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Figuring Blackness through Black love as the antithesis of politics is a precondition for Black love and Black politics’ disavowal Moreover, to understand intramural politics is to understand not only the truth of intramural violence, but also how politics and violence are constituted in and through Blackness (as its construction), and anti-Blackness (as its erasure). Black transgression, then, becomes contained within a closed symbolic system of subjectivity—a subjectivity that cannot create a self—and the Black intramural is overdetermined as maladjusted from the moment of Blackness’ creation. Differently put, the relationship between Black being (within the racial imaginary) and violence becomes causal, rather than Blackness being recognized as an effect of violence. Hence, Blackness pathologized as violence tyrannizes how the psyche processes the truth of Black love. Black subjectivity and “borrowed institutionality” in lieu of a self are pathologized as criminal—the locus of the problem rather than its effect. An essential construction buttresses an entire episteme upon which categories of being, thought, and the Human hinge—Blackness. To account for the political (in)capacity of Black people subtended in white violence would be to cede to the recognition that whiteness—(white) life and humanity writ large—and every discursive formation established in slavery’s wake would have to be dismantled. In other words, to avow, acknowledge and define Black love, which is inseparable from Black violence in its formation, would force whiteness to lose itself, and possibly disappear, into its own violence. Hence, white jouissance undergirds every facet of our conceptions of violence—white disavowal appears even within the most intimate and most revolutionary spheres of Black psychic and social life. Black love, Black demand, and Black relationality can never be read outside of the signifying chain of non-being, violence, that produces Blackness as the disavowed imago par excellence of the unconscious—dangerous, controllable only through recourses of denial and repression. Black demand, which is foundational to Black desire, is a longing for an affective relation to an other Black recognized as other, that could be recognized as a relation. Black demand threatens the foundation of the political, if not the world. A constant marker of the precondition of the political is Black demand, hence Black insurgency through Black love, Black collectivity, and Black revolutionary praxis counterfeits white agency and desire. This simulation appears as the performance of white violence in and through intramural violence, casting white jouissance in the spotlight, if even for a moment. The performance of political desire, whether through the practice of necklacing or, as Ideal states, “[w]e...seek...cruelty...painful conflicts as expressions of love and power,”106 counterfeits death denied to Blackness through “white jouissance” as “the path towards death.” For Blackness is a construct for whiteness to evade its own fear of death. If deathliness can be symbolized through Blackness, only whiteness can reap its benefits—transcendence, memory, progress—while Blackness remains a barred object: that is, unless Black poiesis paves the way for what has yet to be. Differently put, just as Ideal and Jimson are allegories mirroring the conceptual categories underwriting their invention, the performance of Black political desire mirrors the psychic condition undergirding anti-Black violence: white jouissance. Whiteness has capacity to parse out death and love in their affective parameters—the power to declare love recognized as love and not violence. The practice of policing how one loves is concomitant with policing how one punishes, subsequently all facets of Black social life in social death are elaborated within an ethical and psycho-political historical schema foundational to non-Black desire. In so doing, all Black intramural relations are mediated by a past which cannot be disclosed as past, but as a present denied to Blackness. This foreclosure feels like a withholding of love, at best, and a betrayal ventriloquized as a desire for whiteness at worst.

The mediated experience of Black relation through white violence is a non-relation, hence Black demand is perhaps best defined as a drive to inhabit the politics of desire. Here lies the danger of Black revolutionary poiesis and the performance of the political as it is simultaneously the safety of Black violence.

The "terrible spectacle" that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery was the beating of his Aunt Hester. It is one of the most well-known scenes of torture in the literature of slavery, perhaps second only to Uncle Tom's murder at the hands of Simon Legree. By locating this "horrible exhibition" in the first chapter of his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass establishes the centrality of violence to the making of the slave and identifies it as an original, generative act equivalent to the statement "I was born."1 The passage through the bloodstained gate is an inaugural moment in the formation of the enslaved. It is a primal scene. By this I mean that the terrible spectacle dramatizes the origin of the subject and demonstrates that to be a slave is to be under the brutal power and authority of another.2 I have chosen not to reproduce Douglass's account of the beating of Aunt Hester to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave's ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often they inure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity-the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances-and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts?3 Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and suffering? What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the "peculiar institution"? Or does the pain of the other merely provide us with the opportunity for self-reflection? At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed a� the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible. In light of this, how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle, or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other, or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? This was the challenge faced by Douglass and other foes of slavery, and this is the task I take up here. Rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned-slaves dancing in the quarters, the outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage, the constitution of humanity in slave law, and the fashioning of the self-possessed individual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle. The terror and the routine violence of racial slavery were perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, property, and personhood. The scenes of subjection examined here entail the enactment of subjugation and the constitution of the subject; and they include the blows delivered to Topsy and Zip Coon on the popular stage, the obligatory revels of slaves in the marketplace, the simulation of will in slave law, the fashioning of identity, and the processes of individuation and normalization.

Welfare reform not only produced punitive policies, but also established a system that blurred the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system. Until the 1990s, the welfare system was relatively simple and self-contained. The rules of AFDC and Food Stamps were handed down by the federal government, and eligibility rules and violations of welfare rules were consistent from state to state. If families were found ineligible for aid, they were given notice and their benefits ended. If they were found cheating-for example, underreporting their income or failing to report a change of household composition-but were still income-eligible for aid, then the penalties were civil: their welfare benefits would typically be reduced by a certain percentage each month until any overpayments were recouped by the state. 10 6 As a result of the reforms, the federal government and the states instituted policies and practices that burdened welfare receipt with criminality; policed the everyday lives of poor families; and wove the criminal justice system into the welfare system, often entangling poor families in the process. David Garland notes that the "themes that dominate crime policy-rational choice and the structures of control, deterrents, and disincentives, the normality of crime, the responsibilization of individuals, the threatening underclass, the failing, overly lenient system-have come to organize the politics of poverty as well." 10 7 The welfare reform policies were designed to punish the poor; to stigmatize poverty, particularly poverty that leads to welfare receipt; and to create a system of deterrence aimed at the middle class. A vast regulatory and punitive system developed under welfare reform. The welfare policies the states instituted after welfare devolution included a broad range of punitive approaches to the poor designed not only to punish poor adults who failed to transition from welfare to work, but also to punish entire families where the head of the household failed to live up to governing standards of morality. 10 8 The reforms not only ended aid to families as a federal entitlement, they allowed states to develop their own rules about who was entitled to aid and their own regulations and practices around removing families from the aid rolls. More importantly and less well-known, however, the reforms of 1996 produced a system that blurred the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system. The welfare system is increasingly used by the government to police crimes, both those involving welfare and those unrelated to welfare. As the next Part illustrates, the welfare system is now being used to catch criminals, and restrictions on aid are being used to punish individuals who have been convicted of crimes. The fugitive felon prohibitions, Operation Talon, and the drug felony lifetime ban have little to do with aid to the poor. These rules and programs are essentially new ways for the criminal justice system to make use of welfare administrative data to capture poor individuals who are also wanted by the criminal justice system. Through changes in statutes and practices, then, the welfare system has become an extension of the criminal justice system.

How did a program that had been championed for preserving the values of home life and the service of the mother in raising future citizens become a publicly denigrated program that stigmatized its recipients and catalyzed a national movement for its elimination? What can explain the mobilization of political and social forces to eliminate a program that represented only a small fraction of all social welfare expenditures? How can the An1erican people sin1ultaneously castigate ��welfare" and welfare recipients while reaching for increases in other social welfare programs? What made AFDC recipients undeserving? The answer is the same as it was in 1911, in 1935, and in 1966: race. What made African-Americans undeserving under mothers' pensions and under ADC is the fact that they are African-American. The anti-African-American rhetoric changed little from the early 1900s. But when African-Americans were actually receiving social welfare benefits, the rhetoric reflected a different goal on the part of policymakers-program elimination. After exclusion ofAfrican-Americans was no longer tenable, the dissolution of the program became the ultimate objective. What emerged in the 1960s was more than just a ��white backlash," as Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave argue.19 The elimination of AFDC as a national program represented business as usual in the evolution of the U.S. welfare state. Although periods of white backlash clearly occurred throughout the twentieth century and represent an integral part of a larger process of racial conflict, the significance of the elin1ination of AFDC is that the institutionalization of racism in the early 1900s was a determinant of its demise. It is not just the moments of the backlash themselves that are critical, but the embeddedness of race in U.S. state development that enable racial backlash to occur in the first place. Coinciding with an increase in AFDC recipients in the 1960s was the changing face of the welfare recipient. The mass media no longer portrayed the poor as the unfortunate white family, and ��poverty took on a black face. "20 As different studies of the mass media have shown, welfare recipients were usually depicted as African-American, regardless of the group's actual representation on the AFDC rolls. Furthermore, poverty was and continues to be portrayed as a ��black" problem. The media coverage of poor African-Americans was usually negative co1npared with that of whites; in positive stories on welfare� the faces of the poor are typically white.21 While a white mother on AFDC received sympathy for her poverty and hardships, an African-American mother receiving AFDC was labeled as undeserving, irresponsible, and/or criminal. Certain high-profile media stories exacerbated the racialized reform dialogue. In 1994 major television networks and national newspapers covered a story about a drug raid in a Chicago apartment that allegedly revealed the neglect and abuse of nineteen children by five welfare mothers and one African-American man. The image of the ��Chicago Nineteen" became a powerful backdrop for the welfare reform debate.22 As James M. Avery and Mark Peffley conclude in their study of race, public opinion, and the n1edia, the n1edia's racial portrayals of poverty n1atter. Their study demonstrates the media's tendency racialize welfare policy through the disproportionate use of images of African-Americans in stories on poverty. Furthermore, Avery and Peffley show that this racialization affects the way whites respond to the articles. 23 The media stories reinforced popular perceptions and created an environment in which policymakers could take this racialized discourse to the next level. Just as public discourse vilified AFDC mothers, many policymakers capitalized on racial divisiveness to push through a social policy agenda. As discussed previously, legislators criticized AFDC generally for the dependency it created and pathologies it reinforced. However, numerous policymakers used and reinforced racist stereotypes of minorities, especially African-Americans. The image of the ��welfare queen'; emerged with the help of Ronald Reagan 24 and spurred on by depictions of the typical AFDC mother as an irresponsible, lazy drug addict. Reagan's iconic representation of the African-American AFDC recipient was just one in a long line of pejorative representations of African-An1ericans on public assistance. In the eyes of these legislators, black AFDC recipients did not want to work, used their welfare money to buy alcohol and drugs, and neglected or abused their children.25 In comparison to the sympathy white welfare recipients generated, policymakers bla1ned African-Americans for welfare abuse and administrative mismanagement. During the 1995 debates about the Personal Responsibility Act, congressmen did not try to hide their associations of race, welfare, and the ��pathologies of the poor." Representative Martin Hoke (R-OH) commented, [W]e know that in the minority community among blacks two out of every three births is now out of wedlock .... [W]e also know being raised in a family dependent on welfare dramatically reduces a child's intellectual abilities and life prospects. . . . And teenage girls who grow up in fatherless families are far more likely to have early intercourse, pregnancies and abortions than those from two parent families. 2 6 In his congressional testimony, Representative Adam Smith from Washington added to the stereotype by stating incorrectly that 8o percent of all births in ��black inner city poor neighborhoods " occurred out of wedlock.27 Representative Major R. Owens from New York summed up how welfare stereotypes have contributed to the continued racialization of welfare: ��when people think of welfare, the media, the political leadership, have handled the problen1 and issue in ways which have led to an association of welfare with African-Americans, with black people. So it becomes a demonization. "28 The fact that welfare reform seemed a poorly veiled attack on minorities did not go unrecognized during the welfare reform debates. Congressman Gary Franks of Connecticut asked very pointedly, ��As we continue to address these issues, the question is, Mr. Speaker, are we, as a Congress, looking at constructive changes or merely attacks toward African-Americans and the poor? Sadly, Mr. Speaker, at this point I am not quite sure. "29Just as race is significant in explaining why a state was late in adopting mothers' pension legislation during the 1920s, why some counties did not implement the programs at all during the 1930s, and why ADC benefit amounts varied from family to family during the 1940s, race is also significant in explaining why son1e states adopted restrictive AFDC waivers during the early 199os3° and why the national government abolished AFDC and replaced it with TANF in the 1996 reforms. Race has influenced not only different policies adopted at the state and local levels but also the levels of public support for these policies. Even after the adoption of PRWORA, state policies remained influenced by race. The strictest welfare reforms were more likely to be adopted in states where minorities made up a larger proportion of the welfare caseload.31 The devolution of welfare to the states has not eliminated racial prejudice in welfare provision but has merely reinvented the parochialism emblematic of the state n1others' pension programs. Returning to the mothers' pension philosophy of a previous century, state TANF programs can reflect local values and determinations of deserving, fit parents. The United States began its path of welfare state development with a particular deserving recipient in mind-white women. In a class by themselves, white women have been endowed with the right to stay home and raise their children without suffering the pejorative stereotypes imposed on mothers of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. With such strong racist currents running through society, it was ultimately predictable that the United States would generate public policies that perpetuated the racial hierarchy.32 At different points in U.S. state development, different ethnic and racial groups were deliberately excluded from social welfare provision. However, unlike most other racial/ethnic groups, African-Americans never had a legitimate right to ��welfare." Paradoxically, as this book has shown, mothers' pensions and ADC evolved from relatively small social welfare programs institutionally designed to exclude African-Americans into a sprawling program perceived by the public as dominated by unworthy African-An1ericans. The decentralization and fragn1entation of policymaking resulted in the following pattern of African-American participation and status in the American welfare state: initial exclusion, conditional inclusion, stigmatization and political isolation, and finally exclusion through devolution. At various junctures in the development of this social policy, opportunities arose to institutionally challenge the racialization of aid to dependent children. The state-building process is not linear. ��Its character depends on choices taken at pivotal historical moments," write Ira Katz-nelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, ��when fundamental questions about ties between the state and the economy, or between the state and civil society, enter the political agenda. "33 During the passage of the Social Security Act, legislators could have fought for provisions that did not hand to the states a bill that guaranteed the continued exclusion of African-Americans from the benefit rolls. During the War on Poverty, Johnson's advisers argued for a national standard for AFDC, but the administration never proposed such a standard to Congress.34 Furthern1ore, the Johnson administration did nothing to counterbalance the growing rhetoric linking race to the ��welfare problem." When the PWRORA was being debated, legislators could have raised the level of debate beyond the inflammatory racial discourse but instead chose to embrace this discourse to their advantage. By bestowing the administration of this program on states, the national government implicitly accepted the fact that the TANF would be implemented according to local norms and values, which, if the Progressive and New Deal eras are lessons for us, easily translate into racial and ethnic discrimination. Since TANF has been implemented, different studies have demonstrated that white recipients are more likely than members of other ethnic groups to be encouraged to get an education, less likely to be sanctioned for policy violations, and more likely to receive child care subsidies. Studies have also shown that the agencies administering TANF are the least helpful to African-Americans in providing job-readiness skills and are least likely to provide basic academic skills or tutoring services to African-Americans. These mothers are not receiving the assistance needed to successfully transition out of welfare. Finally, white women are more likely than AfricanAmerican women to receive benefits for children born out of wedlock. Some of these disparities are more noted in southern states, such as Virginia and Mississippi.35 Throughout its history, the path of this social policy has never deviated. Welfare policy constitutes one of many examples of state-building in a racialized society. Because race is woven into the An1erican econon1ic, social, and political fabric, any analysis of welfare policy should be considered within this larger institutional and policy context.36 We can see how mothers' pensions and ADC contributed to and strengthened existing civil, political, and social inequalities by mirroring existing social and racial cleavages. Mothers' pensions became the vehicle through which racial differentiation permeated U.S. welfare state-building. The racialization of U.S. welfare policy has resulted in a welfare state that stigmatizes and/or penalizes African-Americans and other ethnic minoritieswhile providing nonstigmatized entitlements to white citizens. This book provides a new lens through which to view and understand the development of America's welfare state at both the state and national levels but is just a starting point in what will be a scholarly reconsideration and reconceptualization of the role of race in the evolution of U.S. social welfare policy and state-building

For the past few weeks a convergence of social media discussions on reparations, Shona Jackson’s book Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean, and her recent post “Humanity beyond the Regime of Labor,” as well as my own thinking about Black Studies’ engagement with Conquest have all compelled me to think critically about the issue of Black labor.[1] I would like to take a moment to focus on the conceptual limits of labor as an epistemic frame for thinking about Blackness (as bodies and discourse) and its relationship to settler colonialism. I am particularly concerned about the ways that Black labor may crowd out Black fungibility as a conceptual frame for thinking about Blackness within settler colonial discourses. While many scholars who understand themselves as humanists have long ago conceded that strict or heavy-handed Marxian (political economic) analyses are generally impoverished and wanting; labor as an analytic persists. Indeed, labor as a discourse, or what Shona Jackson would call a “metaphysics” and “ontoepistemology”—a way of living and a way of articulating this mode of living— still haunts our critical theories (Jackson, 2012, p. 217).[2] This is particularly true as scholars undertake the difficult work of understanding and naming how racialized people are situated within White settler colonial states. Configuring People of Color into the calculus of settler colonial relations is onerous and in fact laborious. It is especially difficult when trying to conceptualize the unique location of Blackness. I commend scholars for taking on this task. In order to do this cumbersome work, scholars tend to rely on the tried and true rubric of labor. Labor becomes the site and mode of incorporating non-Black and non-Indigenous people into settler colonial relations in White settler nation-states. People of Color scholars often rehearse histories of arrival as populations of coerced labor as a way of explaining their presence, as well as distance or proximity to the category of the Settler. Labor also becomes a liberal discourse that allows immigrants and migrants to narrate the terms of their belonging and citizenship within White settler colonial states. In this way, labor functions as another discourse of inclusion. Recently, Jamilah Martin in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article “The Case for Reparations” made a similar and astute point in her blog post “On Reparations: Resisting Inclusion and Co-optation” that reparations work as a discourse of inclusion within the project of American Democracy within the “U.S. anti-Black settler-imperial state.” While the integrationist project of reparations may be a liberal project of inclusion, it also relies on a “teleology of modern labor” (Jackson 2012, p. 147). It holds out hope for Black inclusion into a human family of laborers/workers. Yet, despite the claim of the Black laborer as “subject”, embedded within the metaphysics of labor, the bill H.R. 40 (otherwise known as the Reparations Bill) has not gained traction. H.R. 40’s lack of success partially speaks to the inability of Blackness to become fully legible through human categories like the laborer/worker. Further, it evinces the ways that laborer and worker do not explain the ontological state of Blackness. In Red, White and Black, Wilderson attends to the ways that Afropessimists “have gone considerable lengths to show that, point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status for blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 14). The “alienation” and “exploitation” that the human worker experiences through labor are contingent conditions resulting from human conflicts. Many people can and have occupied these temporary and conditional abased human coordinates. White, Asian and South Asian, Latina/o and Middle Eastern indentured and other kinds of laborers have long inhabited White settler territories and nation-states and, as laborers, immigrants and migrants have all helped build the settler nation. Black laboring bodies have even been used to build the settler nation. However, Black labor is just one kind of use within an open, violent and infinite repertoire of practices of making Black flesh fungible. One way that I have explained fungibility to my undergraduate students in my course “Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora,” is to think about the slave owner Madame Delphine LaLaurie’s use of enslaved bodies in the FX television series, American Horror Story: Coven. LaLaurie uses Black flesh to meet uses and desires beyond those of labor and profit. She runs a torture chamber in order to satisfy lusts that include and exceed the sexual. In one episode, she murders and then uses the blood of an enslaved newborn child as an elixir that wards off the aging process. One gets a sense that the possibilities for Black flesh are unending under her ownership. The infinite possibilities for fungible Black flesh mark a fundamental distinction between fungible slave bodies and non-Black (exploited) laboring bodies. Further, Black bodies cannot effectively be incorporated into the human category of laborers. If Black laboring bodies were incorporated into the category; “laborer” would have no meaning as a human condition. Blackness is constituted by a fungibility and accumulation that must exist outside the edge and boundary of the laborer-as-human. If there were no Black fungible and accumulable bodies there could be no “wage laborer” that cohered into a proletariat. While labor as a discourse may work for non-Black and non-Native people of color as a way of interpellating themselves within settler colonial relations, it does not explain Black presence, Black labor or Black use in White settler nation-states. Theories that attempt to triangulate Blackness into the Settler/Native antagonism in White settler states do so by positing Blackness as the labor force that helps make the settler landscape possible.[3] It is true that Black labor literally tills, fences in and cultivates the settler’s land. However, this singular analysis both obscures the issue of Black fungibility and reduces Blackness to a mere tool of settlement rather than a constitutive element of settler colonialism’s conceptual order. Fungibility represents a key analytic for thinking about Blackness and settler colonialism in White settler nation-states. Black fungible bodies are the conceptual and discursive fodder through which the Settler-Master can even begin to imagine or “think” spatial expansion (King, 2013). The space making practices of settler colonialism require the production of Black flesh as a fungible form of property, not just as a form of labor. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman argues that the enslaved embody the abstract “interchangeability and replaceability” that is endemic to the commodity (Hartman, 1997, p. 21). Beyond, the captive body’s use as labor, the Black body has a figurative and metaphorical value that extends into the realm of the discursive and symbolic. What Hartman names as the “figurative capacities of blackness,” allows the Settler-Master to conceptualize Blackness as the ultimate sign for expansion and unending space within the symbolic economy of settlement (Hartman, 1997, p. 7; and King, forthcoming). Blackness is much more than labor within both slavery’s and settler colonialism’s imaginaries. Like Hartman, I argue that Blackness’ figurative capacity and interchangeability has a life—or afterlife—within the discursive and spatial projects of settler colonial expansion (King, forthcoming). Settler colonialism requires a symbol of infinite flux in order to animate and imagine its spatial project (King, 2013). In my dissertation, In the Clearing, I argue that Jennifer Morgan’s book Laboring Women: Women and Reproduction in New World Slavery, configures Black women as spatial agents who are [symbolically] essential to the settlement of land during the colonial period in the coastal regions of the South and the West Indies. In fact, the Black female body must be discursively constructed in order to make it possible to even conceive of planting settlements during the “first generations of settlement and slave ownership” in South Carolina and Barbados (Morgan, 2004). Morgan argues that 18th century settlement required particular symbolic constructions and particular uses of the Black female body (Morgan, 2004, p. 26).[4] Black fungibility represents this space of discursive and conceptual possibility for settler colonial imaginaries. Black fungible bodies work beyond the metrics and “metaphysics of labor” in White settler colonial states (Jackson, 2012, p. 215). Labor becomes a limiting frame for conceptualizing Blackness on White settler colonial terrain. Reimagining Blackness and theorizing anti-Black racism on unusual landscapes requires that we rethink the usefulness of convenient and orthodox epistemic frames. We must venture beyond labor and its limits in order to think about settler colonialism’s anti-Black modalities. Fungibility and other frames deserve our attention as we continue to think about anti-Black racism, Native genocide and the US settler-slave (e)state.

Homo Economicus’s Others: Black Objects and Black Debt One of the financial literacy programs run by the government, Money Smart, is a free “instructor-led curriculum” that can be taught in “a classroom or small group setting.”56 The curriculum covers “deposit and credit services offered by financial institutions, choosing and maintaining a checking account, spending plans, the importance of saving, how to obtain and use credit effectively, and the basics of building or repairing credit.”57 These materials, among many others, display the basic and well-established assumptions of financial literacy education: that individual financial stability requires rational calculations and decision-making. In other words, financial literacy is a normative project to bring individuals into compliance with the simplistic assumptions of economic models, or what James Kwak terms “economism.”58 As such, financial literacy acknowledges and seeks to remediate what behavioral economists have long noted: that models do not match reality because individuals do not act rationally.59 However, if individuals can be made to act rationally, optimal economic outcomes can be achieved. In other words, the purpose of financial literacy is to make each of us a well-functioning and rational “homo economicus,” the idealized subject of free market capitalism. Financial literacy is just the latest narrative to deploy a version of homo economicus as the baseline subject of economic rationality. Although the term is said to have originated only in the nineteenth century in response to the writing of John Stuart Mill, the notion of a “proper” capitalist subject who acts correctly within various models of capitalism is much older.60 It is also a raced subject. The history of capitalism reveals that the dominant notion of economic rationality is constructed as/in a white subject over and against black bodies both as objects rather than subjects of capitalism and as intense targets of exploitative debt. This racial tension at the heart of economic rationality reveals the racial stakes of calls for financial literacy education of black consumers. White Subject, Black Object According to Michel Foucault, the homo economicus of the late twentieth century eschews the early political economic concern of buying and selling one’s own labor power—with all its potentially collectivist political implications—for the individualized pursuit of self-interest “as an entrepreneur of himself.”61 Foucault offers as evidence Gary Becker’s universalizing idea of “human capital.” Homo economicus is he who can solve any social problem by accumulating human capital that produces an earnings stream for the entrepreneur of himself. But this entrepreneurial self-determination is not equally accessible by all raced subjects. According to Denise Ferreira da Silva, the black is not self-determined but “outer-determined,” which is to say, always open to being “affected,” manipulated by the Western subject for his own benefit.62 The black, then, functions as one about whom choices are made, not one who makes choices. Sylvia Wynter provides the most explicit argument of the overrepresentation of homo economicus as white within the Western construct of the human, which she argues cannot be disarticulated from capitalism. Indeed, homo economicus emerges out of the shift from the Renaissance’s conceptions of politics and Western Judeo-Christianity as signifiers of the human, what she calls “Man1,” to “Man2,” or “a figure based on the Western bourgeoisie’s model of being human that has been articulated as, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, liberal monohumanism’s homo oeconomicus.”63 Likewise, Lisa Tilley argues that Wynter’s homo economicus is a revision of a racialized humanness, “formulated within the colonial episteme’s Darwinian distortions as divided between the naturally selected (Europeans) and the naturally ‘dysselected’ (those racialized as naturally inferiority).”64 Wynter finds the origins of this shift in humanness in the “colonial matrix of power.”65 In her essay “1492,” she argues that Christopher Columbus functioned as a racialized turning point for Europe, one that replaced Western religious conceptions of knowledge, such as the world being flat, with secularized conceptions of the world.66 Further, Columbus’s voyage had as much to do with spreading Chris- tianity and glorifying the Spanish nation as it did with enriching “himself and his family with all the gold and tribute he could extort from the indigenous peoples, even from making some into cabezas de indios y indias (heads of Indian men and women), who could be sold as slaves.”67 Wynter notes that Columbus is often positioned in terms of celebratory American “discovery” in ways that brush over the colonial, nationalistic, and imperialistic implications of his individual financial aspirations and the objectification of black bodies on which those aspirations depended. Walter Mignolo follows Wynter, providing some insight into the racial foundations of homo economicus, particularly connecting it to Western colonialism and imperialism, both of which are inseparable from the post-Columbian context.68 Mignolo argues that the self-interested optimization that fleshes out the figure of homo economicus assumes coloniality and imperialism.69 In effect, Western colonial enrichment—at the expense of indigenous racial others of Europe—is already inherent in the “economic rationality” of homo economicus, as it is seen as a financially rational tool of enrichment, rather than a moral wrong. Elsewhere Wynter claims that the proto-notion of homo economicus that circulated in the sixteenth century underwent important transformations by the nineteenth century. Further removed from Judeo-Christianity, conceptions of economic rationality in the nineteenth century functioned in raced form to articulate both black and indigenous populations in the “New World” as the epitome of economic irrationality. Wynter notes that by the nineteenth century, the black slave “would now be made into the physical referent of the ostensibly most racially inferior and non-evolved Other to Man, itself redefined as optimally homo economicus.”70 The black slave is in effect the defining opposite of homo economicus, that nonbeing who is less than human and/ or not human at all. Where homo economicus is self-interested and free to choose—the subject who can fulfill the ultimate human goal of surplus accumulation on his own—the slave is utterly removed from not only this goal but even the possibility of choosing or acting within the construct of the self.

This dissertation examines the intimate connections between emancipatory democracy and speculative economics. It studies cultural texts that reflect and express national ideals of U.S. democracy that emereged in three periods of heightened captialist speculation the Jacksonian period of the 1830s, the 1930s Popular Front period, and the rise of liberal multiculturalism between 1980 to the present. The project engages two kinds of cultural texts. The project derives its proximate objects of the study--folklore, literature, literary criticism, stage performances, community festivals and public parks—from a range of critical and cultural texts produced by Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Catlin, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the neighborhood of Powderhorn Park. Yet, the disseration also explores a second text that connects these seemingly disparate objects and authors. The social text that binds the chapters of this dissertaion is a broader text of U.S. culture and social practice that is conditioned and inflated by the logic of speculation. This second text reveals culture as a central link in the economic project of U.S. nationalism. Culture in this text, is a key technology by which U.S. inequality is reproduced, reiterated, and translated across contexts. I argue that the cultural logic of specualiton disables possibilities for participatory democracy and racial, gendered, and class justice and equality. This logic aligns the emancipatory aspirations of aggreived groups to the market and property interests of elites. I show that culture has been instrumental for expanding social inequality through the promises of U.S. nationalism. The speculative logic of U.S. democracy relies on the category of "not yet freedom" to hide economic and racial inequalities. It preserves the idea of democracy only by deferring actual justice to a perpetually pushed back future. The pursuit of democracy in the United States has been haunted by histories of refusal and deferral. When aggrieved groups ask for emancipation, elites often respond with promises of freedom without doing the hard work of creating justice. Refusable Pasts explores how the national culture of the United States portrays the deferral of freedom to some unspecified "not yet" time in the future as evidence of real democratic inclusion in the present. Promises of future freedom evidence the power and pervasiveness of popular aspirations for democracy. Yet because national culture offers aggrieved groups democratic promises rather than democratic practices, it also demonstrates the power of elites to suppress popular democracy and preserve their own privileges. Speculative logic and market subjectivity permeate U.S. national culture. Speculative practices originate in economic relations, but their logic structures national culture as well. Speculative logics promising future growth have connected the expressive cultures of U.S nationalism to the economic life of the nation's elites. Just as investors anticipate that economic returns in the future will reward their work in the present, citizens are encouraged to defer their desires for empowerment, autonomy, dignity and community to some perpetually promised but never quite realized time of "not yet" freedom in the future. Hope functions as a fundamental mechanism for deferring freedom to the future and refusing radical change in the present. Under these conditions, culture serves as a cover story promoting economic expansion and empire, slavery and racial subordination, plunder and perpetual warfare. The national culture of the nation works to instantiate, legitimate, and perpetuate economic inequality and social stratification. It is also one forum that elites use to manage the emancipatory aspirations of popular struggles. Culture counts because stories centered on the logic of speculation promise symbolic reconciliations as the salve to the wounds caused by the perpetuation of inequalities in society. The speculative logics that inform national culture portray inexcusable injustices in the present as mere preludes to a promised prosperity and freedom in the future. Thus, the democratic promises inscribed inside national culture actually function as powerful mechanisms for the perpetuation of decidedly undemocratic practices and policies.

Narratives of climate change that have varied across time and space continue to affect understandings of present-day climate change. Scholars, however, are just beginning to uncover the diversity of these narratives, not to mention their implications for social relations and power dynamics. As Mike Hulme explains convincingly, climate science alone is not enough to explain either how we think about climate or why global warming has led to such rancorous debates in recent decades.4 Climate is an idea as much as it is measurable, quantifiable weather patterns. And these perceptions of climate have changed considerably over time, for distinct peoples, and in different places around the globe. There are even narratives of denial that can block climate change adaptation.180 As such, it is necessary to approach climate, as Hulme does, by scrutinizing diverse meanings of science, economics, values, and international politics when trying to pinpoint people’s perceptions of climate change. One of the most prolific narratives is that of global warming crisis, which parallels the declensionist narrative embedded in modern environmentalism. Climate narratives—and indeed much climate history scholarship—perpetuates the environmentalist tale of tragedy, natural resource depletion, and catastrophic collapse that has long been at the heart of the environmental movement.181 Moreover, the dominant view among both environmentalists and those striving to mitigate global warming today is that climate change has resulted from the capitalist economy and the industrialized nations that have been ruining the earth and depleting its natural resources through unregulated, irresponsible pollution. Many in the global warming community use this narrative implicitly or explicitly in their efforts to curb emissions by regulating industry and slowing capitalist consumption. Recent research is increasingly challenging this narrative because of its inherent power dimensions that can further socio-economic and political inequality. Diana Liverman challenges what she identifies as three dominant global warming narratives: the crisis narrative, the differentiated responsibility narrative, and the market solutions narrative. These narratives serve some people more than others, they have directed too much attention to international treaties and north–south disagreements, and they also promote neoliberalism and other market-based solutions rather than offering distinct solutions outside past practices.10 For example, historical narratives of vanishing glaciers—a common motif of climate change stories—often serve particular groups such as scientists, conservationists, and tourists rather than local residents or marginalized populations.182 And in some cases, the way this narrative of melting glaciers creates a vision of glaciers as vanishing water towers—as has been done in mountain ranges worldwide—can empower certain groups like hydroelectric companies and large-scale irrigators (and thus disempower local residents), even though glacier retreat has serious hydrologic consequences for all these social groups.1 But in other cases, local residents in Peru, for instance, have mobilized the global narrative of climate crisis and melting glaciers to fight for their rights to water against a multinational energy corporation and the effects of neoliberal privatization. Although these local Peruvians used collective action to seize control of a large reservoir from Duke Energy, they gained international attention and support in part because they broadcast a (correct) story of vulnerable populations struggling to maintain water supplies below disappearing glaciers.183 Historical scholarship on climate can play a unique and important role here in uncovering this diversity of meanings, narratives, impacts, and responses to climate change. It is the job of historians not only to uncover these histories in the first place, but also to help push their conclusions into broader discussions about climate change today.

For if, as Time magazine reported in January 2007 (Epigraph 2), a U.N. Intergovernmental panel of Natural Scientists, were soon to release "a smoking-gun report which confirms that human activities are to blame for global warming" (and thereby for climate change), and had therefore predicted "catastrophic disruptions by 2100," by April, the issued Report not only confirmed the above, but also repeated the major contradiction which the Time account had re-echoed. This contradiction, however, has nothing to do in any way with the rigor, and precision of their natural scientific findings, but rather with the contradiction referred to by Derrida's question in Epigraph 3—i.e., But who, we? That is, their attribution of the non-natural factors driving global warming and climate change to, generic human activities, and/or to "anthropocentric forcings"; with what is, in effect, this mis-attribution then determining the nature of their policy recommendations to deal with the already ongoing reality of global warming and climate change, to be ones couched largely in economic terms. That is, in the terms of our present mode of knowledge production, and its "perceptual categorization system" as elaborated by the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences (or "human sciences") and which are reciprocally enacting of our present sociogenic genre of being human, as that of the West's Man in its second Liberal or bio-humanist reinvented form, as homo oeconomicus; as optimally "virtuous Breadwinner, taxpayer, consumer, and as systemically over-represented as if it, and its behavioral activities were isomorphic with the being of being human, and thereby with activities that would be definable as the human-as-a-species ones. Consequently, the Report's authors because logically taking such an over-representation as an empirical fact, given that, as highly trained natural scientists whose domains of inquiry are the physical and (purely) biological levels of reality, although their own natural-scientific order of cognition with respect to their appropriate non-human domains of inquiry, is an imperatively self-correcting and therefore, necessarily, a cognitively open/open-ended one, nevertheless, because in order to be natural scientists, they are therefore necessarily, at the same time, middle class Western or westernized subjects, initiated 15 as such, by means of our present overall education system and its mode of knowledge production to be the optimal symbolically encoded embodiment of the West's Man, it its second reinvented bio-humanist homo oeconomicus, and therefore bourgeois self-conception, over-represented as if it were isomorphic with the being of being human, they also fall into the trap identified by Derrida in the case of his fellow French philosophers. The trap, that is, of conflating their own existentially experienced (Western-bourgeois or ethno-class) referent "we," with the "we" of "the horizon of humanity." This then leading them to attribute the reality of behavioral activities that are genre-specific to the West's Man in its second reinvented concept/self-conception as homo oeconomicus, ones that are therefore as such, as a historically originated ensemble of behavioral activitiesas being ostensibly human activities-in-general. This, in spite of the fact that they do historicize the origin of the processes that were to lead to their recent natural scientific findings with respect to the reality of the non-naturally caused ongoing acceleration of global warming and climate change, identifying this process as having begun with the [West's] Industrial Revolution from about 1750 onwards. That is, therefore, as a process that can be seen to have been correlatedly concomitant in Great Britain, both with the growing expansion of the largely bourgeois enterprise of factory manufacturing, as well with the first stages of the political and intellectual struggles the British bourgeoisie who were to spearhead the Industrial Revolution, to displace the then ruling group hegemony of the landed aristocracy cum gentry, and to do so, by inter alia, the autopoetic reinvention of the earlier homo politicus/virtuous citizen civic humanist concept of Man, which had served to legitimate the latter's traditionally landed, political, social and economic dominance, in new terms. This beginning with Adam Smith and the Scottish School of the Enlightenment in the generation before the American, French, and Haitian (slave) revolutions, as a reinvention that was to be effected in now specifically bourgeois terms as homo oeconomicus/and virtuous Breadwinner. 116 That is as the now purely secular genre of being human, which although not to be fully (i.e., politically, intellectually, and economically) institutionalized until the mid-nineteenth century, onwards, when its optimal incarnation came to be actualized in the British and Western bourgeoisie as the new ruling class, was, from then on, to generate its prototype specific ensemble of new behavioral activities, that were to impel both the Industrial Revolution, as well as the West's second wave of imperial expansion, this based on the colonized incorporation of a large majority of the world's peoples, all coercively homogenized to serve its own redemptive material telos, the telos initiating of global warming and climate change. Consequently, if the Report's authors note that about 1950, a steady process of increasing acceleration of the processes of global warming and climate change, had begun to take place, this was not only to be due to the Soviet Revolution's (from 1917 onwards) forced march towards industrialization (if in its still homo oeconomicus conception, since a march spearheaded by the 116 See the already cited essay by J.G.A. Pocock "symbolic capital," education credentials owning and technically skilled Eastern European bourgeoisie)—as a state-directed form of capitalism, nor indeed by that of Mao's then China, but was to be also due to the fact that in the wake of the range of successful anti-colonial struggles for political independence, which had accelerated in the wake of the Second World War, because the new entrepreneurial and academic elites had already been initiated by the Western educational system in Western terms as homo oeconomicus, they too would see political independence as calling for industrialized development on the "collective bovarysme "117 model of the Western bourgeoisie. Therefore, with the acceleration of global warming and climate change gaining even more momentum as all began to industrialize on the model of homo oeconomicus, with the result that by the time of the Panel's issued April 2007 Report the process was now being driven by a now planetarily homogenized/standardized transnational "system of material provisioning or mode of techno-industrial economic production based on the accumulation of capital; as the means of production of ever-increasing economic growth, defined as "development"; with this calling for a single model of normative behavioral activities, all driven by the now globally (post-colonially and post-the-1989-collapse-of-the-Soviet Union), homogenized desire of "all men (and women) to," realize themselves/ourselves, in the terms of homo oeconomicus. In the terms, therefore, of "its single (Western-bourgeois or ethno-class) understanding" of "man's humanity," over-represented as that of the human; with the well-being and common good of its referent "we"—that, not only of the transnational middle classes but even more optimally, of the corporate multinational business industries and their financial networks, both indispensable to the securing of the Western-bourgeois conception of the common good, within the overall terms of the behavior-regulatory redemptive material telos of ever-increasing economic growth, put forward as the Girardot-type "cure" for the projected Malthusian-Ricardo transumed postulate of a "significant ill" as that, now, ostensibly, of mankind's threatened subordination to [the trope] of Natural Scarcity, this in the reoccupied place of Christianity of its postulate of that "ill" as that of enslavement to Original Sin."' With the result that the very ensemble of behavioral activities indispensable, on the one hand, to the continued hegemony of the bourgeoisie as a Western and westernized transnational ruling class, is the same ensemble of behaviors that is directly causal of global worming and climate change, as they are, on the other, to the continued dynamic enactment and stable replication of the West's second reinvented concept of Man; this latter in response to the latter's existential imperative of guarding against the entropic disintegration of its genre of being human and fictive nation-state mode of kind. Thereby against the possible bringing to an end, therefore, of the societal order, and autopoetic living Western and westernized macro world system in it bourgeois configuration, which is reciprocally the former's (i.e., its genre of being human, and fictive modes of kind's condition of realization, at a now global level. This, therefore, is the cognitive dilemma, one arising directly from the West's hitherto unresolvable aporia of the secular, that has been precisely captured by Sven Lutticken in a recent essay. Despite, he writes, "the consensus that global warming cannot be ascribed to normal fluctuations in the earth's temperature... [the] social and political components of this process have been minimized; man-made nature is re-naturalized, the new (un)natural history presented as fate." And with this continuing to be so because (within the terms, I shall add, of our present "single understanding of man's humanity" and the unresolvable aporia which it continues to enact), "[t]he truly terrifying notion is not that [global warming and climate change] is irreversible, but that it actually might be reversible—at the cost of radically changing the economic and social order..."119 The changing, thereby, of the now globally hegemonic biologically absolute answer that we at present give to the question to who we are, and of whose biohumanist homo oeconomicus symbolic life/death (i.e., naturally selected/dysselected) code's intentionality of dynamic enactment and stable replication, our present "economic and social order" is itself the empirical actualization.

FW: That was at Haile Gerima’s bookstore in DC, and it was an all- Black audience, so I didn’t have my guard up. I might have said it differently in a classroom, who knows. What I meant there was, well it was a bit tongue in cheek, but of course I hate police brutality. I haven’t been brutalized in the past ten years, but when I was brutalized I did hate that. I hate the harassment However, I feel that what my critical work is trying to contribute is to say that Black people in the US and worldwide are the only people -- and I say this categorically -- for whom it is not productive to speak in terms of ‘police brutality’. I know that we have to, because we’re forced to speak in these terms, and there is a way in which all Black speech is always coerced speech, in that you’re always in what Saidiya Hartman would call a context of slavery: anything that you say, you always have to think, ‘what are the consequences of me speaking my mind going to be?’ The world -- and this goes for Democracy

Now, it goes for our post-colonial comrades, etc. -- is not ready to think about the way in which policing affects Black people. And so what we have to do is ratchet-down the scale of abstraction, so that we don’t present the world with the totality of our relation to the police, which is that we are policed all the time, and everywhere. We have to give the world some kind of discourse, some kind of analysis in bite-size pieces that they are ready to accept, so that they can have some kind of empathy for us, some kind of political or legal adjudication. That is why police brutality becomes the focal point of the problem.

The difficulty of a writing a book which seeks to uncover Red, Back, and White socially engaged feature films as aesthetic accompaniments to grammars of suffering, predicated on the subject positions of the “Savage” and the Slave is that today’s intellectual protocols are not informed by Fanon’s insistence that “ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [sic]” (Black Skin, White Masks 110). In sharp contrast to the late 60s and early 70s, we now live in a political, academic, and cinematic milieu which stresses “diversity,” “unity,” “civic participation,” “hybridity,” “access,” and “contribution.” The radical fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and social stability. The distance between the protester and the police has narrowed considerably. The effect of this upon the academy is that intellectual protocols tend to privilege two of the three domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around “political unity,” “social attitudes,” “civic participation,” and “diversity,”) and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the humanities’ postmodern regimes of “diversity,” “hybridity,” and “relative [rather than “master”] narratives”). Since the 1980s, intellectual protocols aligned with structural positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power relations—such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academy’s ensembles of questions are fixated on specific and “unique” experience of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions. This would fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the upshot of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play, and the composite effect of cinematic and political discourse since the 1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites the US and its foundational antagonisms. This state of affairs exacerbates—or, more precisely, mystifies and veils—the ontological death of the Slave and the “Savage” because (as in the 1950s) cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of the current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of Indigenism and Blackness—academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a revolutionary critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how Left-leaning scholars help civil society recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of emergency for Indians and Blacks. The aim of this book is to embark on a paradigmatic analysis of how dispossession is imagined at the intersection of (a) the most unflinching meditations (metacommentaries) on political economy and libidinal economy, (e.g., Marxism, ala Antonio Negri’s work, and psychoanalysis, such as the work of Kaja Silverman, respectively), (b) the discourse of political common sense, and (c) the narrative and formal strategies of socially/politically engaged films. In other words, a paradigmatic analysis asks, What are the constituent elements of, and the assumptive logic regarding, dispossession which underwrite theoretical claims about political and libidinal economy; and how are those elements and assumptions manifest in both political common sense and in political cinema? Charles S. Maier argues that a metacommentary on political economy can be thought of as an “interrogation of economic doctrines to disclose their sociological and political premises…in sum, [it] regards economic ideas and behavior not as frameworks for analysis, but as beliefs and actions that must themselves be explained. “vi Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as “the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious.” Needless to say, libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as “objective” as political economy. Importantly, it is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. He emphasizes that it is “the whole structure of psychic and emotional life,” something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what Gramsci and other marxists call a “structure of feeling”; it is “a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation. “vii Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms interrogates the assumptive logic of metacommentaries on political and libidinal economy, and their articulations in film, through a subject whose structure of dispossession (the constituent elements of his/her loss and suffering) they cannot theorize: the Black; a subject who is always already positioned as Slave. The implications of my interrogation reach far beyond Film Studies, for these metacommentaries not only have the status of paradigmatic analyses, but their reasoning and assumptions permeate the private and quotidian of political common sense and buttress organizing and activism on the Left. In Leftist metacommentaries on ontology (and in the political common sense and the radical cinema in fee, however unintentionally, to such metacommentaries) the subject’s paradigmatic location, the structure of his/her relationality, is organized around his/her capacities: powers the subject has or lacks, the constituent elements of his/her structural position with which s/he is imbued or lacks prior to his/her performance. Just as prior to the commencement of a game of chess, the board and the pieces on it live in a caldron of antagonisms. The spatial and temporal capacities of the queen (where she is located and where she can move, as well as how she can move) articulate an irreconcilable asymmetry of power between her and a rook or a pawn for example. Vest the rook with the powers of the queen (before the game begins, of course) and it is not the outcome of the game that is jeopardy so much as the integrity of the paradigm itself—it is no longer chess but something else. And it goes without saying that no piece may leave the board if it is to stand in any relation whatsoever (asymmetry aside) to its contemporaries; this would be tantamount to leaving the world, to death. Power relations are extant in the sinews of capacity. For marxists, the revolutionary objective is not to play the game but to destroy it, to end exploitation and alienation. They see the capacity to accumulate surplus value embodied in one piece, the capitalist, and the embodiment of dispossession as being manifest in the worker. But the worker’s essential incapacity (powers which cannot accrue to the worker, suffering as exploitation and alienation) is the essence of capacity, life itself, when looked at through the eyes of the Slave. Socially or politically engaged films pride themselves on their pro- clivity to embrace what the Left views as the essence of dispossession: the plight of the exploited and alienated worker. Throughout this book, I argue that as radical and iconoclastic as so many socially or politically engaged films are (and they are indeed a breath of fresh air compared to standard Hollywood fare), in their putative embrace of working-class incapacity there is also, from the standpoint of the Slave, a devastating embrace of Human capacity—that which the Slave lacks. In other words, the narrative strategies of films that articulate the suffering of the worker are shot through with obstinate refusals to surrender their cinematic embrace to the structure of the Slave's domination, something infinitely more severe than exploitation and alienation. I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my argument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psychoanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native- and Black American metacommentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and (2) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria, and Haunani Kay-Trask; and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe, against the deluge of multicultural positivity, is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjectivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height of COINTELPRO repression. On the semantic field upon which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed become partially legible through a programmatics of—as fits our globalized era—structural adjustment. In other words, for the Indian subject position to be legible, her/his positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians “possess” is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which the Indian would not, paradoxically, “exist.”viii Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. 18 If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

Anti-Black racism is a form of systemic racism that methodically marginalizes Black people, devalues Blackness, and dehumanizes those who are Black (University of California San Francisco,n.d.). According to the Council for Democratizing Education, anti-Black racism voids the value of Blackness (including Black culture and identity), and marginalizes Black people and their concerns (Portland Means Progress,n.d.). Anti-Black racism encapsulates both overt and covert forms of structural racism and is carried out by individuals who fail to act and respond in ways that disrupt policies, practices, and ideologies that disregard or objectify Blackness (Heckler,2017). In a society gripped with nervousness, apathy, and ignorance surrounding racial realities, campuses are often ill-equipped to address anti-Black racism (Zambrano,2018). Faculty often fail to teach culturally responsive curricula and administrators lack the skill and will to make substan-tive changes to meet the needs of diverse learners (Hammond,2015).There is a culture endemic in higher education that centers on whiteness. These power struc-tures continually elevate white individuals to senior leadership positions and allow white students to outperform students from historically underrepresented backgrounds and divested commun-ities (Hammond,2015; Zambrano,2018). The result of anti-Black racism in higher education translates into Black people not being hired into the academy, not being selected for tenure or tenure-earning positions, hired as temporary lecturers, and experiencing various forms of oppres-sion and retaliation (Niemann et al.,2020; Zambrano,2018). Anti-Black racism appears among the faculty ranks in student evaluations and during tenure and promotion processes (Zambrano,2018). Studies have shown that students rate white faculty higher than Black faculty (Drake et al.,2019; Smith & Hawkins,2011). Poor performance by white faculty is explained away, while simi-lar performances by Black faculty are equated with poor teaching skills (Bridgeman,2020). Black students learn in classrooms led by teachers who purport color-blind pedagogical approaches(Hammond,2015). These faculty design and deliver course content through a white racial frame(Zambrano,2018) using approaches where Black students fail to see themselves reflected in the material, fail to develop connections with the faculty, and fail to perform well in the course(Douglas et al.,2008; Love,2019). The burden for Black faculty shows up as cultural taxation, devalued research, heavier teaching and service loads, and suffering under the burden of per-ceived “affirmative action”work (Zambrano,2018). This burden culminates in Black academics experiencing difficulty achieving tenure and promotion (Bridgeman,2020; U.S. Department ofEducation,2020) In the classroom, the experiences of students of color are influenced by the pedagogical approaches combined with the context in which the education occurs (Hammond,2015). Studies have shown that “students of color routinely receive less instruction in higher order skills devel-opment than other students...Their curriculum less challenging and more repetitive. Their instruction is more focused on skills low on Bloom’s taxonomy”(Hammond,2015, p. 12).Students of color must also contend with the existence of the hidden curriculum (i.e., aspects of the learning environment—lessons, norms, attitudes, values, and perspectives—that are transmit-ted to students through actions, interactions and social norms created by academic personnel;Small,2020). The lack of connections and sense of belonging in these environments contribute to negative self-image and poor interactions with teachers and peers and resultantly affects their learning outcomes (Hammond,2015). Combined, the structure and experiences associated with the learning environment are a manifestation of the perpetuation of anti-Black racism that con-tributes to differential outcomes. While the K-12 system is critical to socialization and establishing the foundation for learning, it is the collegiate experience where Black students grow their capacity for building agency to become well-informed citizens. It is the college experience that far too often hampers that pro-gress. Black college students across the US report having negative educational experiences in com-parison to other racial and ethnic groups (Harper et al.,2009). Black students report greater disconnection from faculty and often do not feel empowered to learn in the classroom(Hammond,2015). They are also more likely to report incidents of bias, discrimination, harass-ment, and microaggressions (Ancis et al.,2000; Fries-Britt & Griffin,2007; Pascarella &Terenzini,2005). Teachers often believe they can create and transfer knowledge free from racial or other oppressive influences in academic spaces. Their desire to overlook or dismiss race thwarts any attempt at equity. Levchak suggests, “Oppression thrives in silence”(2018, p. 3) and without intentional efforts to disrupt these systems, they will undoubtedly continue. Academic environments, much like other public institutions, tend to purport a culture com-mitted to neutrality, objectivity, and technical rationality (Blessett & Gaynor,2021). These cul-tures are hallmarked by institutional fragility (similar to white fragility) where fear and trepidation prohibit an active integration of Blackness for fear of backlash from white and other groups who find comfort in the status quo. An antiracist culture requires a deep understanding of critical concepts, such as anti-Black racism, systemic racism, structural racism, microaggres-sions, (the myth of) white supremacy, and white fragility (Blessett & Gaynor,2021; Gaynor &Lopez-Littleton,2021; Kendi,2019). Cultural shifts are driven by critical conscious leaders who are capable of acknowledging historic and contemporary issues around racism are inspired to act(Waite,2021). In this regard, campus leaders must be committed to the active opposition of racism through dialogue, social action, and the concurrent pursuit of social equity as a means of achieving justice for all (Kendi,2019). These inclusive leaders will need to prioritize the resources necessary to effect change for Black individuals at all levels of the institution. Their ability to combine their knowledge with the theoretical lens of CRT, in effect, actualizes social equity as a tangible institutional goal capable of addressing anti-Black racism through mechanisms that pre-vent discrimination and protect those who would be harmed by anti-Black racism (Berry-James et al., 2020).

In society at large as well as institutions, Black people are subject to oppression in the form of anti-Black racism, perpetuated through antiblackness within spaces. Dumas (2016) argues that antiblackness does not signify a mere racial conflict that might be resolved through organized political struggle and appeals to the state and to the citizenry for redress. Instead, antiblackness marks an irreconcilability between the Black and any sense of social or cultural regard. The aim of theorizing antiblackness is not to offer solutions to racial inequality, but to come to a deeper understanding of the Black condition within a context of utter contempt for, and acceptance of violence against the Black. (p. 13) Wilderson (2010) suggests that the question of being Black revolves around two fundamental questions: “What does it mean to suffer?” and “How does one become free of suffering?” (p. 126). As Black scholars who embrace the embodiment of Blackness, claim to the fullest of our African ancestry, walk in the spirit and light of our ancestors as descendants of the enslaved, live and work in spaces that continue to harm and traumatize Black people, we understand what it means to suffer. In this article however, we focus on ways to become free and more specifically ways for Black students to become free in the spaces that they learn. In the ontological polarity of the West, antiblackness draws its energy from the positioning of Blackness situated at the bottom of the polarity (Kline, 2017). In many ways, Black people are positioned as having no history prior to slavery and this myth is perpetuated through pedagogy and curriculum, thereby cutting off Black students from the rich history and knowledge which they come from. Kline (2017) argues further that antiblackness is also about power and is revealed through practices, forms, and apparatuses; and ways that “antiBlack racism have historically developed, changed, and reassembled/reterritorialized in relation to state power, national identity, philosophical discourse, biological discourse, political discourse, and so on” (p. 66). Some scholars argue that as discourses of equity, inclusion, and diversity abound in the United States and other Western countries trying to grapple with their racist histories and current demographic shifts, there is a strain against the dark (Busey & Coleman-King, 2020; Sexton, 2008; Wilderson, 2010). In this social and political contexts, Black youth, families, and communities struggle to make sense of what are widely regarded in Black cultural spaces as cases of (anti-)Black suffering and death are on the rise (Dumas, 2016). The killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 in the United States, as well as the killings of Black people in Canada and other countries is furtherance of the fear that Black people experience in these spaces. Over 400years of injustice in the United States, Canada, and other Western countries there is a collective rage about social injustices that continue to plague society. The world has been transfixed by the unrest in the United States amid video footage of brutal clashes between the police and protesters during marches and vigils in Mr. Floyd’s memory. Dumas (2016) argues that while most educational researchers and practitioners acknowledge and lament the killing of and violence against Black people as examples of racism or (multi)cultural insensitivity, or the enactment of white supremacy, there has been little theorizing in education on the specificity of anti-Black racism, or the broader terrain of antiblackness. Tackling antiblackness is about challenging the position of Black person as socially dead, in other words, denied humanity thus ineligible for full citizenship and regard within the polity (Patterson, 1982). Anti-Black racism is a form of racism that is directed against Black people and their resistance to such oppressions (Benjamin, 2011). The legacy of anti-Black racism and the ongoing denial of Black people of their basic humanity reflects the “afterlife of slavery” that continually situates Black peoples as objects of fetish and force (Sexton, 2010, 2015). Dumas (2016) argues that analyses of racial(ized) discourses and policy processes in education must grapple with cultural disregard for and disgust with blackness. Doret and Gordon (2018) suggest that the fear of Blackness is implicated in the day-to-day practices of education and schooling. Dumas (2016) notes: theorization of antiblackness allows one to more precisely identify and respond to racism in education discourse and in the formation and implementation of education policy…. I contend that deeply and inextricably embedded within racialized policy discourses is not merely a general and generalizable concern about disproportionality or inequality, but also, fundamentally and quite specifically, a concern with the bodies of Black people, the signification of (their) blackness, and the threat posed by the Black to the educational wellbeing of other students. (p. 12) The continued fear of Black youth reveals the persistence of anti-Black racism that continues in the new millennium to plague the socio-political body (Doret & Gordon, 2018). Anti-Black racism is not limited to particular time periods or projects. AntiBlack racism is systemic, pervasive, and productive (Feagin, 2013). As we examine the impact of anti-Black racism Sexton (2010) calls for the disruption of the Black/White binary and suggests that anti-Black racism is not just about White on Black racial oppression, but also includes the relationship that other groups have to Black people. Education and schooling continues to be site of antiblackness and anti-Black racism. Black students and families are often constructed as the problem, pathologized, students bear the brunt of harsh school discipline, and families are not perceived as resourceful and knowledgeable. In the United States, some fought against integration of schools; and most recently we have witnessed the under-resourcing of schools in predominantly Black communities.

[19] How, then, does one develop a working genealogy of a conundrum such as Afro-pessimism? Where does one begin? How is it possible to chart the history of something as polymorphous, as generative of and yet so abjectly banished from the life of Western modernity as the phenomenon of blackness-as-negation and negation-as-blackness? How does one narrate a story whose most poignant expressions have never been made with the written word or debated forthrightly in the public transcripts of civil society? How does one develop a functional vocabulary of silence? How does one paint a portrait of the unseen? And, most gravely perhaps, how does one do this crucial work while remaining sane in the face of a million commonplace and pitiless deferrals?

[20] The first challenge one confronts when trying to develop a theory and practice of black study is the problem of scale. That is, accepting the daunting task of conveying the sheer magnitude, the confounding depth and breadth of the topic at hand. Elaborating the slave's capture and subordination, establishing the relationship between the violence entailed by this process and the most essential and seemingly inessential formations of the modern (on the one hand, the nation, the state, civil society, the regime of value and its accumulated surplus and so forth; on the other, the minute protocols that organize our affiliations and disaffiliations with these meta-dispositifs of power), is itself enough to test the most stable psychology and blackness, we must remember, is born just a little bit crazy. But elaborate them we must, for without this effort all subsequent theorizations of blackness fail. Lindon Barrett's posthumous and tragically incomplete masterpiece, Racial Blackness and the (Dis)continuities of Western Modernity, serves as a case-point for the almost maniacal lengths a brilliant mind such as his must go through in order to demonstrate with precision (for anything less than precision will be dismissed outright on a technicality) the emergent circumstances of racial blackness, to show the centrality of trans-Atlantic plantation slavery to this formation, to catalogue the means by which slavery was a constituent element in the development of capitalism and is thus a constituent element of the contemporary global distribution of wealth and European territorial hegemony, of tracing the historical transition away from European feudal and monarchical forms of consolidated power to the more elusive, flexible forms of capitalist authority we live under today, to call attention to the consequent unstable formation of the human as a normative subject, to assemble an encyclopedic catalogue of the philosophers, historians, psychoanalysts, revolutionary anti-colonialists and social scientists of the more tame type who buttress these truths in order to show how and why we can and must see the extraction, consolidation, and distribution of resources in the creation of the Atlantic economies as not just foundational to but an ongoing process in the formation of the modern world, to emphasize, finally, the relation between the materiality of power and the "discursive grammar" by which subjects are composed and imagined, and all of this as prelude to say something else, something as simple as "I am" and "I am here." Reading Barrett's exhaustive résumé one can feel the frenetic energy expended upon the project and the almost perceptible slide into madness as he attempts to elaborate the elaborated, to prove the proven, to speak what has already been spoken, to be heard in a world where blackness lives in and is defined as vacuum: A living black hole pockmarking the face of modernity.[8]

Naomi Oreskes makes a compelling case for the trustworthiness of science, its social, value-laden, and fallible character, and the conditions for objectivity. She also reveals the rather effective diversion created in public debates by many climate change skeptics. In most cases, skeptics no longer question the overwhelming, credible scientific evidence on anthropogenic, risky climate change. Instead, they argue against particular economic or social implications of potential political responses to climate change. While they balk at the idea of engaging in open dialogue about their concerns as to the various possible (political) responses to climate change, they simply deny that the latter is a scientific problem. They urge the academic community to continuously clarify the science. And even when the science of climate change is accepted they deny the severity of damages caused by climate change. The recent SCC estimate of the Trump administration is one such example. Furthermore, according to their view, evidence-based research can never reduce the uncertainties to such an extent as to allow for the implementation of climate policies.

The often-intractable conflicts about climate policy are thus not necessarily rooted in a lack of trust in climate science—but rather in disagreement on the design of climate policies.3 Any reasonable answer to this crucial question is dependent on disputed ethical values, concepts of intergenerational and intragenerational justice, preferences, and interests (as Oreskes rightly points out). But the estimates of social science concerning the costs of action and inaction, the co-benefits and unintended societal side effects of climate policy must figure prominently too in such an answer. Natural science and technology alone cannot determine appropriate climate policies. Stubbornly insisting on the facts of climate science to counter skepticism just makes environmental controversies worse.4 Due to her emphasis on criteria for the trustworthiness of natural science Oreskes does not answer sufficiently the question as to the conditions—if at all5—under which the policy assessments provided by scientific experts can both be trustworthy and legitimate, particularly given the highly disputed value judgments involved. Therefore, we need to reflect about these integrated, transdisciplinary assessments of complex socioeconomic and political aspects. How can we specify, apply, and perhaps amend Oreskes's convincing criteria for trustworthiness to provide guidance also for the social sciences in these cases?

In evaluating a scientific claim that has social, political, or personal consequences there is one more question that needs to be considered: What are the stakes of being wrong in either direction? What is the risk of accepting a claim that turns out to be false versus the risk of rejecting a claim that turns out to be true?

Knowing there is a risk of depression, if a healthy woman decides to take the Pill she can quickly stop taking it if the risk materializes. Pill-induced depression generally clears up quickly, so for many women the risk is modest and worth taking. Similarly, dental floss is cheap and only takes a few minutes a day to use. If it turns out to have little benefit, little has been lost. But some issues are not so easily resolved.

From this angle, it becomes clear that capitalism is highly inefficient when it comes to meeting human needs; it produces so much, and yet leaves 60% of the human population without access to even the most basic goods. Why? Because a huge portion of commodity production (and all the energy and materials it requires) is irrelevant to human well-being. Consider this thought experiment: Portugal has significantly better social outcomes than the United States, with 65% less GDP per capita. This means that $38,000 of US per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13 trillion per year for the US economy as a whole; $13 trillion worth of extraction and production and consumption each year, and $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds

In the United States and other rich countries, the means already exist at present for such a massive, qualitative transformation of society in line with social priorities and the needs of the oppressed working class, while shifting away from imperialism and the global oppression of “the wretched of the earth.” This can be easily seen by pointing to the now trillion-dollar military budget, which could be repurposed to carry out those changes in the energy infrastructure necessary for human survival. But it can also be seen in the rising levels of expropriation of surplus from the direct producers. A study by RAND Corporation estimated that $47 trillion (in 2018 dollars) was expropriated from the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. population between 1980 and 2018, calculated based on what they would have received if income had grown equitably within the economy over the period. This exceeds the entire current value of the U.S. housing stock, which in January 2022 was $43 trillion dollars.118 At the base of this enormous social surplus is social labor, which needs to be allocated on an economic and ecological basis, and no longer on the basis of private accumulation.

4. We can’t just “decide not to build AGI” because GPUs are everywhere, and knowledge of algorithms is constantly being improved and published; 2 years after the leading actor has the capability to destroy the world, 5 other actors will have the capability to destroy the world. The given lethal challenge is to solve within a time limit, driven by the dynamic in which, over time, increasingly weak actors with a smaller and smaller fraction of total computing power, become able to build AGI and destroy the world. Powerful actors all refraining in unison from doing the suicidal thing just delays this time limit – it does not lift it, unless computer hardware and computer software progress are both brought to complete severe halts across the whole Earth. The current state of this cooperation to have every big actor refrain from doing the stupid thing, is that at present some large actors with a lot of researchers and computing power are led by people who vocally disdain all talk of AGI safety (eg Facebook AI Research). Note that needing to solve AGI alignment only within a time limit, but with unlimited safe retries for rapid experimentation on the full-powered system; or only on the first critical try, but with an unlimited time bound; would both be terrifically humanity-threatening challenges by historical standards individually.

So why should I be interested in a debate on governance of a set of technologies that I would like to see banned? The answer is clear: a ban requires governance to ensure it is being implemented and enforced. And furthermore: governance of geoengineering is not just about the rules, procedures and institutions controlling research and potential deployment, but it is also about the process and discourse leading up to it. Unfortunately, current debates about climate engineering are undemocratic and dominated by technocratic worldviews, natural science and engineering perspectives, and vested interests in the fossil-fuel industries. Developing countries, indigenous peoples, and local communities must be given a prominent voice, so that all risks can be fully considered before any geoengineering technology is tested or implemented.

The good news is that a debate of governance of geoengineering does not take place in a legal or political vacuum. There are a number of important decisions to build upon.