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Black lives matter and black lives matter and black lives matter. This homographic reading of the most salient political statement of recent years speaks to the torsions of blackness, matter, and life that have come to define our contemporary era. In “Unbearable Blackness,” Jared Sexton (2015) argues with regard to the triangulation of these concerns that antiblack fantasies “do not render blacks, like so much of the planet, subject to death in an economy of disposability; rather, they subject blacks to ‘the interminable time of meaningless, impersonal dying’” (p.168). In the wake of recent grand jury decisions not to prosecute the murders of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, to name only the most widely publicized cases, Sexton’s claims register most strongly in the state’s refusal to allow these deaths to die. They are caught instead in a biopolitical apparatus that suspends racial blackness between a life unrecognized as such and an illegible form of death that can never pass into reason. Against this timeless, spectral dying, we can read the declaration that “Black Lives Matter” as a call to return racial blackness to a form that matters, to a form, in other words, that is matter. On this score, I ask: how do black life and death become matter, and what is at stake in the demand that they should assume such form? Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) dramatize these questions through protagonist Lauren Olamina and her condition of hyperempathy. In this article, I explore hyperempathy as a speculative embodiment of “pornotroping” (Spillers, 2003) to understand how racial blackness structures current theorizations of matter. Questions about the proper scale, scope, and character of matter have assumed a renewed sense of urgency given the emergence of the Anthropocene, a distinct geological epoch in which human activity has become so influential as to alter fundamental aspects of the Earth System. While ecologist Eugene Stoermer and Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced the current definition of the term in the 1980s, we have since witnessed a growing scientific consensus about the rigor of the concept. A recent article published in the journal Science by the Anthropocene Working Group (2016) provides the latest example of this support, demonstrating that fluctuations in the content and pace of sediment deposits and extinction rates are anthropogenically driven. However, the very nomenclature of the “Anthropocene” has been subject to critique from within the humanities for allowing an abstract notion of the “Anthropos” to anchor an implicit philosophy of history. Daniel Hartley (2015), for instance, comments in a recent issue of the UK-based magazine Salvage, “Inherent to the Anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a one-onone billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect, which is simply inadequate to explain actual social and relational modes of historical causation” (para. 4). Hartley takes special issue with the presumed origins of the Anthropocene, which many geologists date to the industrial and nuclear revolutions. This determination, he suggests, interprets the environmental impact of technology as the “net effect” of an undifferentiated “human” activity (Waters et. al., 2016, p. 139). In order to assert a causal link between technological development and ecological catastrophe, any consideration of the roles race, class, and gender have played in engineering our historical present must be obscured.1 The benefits and consequences of technological development and environmental disaster, after all, are rarely if ever distributed symmetrically among and within human populations. “It is not all people that are indicted by the onset of the Anthropocene,” writes Nicholas Mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016), “but a specific set: colonial settlers, enslavers, and would-be imperialists” (pp. 19-20). At the same time, this remodeling of human history and ecological philosophy is not unique to geologists. Indeed, the Anthropocene’s scientific definition may have become matters of debate only recently, but its constitutive concerns—global warming, genetic technology, biodiversity loss, environmental racism—have thrown our prevailing concepts of nature and culture into crisis well before the epoch’s formal identification. At stake is not only the fate of homo sapiens as a species, but also the basic composition of a world yet to come. The challenges of analyzing the effects of non-human systems (e.g., weather patterns or ocean currents) and actors (e.g., viruses or pesticides) while attending to the uneven distribution of environmental risks and resources have generated a range of philosophical responses. For example, publications like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2009), “The Climate of History,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s (2014) The Sixth Extinction, and Roy Scranton’s (2015) Learning to Die in the Anthropocene recommend a universal or existential “species thinking” necessary for grasping the complexities of climate change. Other responses, like Jane Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (2015) Stone, interrogate fantasies of human mastery as a way of reckoning with the power of non-human agents. Over the last decade, one particular variety of response has acquired critical purchase within the academic left: the new materialisms. As part of what Richard Grusin (2015) has named “the nonhuman turn” in contemporary thought, the new materialisms join affect theory, critical animal studies, and object-oriented ontology in calling for enhanced attention to matter and materiality. The popularity of this approach, evidenced by a growing number of monographs, special journal issues, and anthologies, appears grounded in the need to develop strategies of coexistence attuned to the Anthropocene’s political and ecological crises.2 How, for example, should we understand agency and embodiment in light of recent developments in biotechnology and the increasingly unpredictable behavior of non-human objects? The promise of the new materialisms thus inheres in the notion that a focus on materiality can offer us more comprehensive and efficacious ways to respond to these developments. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) write in their introduction to the New Materialisms anthology, “What is at stake here is nothing less than a challenge to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world, including its normative sense of the human and its beliefs about human agency, but also regarding its material practices such as the ways we labor on, exploit, and interact with nature” (p. 4). There is much to recommend an intensified engagement with matter, not least of which is Coole and Frost’s proposal that such engagements can disrupt our “normative sense of the human” and of “human agency.” Given this professed interest in dismantling human exceptionalism, it is curious then that, as Zakiyyah Jackson (2015) and other critical race scholars point out, the new materialisms have systematically “[ignored] praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people, particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production of ‘the human’ or illegible from within the terms of its logic” (p. 216).3 Black thought has long challenged the enforced description of Africans and their descendants as non-human objects of science, as specimens for study and experimentation, as commodities for market exchange, as things. In fact, from at least the 16th century onward, black bodies provided crucial raw material for the development of natural history, the natural sciences, and the life philosophies in Enlightenment thought.4 Both geology and biology, for example, pursued notions of species and evolution that preserved early racial taxonomies; the techniques of observation and interpretation used to analyze geological activity were the same as those employed by the racial science of phrenology. Mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016) leverages this history to argue that “the very concept of observable breaks between geological eras in general and the definition of the Anthropocene in particular is inextricably intermingled with the belief in distinct races of humanity” (p. 2). His claim that the concept of the Anthropocene reproduces race-making technologies gestures to the historical fact that the human as such has emerged through the exclusion and extermination of black bodies. Proscribed from the realm of the human, black intellectuals have had to think within and through the categories of the non-human and the inhuman to pursue new ways of being in the world. Philosophical questions about the vitality and agency of the human, the animal, and the object are therefore longstanding in the fields of Black studies. Alexander Weheliye (2015) observes in Habeas Viscus that across Sylvia Wynter’s oeuvre, “it is the human—or different genres of the human—that materializes as the object of knowledge in the conceptual mirror of black studies” (p. 21). The scholarly work of Hortense Spillers (2003) and Fred Moten (2003), and the Afrofuturist contributions of Nalo Hopkinson (1998; 2000) and Nnedi Okorafor (2010), similarly confront the “most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world,” including our notions of history, temporality, and modern science.5 And yet, as it is with the Anthropocene’s implied philosophy of history, much of the scholarship produced under the banner of the new materialisms tends to reduce race to a crude “identity politics” or to endorse a model of difference-withoutrace.6 This reduction and disavowal of race, I contend, is something of a structural necessity for the new materialisms. In what follows, I trace the general theoretical principles of the new materialisms to a dissatisfaction with the linguistic and cultural paradigms of post-structuralism. I then demonstrate how this dissatisfaction enables an ethics of relation or affect that further legitimizes the reduction and dismissal of race. However, as a close reading of Butler’s Parable duology reveals, one of the primary figures of the new materialisms—the material body—is defined by and through disavowed social fantasies about black female flesh that are linked to the global legacies of modern slavery. My examination of the critical responses to Butler’s novels further suggests that such fantasies are necessary to secure a libidinal investment in the ethical potential of materiality. I argue, thus, against a misrecognition of black female flesh as a resource against the violence of hierarchical differences, rather than the site of their active production. Finally, I turn to a reading of Butler’s Parable duology as an allegory about the dangers of proceeding in the Anthropocene without a robust analysis of the formation of racial blackness. Because a proper survey of new materialist literature is beyond the scope of this article, the comments below should be taken as entry points for probing the (absent) place of racial blackness in theories about matter.7 The promise of the new materialisms The new materialisms are drawn from a long genealogy of philosophical materialism, in which Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Marx, and Deleuze are cited as major touchstones. In recognition of this legacy, Coole and Frost (2010) assert that the interventions loosely gathered by the term “new materialisms” are better “categorized as renewed materialisms,” with the qualifier “new” acknowledging the “unprecedented” ecological, biological, and technological conditions under which we currently live and labor (p. 4, italics in original). Although their specific objects of analysis are appropriately diverse, the new materialisms collectively insist on a post-humanist matter that is lively, self-directed, agential, creative, and always in the process of becoming. In this regard, matter is better thought of as materialization, or the process by which complex phenomena are temporarily and contingently stabilized to varying degrees. The ontological shift entailed here is towards a philosophical monism, inspired most notably by the work of Deleuze. Following Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze (1994) develops a notion of the virtual as a generative field of difference, or a “plane of immanence,” where “all the varieties of differential relations and all the distributions of singular points [coexist] in diverse orders ‘perplicated’ in one another” (p. 206). These differences are then formatted into distinct phenomena or entities by processes of actualization that “[bring] the object back into relation with the field of differential relations in which it can always be dissolved and become actualized otherwise, as something else, by being linked through other differential relations to other particles” (Cheah, 2010, pp. 85-86). While not all new materialist theories cleave to a strictly Deleuzian philosophy, there is general agreement that the dynamic interactions among objects, bodies, and phenomena turn us away from the Anthropocene’s “billiard ball model” of causality, and more significantly, away from some of poststructuralism’s critical trends. According to the new materialisms, the linguistic and cultural turns of the last half century have resulted in both an intellectual and a political poverty. Specifically, social constructivism (Coole & Frost, 2010) and cultural representationalism (Barad, 2007) have overdetermined matter to the extent that it appears as a passive product made meaningful only through cultural and discursive practice. Coole and Frost (2010) even write of a theoretical “exhaustion,” claiming that they “share the feeling current among many researchers that the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (p. 6). Somewhere and sometime during the rise of the Anthropocene, cultural theory, broadly conceived, lost its explanatory power. This assessment of inadequacy repeats across much of the recent new materialist scholarship, condensing the cultural turn into a discursive reductionism that rebuffs the empirical for the ideal, or the material for the symbolic. Elizabeth Grosz’s (2004) The Nick of Time opens with a telling “reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism, and questions of the politics of globalization, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research…not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality” (p. 2). Social, political, and cultural theory, in other words, have overlooked the material conditions of life that render the body available for inscription and enculturation in the first instance. So too in the recently published Gut Feminism does Elizabeth Wilson (2015) rebuke “social constructionism” for “[tending] not to be very curious about the details of empirical claims in genetics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology or biochemistry” (p. 3). Her ensuing conclusion is that focusing on how social structures produce and discipline bodies comes at the expense of recognizing the ways bodies radically alter and organize social structures themselves. It appears that cultural theory harbors an “allergy to ‘the real’” that dissuades “critical inquirers from the more empirical kinds of investigation that material processes and structures require” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 6). However, the very aspects that would make matter more “real” than language or culture are the same aspects that restrict its ethical potential and facilitate a conceptual rejection of race. In line with their post-humanist agenda, the new materialisms evoke matter and materiality as existing in excess of human subjectivity and its attendant domains. Mechanistic theories of causality hold that objects are composed of inert matter acted upon by external forces, which presumes that an object’s potential or possible capabilities are already present and fixed in some initial moment of creation. But, as the new materialisms emphasize, the virtual field of differential relations is immanent to matter in such a way that it is impossible to anticipate all of the effects a material configuration may have, or the organizational forms it may take. This ability to act independently of the subject’s will and desire is variously construed as “impersonal and preindividual forces,” an alterity that “comes from outside the capability or power of the subject” (Cheah, 2010, p. 80, 89), “degrees of indetermination” that represent the “‘true principle of life’” (Grosz, 2010, p. 149), and a “powerful reminder…that life will always exceed our knowledge and control” (Bennett, 2010, p.14). Differences in terminology aside, the new materialisms are united by an understanding of materiality as a spectral, impersonal force with material effects, one that escapes reason and disrupts systems of meaning, including modernist binaries like mind/body, culture/nature, and inside/outside (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). The latter aspect is key because, while matter can frustrate representation, its “excessive” properties do not mean that it exists “outside” of the subject. Rather, matter and materiality are “real” because they actively produce reality in unpredictable ways (Cheah, 2010). It is here that the ethical impetus of the new materialist project is located. If we accept our embeddedness in mutually transformative, nonhuman networks, the ground of ethics shifts accordingly. First, a responsibility to an externalized other gives way to an accountability for the many relations that constitute becoming. And second, ethics are no longer reducible to the decisions or actions of individuals that are initiated by a properly historical judgment. In Rosi Braidotti’s (2010) terms, “Accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codependence is what is at stake in postsecular affirmative ethics” (p. 214). I find nothing immediately problematic with an ethics that aspires to keep pace with advancements in science, philosophy, and technology. What I find troublesome is how our acquiescence to these ethics is solicited. New materialist ethics necessarily manifest as affective encounters that operate best on micropolitical scales. Because materiality is figured as an impersonal force of the real, it runs the risk of becoming a transcendental signified that merely replaces language or culture as an organizing principle. Doing so would severely diminish its import as an inducement to a posthumanist ethics. To circumvent the “tension between universalistic theory and specific mode of inquiry,” chance, contingency, and creativity in micro-level encounters are prioritized over more obstinate assemblages that congeal at the global or macro-levels (Zhan, 2016, p. 26). Further, as the nucleus of the new materialisms, the embodied subject or material body compels an ethics that unfolds on a parallel plane, meaning between and within bodies. “This implies,” Rosi Braidotti (2010) proposes, “approaching the world through affectivity and not cognition: as singularity, force, movement, through assemblages or webs of interconnections with all that lives,” and “accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codependence” (p. 214). In the quotation above, Braidotti invokes an ethics of relation, in which sensation and perception comprise the “zone of [ethical] effectivity,” and attunement and affirmation take precedence over social transformation (Tumino, 2011, p. 555). Because material inter- and intraactions are preconscious and multisensorial, ethical practice is based not on the ability to evaluate right from wrong, but on a commitment to feeling right. We can observe this adjustment in appeals to “an ongoing responsiveness to…entanglement” (Barad, 2007, p. 394), “a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages” (Bennett, 2010b), a “wakefulness” to the “feel [of] what makes us laugh, lament, and curse” (Orlie, 2007, p. 127) and an “experience of the vitality of being” (Connolly, 2010, pp. 196-197). As a consequence, the experiences of living under conditions of crisis are fetishized at the expense of addressing the causes of these conditions themselves. The imperative to “[live] with the open wound...through a sort of depersonalization of the event” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 213), for example, not only depoliticizes the claims of historically oppressed communities, but also flattens distinctions between traumas inflicted through happenstance and persistent intergenerational harm. How else could one, as Braidotti does, list as equivalent examples: those who survived the Holocaust, Frida Kahlo’s deadly tram ride, and missing the train to the World Trade Center on September 11th (p. 214)? The limits of a new materialist ethics appear most forcefully, then, as we attempt to move from an embodied “responsiveness” to the dislocation of structures. When patterns of materialization are addressed, it is generally as the amalgamation of “perpetual circuits of exchange, feedback, and reentry” that thereby “[inflect] the shape of political experience” (Connolly, 2010, pp. 190-191). On the one hand, there is nothing innately objectionable about attributing the creation and transformation of political structures to any number of quotidian, embodied experiences. This is in fact common in political theory and historiography.8 On the other hand, it becomes more difficult to reconcile the effects of chance, unpredictability, and indeterminacy with the endurance and repetition of something like antiblack violence.9 The new materialisms are therefore at pains to clarify why the structures of global antiblackness continue to function as if “neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (Spillers, 2003, p. 208). Interpreting and describing our entanglements with non-human, materialist forces are not enough to account for, much less dislodge attachments to, social categories and representational arrangements. By this I mean that becoming more aware of material forces will not inevitably reduce the weight of discursive or psychic formations. It could even obstruct change by making forms of affect and sensation newly available for inscription. As Timothy Morton (2007) states, when “contact becomes content,” perceptions of difference collapse into identity (p. 37). Granted, these complications are not unique to the new materialisms as changes in scale almost always require a re-calibration of ethics. The point is, however, that the framing of the new materialisms as inherently more ethical generates, and is generated by, a disavowal or misreading of race as a stagnant analytical framework. As I submit above, since at least the Enlightenment period intellectual genealogies have maintained an almost overwhelming racial homogeneity. Critical theories produced by non-white scholars may have increased in terms of production or representation, but these are consistently marked as minority perspectives that have little to do with universal or ontological questions.10 Hence, black bodies especially are rendered objects for theoretical development, rather than subjects of universal philosophy. Coole and Frost (2010) continue this trend, revealing that even as “feminists and class theorists have often insisted upon” the importance of material bodies and environments, the authors remain “[concerned] that such material dimensions have recently been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity politics” (p. 19). The latter, they continue, “had a good deal to say about the body and its imbrication in relationships of power, but we are not convinced that they pay sufficient attention to the material efficacy of bodies or have the theoretical resources to do so” (ibid.). Such a statement is heavy with longstanding racial charges of intellectual primitivism and parochialism. The unfortunate request to be “convinced” of identity politics’ intellectual merit effectively seals an historically white critical theory as the standard for authoritative knowledge production.11 One must also wonder about the referents for these insufficiently materialist identity politics, given that the New Materialisms anthology fails to cite even one example that might be taken as representative of a larger trend. Even if Coole and Frost employ “identity politics” as a shorthand for idealist approaches to subjectivity, their statement betrays both a misunderstanding of studies of “identity,” and a symptomatic desire to abandon race. To be clear, Coole and Frost never openly reduce “identity politics” to racial identity. But in many if not most of new materialisms’ founding texts, race receives only casual mention alongside the “other socalled axes of social difference” like sex, gender, and class, and often to specify a concept that has been “paralyzed by [a] ‘binary’ take on dualism” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 88, 143), or to name potential beneficiaries of one’s theorization (Barad, 2007; Grosz, 2004). We could perhaps attribute this treatment of race to an obdurate politics of attention (Ahmed, 2008) that determines which issues receive consideration.12 Nonetheless, to ascertain if and how the new materialisms might furnish us with a timelier ethics, we must first ask what purpose the omission of race serves. The Movement for Black Lives has forcefully reminded us that black bodies have historically provided the standards against which the human subject and non-human objects are measured. This is to say that the “rupture in the quality of being” inaugurated by modern racial slavery is not limited to black lives (Brand, 2001, p. 29). Black critical theorists repeatedly insist on the world-historical scale of this rupture, tracking how it conditions our thinking about humans and matter, and the movements of this thought itself. What this means for our current discussion is that “the question of race’s reality has and continues to bear directly on hierarchies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of reality itself” (Jackson, 2015, p. 216), or on what Dionne Brand (2001) calls our “cognitive schema” (p. 29). As a conceptual orientation or method of “way-finding,” the prevailing cognitive schema articulates a libidinal economy of antiblackness to the history of ideas, ensuring, as Spillers (2003) maintains, that “dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation;” “sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (pp. 208-209). By inverting a childhood rejoinder about the supposedly limited reach of the symbolic, Spillers lays out a provocative proposal: the metaphors of slavery are immanent to the force of the material. Although “‘race’ alone bears no inherent meaning, even though it reifies in personality,” it “gains its power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to meaning” (Spillers, 2003, p. 380). Black lives matter, and blackness enlivens matter. It is possible, then, that the elaboration of thought, the conditions of its enunciation and reception, are always part of a racial praxis, even when those “personalities” that absorb the reification of race are most absent. This is a paradigmatic example of the prevailing cognitive schema at work. Antiblackness conditions the force of materiality by determining the logic of both its actualization and its theoretical manifestations. These functions become clearer when we turn our attention to Octavia Butler’s Parable duology.

Why Carbon Pricing and Trading Is a False Solution This paper finds that carbon pricing and trading systems are not very effective or equitable measures for curbing carbon emissions. Our research shows that these systems can often play out as what amounts to sophisticated international shell games, where little net decline in emissions occurs because the measures simply serve to transfer pollution from one location or one 9 country to another, depending on who can afford to pollute. Within the U.S., there is evidence that carbon pricing and trading can exacerbate existing inequalities by creating or worsening “sacrifice zones.” These zones are communities, often with BIPOC residents and households with low-income, in or near where significant fossil fuel-related pollution occurs. Thereby sacrificing the wellbeing of those communities to fuel the excesses of people living elsewhere. As consensus grows around the urgency of the climate crisis, we’re confronted with a range of false solutions that deepen inequalities and are insufficient to meet the scale and speed of needed changes. In many cases, the fight against climate change becomes a big business opportunity – with the same political and economic interests that are most responsible for the climate crisis championing supposed solutions. In fact, some of the worst environmental offenders co-opt the language of environmental advocates in order to protect their bottom line, neutralize climate legislation, and preserve the status quo. It is important to recognize that these false solutions not only fail to deliver on their environmental claims, but often worsen our ecological and economic crises. Carbon pricing falls short on many grounds. If we look at the lived experiences shared by residents of frontline communities in the US and around the world against carbon pricing schemes, we can critique the position from multiple vantage points: moral/ethical, religious and spiritual, human and civil rights, flaws with the economic reasoning, as well as socio-economic and environmental outcomes. There are four key reasons that carbon pricing and trading schemes are false solutions: #1: It misses the bigger picture – failing to tackle the root causes of the problem. Carbon pricing puts on the act of addressing the problem, but it fails to tackle the primary issue: burning fossil fuels to create energy. Instead, it aims to remedy the situation after the fact when the processes of extracting and burning fossil fuels have already taken place. #2: Carbon pricing schemes are not designed to produce localized emissions reductions. Too often, carbon pricing makes pollution hot spots worse and fails to reduce localized emissions--by design. 1,2 #3: The origins of the carbon pricing model design is establishing a mechanism that favors polluter/industry interests. Carbon markets were created so that governments and fossil fuel companies could “flexibly” meet emissions reductions standards without having to significantly change their own polluting practices.3 #4: Existing carbon markets haven’t produced significant emissions reductions at the rate we need.4,5 Carbon prices have been consistently too low. In fact, some studies, such as in British Columbia, Canada, have demonstrated that emissions have actually risen since a carbon tax was implemented.6 Policymakers have often had more success in reducing emissions by imposing direct regulations. “I don’t know who’s willing to gamble on climate change. We’re in a crisis, and we don’t have the luxury of taking a gamble.” Kathy Egland, Chair of the ECJ Committee of the NAACP National Board of Directors Advising the Federal Government against Carbon Pricing In May 2021, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council released recommendations for the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool & Executive Order 12898 Revisions. In their list of Examples of The Types of Projects That Will Not Benefit A Community, they included the “establishment or advancement of carbon markets, including cap and trade.” Debunking “Equity” Arguments for Carbon Pricing While carbon pricing is often framed as the only, the best, or the most realistic solution to the climate crisis, in reality there are many far more effective means through which climate movements can build power and move toward a just transition. Climate justice activists and advocates should be aware of the ways that fossil fuel interests attempt to pacify and co-opt the climate movement. It is critical that we remain vigilant to the way that changes in language or framing are used to confuse, compel, and divide us. Below are the three most common ways that carbon pricing advocates falsely use equity framing: “Polluters Pays” Discourse: Rather than effectively and completely forcing polluters to absorb all the true costs of their pollution, carbon pricing allows polluters to buy their way out of stopping their pollution. Faulty Economic Justice Arguments: Token revenues distributed to frontline communities will never make up for the destruction resulting from the source of that revenue. “I can tell you that the fossil fuel industry takes a page, a few pages, from our civil rights playbook. They come into our communities, and they prey on economic desperation. They make false and idle promises which they have no intentions of keeping. It’s a simple message to explain to people how ‘this is a way you’re going to be able to put a roof over your family’s heads and food on your table.’ And then when we come in, it’s kind of difficult to come behind a message like that with something that might take a little more time but would be worth that investment of time.” Kathy Egland, Chair of the ECJ Committee of the NAACP National Board of Directors. Language of Urgency of “Realistic” Action: We don’t have time for false solutions like carbon pricing that fail to disrupt the power of the fossil fuel industry. There are numerous more effective, real solutions that promote the structural changes we urgently need. A Just Transition, not Cap and Trade, Will Advance Climate Justice Washington-based coalition Front and Centered, which includes the Seattle King County NAACP and Tacoma NAACP, makes it clear: “Washington state must cut greenhouse gas emissions from energy use in half within the next ten years if we have any chance in meeting long term state requirements to nearly eliminate pollution that causes climate change by 2050. To achieve this goal – let alone achieve it in a way that protects communities from the impacts of climate change and fossil fuel pollution and the pitfalls of an unjust transition – requires much more than a change in the price of oil, gas, or coal, it requires a Just Transition of our entire economy. There is no just pathway to our emissions goals that relies on the commodification of our air, land, and water, which we depend on for life.”

Criminal legal debt provides a revealing lens through which to examine universal basic income (UBI). It highlights a path to potential failure: fetishizing labor markets as the engine of economic inequality ignores how today’s criminal legal system carries forward racial capitalism’s techniques of targeted extraction. Yet recognizing this also opens a door to more robust visions of UBI that join together the powers of work refusal and debt refusal. UBI’s radical appeal has been staked to its potential to enable in practice and convey in principle a refusal of the labor market. As Kathi Weeks explains in theorizing a “post-work imaginary,” this does not require an absence of work but rather its decentering as an organizing institutional and cultural principle. And UBI would simultaneously shift power relations within waged work (as well as between waged and unwaged workers in families & communities), the centerpiece of Erik Olin Wright’s embrace of UBI as “eroding capitalism” over time. The work refusal analysis focuses on income. UBI would relieve the “work or starve” dilemma that enables labor exploitation. To do this, income must put food on the table. That places perhaps undue faith in consumer markets (as Lydia Nicholson points out). But furthermore, income can be forcibly removed before it can be used, through debt collection. This observation occasionally crops up with regard to taxation in analyses of UBI financing and tax-transfer integration. There, however, the significance (setting aside broader critiques of a financing frame, like that of Raúl Carrillo’s) involves how offsetting taxes on higher income people complicate the expressive and practical commitment to universality. Of greater concern is how UBI might be taxed back from the most marginalized, those for whom an independent income stream might be most empowering. This is where criminal legal debt fits in. Criminal imposition and enforcement of economic sanctions doubly amplifies the racial construction of economic inequality. It lies at the intersection between racialized, and particularly anti-Black, policing and punishment and also the vulnerability produced by racial structures operating within conventionally “economic” spaces of labor, housing, credit markets and so on. Accounting for this goes beyond defending formal universalism by including not only unauthorized immigrants but also currently or formerly incarcerated people. A UBI responsive to systematically racialized economic extraction must address not only historically-informed reparations but also ongoing predation. Building on USDOJ’s Ferguson report, advocates in California have documented a vicious cycle of fines and fees exacerbated by racial profiling in traffic stops, racially concentrated inability to pay that triggers drivers’ license suspensions, then arrests for driving without a license after further racially targeted stops, and more debt and risk of incarceration. A multi-state survey of formerly incarcerated people and their families found an average of $13,607 in criminal legal debt, more than the entire annual value of presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s recent UBI proposal. And Alexes Harris’ pathbreaking research found comparable debt burdens–and pervasive inability to pay–among people with felony convictions in Washington State. It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work. There are concrete reasons to fear this grim outcome, given both the predominant frameworks for regulating criminal legal debt and the loopholes built into some prototypes for UBI. The legal and conceptual architecture for resisting criminal legal debt largely adopts an “ability-to-pay” framework that highlights the injustice of incarcerating (or otherwise punishing) people who are unable to pay. But this same approach authorizes arrest and incarceration of anyone who chooses to refuse, despite having the money to pay. Indeed, some critics of the “new debtors prisons” might be tempted to embrace UBI precisely because it enables payment: losing your basic income is better than jail. As Theresa Zhen has argued, the ability-to-pay framework risks legitimizing the criminal legal system’s deployment as a tool of racialized economic extraction. UBI would provide a whopper of racially stratified fiscal substitution, with state and local criminal legal systems able to (selectively) capture national basic income payments. This also would blunt one of criminal debt abolitionists’ pragmatic arguments: that these onerous debts are rarely collectible. Contrary both to UBI’s universalism and work refusal goals, this would dynamically entrench racial labor stratification by creating racially differentiated capacity to refuse work. Indeed, we can already glimpse that prospect in today’s coercive systems of “get to work or go to jail” often styled as debt enforcement. And the differentially precarious economic circumstances of people with criminal records already helps concentrate them in the worst jobs. In complementary fashion, precedent exists for diverting basic income to satisfy criminal legal debt. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (APFD) program often is touted as a UBI prototype. But its garnishment protections are substantially weaker than those currently applicable to wage garnishment. The vast majority (80%) of an individual’s dividend can be seized to satisfy any creditor’s judgment. The remainder is protected against most ordinary civil debts but explicitly exposed to certain collections–including of criminal legal debt. Another related, though less sweeping, example is the deduction of student loan and child support arrears from recent pandemic stimulus checks.

(3) We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and insure the coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other postrevolutionary possibilities, i.e., idleness. The scandal, with which the Black subject position “threatens” Gramscian and coalition discourse, is manifest in the Black subject’s incommensurability with, or disarticulation of, Gramscian categories: work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony, and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the Black subject destabilize—emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of—historical materialism? How does the Black subject function within the “American desiring machine” differently than the quintessential Gramscian subaltern, the worker? Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. According to Barrett (2002), something about the Black body in and of itself made it the repository of the violence that was the slave trade. It would have been far easier and far more profitable to take the white underclass from along the riverbanks of England and Western Europe than to travel all the way to Africa for slaves. The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is twofold. First, capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital’s primal desire than is exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery, i.e., the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex has, once again, as its structuring metaphor and primary target the Black body. The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black subject, lies in the Black subject’s potential for extending the demand placed on state/ capital formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In other words, the positionality of the slave makes a demand that is in excess of the demand made by the positionality of the worker. The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci’s new hegemony, Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, in a word, socialism). In contrast, the slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of the text’s inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation. Thus, the Black subject position in America represents an antagonism or demand that cannot be satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics. In contrast, the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful war of position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, while the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself. Thus, the insatiability of the slave demand upon existing structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent). The Black body cannot give its consent because “generalized trust,” the precondition for the solicitation of consent, “equals racialized whiteness” (Barrett, 2002). Furthermore, as Orlando Patterson (1982) points out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say, a slave has no symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange. A slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical), but is subsumed by direct relations of force. As such, a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality, whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. A metaphor comes into being through a violence that kills the thing such that the concept might live. Gramscian discourse and coalition politics come to grips with America’s structuring rationality—what it calls capitalism, or political economy— but not with its structuring irrationality, the anti-production of late capital, and the hyper-discursive violence that first kills the Black subject, so that the concept may be born. In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of white life. This is important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm and their spiritual progenitors in the world of organizing in the U.S. today, with their overvaluation of hegemony and civil society. Struggles over hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifying. At some point, they require coherence and categories for the record, meaning they contain the seeds of anti Blackness. What does it mean to be positioned not as a positive term in the struggle for anti- capitalist hegemony, i.e., a worker, but to be positioned in excess of hegemony, to be a catalyst that disarticulates the rubric of hegemony, to be a scandal to its assumptive, foundational logic, to threaten civil society’s discursive integrity? In White Writing, J.M. Coetzee (1988) examines the literature of Europeans who encountered the South African Khoisan in the Cape between the 16th and 18th centuries. The Europeans were faced with an “anthropological scandal”: a being without (recognizable) customs, religion, medicine, dietary patterns, culinary habits, sexual mores, means of agriculture, and most significantly, without character (because, according to the literature, they did not work). Other Africans, like the Xhosa who were agriculturalists, provided European discourse with enough categories for the record, so that, through various strategies of articulation, they could be known by textual projects that accompanied the colonial project. But the Khoisan did not produce the necessary categories for the record, the play of signifiers that would allow for a sustainable semiotics. According to Coetzee, the coherence of European discourse depends upon two structuring axes. A “Historical Axis” consists of codes distributed along the axis of temporality and events, while the “Anthropological Axis” is an axis of cultural codes. It mattered very little which codes on either axis a particular indigenous community was perceived to possess, with possession the operative word, for these codes act as a kind of mutually agreed-upon currency. What matters is that the community has some play of difference along both axes, sufficient in number to construct taxonomies that can be investigated, identified, and named by the discourse. Without this, the discourse cannot go on. It is reinvigorated when an unknown entity presents itself, but its anxiety reaches crisis proportions when the entity remains unknown. Something unspeakable occurs. Not to possess a particular code along the Anthropological or Historical Axis is akin to lacking a gene for brown hair or green eyes on an X or Y chromosome. Lacking a Historical or Anthropological Axis is akin to the absence of the chromosome itself. The first predicament raises the notion: What kind of human? The second predicament brings into crisis the notion of the human itself. Without the textual categories of dress, diet, medicine, crafts, physical appearance, and most important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of the invitation to become Anthropological Man. S/he was the void in discourse that could only be designated as idleness. Thus, the Khoisan’s status within discourse was not that of an opponent or an interlocutor, but rather of an unspeakable scandal. His/her position within the discourse was one of disarticulation, for he/she did little or nothing to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of the discourse. Just as the Khoisan presented the discourse of the Cape with an anthropological scandal, so the Black subject in the Western Hemisphere, the slave, presents Marxism and American textual practice with a historical scandal. How is our incoherence in the face of the Historical Axis germane to our experience of being “a phenomenon without analog”? A sample list of codes mapped out by an American subject’s historical axis might include rights or entitlements; here even Native Americans provide categories for the record when one thinks of how the Iroquois constitution, for example, becomes the U.S. constitution. Sovereignty is also included, whether a state is one the subject left behind, or as in the case of American Indians, one taken by force and dint of broken treaties. White supremacy has made good use of the Indian subject’s positionality, one that fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit imperial) idea because treaties are forms of articulation—discussions brokered between two groups are presumed to possess the same category of historical currency, sovereignty. The code of sovereignty can have a past and future history, if you will excuse the oxymoron, when one considers that 150 Native American tribes have applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for sovereign recognition so that they might qualify for funds harvested from land stolen from them.1 Immigration is another code that maps the subject onto the American Historical Axis, with narratives of arrival based on collective volition and premeditated desire. Chicano subject positions can fortify and extend the interlocutory life of America as an idea because racial conflict can be articulated across the various contestations over the legitimacy of arrival, immigration. Both whites and Latinos generate data for this category. Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subject’s positionality. The Black American subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are “off the map” with respect to the cartography that charts civil society’s semiotics; we have a past, but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because—and this is key—our presence works back upon the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject—even the most massacred among them, Indians—is required to have analogs within the nation’s structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject, upon whom the nation’s order of wealth was built, is without analog, then that subject’s presence destabilizes all other analogs.

Contemporary biomedical technologies that target race seem to ameliorate the ‘‘cut’’ of systemic racism—by targeting supposedly race-specific health factors or directing health care toward particular spaces to alleviate health disparities. In what follows, we consider two examples of biomedical targeting technologies and their biopolitical operations. First, we focus on BiDil, a pharmaceutical approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2005, and subsequently marketed as a race-specific drug for self-identified African Americans suffering from heart failure. Second, we turn to what is known as ‘‘medical hot spotting,’’ a practice that began in Camden, New Jersey in 2007, and that uses GIS technologies and spatial profiling to identify populations that are medically vulnerable (‘‘health care’s costliest 1%’’) in order to provide preemptive care at home and lower hospital admissions and health care costs. These targeting operations are deployed ostensibly to affirm life: They are said to redress past forms of biomedical neglect and enable the tailoring of biomedical intervention into vulnerable communities, and they are advocated as the means through which to foster the health of those populations—through attention, through targeting. Such forms of redress and attention might be understood, then, as the attempt to practice—and actualize—a different racial future, precisely through attending to inequities in the present. However, targeted health interventions may in effect signal inequitable and endangering forms of biomedical administration.3 We advance this more cautionary view through three foundational claims. First, regardless of the motivations for biomedical targeting—that is, the will to attend to black health—the operation of race-specific biomedical targeting of black subjects is structured through an epistemology of anti-blackness. More than racist actions against blacks, the architecture of racial discrimination, or a paradigm that binds blackness and death together, anti-blackness is a form of knowledge that positions the black subject outside of the category Human.4 This positioning stems from liberal humanist thought and is constitutive of Western modernity (Barrett, 2014). Not only has the epistemology of anti-blackness shaped the racial past in the U.S., but it also curtails the present and future of black life. Such expulsion of black lives from the normative position Human is undeniable, ‘‘[g]iven the histories of slavery, colonialism, segregation, lynching’’ and the ongoing daily imperiling of black lives through police brutality and mass incarceration (Weheliye, 2014: 19). That biomedical targeting is structured through antiblackness is evident in the way it reinstitutes racial difference and separation and, as we will show, stages an additional form of violence by actually expelling blacks from the possibility of optimal health. Black lives have been consistently imperiled in and through the biomedical encounter, in the form of lack of access to care and health insurance, inequities in caregiving, and the medical abuse of black bodies, from grave robbing for medical experimentation, to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, and the appropriation of the Henrietta Lacks cell line (Duster, 2003a; Institute of Medicine Report, 2002; Nelson, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Van Ryn and Fu, 2003; Washington, 2008). Anti-blackness continues to thwart black life and futurity through biomedical targeting operations that subject African Americans to what Du Bois (1899) named as a ‘‘social atmosphere . . . which differs from that surrounding whites.’’5 Race-based targeting efforts that are aimed at redressing health inequities recursively secure anti-blackness by refusing to acknowledge its structuring logic, thus equating blackness with inevitable vulnerability, risk, threat, and premature death.6 Second, and related to our first point, these biomedical targeting operations extract the conditions of black health and illness from the broader contexts of structural racism. Biomedical targeting generally fails to recognize the social conditions in which poor health emerges and, in the case of black subjects, how poor health, institutional racism, and the epistemology of anti-blackness are ontologically enmeshed. The targeting of black populations—specifically the two cases we explore here—does not simply direct resources to black subjects. Instead, in such operations, race is objectified as that to be targeted, meaning that race itself is not undone: That is, race as a stratifying mechanism that orders the social—a social order characterized by anti-blackness—is not called into question. Both BiDil and medical hot spotting demarcate populations, with supposedly distinct bodies, and name them as a political problem in need of specific health governance; black bodies and racialized spaces are targeted in order to manage the life of the population. Accordingly, BiDil might be seen to ontologize blackness as a corporeal truth for market accumulation, while medical hot spotting can be said to spatially ontologize structural racism in order to secure cost efficiencies of the health care system. BiDil is predicated on financial extraction; medical hot spotting is predicated on threat containment. These biomedical targeting technologies reveal how health interventions do not necessarily support or achieve a better future for African Americans. Instead, they advance the epistemological violence of anti-blackness by concentrating the ‘‘problem’’ of black life in the U.S. at the scales of: (1) the racialized body (BiDil) and (2) space (hot spots), which both become objects of ever more heightened administration, financial exploitation, and securitization. BiDil positions African Americans as ‘‘problem bodies’’ that must take on responsibility for their own racialized embodied risk through the act of buying and consuming race-based medicine; here, anti-blackness operates through the black responsibilization of risk. Medical hot spotting tracks, maps, and fixes high-cost health care users in ‘‘problem spaces’’ that are positioned outside the populace; hot spotting locates and reifies the structural position of anti-blackness in space for the purposes of surveillance, anticipation of risk, and containment. Third, contemporary biomedical targeting technologies are an endangering form of health administration exacerbated by the logics of neoliberalism. Under neoliberal conditions, populations previously excluded from the vital politics of the nation are now ostensibly being addressed. However, the two biomedical targeting technologies that we explore reveal a predatory power to demarcate race for purposes spanning financial extraction to threat containment—even as such ‘‘targeting’’ is advocated as the means for addressing the embodied and spatial effects of racial inequality. In neoliberal times, the color line no longer operates as a clear and obvious modality of exclusion, as Du Bois would have it (Goldberg, 2008). The neoliberal biopolitics of health increasingly emphasizes customizing health, the body, and life itself through biomedical practices (Clarke et al., 2003: 181–182). Our two case studies reveal how customizing health seems to be an operation of inclusion (directly or indirectly by race) within biomedicine: BiDil is a customized drug that attends to black health; it targets racial minorities supposedly to extend life. Medical hot spotting is also a form of customization through care delivery: It delineates ‘‘problem spaces’’—where high utilizers of health care are located—in order to direct resources and generate efficiencies in health provisions. ‘‘Customizing’’ works in the first case through ‘‘color awareness’’ and marketing within biomedicine (i.e. the racialized spectacle of the body), and paradoxically in the second, through invisibilizing race at the level of ‘‘location’’/space according to the socalled colorblind agency of the free market and cost–benefit analysis (O’Boyle, 2007). While both targeting technologies may attempt to alleviate racial health disparities, they simultaneously augment racial difference and exacerbate racial inequalities—but they do so in very different ways: thus emphasizing the importance of tracing out the empirically distinct means through which each technology resecures the epistemology of anti-blackness. BiDil highlights the neoliberal refusal to acknowledge the social production of risk, by casting health as an individual—not social—enterprise. Medical hot spotting disavows the historical and spatial processes of racial formation that structure the present and simultaneously shows that certain (racialized) subjects are positioned—in advance—as risk failures within the paradoxically ‘‘race-neutral future’’ of the nation. To begin exploring these ideas, we turn to the case of BiDil, the oft-disputed first pharmaceutical with a race-specific indication.

The most prominent of these global axes of inequality is undoubtedly economic in nature and manifests in the highly unequal international access to biomedical interventions during global health emergencies. “[T]he single greatest global challenge in public health,” a report by the Third World Network (TWN) notes, “is to address the huge disparities between wealthy and poorer countries in their citizens’ access to vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics” (Hammond 2021, 3). The global demand for new biomedical interventions spikes dramatically during pandemics and certainly runs much higher than the initial international production capacity for novel therapeutic products. With global pharmaceutical production largely concentrated in profit-orientated commercial and corporate enterprises, and in a context where demand outstrips global supply under market conditions, the factor most likely to determine who will secure access to those scarce treatments during a pandemic is price. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), therefore, routinely struggle to compete with their wealthier counterparts in securing access to such life-saving biomedical interventions. Recent experiences with COVID-19 underscore those longer standing concerns. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many high-income countries pledged support for the new COVAX facility—an ambitious international procurement mechanism designed to equitably supply newly developed COVID-19 vaccines to the entire world. However, many high-income countries subsequently entered into extensive bilateral agreements with commercial vaccine manufacturers to supply their populations, and so the COVID-19 pandemic was once again marked by a resurgence of vaccine nationalism, with many high-income countries purchasing far more vaccine doses than needed for the size of their population (Hammond 2020, 2; Wouters et al. 2021). Over a year into the pandemic, many low-income countries were still struggling to vaccinate even 10 percent of their populations, while many high-income countries were already accumulating spare doses and contemplating additional “booster” shots (Usher 2021). As with many prior outbreaks, a major gap thus rapidly emerged between high- and low-income countries around access to vaccines during COVID-19 (Eccleston-Turner and Upton 2021; Mathieu et al. 2021). Yet, those international tensions over affordability are only the most immediately apparent economic inequalities that are relevant here. A subtler form of economic inequality additionally relates to how the global geographic distribution of pharmaceutical infrastructures has evolved historically. That is because countries home to substantial pharmaceutical infrastructures also possess a second option for securing access to scarce biomedical interventions; they can invoke the exceptional circumstances of a pandemic to nationalize pharmaceutical products manufactured within their territories. During pandemic flu (H5N1, H1N1), for example, the limited global manufacturing capacity for pandemic influenza vaccines was geographically concentrated in high-income countries (Australia, Europe, Japan, and North America), giving those countries and regions a distinct advantage in terms of securing priority access to medicines for their populations (WHO 2005, 47; Elbe 2018). Yet, this alternative option of nationalizing supplies, which has resurfaced in the form of widespread vaccine nationalism during COVID-19 (BBC 2021), is only available to those countries possessing such pharmaceutical infrastructures, again excluding the vast majority of the world’s LMICs. Thus, the geographically uneven global distribution of pharmaceutical infrastructures compounds their subaltern economic position during global health emergencies. Many LMICs are also at a third economic disadvantage here. Scholars of international political economy have described how biocapital, that is, the growing commercial exploitation of biological materials, has become a highly profitable component of the global economy (Rajan 2006; Birch and Tyfield 2013; Elbe and Long 2020). Global health emergencies can generate lucrative opportunities to produce such commercial biovalue and financial profit by triggering immense international demand for new diagnostics, medicines, and vaccines; virus samples are critical to those commercial production processes. While pathogen samples are initially shared for noncommercial public health purposes (such as characterization and monitoring of genetic variations), some of these samples are subsequently also used by the pharmaceutical industry for commercial and profit-orientated practices to develop propitiatory commercial biomedical interventions (Hammond 2020, 1). With biomedical expertise and production capabilities concentrated in highincome countries, however, such commercial revenues again flow mostly to their corporations and stakeholders. To the Indonesian health minister, the entire system of international virus sharing, therefore, appeared to perpetuate a protracted cycle of international economic inequality in which “the developed countries become richer and richer while the poor countries become poorer and poorer” (Supari 2008, 6). Emphasizing the powerful global health rationale for international virus sharing obscures, then, how those practices can also buttress the hegemony of already dominant economic actors in international relations and how LMICs frequently occupy a subaltern position during global health emergencies. Unlike their wealthier counterparts, LMICs cannot usually access the life-saving biomedical interventions that are subsequently developed with those critical samples. They also do not have the option of nationalizing such products to secure access for their populations nor can they reap the considerable commercial benefits generated from such biomedical technologies. Viewed from this perspective, the entire process of international virus sharing can appear intensely unjust, resembling an elaborate international circuit of dispossession “in which property is generated under conditions that require its divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retrospectively, as its original owners” (Nichols 2018, 5). Echoing the geopolitics of knowledge articulated by Walter Mignolo (2002) to ask “who and when, why and where is knowledge generated” (Mignolo 2009, 160), there is also a highly stratified geopolitics of biomedicine that only selectively protects some populations against emergent viral harms.

The Whiteness of Global Health Security

“Biomedicalization” has been used to explain a wide gamut of social phenomena, from specific diseases such as HIV and cardiovascular disease to overarching conditions such as mental and sexual health, as well as to life processes such as aging and dying and social characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality. Researchers examining these phenomena have noticed the ways in which biomedicine has come to define them, casting such phenomena with a bioscientific imprimatur. The term “medicalization” was first introduced in the early 1970s to characterize the social process by which medicine increases its jurisdiction, entering into formerly nonmedical domains of life (Conrad 1975; Zola 1972). Theorists at the time trained their attention on the dominance of the medical profession, encouragement by social movements and patient advocacy groups, and changing institutional or organizational structures that supported the increasing reach of medicine. Yet by the turn of the Millennium, scholars were finding that medical authority wasn’t what it used to be, medicine itself was again restructuring in critical ways, and the forms that health organizing was taking were also changing drastically (Conrad 1992, Starr 2008). Due to government cost control measures and the success of social movements to create patient-based and holistic healthcare, the professional dominance of doctors was rapidly eroding. A corporate brand of managed care was taking the place of self-administered physicians networks. The pharmaceutical industry rushed in to sell drugs directly to managed care organizations and to patients themselves. Third-party payers also grew in influence, assuming a gatekeeping role in healthcare (Prainsack, this volume). The late 1990s was a critical time for medicine, as the world braced itself for the first mapping of the human genome. The Human Genome Project published a draft map in 2000, and medicine underwent a paradigm shift, becoming rationalized by bioscientific interests and aims (Clarke et al. 2010). A substantial biotechnology industry arose, replete with new, closer academic–industry relations and a growing market of direct-to-consumer goods. One major aspect of the new bioscientific medicalization, what Clarke et al. (2003: 162) summarize as “the increasingly complex, multisited, multidirectional processes of medicalisation that today are being both extended and reconstituted through the emergent social forms and practices of a highly and increasingly technoscientific biomedicine,” is economic restructuring toward the consolidation of a “biomedical technoservice complex.” This new system is characterized by multinational corporations and privatized rather than state-funded research and healthcare. Again, managed care systems have replaced physician-dominated systems. Meanwhile, increases in fee-for-service options and the devolution of healthcare management to individual patients, as well as new population-based practices that rely on new concepts of identity, have created a uniquely stratified form of medicalization. A second aspect of biomedicalization is a concerted focus on health, risk, and surveillance. Health has become a moral imperative, something individuals must work toward. Governments, medical organizations, and individuals themselves constantly monitor risks, and they do so in terms of genetic diagnoses and molecular categorizations. As Clarke et al. (2003: 172) note, “it is impossible not to be ‘at risk.’” Third, biomedicalization is characterized by a “technoscientization” of biomedicine, that is, a rationalization by technology and science at the same time. Processes and systems are computerized and standardized by new technologies and scientific classification systems. Healthcare is driven by evidence-based biomedicine, which is itself characterized by statistical reasoning and molecular science. A host of “Omic” sciences prevail, encouraging biological engineering “from the inside out” (Clarke et al. 2003: 176). Healthcare is delivered by way of electronic record systems, digitized biotechnologies, and bioengineered applications. Fourth, biomedicalization works by way of new transformations of information and the production and distribution of knowledges. Biomedicine dominates the media, where it dispels alternative notions of health and wellbeing and alternative systems of knowledge. Responsibility for one’s health is cast as an individual problem that is to be addressed with consumer applications. A range of cottage industries has cropped up offering consumers DIY (Do-It-Yourself ) goods and services, while health gurus and high-profile medical experts have encouraged patients to go online, self-diagnose, and purchase products. At the same time, pharmaceutical commercials and news of clinical trials trump alternative and complementary medicine, now joining with healthcare professionals and patient movements to popularize genetic tests and cures (Löwy, this volume). Finally, biomedicalization entails a transformation of bodies and identities. Biomedicalization is no longer about controlling a pathological entity, but rather hinges on customizing bodies to be the best they can be. There are two fundamental rhetorics, that of choice and lifestyle optimization. Individuals are pressed to opt for healthy behaviors and habits in their everyday lives, and to use biotechnologies to constantly monitor their improvement from moment to moment, in real time. Norms have multiplied such that there is no longer a singular definition of what it is to be “normal.” A plethora of identities have emerged, forged through the interaction with biotechnology and new medical classifications. Increasingly, identity is cast in genetic terms, and it is done so amid a global network that has important international ramifications (see Jingfeng in this volume). Medicalization theorists have debated whether these transformations warrant a shift in terminology (Conrad 2005; Rose 2007). Still, all agree that where medicalization occurs, it is unique in how it links up with processes like geneticization, molecularization, and pharmaceuticalization, the processes by which reductionist genetic explanations are used to describe differences between individual and group traits and behaviors (Lippman 1991), molecular models advance in science and society (Chadevarian and Kamminga 1998), and the way that conditions are transformed into opportunities for pharmacological interventions (Williams et al. 2011). Biomedicalization increasingly involves the redefinition of characteristics and conditions as inherently found in one’s DNA code and thus knowable and treatable by biomedicine, propels molecular models forward in the various fields and subfields of biomedicine as well as in healthcare and society, and bolsters pharmacological hegemony in the basic structures of bioscience and health delivery systems, often leading to an individualization of intervention and a depoliticization of care (Bell and Figert 2015).

Min Hyoung Song recently highlighted a disavowed yet structurally inevitable entanglement between blackness and Asian Americans in U.S. civil society when he noted that Asian Americans are becoming “less of a model whose successes specifically berate blacks and other racial minorities for their lack of resolve and more a kind of, for lack of a better term, super-minority whose successes berate everyone [including the disabled] who fails somehow to succeed” (18). Song’s provocative take on the evolving status of the “model minority” maps what I see as a potentially productive dialogue between Disability studies and the contemporary critique of the concept of an Asian-American model minority.1 Also, as Song makes explicit, we should also include in this dialogue the construction of blackness in any discussion of the “model minority” because the term insinuates that there is an antithesis of the “model” and it is safe to say within the Americas that people of African descent have historically and are now under the greatest scrutiny in that category. In this way, Asian Americans’ emergent status as “super-minority” also correlates with what Michelle Alexander has recently diagnosed as the “‘color blind’ public consensus that personal and cultural traits, not structural arrangements, are largely responsible for the fact that the majority of young black men in urban areas across the United States are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded as felons for life” (234-5). Broadly put, the aim of the present essay is to foreground how subfields such Asian American and Disability studies can participate, however unwittingly, in deflecting attention from what Alexander calls the “structural arrangements” that contour blackness within U.S. civil society. In doing so, I hope to intervene in the ongoing depoliticization of ethnic/minoritarian studies within higher learning. The Zero Degree of Sociality of Blackness To clarify this structural displacement I also draw upon Frank B. Wilderson’s recent intervention entitled Red, White & Black (2011). Wilderson’s provocative study maintains that in order for a politics or ethics to become legible within U.S. civil society, it must be based upon an assumptive logic which calibrates all citizens-subjects as a priori human, which effectively puts under erasure what Wilderson calls one of the “structural antagonisms” that has historically framed black bodies as potentially, or rather, always already non-human. It is, therefore, only by attending to such “structural antagonisms” (as opposed to a conflict which can be dialectically resolved) that anti-blackness (and in a different way, the antagonism toward the Native American) can be brought into sharp relief not as contingent but gratuitous (i.e. structural) to the formation of U.S. civil society.2 Thus when the concept of the human (or any of its metonymic variation such as personhood) is invoked as the a priori condition that subsumes all persons within civil society, it has the effect of displacing and putting under erasure what Wilderson calls the “blackness’s grammar of suffering”―which is structurally bound to the Middle Passage that effectively transformed the African into the fungible object status of the Slave. Therefore, as Wilderson reminds us: For the Black, freedom is an ontological, rather than experiential, question. There is no philosophically credible way to attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one considers the Black―such as freedom from gender or economic oppression, the kind of contingent riders rightfully placed on the non-Black when thinking freedom. Rather, the riders that one could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolic―though no less true―and ultimately untenable: freedom from the world, freedom from Humanity, freedom from everyone (including one’s Black self). (24) In this, there can be no analogue to “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” which exceeds the descriptive power of representative language, as it gestures toward the unrepresentable, the zero-degree of sociality which the Slave embodies. Drawing upon the interarticulations between Disability and Asian American studies to illuminate this structural displacement is not as arbitrary as it might seem, as both become legible and ultimately unstable in and around “blackness.” This complex entanglement, says Wilderson via Ronald Judy’s (Dis)Forming the American Canon (1994) that the mere presence of the Black and his or her project, albeit adjusted structurally, threatens the fabric of the ‘stable’ economy by threatening its structure of exchange. ‘Not only are the conjunctive operations of discourse of knowledge and power that so define the way in which academic fields get authenticated implicated in the academic instituting of Afro-American studies, but so is the instability entailed in the nature of the academic work.’ (40) As previously mentioned, Wilderson’s deployment of the term “antagonism” reflects his understanding that U.S. Civil Society continues to gratuitously position the Black as a being without humanity. According to Wilderson’s extension of Judy’s study, the disavowal of the “structural antagonism” toward the Black is thus a necessary function that is crucial to not only “instituting of Afro-American studies” but the manner in which such fields as Asian American and Disability studies “get authenticated” within academia. This insight is crucial to understanding how the convergence of Disability and Asian American studies on their assumptive logic of the human unwittingly works to displace “blackness’s grammar of suffering” from the political and ethical terrain that contours U.S. civil society.

Keeping each of the definitions of wake in mind, I want to think and argue for one aspect of Black being in the wake as consciousness and to propose that to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding. To be “in” the wake, to occupy that grammar, the infinitive, might provide another way of theorizing, in/for/from what Frank Wilderson refers to as “stay[ing] in the hold of the ship.” 20 With each of those definitions of wake present throughout my text, I argue that rather than seeking a resolution to blackness’s ongoing and irresolvable abjection, one might approach Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness. Political scientists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars, and others have posed as a question for thought the endurance of racial inequality after juridical emancipation and civil rights, and they have interrogated the conflation of blackness as the ontological negation of being with Black subjects and communities. That is, across disciplines, scholars and researchers continue to be concerned with the endurance of antiblackness in and outside the contemporary. In that way In the Wake: On Blackness and Being joins the work of those scholars who investigate the ongoing problem of Black exclusion from social, political, and cultural belonging; our abjection from the realm of the human. But the book departs from those scholars and those works that look for political, juridical, or even philosophical answers to this problem. My project looks instead to current quotidian disasters in order to ask what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion, this ontological negation, and how do literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this un/survival. To do this work of staying in the wake and to perform wake work I look also to forms of Black expressive culture (like the works of poets and poet-novelists M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Kamau Brathwaite) that do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use the wake in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (Hartman 2007, 6) Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property” and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children. Living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and effects of continued marked migrations, Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters, trans-American and -African migration, structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/colonialisms, and more. And here, in the United States, it means living and dying through the policies of the first US Black president; it means the gratuitous violence of stop-and-frisk and Operation Clean Halls; rates of Black incarceration that boggle the mind (Black people represent 60 percent of the imprisoned population); the immanence of death as “a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy” (James and Costa Vargas 2012, 193, emphasis mine). Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased. Put another way, living in the wake means living in and with terror in that in much of what passes for public discourse about terror we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments; the ground of terror’s possibility globally. This is everywhere clear as we think about those Black people in the United States who can “weaponize sidewalks” (Trayvon Martin) and shoot themselves while handcuffed (Victor White III, Chavis Carter, Jesus Huerta, and more), those Black people transmigrating 21 the African continent toward the Mediterranean and then to Europe who are imagined as insects, swarms, vectors of disease; familiar narratives of danger and disaster that attach to our always already weaponized Black bodies (the weapon is blackness). We must also, for example, think of President Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs, who said, commenting on the drone murder of sixteen-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman Al-Alwaki, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if you are truly concerned about the well being [sic] of your children” (Grim 2012). 22 We must consider this alongside the tracking of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent without papers by drones in the midst of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic. 23 We must consider Gibbs’s statement alongside Barack Obama’s reprimands of Black men in the United States, his admonishing them to be responsible fathers. Consider, too, the resurgence of narratives that Black people were better off in chattel slavery. This is Black life in the wake; this is the flesh, these are bodies, to which anything and everything can be and is done. In the immediate aftermath of the June 17, 2015, murders of six Black women and three Black men in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in South Carolina in the United States, the poet Claudia Rankine published a New York Times op-ed piece titled “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.” Rankine writes, “Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black” (Rankine 2015). To be in the wake is to live in those no’s, to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no citizenship, to live in the long time of Dred and Harriet Scott; and it is more than that. To be/in the wake is to occupy that time/space/place/construction (being in the wake) in all of the meanings I referenced. To be in the wake is to recognize the categories I theorize in this text as the ongoing locations of Black being: the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather. To be in the wake is also to recognize the ways that we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force. 24 In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death? I want to suggest that that might look something like wake work.

The checkered history of past efforts to alleviate poverty and economic inequality reveals the difficulty of decoupling subsistence-level benefits from politically popular work mandates. Under current workfare programs funded by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), compulsory work requirements subject recipients to punitive sanctions for noncompliance—no matter how inappropriate or degrading the assigned work—that reduce subsistence benefits despite demonstrated need.49 Government assistance has thus been formally recast through workfare, not as a justly deserved entitlement but rather as a condition to be excused solely in extreme circumstances.50 Hence the Trump Administration openly characterized poverty as laziness—an immoral failure of will—and expanded work requirements beyond cash assistance by requiring recipients of government aid to work off their “debt” for access to medical assistance, nutritious food, and safe housing.51 At the same time, national tax and spending policies have consistently— both in intent and impact—favored the breadwinning-white-male-headed household over that of the unmarried single mother of color. Such incentives encourage patriarchal patterns of economic dependency that exacerbate disparate racial and gender impacts in income inequality, wealth building, and economic mobility.52 Even if not explicitly supporting disparate treatment by race, sociologists suggest that “perceptions of rising minority power, declines in whites’ relative socioeconomic status, or other perceived macro-level threats to whites’ racial status may provoke adoption of more restrictive welfare regimes.”53 As a result, cash assistance programs associated with greater uptake by people of color carry the harshest and most punitive or onerous requirements.54 “As whites attempt to undermine racial progress they see as threatening their group’s status, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups.”55 Past experiences with welfare and workfare reform since the New Deal era reveal persistent discrimination and disparate impact in both the conception and execution of safety net assistance and job creation programs. First, as historians have described, the design and implementation of New Deal programs, both by intent and in effect, reproduced existing social disparities that excluded Black workers and women of color from program benefits.56 Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) were explicitly and intentionally designed to exclude agricultural and domestic workers—primarily Blacks in states governed by southern democrats—from benefits and protections,57 an injustice also effectuated by TANF’s predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and later by the GI Bill, as implemented at the discretion of state agency employees.58 Federal New Deal programs intended to provide a social safety net after the Great Depression provided paid, public-works jobs primarily to ablebodied men (for example, through the Works Progress Administration (WPA)) while also expanding means-tested cash assistance to households with dependent children regardless of adult employment status through AFDC.59 Although these programs varied greatly in implementation from state to state, one aspect was consistent: Blacks were excluded from the highest paying jobs and benefit amounts.60 As economist Nancy Rose recounts, the WPA and other New Deal work programs were successful on a number of levels but still fell victim to opposition from employers who objected to the wages as too high, the work as unproductive, and the workers as displacing the private labor force.61 Left to the discretion of local agency supervisors, job placements revealed supervisors’ preferences for enrolling older male heads of household in each family’s WPA slot and reproduced existing social disparities by, for example, favoring more privileged workers for white-collar, professional jobs.62 To appease southern legislators, WPA rolls were closed during certain seasons to maintain a ready supply of cheap domestic and agricultural workers—who were disproportionately Black63—as private employers sought agricultural laborers for low-paid farm work.64 Finally, WPA workers were prohibited from refusing jobs offered by private employers.65 While Black workers remained excluded from the benefits of social safety net programs, unmarried women faced a double bind: segregation in the labor market and increasingly punitive safety net programs.66 By the mid-1960s, as the War on Poverty continued to rage, racist stereotypes and public perceptions of welfare dependency as a disincentive to engage in low-wage work demonized Black single mothers67 and derailed attempts to create a federal Family Assistance Program (FAP), which would pay a minimum amount of cash assistance without a work requirement to households with children.68 Instead, the Earned Income Tax Credit was born to incentivize paid work through a tax credit conditioned on receipt of earned income and effectively meaningful only to households with dependent children.69 As sociologist Brian Steensland argues in his careful account of the rise and demise of FAP, ideology and culture played a decisive role in ending FAP’s chances of passage, as public depictions of the program increasingly framed it as a non-reciprocal payment with no expected social contribution in return.70 Coupled with the National Welfare Rights Organization’s opposition to the proposed reduction of benefit levels in northern regions of the country, and in response to pilot experiments reporting higher divorce rates correlating with mothers’ reduced economic dependence on men,71 FAP was eventually overshadowed by calls for an Earned Income Tax Credit and a later abandoned JG.72 Rose’s comprehensive history beginning with temporary New Deal job creation programs and continuing through 1990s welfare reform highlights numerous concerns that repeatedly threatened to impede progress, including fears of corruption, displacement of private employees, make-work jobs, and illegal discrimination due to discretionary local job assignment practices.73 Writing before TANF imposed even harsher work requirements as a condition of receiving public benefits, Rose called for expansion of voluntary work incentive programs (fair work rather than workfare) in order to increase labor market participation and job readiness for those left out of economic prosperity or structurally unemployed.74 Based on her extensive analysis of New Deal WPA programs, Rose identified several challenges that could have been addressed by a genuine JG program but that were instead exacerbated by the TANF program’s punitive mandatory work requirements.75 To avoid similar problems in a JG and safety net program, Rose advised that such schemes should adhere to nondiscrimination and other labor protections, be locally driven, be administered by nongovernmental organizations, and preserve worker dignity and choice—for example by preserving the choice to combine paid work with caregiving or postsecondary education.76 Similarly, around the time that welfare reform was seriously being debated, the late Anthony Atkinson proposed “participatory income” as a compromise—offering a basic income to all individuals conditioned upon participation in a broadly defined range of socially useful activities—which he later promoted as a substitute for the existing safety net.77 Even this kinder, gentler version of workfare retained the problematic aspects of a restrictive mandatory system. Instead, in 1996, the TANF program enacted a punitive workfare scheme that intensified the worst features of the WPA by imposing mandatory work requirements as a condition of receiving subsistence-level benefits.78 With the racialized association of poverty with Black women cemented in the public mind through the false image of a welfare queen living on taxpayer funds,79 TANF imposed lifetime limits on the receipt of federal cash assistance and conditioned receipt on participation in work requirements.80 Consequently, states dependent on federal funds were required to implement punitive work programs.

Universal basic income programs are meant to broadly distribute wealth so that no one falls below the threshold for a decent standard of living. However, this policy alone cannot address the historical damage of systematic discrimination and cumulative disadvantage that has marginalized many communities in the first place. In addition, efforts to restitute past injustices—such as campaigns for reparations or struggles to maintain the current welfare state —may, paradoxically, be threatened by the implementation of what I term neoliberal universal basic income.This section explains why those living in the wake of historical injustice (Sharpe 2016) should take particular interest in the structure and policy goals of any proposed UBI program to avoid the adoption of a program that could undermine the efficacy of UBI for improving the overall well-being of historically marginalized communities. One of UBI’s primary and most discussed advantages as a policy is that it is universal. By giving benefits to every member of society, UBI avoids the stigma that usually comes from receiving welfare. As Van Parijs (2004, 13) puts it, “there is nothing humiliating about benefits given to all as a matter of citizenship.” However, a universal policy that distributes equal benefits cannot explicitly recognize or ameliorate disparities in income and generational wealth that have emerged historically along gender and racial lines. Standard UBI proposals are not structurally designed to redress the inequalities produced by centuries of oppression, slavery, exploitation, settler colonialism, and race- and gender-based exploitation. While most UBI proposals would clearly benefit the most marginalized to some extent, they cannot directly address the harm, both in terms of a dearth of material resources as well as the psychic and collective pain of marginalized groups, that centuries of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity have produced. Put simply, a universal basic income may be desirable for a variety of reasons, but it is not a panacea for social problems, nor can it serve as a replacement for reparations for historical injustices inflicted on marginalized groups. UBI could lessen economic inequality but does not address the systemic and historical processes and phenomena that have generated contemporary patterns of inequality, economic or otherwise. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia all exist in social relations as quasi-autonomous but also interlocking phenomena that serve to stratify and oppress marginalized people in innumerable ways (see Crenshaw 1989). While forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia do often negatively impact a person’s socioeconomic status, the effects of these structures and practices cannot be reduced to socioeconomic measures, nor can they be solved or propitiated though monetary restitution. The histories of slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity have innumerable effects on people of color, women, and LGBTQ people, leaving deep-seated scars that cannot be redressed by throwing money at the problem. To give one example of how deep the problems lie in historically marginalized communities, Sharpe (2016) explains how African Americans grapple with the afterlives of slavery, in what she calls the Wake. The Wake can be understood as the conceptual frame for living blackness in remembrance of the African diaspora and in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery. Sharpe (2016) uses the word Wake with multiple meanings to get at the multiplicity of ways of living and being in the shadows of dark histories of oppression and violence. The primary image she uses is of the track left on the water’s surface by a ship. One can visualize this as African Americans living in the midst of that wake, being tossed and turned by the currents of history, always fighting against the waves with no real respite. She also describes the Wake as a form of grief, a ritual of mourning, or being in the line of the recoil of a gun (Sharpe 2016, 11, 8). It is also a form of political consciousness (i.e. wakefulness) that recognizes the “continuous and evolving present of slavery’s yet unresolved unfolding” (Sharpe 2016, 14). Sharpe (2016) uses this imagery and plays with the word to describe the African American experience in modern history as living in the Wake—from four hundred years of the slave trade to the legalized discrimination of Jim Crow to colorblind racism and the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration (Alexander 2010). A UBI scheme can only minimally address the burdens of history for diasporic Africans (See Commander 2017, Hartman 2008). Similar histories and lived experiences can be examined and explained for other marginalized groups such as women and LGBTQ people, and those at the intersections of multiple identities (Crenshaw 1989). Though the experiences of each are qualitatively different, a kind of wake, a continuous turbulence and precarity, is experienced by all marginalized people. This reveals how experiences of marginality in modern society are not limited to strictly economic or class concerns, nor could they be solved by alleviating economic hardship. The pain runs deeper than that. Lived experiences cannot be measured or quantified. Therefore, the quantitative redistribution of money across society can ameliorate the struggle for material needs but cannot alone address the qualitatively distinct lived realities of marginality that have been produced by hundreds of years of white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. This is important to remember in tempering the occasionally utopian expectations placed on UBI by some of its proponents (Bregman 2017, Srnicek & Williams 2015, van der Veen & Van Parijs 1986).

In the United States, homegrown white supremacists, and the lion’s share of their more moderate neighbors, have long considered black people to be weapons of mass destruction. Racial profiling, the hallmark of Homeland Security’s dreadful encroachments, cut its fearsome teeth several years prior to the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Prior, as well, to the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) “Driving while Black” campaign in the late 1990s; prior to the launch of President Ronald Reagan’s infamous war on drugs in the early 1980s, and even to President Richard Nixon’s earlier consolidation of the first truly nationwide police apparatus in the late 1960s. In fact, the genealogy of this nefarious police practice is properly charted beyond the twentieth century, reaching back, with stunningly little modification, to the ethos of the colonial slave patrols of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Given this line of descent, it is not unreasonable to say that racial profiling is the sine qua non of modern policing.

In the consternated deliberations of national security, official and unofficial, from the founding of the republic to the trumpeting of the new world order, the social control and crisis management of the black population has always figured centrally, even or perhaps especially when matters of emancipation or racial equality have by no means enjoyed the focus of debate. Across the sweep of U.S. history, policing the color line has required no credible threat of invasion, no evidence of insurrectionary design, no proven stockpile of illicit chemical agents or radioactive material, no particular breach of domestic or international law, no sensational moral or ethical transgression (though all of these items, real or imagined, have factored in the relevant discourses, public and private). It has only required the presence — within the polity, economy, culture, and society — of a so-called problem people, dwelling as the absence of human presence.

For, it is not Zerzan who has invented the Machine with its terminology and the technological solution that made the atomic bomb possible as THE option, leaving no possibility for life outside of the “Atomic way of life” under the constant threat of obliteration (and, actual death; let us not forget Baghdad, Serbia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki). And it is not Zerzan who has welcomed the extermination of millions of people around the world under the aegis of the defence of the Civilised way of life (slavery, colonialism, the war of terror on terror, etc.). Those who are worried about the collapse of their system, close their eyes on, and hence participate in, the continuing extinction of human and, what Zerzan calls, plant and animal communities around the world whose collapse this civilisation has impelled. Perhaps, the speakers, still fail to perceive the millions of already dead and still dying as “people” or as complex entities of a complex system that exists for its own right and not for the sake of being domesticated (appropriated and exploited) by some humans. Instead, in fearing the onslaught of their own collapse, these people see the “other” victims of civilisation as “resources”, the necessary collateral damage needed to regulate the smooth flow of food to the fridges, restaurants and cafés of the speakers – what Malthus called the disasters necessary to regulate “their” (the brown people’s) “overpopulation” and not “our” (civilised) voracious appetites. Being a white male, Zerzan has renounced the privileges of the white male system and his biography is a witness to that fact. While, of course, there is a difference between someone renouncing having had a choice in the first place and someone not having a chance to renounce because the System never extended an invitation to the Bacchanalia of Civilisation, it is still an excellent example for those in the position of privilege to follow. Which, of course, hardly ever the privileged do, since they greatly fear their own demise even though for others this collapse has long occured. But then, Zerzan warns us that the symbolic alienates people from the suffering of others and replaces our ability for empathy and experience with concentration on personal salvation. In its imposition of a virtual reality, Civilisation estranges us from our own pain and, ultimately, by killing the Other the civilised kill the Self. The other side of the question, though, is that many of those who do not even have a chance at privilege, gobble up the whole value system and ensure that by their simple desire to “one day get there” (“there” is of course the ultimate abstraction) run the system to its logical end: the Total Collapse, the Apocalypse – that elitist knowledge and desire that will blow up the rest of the world. Some of the so-called “anarchists” at the fair seem to fall in this category: they do not associate themselves with the capitalist elites, they identify themselves as anarchists and yet scream in fear that it is Zerzan – and not those who order and finance Knowledge and technologies – who is going to take away their cosy computers, tasty bakeries, black uniforms, contraceptives and the medical establishment that makes their abortions and sex change operations, and the like. In other words, they are deaf to the fact that it is this Knowledge with its implicit and inherent logic that has killed off thousands of varieties of animal, plant, and human cultures around the world. When they scream that the collapse will kill millions of people, they obviously exclude all the Africans, Asians, Aborigines who have already been killed and continue to perish around the world. This logic, obviously, excludes these people from the category itself of “people” and we find ourselves facing the elitist eugenicist rhetoric, once again.

My intention in this book is to provide an analytical and interpretative reflection of the markedly new ways globalization is impacting the welfare state in today’s America. My concern is not simply that in the United States, post-Fordism and its emphasis on service production escalate the need for an abundance of flexible, exploitable, cheap workers. I am more interested in the many ways in which the neoliberal government responds to capital need for exploitive cheap labor through welfare-to-work-programs and the implementation of workfare, the generic term for the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). While there is a clear link between welfare and low-wage markets, with the specious garb of ending welfare dependency, workfare forces welfare recipients, including single mothers with young children, to work outside of the home. More importantly, workfare provides an “underclass” of labor that is desolately trapped in jobs that pay minimum wage. This “underclass” is gendered and racialized, occupying a central place that is oppressive and unsettling, which is in accordance with “neoliberal governmentality”2 and its cartography of power. It is therefore critical, here, to revisit and reframe T. H. Marshall’s notion of “the social rights of citizenship”3 and the ethical question of social “rights claims” to include economics and the right to a modicum of a livable wage for all members of a democratic polity, including poor black women positioned outside of the norm of “a livable life.”4 To capture and elaborate on the precise form of the lived experience of poor black women under the workfare state, I used the concept of “deathin-life” as a condition that afro-pessimism describes as “ontological death,”5 that is, the loss of their personhood. This ontological death, as I will later show, is intrinsically linked to the trope of the welfare queen that reduces black women on welfare to that stereotype. In other words, as racialized gender bodies, black women are, in the words of the French postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, “overdetermined from the outside,”6 another form of black-women-on-welfare profiling as I named it. In fact, prior to the very prospect of their livability, they must, in order to live, draw upon and develop an alternative way of being in the world, which is impossible until racialized gender norms and institutionalized forms of power that produced and form them are challenged and rejected. In this regards, life needs to be “livable” first before any arguments for social “rights claims” for poor black women can be made. And to be rights bearing subject, black women’s lives have to be first recognizable as lives worth preserving. Social “rights claims” won’t necessarily reduce structural inequality, such as “gendered racism” no matter the form it takes. However, I would like to focus on rights as important to the liberal tradition that shaped and continues to shape social policies in the United States and draw attention to its limitations, especially, when such rights are, for the most part, curtailed for the undeserving poor. The upshot, as I see it, is to make a case for welfare as a right for poor people. It is understandable that my discussion seeks to illuminate a crucial but largely overlooked aspect of the negative impact of the restructuring of welfare on black single mother welfare recipients. The stereotype of the welfare queen, which is infused with racial meaning is used to describe and illustrate the position of black single mother welfare recipients as welfare dependents and undeserving of welfare. More so, it is a way of talking about poor women with an invidious racist and sexist subtext that merges in “gendered racism,” that is, a form of racism and sexism that “narrowly intertwine and combine under certain conditions into one hybrid phenomenon,”7 in the words of black feminist and critical race theorist Philomena Essed.8 Since an ethical concept of gendered racism must simultaneously be a theory of the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and other forms of differences, an intersectionality framework is properly vital for interrogating and problematizing the restructuring of welfare in which poor black women are implicated. Additionally, an intersectionality framework is antithetical to the neoliberal model of welfare restructuring in which the market and not democratically elected government is to determine poor people’s social rights. Thus, I make an argument for moving beyond T. H. Marshall’s notion of “the social rights of citizenship” and the ethical question of social “rights claims,” largely conceived to include poor black single mothers. It is only, then, that life can plausibly be “livable” for them

Slavery is the great leveler of the black subjects positionality. The black American subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because—and this is key—our presence works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject— even-the most massacred among them, Indians—is required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom the nations order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subjects presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder."12 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 (Sexton), and whoever says "aids" says black—the "Negro is a phobogenic object."13 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 antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition movement—invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the United States. 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, ones politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites ones politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movements 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 United States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the foy 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, the 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 y 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 that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.

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.

Crenshaw then goes on to examine how black women's lack of fit with this dominant approach to defining discrimination provides less than desir able outcomes. The law reflects the reality of the most "privileged" members of legally recognized classes (151). According to her, the top-down, "but-for" (151) approach fails, because "[i]f Black women cannot conclusively say that 'but for' their race or 'but for' their gender they would be treated differently, they are not invited to climb through the hatch but told to wait in the unprotected margin until they can be absorbed into the broader, protected categories of race and sex" (152). For black women who are assailed by sexism and racism (again, sometimes in ways that resemble their impact on other groups, sometimes in ways that are compounded, or sometimes based on black women as a separate class), the law is inept. In one notable case, DeGraffenreid, for instance, the court decided that antidiscrimination law did not provide for a "super-remedy" that combined consideration of both race and sex discrimination for black women qua black women as advanced by the plaintiffs (141). The law is too narrow to address a bottom-up approach, emanating from the perspective of black women at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Just as it prohibits the application of the law to black women's discrimina tion and thereby reproduces institutional racism and sexism, this top-down approach affirms a dominant feminist praxis that universalizes white female experience as that of all women and abets white women's avoidance of their investments in racism. Echoing criticisms of other black feminists, Crenshaw observes that white feminists often speak for women qua women in ways that deny the specificity of black women's lives. White feminists' discussions of rape, for instance, have often been ill-fitted for black women's circumstances, according to Crenshaw; white feminists who pointed to rape laws as a means of securing female virtue fail to comprehend the implicit centering of the white experience in these positions (157-58). Black women's virtue or "chastity" was something that early rape law never had as a goal (ibid.). Indeed, Crenshaw notes that mainstream feminism's single-axis approach fails to relay how rape constituted "racial terrorism]" against black communities, and that the law aided and abetted white male access to black women's bodies (158). This top-down, single-axis focus Crenshaw derides is problematic because it also centers analyses of racism's impact on black men, leaving in the shadows black women who are doubly disadvantaged by sexism and racism. Within black communities, racism is read as the principal threat to blacks' well-being. In this light, black women who address sexism are often at cross-purposes with stated community interests geared toward fighting racism, and they are left with little support in fighting pernicious patriarchal practices.

White fem is antiblack pt 2.

The Fiat of Dreams: The potentiality of whiteness—the proleptic call of white anti-racist consciousness— is nothing more than the fiat of an ahistorical dream. A command ushered before thought engages racism, before awareness of the world becomes aware of what is actual. This is forced upon accounts of racism where whiteness is morally obscured from being seen as is. [w]hiteness as is partly determined by what could be, since what is was a past potentiality—a could be. The appeal to the sentimentality, morality, the moral abstraction/distraction of equality—both as a political command and its anthropological requisite—complicate the most obvious consequence of anti-Black racism, namely violence. This moral apriorism urges the Black thinker to conceptualize racism as an activist project rooted in the potential of a world filled with non-racists, a world where the white racist is transformed by Black activity into the white anti-racist. But this project supposes an erroneous view of the white racist which occludes the reality of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. As Robert F. Williams argues in Negroes with Guns, “the racist is a man crazed by hysteria at the idea of coming into equal contact with Negroes. And this mass mental illness called racism is very much a part of the ‘American way of Life.’” The white racist is not seen as the delusional individual ostracized from society as a result of their abhorrent social pathologies of racist hate. Rather the white racist is normal—the extended family, the spouse, the sibling, the friend of the white individual—the very same entities upon which the inter/intrasubjectivity nexus of the white self is founded. The white [he] experiences no punishment for his longing for Black servitude and his need to exploit and divest the Black worker here and then of [his] wealth. The white [she] has no uneasiness about her raping of—the destruction of generations of Black selves—mothers, children, and men—and today usurps the historical imagery of “the nigger,” to politically vacate Blackness and demonize niggers as beyond political consideration. She rewrites history, pens morality, and embodies the post-racial civil rights subject. As such, racism, the milieu of the white racist is not the exposed pathological existence of the white race, but rather valorized in white individuality, the individuality that conceptualizes their racism as a normative aspiration of what the world should look like, and even more damning, an aspiration that can be supported and propagated in the world. The white racist recognizes the deliberateness of the structures, relations, and systems in a white supremacist society and seeks like their colonial foreparents to claim them as their own. The Anti-Ethical as Paradigmatic Imperative: Traditionally we have taken ethics to be, as Henry Sidgwick’s claims, "any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings 'ought'—or what is right for them—or to seek to realize by voluntary action.” This rational procedure is however at odds with the empirical reality the ethical deliberation must concern itself with. To argue, as is often done, that the government, its citizens, or white people should act justly, assumes that the possibility of how they could act defines their moral disposition. If a white person could possibly not be racist, it does not mean that the possibility of not being racist, can be taken to mean that they are not racist. In ethical deliberations dealing with the problem of racism, it is common practice to attribute to historically racist institutions, and individuals universal moral qualities that have yet to be demonstrated. This abstraction from reality is what frames our ethical norms and allows us to maintain, despite history or evidence, that racist entities will act justly given the choice. Under such complexities, the only ethical deliberation concerning racism must be anti-ethical, or a judgment refusing to write morality onto immoral entities. In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the dominant illusion is that discourse itself , an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as “similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual, who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined, not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch. Ought implies a projected (futural) act. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, the can ideally imagine an “if condition,” whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: “if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors. Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action, hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics. These ethics, the ethics that result from this vitiated morality, are not arbiters of oppression at all. They are not a rational calculus that is capable of revealing a categorical imperative, rather they function as the Kantian constraints upon human experience; the synthetic apriori upon which the phenomena of whiteness is the landscape of thinking about Blackness under the Western anthropos. There is an implicit appeal to a hierarchy of being that is both empirical and universal—all man is superior to non-man. Hence, ethics emerges as the product of the overrepresentation of Western man thinking itself—projecting itself—into the future. These ethics, theorized away from the anti-Blackness not within it, only uphold an overdetermined virtue of whiteness. They hold within them no actual delineation between good or bad, only a Puritanical call to reason to turn its attention towards the other-ed created. This attention however relies on the perceptions and caricatures of Black torment that appeal to the whites’ self-assuring imagining of themselves, so that even when confronted with racism and their role as whites thinking about Black people incarcerated within a racist society and dying, these whites can claim that their conceptualization of racism itself, or (inter-sectionally) next to other injustices like poverty, sexism, homophobia, etc. makes them (whites) virtuous. It is the process of, the appeal to, “getting whites to recognize” (racist) oppression that allows the destruction of reality, Black death, to continue unabated, since it is the exact moment that whites are forced to engage racist problems in America, be it the anti-Black violence of American society, which animates the aversion of the justice system, the police state, the white citizenry, or the practice of American democracy itself—where the death of Black people/criminals/deviants/thugs remain normal and justified by whites—that they, the white(s) thinking about racism, get to impose upon Black reality, a racist moral maxim, namely that racism is not death and beyond –the end of--ethical calculus or moral evaluation, but ultimately contingent in America and of measurable consequence so much so that must be weighed next to the other democratic values that preserve this great white society: security, safety, individuality, property, profit, and freedom, the very values that when enacted by whites continue to perpetuate one ultimate end, the death of Blacks. Racism is not unethical simply because it is a moral affront to the allegedly generalizable Western/white/enlightenment notion of humanity extended to Blacks by the liberal synonymy of citizenship. Racism is unethical, immoral, because it re-presents—makes known in the present— and acts to capture the Blacks urging the acknowledgment of racism in the ontological entity of modernity’s greatest oppression—the slave; the non-human. To say racism is unethical is to say that it is outside of ethical deliberation, which is to say what is meant by ethics meant to rationally determine relationships between human beings. Because racism exposes the absurdity of Western ontology’s suggestion that the white/European human stands in moral obligation towards the non-human/Black/racialized other created by the Western notion of MAN, calling for “ethical deliberation” is a call to make the historical event of Black inhumanity introduced by modernity the referent of white rationalizations about Black death, and anti-Blackness. Such deliberation only offers the white mind the opportunity to reassert the social boundaries constraining Black life conceptually. It is the memory of slavery, which motivates the white’s attachment to the contingency of Black life, and ultimately concludes that racism, while unfortunate, is/was necessary for America/the West, the world to exist and humanity/the citizen to reach its historical/imperial apex. Thus, MAN, the onto-anthropological basis of humanity and the cultural values that are simultaneously birthed to project humanity into existence is the origin of the oppressive conceptualizations of the other. Oppression “as is” was born out of and sustained by the exclusive morality of white/Western humanity against the barbarism imposed on the Black/African. As such, the nigger born of racism is behind all oppressions, since “it” is the cultural/epistemological/historical ethic—the moral rock bottom of dehumanization. The oppressed is made nigger through dehumanization; the product of absolute debasement, while morality/virtue the valuations of ethics itself is reified perpetually by the activity of whiteness; its perpetual commanding of morality to conform to and justify their existence as the human. As Karen Gange writes in “On the Obsolesce of Disciplines” (2007), The shift out of our present conception of Man, out of our present “World System”—the one that places people of African descent and the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless, jobless, and criminalized damned as the zero-most factor of Other to Western Man’s Self—has to be first and foremost a cultural shift, not an economic one. Until such a rupture in our conception of being human is brought forth, such “sociological” concerns as that of the vast global and local economic inequalities, immigration, labor policies, struggles about race, gender, class, and ethnicity, and struggles over the environment, global warming, and distribution of world resources, will remain status quo. Anti-ethics; the call to demystify the present concept of man as illusion, as delusion, and as stratagem, is the axiomatic rupture of white existence and the multiple global oppressions like capitalism, militarism, genocide, and globalization, that formed the evaluative nexus which allows whites to claim they are the civilized guardians of the world’s darker races. It is the rejection of white virtue, the white’s axiomatic claim to humanity that allows the Black, the darker world to sow the seeds of consciousness towards liberation from oppression. When white (in)humanity is no longer an obstacle weighed against the means for liberation from racism, the oppressed are free to overthrow the principles that suggest their paths to liberation are immoral and hence not possible. To accept the oppressor as is, the white made manifest in empire, is to transform white western (hu)man from semi-deitous sovereign citizen to contingent, mortal, and un-otherable. Exposing the inhumanity of white humanity is the destruction/refusal of the disciplinary imperative for liberal reformism and dialogue as well as a rejection of the social conventions that dictate speaking as if this white person, the white person and her white people before you are in fact not racist white people, but tolerable—not like the racist white people abstracted from reality, but really spoken of in conversations about racism. The revelatory call, the coercively silenced but intuitive yearning to describe the actual reality set before Black people in an anti-Black society, is to simply say there is no negotiating the boundaries of anti-Blackness or the horizons of white supremacy. Racism, the debasement of melaninated bodies and nigger-souls, is totalizing.

Samuel A. Chambers defines the imagination as a “synthetic power of creation and re-creation—an ability to combine the uncombinable, to surpass binaries without merely collapsing them, to fashion something new” (620). And from such synthesis, we are told that a democratic imagination is possible, since we would “think the limits (and their transgression) of democratic theory and of democracy as well” (620). Here, we see that the democratic imagination recasts limits as possibilities rather than complete failures. Limits become the resource for creation and re-creation rather than evidence of destruction and uselessness. A couture Kantianism / Hegelianism (mixed with a splash of deconstruction) salvages democracy from the perils of its absurdity, devastation, and brutality. Why this investment in democracy’s “intrinsic” creative power? Can this creativity finally bring an end to anti-Black violence and Black suffering? Or is the knowledge of democracy’s fabulousness enough to sustain Blacks through police terrorism, environmental racism, re-enslavement through incarceration, and food / housing insecurity and discrimination? I would suggest that what makes such creative synthesis possible is an unacknowledged dependence on time. For proponents of democracy, it is time that is malleable for creative enterprises of re-imagination, of progress fetishization, and an “ontology of change” that need not justify (or prove) itself, declaration of change seems to be enough (Badiou, “Ontology”). What if, however, democracy is clinging to a depleted resource? What if time is no longer enough to orient existence, especially for those inhabitants of an abyss—within which time, space, ethics, and law are weaponized against existence? Put somewhat differently, democracy has exhausted the imagination. It is a speculative vampire that drains the imagination of any vital resource for its own survival. This speculation is an outrageous expenditure of energy, an enjoyment without end, a scholarly surplus-pleasure requiring an incessant (and useless) political repetition (Johnston). I would describe this speculation—the conjoining of time, democracy, and the imagination—as an interminable quest, or a certain “stuckness” in a scene of failure (a constant encircling of political and legal vacuity). This repetition is most dramatically demonstrated, for me, in Black political participation—voting, protesting, keeping hope alive, returning to the kernel of authoritarian violence (i. e., anti-Blackness) with unbridled hope, temporal determination, and an investment in the ontology of change (Warren; Farred). Time mocks Blacks, requiring historical déjà vu to be re-imagined, redeemed, rethought, or ignored, rather than accepting time as anti-Black enmity and democracy as the Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination Amst 66.1 (2021): 247-51 249 permanence of anti-Blackness. Chants of “yes we can!” “your vote matters!” “we have power!” “we’re moving forward,” etc., serve to neglect the failure of Black political participation and to imprison the imagination within futurity. As I am writing these remarks, I am witnessing the absurdity of this democratic imagination and its unrelenting time. On one news program, I hear that police shot unarmed Andre Hill, a forty-seven-yearold Black resident of Columbus, Ohio, without cause, and rather than offering him medical assistance, decided to handcuff him (just in case the supine, dying man finds a gun, magically, I guess). On the other news program, I hear Black politicians importuning, begging, and guilting Blacks into voting for change. Black political pundits assure voters that the ontology of change is realizable if you just exercise your right to vote. “Never again!” “We will transform police practices!” “This time will be different!” Did Blacks not vote when police shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice as he was playing with his toy gun on the playground? (By the way, no federal charges will be brought against the police officers who shot him). Did Blacks not vote when Sandra Bland lost her life in police custody? Did Blacks not vote after police deprived Eric Garner and George Floyd (and apparently 70 other people) of breath (Baker et al.)? In answer to my inquiry “why should we continue to vote if anti-Black violence is not changing?” I am told, “Just keep believing, we can vote people in that can change things!” When I then ask, “But I voted for President Obama (suspending my nihilism in an intoxication of hopeaffect), I thought things were going to change for Blacks? I feel just as unsafe and endangered post-Obama as pre-Obama,” I am told, “Obama wasn’t a ‘magic Negro.’ He did the best he could.” Then I ask, “So why vote if it will take an act of magic to address the existential threat of anti-Blackness?” Time mocks the cyclical movement of such inquiries, they are, indeed, unanswerable within the creative, synthetic, and powerful democratic horizon. Voting becomes the premier instrument of the democratic imagination—supposedly, it activates the imagination with futurity, avoids paralysis with action, and can be repeated. What type of creativity will finally eradicate anti-Black brutality? And could such creativity even operate within time? Could we still call such creativity democracy? Must we abandon time to enable the imagination to perform the mystical, the magical, and the ineffable?

In light of Shakina’s comment, I want to offer another reading that refracts the targeted control of Black women’s reproduction, a racial politics of reproduction, through the afterlife of slavery framework. The historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman (2007, 6) defines the afterlife of slavery as the circumstance of having “established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone.” Consequently, “Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (Hartman 2007, 6). She goes on to say that the afterlife of slavery encompasses “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (Hartman 2007, 6). I use the afterlife of slavery as a critical framework to discuss a method of reasoning and knowledge production about the medical management of Black women’s reproduction. It draws on archives and documents of the past to uncover how the precarities of chattel slavery are imposed on contemporary conditions of Black life. As Dorothy Roberts (2014) reminds us, the politics of reproduction are indeed linked to slavery. Using the afterlife of slavery, we can read the incident Efe described as an expression of reproductive abuse—a lingering reference to earlier moments of population control. Specifically, nineteenth- and twentieth-century eugenic projects viewed particular groups of people as inferior and dangerous, and they ultimately subjected to sterilization people deemed unfit because of their (dis)ability, poverty, ethnicity, or race.1 The archives offer instructive sources as I seek to unpack what is so disturbing about a discussion of tubal ligation with a group of pregnant Black women attending a prenatal care session. We need only remember the Relf sisters. Mary Alice and Minnie Relf, aged fourteen and twelve, respectively, were sterilized in 1973. Deemed mentally disabled, they were targeted for sterilization along with a disproportionate number of African American, American Indian, Puerto Rican, and Mexican women (when compared to European American women). The abuse they endured became a rallying point for reproductive activists, and it was the Relf case that brought racially targeted sterilization abuse to national attention. To Shakina and Efe, the discussion of tubal ligation in prenatal care evoked the Relf incident as iconic of population control: an apparition of that past. A second example of how we can analyze the politics of reproduction through the afterlife of slavery framework comes from a little-discussed moment on March 29, 2011, when former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum appeared on a New Hampshire radio show called “The Advocates.” Although Santorum’s most notable legislative accomplishment was ushering through a bill banning late-term abortions and then pushing to prohibit the use of fetal tissue for research purposes on moral grounds, this conversation underscored a financial impetus for his antiabortion position. A caller erroneously claimed that 50 million abortions occurred in the United States every year, pointing out that if half that number instead represented future workers who paid Social Security taxes and Medicare, those two systems would be solvent. The actual number of abortions performed each year in the United States is closer to 1 million. Nonetheless, Santorum agreed, commenting that “the reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion” (Kiely 2011). Santorum’s assessment contradicts data showing the U.S. abortion rate at 1.5 percent, meaning roughly 15 abortions per 1,000 women aged fifteen to forty-four (Guttmacher Institute 2018). Social Security, according to the Urban Institute (Steuerle, Smith, and Quakenbush 2013), when considered across many decades, redistributes money from Hispanics, Blacks, and other people of color to whites. This is less ambiguous when examining old age and survivors’ benefits, although disability payments do restore some progressive redistribution to Blacks. This happens, for example, through forced annuitization, “the requirement to claim benefits as a perpetual stream of payments after reaching the age of eligibility rather than as a lump sum” (Steuerle, Smith, and Quakenbush 2013, 2). Here, we clearly see the redistribution of capital from those with shorter lifespans—often Black people—to those with longer lifespans. Deploying Black reproducing bodies to uphold the redistribution of money through actuarial analyses in Social Security resembles the racialized actuarial practices found in insurance policies during enslavement. The historian Dania Ramey Berry (2017) argues that the value of enslaved laborers is calculable through analyses of life insurance policies. According to Berry, enslavers protected their investment by purchasing policies based on an appraisal to determine the premium connected to death averages and mortality tables. Yet processes of commodification capitalized Black women’s preconception. Indeed, reproduction was crucial to the expansion of slavery. In the database that Berry compiled, we find that insurance coverage for young women from ages twelve to seventeen ranged from $1,800 to $2,600, with interest rates between 2.25 and 2.75 percent. Enslavers capitalized on enslaved people’s value and factored in the time from which they were able to reproduce. The Black body, Berry (2017, 89) claims, was a “well-thought out” enterprise. The value of reproduction through the actuarial narratives of Social Security and insurance appraisals described above aligns with both abortion and antiabortion positions. According to the historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz (2006), slaveholders generally wanted enslaved women to bring infants to term. This held especially true after Congress ended the importation of slaves in 1808. The value of enslaved children led doctors to pay increased attention to preventing spontaneous and deliberate miscarriages in the slave quarters and prompted medical professionals to become “more sensitive to debates surrounding abortion” (Schwartz 2006, 108). Yet debates about abortion were drawn along racial lines and structured in relation to morality. Black women—already degraded by race and class—were not really viewed as debasing themselves by performing abortions. That moral repugnance, Schwartz argues, was reserved for white women who avoided childbirth for selfish reasons. This observation resonates, albeit imperfectly, with a point Faye Ginsburg (1998, 128) makes in her book Contested Lives, in which she describes how “many pro-life women . . . viewed liberated women as a symptom of an increasingly selfish and materialistic society.”

Returning to the controlling dimension of restricting abortion, the issue was that Black women performing their own abortions challenged slaveholders’ authority. By regulating their own fertility, enslaved women undermined owners’ power over them and interfered with potential capital accumulation. Slaveholders therefore castigated abortion when initiated by the mother, but paradoxically utilized the procedure when the life of the mother was in jeopardy, because her future fecundity was measured against the financial gain of her having a child (Schwartz 2006). The paradox of race and reproduction in the Trump era is that reproductive restrictions simultaneously protect whiteness and determine power over nonwhites. As the reproductive justice activist and scholar Loretta Ross (2016, 53) points out, the concurrent narrowing and expansion of reproduction exemplifies how “white supremacy constructs different destinies for each ethnic population of the United States through targeted, yet diffuse policies of population control.” At the intersection of Ross’s and Berry’s analysis rests a complex explanation for Santorum’s comment—restricting abortion access represents power over Black and brown bodies and facilitates the capitalization of Social Security with more workers.