to change white people’s racist attitudes and comport-ments, critical philosophers and other theorists of race often start in thewrong place by focusing on conscious beliefs. We might think, as the earlyW. E. B. Du Bois did, that if we could just provide accurate informationthat would eliminate white people’s misconceptions about African Ameri-cans, then their mistaken belief in white supremacy would dissolve. Andif more information alone is not enough to do the trick, then it can besupplemented with moral injunctions that use guilt and shame to get white people to change their minds about people of color. In either case,faulty beliefs about people of color are the supposed culprits. But as DuBois himself later realized, white misunderstandings and ignorance of people of color are not accidental, and they are not likely to be changed by moral exhortations. A kind of racial occlusion, they are a product of white people’s unconscious racial habits, which have deep roots and are strongly invested—albeit not consciously—in maintaining the economic, psycho-logical, and global domination of people of color (Du Bois 1984, 296). White occlusions regarding people of color, and of race more broadly, are part of what Mills has called an epistemology of ignorance that enables and even requires white people to know the world in systematically distorted ways(Mills 1998, 18, 93). 6 White ignorance is not an accidental feature of the world—although itlikes to be understood in this way. If white people’s (mis)understandingsof the world seem like a product of happenstance, then they can appearrelatively harmless and easy to correct. Sure, one might say, white people might have gaps in their knowledge about people of color, but their ignorance is not significant and does not have any major impact on the world. White ignorance is much more devious and malign than thispeaceful description depicts, however. “Imagine,” as Mills urges, “anignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that isactive, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—not at all confined to theilliterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land,indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge ” (Mills 2007, 13).Because white ignorance functions as official knowledge of “inventedOrients, invented Africas, invented Americas, with a correspondinglyfabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people whonever were—Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambos,” it tends tobe extremely powerful and effective (Mills 1998, 18–19). It helps produceand secure a white-dominated world that is comfortable for, and flattering to, white people.The epistemic distortions generated by white ignorance thus do nothinder white people. In fact, they are incredibly functional: they allowwhite people to socially, psychologically, and financially thrive at theexpense of people of color (Mills 1998, 18). Yet at the same time, as Millsargues, the distortions of white ignorance morally handicap white people.They produce tremendous obstacles for the ethical behavior of whitepeople, toward people of color in particular but also toward other white people at times. 7 It is not just that the racial contract contains rigorousepistemological clauses, in other words. Its twisted epistemologicalrequirements also entail a particular moral relationship to the world thatis highly unethical. The resulting handicap is twofold. Even as they mightthrive in other respects, white people are largely incapable of behaving ethically especially with regard to racial matters, and they generallycannot see or understand themselves as unethical and thus they havelittle chance of changing their behavior for the better. According to Mills, white ignorance is primarily a cognitive dysfunc-tion. 8 Even as he insightfully examines the “microspace of the [raced]body” and the perception of black bodies in particular as “moving bubble[s]of wilderness,” white people’s distorted understandings of nonwhite bodies(and the world more generally) are never themselves described as embod-ied (1998, 51, 53). They are mental. As in the epigraph, Mills invokes thecognitive in claiming that “ white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the mostpervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, andenslavement” (Mills 1998, 19; I italicized “mental” and “cognitive,” allother italics are Mills’s). The inverted epistemology of the racial contractis “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions”requiring “a certain set of structured blindnesses and opacities” (Mills1998, 18, 19). Those blindnesses are “not, of course, due to biology, theintrinsic properties of [a white person’s] epidermis, or physical deficienciesin the white eye,” but to a pattern of white cognitive (mis)perception thatsystematically distorts the world for the ends of white domination (Mills2007, 18).In contrast with Mills, I want to invoke biology—not in the sense thatwhite people have deficiencies in their retinas or optical cones, but in thesense that their racialized blindness can be located in their opacities of their physiology—to understand the operations of white ignorance.This claim appreciates Du Bois’s shift to understanding white dominationas unconscious, which in turn resonates strongly with Mills’s vibrantdescription of white ignorance as aggressive, active, and dynamic. But itpushes further to posit that contemporary white people’s supremacist understandings of race are located not just in their unconscious habits,but also in their bodily constitution (which of course is related to uncon-scious habits). Human physiology is where a great deal of supposed non-bodily aspects of human existence is located. Philosophers (andperhaps also others) tend to be ignorant of the physiology of phenomenasuch as white racism, however, because of their general dismissal of thebody. Critical philosophers of race will make better headway against white racism if they acknowledge that it can function physiologically. By “physiologically” I mean something stronger or more specific than the phenomenological claim that white racism is embodied. White racism certainly is manifest in the embodied habits of white (and sometimes also non-white) people, and the phenomenological analysis of racial embodi-ment has developed helpful understandings of the operations of whiteprivilege and white supremacy. 9 As in the case of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,however, phenomenology’s approach to embodiment often is set in oppo-sition to the biological, psychological, and medical sciences, arguing for “aforeswearing of science” because “scientific points of view . . . are alwaysnaïve and at the same time dishonest” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, vii, ix). Thisdismissal is problematic given that white racism is bodily constitutive of more than just white people’s physical comportment, gestures, and stylesof interaction with others. White racism also can help shape white people’s biochemical make-up and activities: for example, their serotonin and other neurotransmitter levels, the activity patterns of their autonomic nervous system, their predisposition for gastric tachyarrhythmia, their levels of hormone production, and so on. We might say that the tenets of the racial contract need to be examined not just morally and epistemo-logically, but also biologically. To be fully effective, critical philosophy of race needs to be in conversation with the medical sciences: neurobiologists, gastroenterologists, psychoneuroimmunologists, and other medical and health professionals who understand human biologyand physiology well. What then do we learn from these conversations? The main focus of themedical sciences when they study race and racism tends to be on thedetrimental health effects of racial discrimination and oppression forpeople of color. For example, hypertension, high blood pressure, poorcardiovascular activity, and other physiological conditions associated withincreased mortality rates have been linked with incidents of racial hos-tility and socioeconomic stress experienced by African Americans andother racial minorities in the United States (Ryff and Singer 2003; see alsoWilliams 1999). Interestingly, what is never discussed to my knowledge isthe flipside of this research’s conclusions, namely that the relatively goodhealth of many white Americans—lower incidence of hypertension, high blood pressure, and so on—can be considered a product of white privilegerather than a neutral or “normal” physiological condition. (I will return tothis flipside shortly.) While white people sometimes are mentioned as aracial group in medical studies, they virtually never are discussed as agroup of people who systematically benefit, medically and otherwise, fromtheir race. Categories of race sometimes are used in the medical and lifesciences, in other words, and occasionally even racism is acknowledged asa problem that people of color confront, 10 but the topic of white domin-ation’s effect on white people is largely absent. And yet it hovers in the margins of at least some scientific studies,which makes it possible to hypothesize about the operations of whiteprivilege and domination in the physiology of white people. 11 Take the example of nausea, a queasy or tense feeling in the stomach that is acontrol mechanism inhibiting food intake and sometimes producing vom-iting. What is interesting about this control mechanism is that it is notmerely physiological. It also is psychological and, as psychologist R. M.Stern explains, “it [sometimes] occurs in threatening situations that have little to do with eating” (2002, 590). While perhaps initially puzzling, this characteristic of nausea turns out to make sense: when threatened, the body’s autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity changes in ways that decrease or even stop gastric motor activity (Stern 2002, 590). The stomach and intestines stop digesting their contents, in other words, andso it is not a good idea to keep putting food into them. In the face of a threat—which can be a toxic piece of food, or it can be a threat having nothing to do with food whatsoever—the body has a control mechanism to keep the stomach and intestines empty while they are not functioning. While the different nausea thresholds of white, Chinese, and African American people are briefly discussed in Stern’s study, topics of racism and white domination are never explicitly broached. The non-food-related “threats” that are mentioned in the study are public speaking and acting in a play. But the specific phenomenon of threat is used to explain the psychophysiology of nausea, and I suggest that racial threats, both real and perceived, fall into the category of menacing situations that can contribute to nausea. When a person feels threatened because of a racial situation, her physiology can be altered: chemical levels can change, gastromotor activity can cease impacting the absorption of nutrients that help constitute her flesh, bones and blood, etc. This is true for anyone in a threatening racial situation, whatever hisor her race.Although I am focusing here on white people, such as Brittney,who experience themselves as racially threatened, I must underscore thathistorically and presently white people themselves are the primary groupthat poses a threat to other people. White people almost exclusively arethe terrorizing force that uses race to menace people of color, not the otherway around. I am not, in other words, flattening the racial terrain with aturn to white people’s physiology, nor am I equating a perceived threat (forexample, of black men experienced by Brittney) with a real threat (forexample, of white lynchers). What I am claiming is that white dominationhas different but nonetheless constitutive effects on the biology of whitepeople and people of color and that the end of white domination willrequire not just significant financial, legal, educational, and politicalchanges, but also psychophysiological transformations. White people’s mistreatment of people of color as inherently inferior is found in all kindsof registers, not just the physiological, but it manifests itself in the latterdomain too. As long as white women’s stomachs seize up in fear of black men, we know that white privilege and white supremacy continue to “invisibly” thrive. The hidden physiological dimensions of white privilege—in this case, specifically white class privilege—also can be found in recent neurocardiological research on the heart. This claim may seem puzzling since, as mentioned above, the benefits of white privilege to white healthare never discussed to my knowledge in any current neurocardiologicalstudies. To see white privilege at work in them, one must read with an eyefor something that, in a significant respect, is not there. This does notmean, however, that white privilege is a foreign topic being artificiallyinserted into the research. It is not the case, as the familiar accusationgoes, that white racism never would have been an issue if the criticalphilosopher of race (or person of color) had not introduced it. 12 Something like a gestalt shift is necessary; we need to change what we are looking for when we read. As we will see, while the study examined below saysnothing about the health effects of white privilege for middle and upperclass white people, the topic simultaneously is included, written with the very same words that do not speak of it. Dubbed the “heart brain” because of its sophisticated intrinsic nervoussystem, which “enables it to learn, remember, and make functional deci-sions independent of the cranial brain,” the heart affects not just thebody’s autonomic regulation, but also its emotional processing (McCraty and Childre 2004, 232). Afferent neuronal signals travel from the heart tothe brain, affecting the central nucleus of the amygdala, which is a keyemotional center (McCraty and Childre 2004, 233, 235). This means thatfolk associations of the heart with love, compassion, and spirituality canbe understood as more than metaphorical or figurative (McCraty andChildre 2004, 230). These other-directed emotions and states of being areassociated with both an appreciative openness to the world and a com-plementary sense that the world is open to you. Both experiences of openness, moreover, are correlated with a physically healthy heart brain. A heart brain that is functioning optimally is the physical manifestationof an open relationship to the world.Evidence of the heart brain’s optimal functioning can be found in therhythms and patterns of a person’s heart rate, as indicated by itstachograms (indicating heartbeats per minute) and its power spectraldensity (indicating the frequency, or the specific electric current, of thebeating heart) (McCraty and Childre 2004, 237). Consider three differentcases: one of negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, or anger; amore neutral case of relaxation; and finally a case of positive emotionssuch as appreciation. As we will see, the terms “negative” and “positive”here correspond with the harmful or beneficial physiological effects of various emotional states. For example, when a person is angry, her heartrate tends to be fast, erratic, and characterized by rhythms in the lowfrequency band of the power spectrum (0.0033–0.04 hertz). This type of heart rate decreases parasympathetic activity in the ANS (autonomicnervous system), which is significant because the parasympathetic branchof the ANS regulates sleeping, digesting, and other bodily activitiesassociated with rest and relaxation (McCraty and Childre 2004, 233). If the balance in the ANS tips too often away from the parasympathetic andtoward the sympathetic branch, the latter of which stimulates “fight orflight” responses to danger, the body does not have enough time or energyto renew and repair itself. The result of this imbalance tends to be healthproblems associated with chronic anxiety and stress, such as cardiovas-cular disease and antecedent conditions such as hypertension (Malpas2010). In contrast, when a person is relaxed and not angry, her heart ratepattern tends to be relatively slow, less erratic, and marked by increasedpower in the high frequency band (0.15–0.4 hertz). Correspondingly,parasympathetic activity in the brain also increases (McCraty and Childre2004, 237).The sympathetic branch of the ANS should not be thought of as simplyopposed to the parasympathetic branch, however. The relationshipbetween the two branches actually is one of complementarity since theconstant, basic activity of the sympathetic branch is crucial to the body’sability to maintain its internal stability (homeostasis). Thus, the idealphysiological situation is for the two branches to be synchronized, and this takes place when the heart rate is highly ordered and smooth. This typeof heart rate tends to occur when a person feels positive emotions such asappreciation. When a person experiences the emotion of appreciation orgratitude, her parasympathetic activity increases and coordinates withthe activities of the sympathetic branch. The rhythms of the appreciativeheart are not identical to those of the relaxed heart, however. While bothare marked by increased parasympathetic activity in comparison to theangry heart, the appreciative heart oscillates at a different frequency(0.04–0.14 hertz, centering around 0.1), one that allows better resonanceand coherence across different physiological systems.When a person feels grateful or appreciative, her entire biologicalsystem tends to pulse in smooth coordination with itself. The result of such synchronization is health benefits such as “increased efficiency influid exchange, filtration and absorption between the capillaries andtissues” and other physiological changes that increase “systemwide energyefficiency and metabolic energy savings” (McCraty and Childre 2004, 238).Sometimes this event is described subjectively as an experience of increased “flow,” of clarity, creativity and invigoration in which blockagesand barriers in one’s life have (at least temporarily) dissolved (McCratyand Childre 2004, 231–32). The feeling is one of possibilities opening up,along with the physical and emotional energy to pursue them. As acorresponding study argues, while negative emotions “narrow people’sideas about possible actions,” positive emotions “widen the scope of atten-tion, broaden repertoires of desired actions, . . . and increase openness tonew experiences” (Fredrickson 2008, 450). This can be a spiritual experi-ence for some, in which one feels an increased connection with otherpeople and the world at large. Whether spiritual or not, however, positiveemotions such as appreciation have been linked scientifically to increasedphysiological efficiency, “substantiat[ing] what many people have long intuitively known: positive emotions bolster one’s ability to meet life’schallenges with grace and ease, optimize cognitive capacities, sustainconstructive and meaningful relationships with others, and foster goodhealth” (McCraty and Childre 2004, 249).So, the primary study’s authors ask, why are not more people doing something to pursue positive emotions on a day-to-day basis? Theiranswer provides a trigger for the gestalt shift needed to reveal white classprivilege: Why do genuine positive emotional experiences remain transient and unpre-dictable occurrences for most people? We propose that a main factor under-lying this discrepancy is a fundamental lack of mental and emotionalself-management skills. In other words, people generally do not make effortsto actively infuse their daily experiences with greater emotional qualitybecause they sincerely do not know how. (McCraty and Childre 2004, 241) The authors proceed to offer a number of feedback techniques, or “inter- ventions,” that can improve emotional experience by increasing awarenessof and altering heart rates and frequencies. These can be sophisticated“heart math” techniques or as simple as deep breathing exercises, whichmodulate the heart’s rhythm and thus can change one’s emotional-neurological state (McCraty and Childre 2004, 243–46, 236).The authors’ suggestions are intriguing, and in many respects theiroverall research program integrating emotions, cardio-physiology, andneurology is both medically and philosophically important. It provides aconcrete example of how to non-reductively appreciate the medical-physiological aspects of human emotional life. But it is woefully focused onthe individual isolated from the social-political world, which enables theauthors to offer extremely whitewashed guidance for improving humanemotional-cardio health. By “whitewashed,” I mean saturated with whiteclass privilege. Whether or not the authors are white or come from classprivileged backgrounds (I do not know, nor is it necessarily important toknow), their interventions implicitly address only the emotional-cardiodifficulties of middle- and upper-class white human beings, and excludethose of non-white people. They focus on people who are not regulartargets of white racism and who do not daily benefit from the “invisible”ease and comfort in life provided by white class privilege. In that way, theauthors’ suggestions suffer from white solipsism, erasing or ignoring thelives and health of those who are not white.To better see the white class privilege at work in this study, let usconsider an all-too-common experience for African Americans of being presumed to be criminal. George Yancy powerfully describes the phenom-enon of hearing the click of a car door being locked by a white person inside when he or she sees a black person on the street. Much more than just a simple sound, the click is “part of a racial and racist web of significance” that constructs “the occupants’ sense of themselves as ‘safe’(and white) [which] is purchased at the expense of denigrating the blackbody as unsafe” (Yancy 2012, 31). If the clicks could speak, we could hearthem establish the ontological stability and epistemological credibility of white identity: “ Click (innocent) . . . Click (reliable). Click ( our whitespace) . . . Click (civilized). Click (law abiding)” (Yancy 2012, 31). Whitepeople’s security and comfort is established in opposition to the dangerousblack person, “fragment[ing] my existence and cut[ting] away at myintegrity,” as Yancy explains (Yancy 2012, 33). The same clicks proclaim-ing white goodness simultaneously tell him and all black people—for theytoo can hear the clicks outside the car—that they are subpersons: “ Click (thug), click (criminal), click (thief)” and, ultimately, “ Click , click, click,click, click (nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger)” (Yancy 2012, 33).This is not an isolated or atypical experience for black people in theUnited States. In addition to the clicking experience, there is the elevator effect—again powerfully described by Yancy—in which white women aloneonanelevatorvisiblytenseupwhenablackmangetsonboard(Yancy2008,5).As mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay, Brent Staples alsowrites of the handbag-clutching march white women assume when they seehim on the street (Staples 1986, 54). Cornel West documented his experi-ence with the police when he was Driving While Black, that is, stoppedthree times in ten days for driving too slowly in an upscale residential area(Yancy2012,44–45;seealsoWest1993,x–xi).Andontheflipside,TimWise,a white man, describes the surprise on a white police officer’s face whenWise rolled down the darkened window of his beat-up, anti-David-Duke-bumper-stickered car when he was stopped for no apparent reason (dis-cussed in Yancy 2012, 45–46; see also Wise 2005, 39).As the shocked officer fumbled to find an explanation for pulling Wise over, it was clear to Wisethat he was targeted because his car marked him as black. Finally, there isthe corresponding, ubiquitous experience of black people’s being tailed bystore clerks or plainclothes officers when they do their shopping. As Yancyexplains, the “presumptive innocence” granted to white people spares themthis unnerving and infuriating experience. A white person “can walk intostores [or drive down the street] without anyone doubting the integrity of his [or her] character and intentions” (Yancy 2012, 164).These incidents might seem (to white people) minor, even trivial—afterall, there are no physical or legal obstacles to a black person’s entering anelevator or a store, for example, and traveling to the desired floor ormaking the needed purchases. What is the big deal about an unfriendlyclerk or an uptight elevator companion? The answer is that in thecumulative effect of seemingly small details such as these lies a particularworld that black people are forced to inhabit, one that is substantiallydifferent than the world inhabited by white people. The worlds of whiteand black people are not always, or perhaps ever the same, even thoughblack and white people might inhabit (sometimes, anyway) the samephysical space. “To be white in a white world,” as Yancy reveals, “is to beextended by that world’s contours. The world opens up, reveals itself as aplace called home, a place of privileges and immunities, a space forachievement, success, freedom of movement” (Yancy 2012, 45).The world generally is not open to black people in this way. Even whenthey are not, for example, tailed by a clerk or stopped by a cop on a givenday, the possibility that they could be is ever present, adding to everyexcursion into the public sphere an element of anxiety. As Yancy explains, black people are “exposed to a daily enactment of white racialized drama” that undercuts their efforts to “secur[e] existential and psychological safety in a white racist world” (Yancy 2012, 156). Whether in a store, atwork or school, or merely walking down the street, they do not get toarrive on the scene as white people do, “with socially fortified . . . iden-tities that are certain of who they are” and whose “psychic integrity” is not at risk (Yancy 2012, 131). As a result, even though explicit Jim Crow lawshave long been removed from the books in the United States, the Ameri-can world is not a smooth space of easy passage for black people in theway that it generally is for white people. The world presents obstacles toblack people at just about every turn.Even though the obstacles are not physical, their effects can be. Kim Anderson, an African American lawyer, captures this point well as sheexplains her experience being tailed: So nobody, when I walk in a store, nobody says, “Oh, that’s Kim Anderson, African-American, female lawyer, went to Columbia,” they just see a blackwoman. I was in a store once, just walking around thinking I was going tobuy a pair of jeans. This clerk’s following me around. So I said, “Why are youfollowing me around? I’m not going to steal anything. Leave me alone. I’mnot going to take something.” When you’re confronted with racism, that covert racism, your stomach just gets so tight. You can feel it almost moving through your body; almost you can feel it going into your bloodstream.(Quoted in California Newsreel 2008, 7) We should understand Anderson’s last point literally. When she describes white racism coursing through the veins and tissues of her body, she is right. It is highly likely that the emotional tension she felt in the store was simultaneously a physiological event in which cortisol and other stress-related hormones elevated her heart rate and stimulated the sym-pathetic branch of her ANS (Boyles 2010). The “outside” of the social world cannot be sharply divided from the “inside” her body. The racism “outside” Anderson’s body simultaneously was “inside,” altering her heart brain (for the worse in this case).