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This Article adds a new critical lens—that of queer analysis—to appraise IP, arguing that IP law and doctrine create a power matrix and cultural order that systematically subjugate certain cultural expressions and creators. IP produces a hierarchy of cultural categorizations that, in turn, channels groups and individuals into a hierarchal social order. More specifically, a queer analysis of IP law asserts that IP constructs creative production as a heteronormative endeavor, abetting the institutionalization of heteronormativity as the dominant cultural format in popular culture and the marginalization of alternative sexual, gendered, and intersectional cultural expressions, resulting in a cultural and a social hierarchy. IP law does so through doctrines that disadvantage queer cultural expressions, such as the categorization of certain queer creative expressions as folklore that is not copyrightable, and through sex-negative and queer-negative attitudes in courts—for instance, in courts’ reluctance to apply fair use provisions for cases involving the use of copyrighted material in sexualized or genderqueer contexts.8 At the same time, a queer analysis of IP also offers a new understanding of the relationship between IP law, mainstream culture, and counter-mainstream culture. The relationship between IP and queer creativity (and other countercultural expressions), this Article argues, is deeper and more complex than meets the eye: queer cultural production is often grounded in the rejection of IP’s concepts, rules, and aesthetics. So, while IP law structures hegemonic notions of cultural production, it simultaneously defines a field of marginal cultural production. Similarly, queer creativity often engages directly with mainstream works (which are often under copyright), transforming, rewriting, and “queering” mainstream culture. A quick clarification of what a queer analysis encompasses can be helpful at this point. While queer theory resists definitions, viewing “queer” as a fluid, plural, and continually negotiated term,9 it is, as Andrew Gilden observes, profoundly “concerned about the relationship between the tangible and the intangible,” much like IP theory.10 Queer theory understands that the organization of intangible things, such as what we see, feel, and touch, shapes our social landscape and the distribution of wealth, happiness, and political power.11 Queer theory maintains that sex and gender are produced through certain patterns that are associated with certain social labels; thus, they are essentially performative.12 A queer analysis would therefore endeavor “to reveal and disrupt narratives, conventions, institutions, and identities” that are structured around sex and sexuality and identify the ways in which certain kinds of stylizations of gender and sexuality are foregrounded and rewarded.13 A queer exploration of IP law then would aim to investigate how IP foregrounds sexuality, normativity, and gender stylizations in cultural production and ask questions such as how the sexualization and gendering of certain methodologies, occupations, creative works, or the cultural landscape result in bestowing or withholding certain legal or social privileges.14 The term “queer” also encompasses a sociological component that is related to, but not to be confused with, queer theory. Queer can also be a (personal or collective) identity, and queer sites can be seen as places where “traditional social correlations of bodies, desires, kinship, and temporality come apart and new ways of imagining their intersections come to the surface.”15 Often, in these sites, queer creativity and culture flourish.

Recent years, however, have seen a growing body of scholarship that engages in critical appraisal of IP through various lenses, including post-colonial, race, class, and feminist theories.1 These studies illustrate that IP’s procedural and substantive rules are far from neutral: for example, by unmasking the ways in which the IP. public domain binary functions more in the interests of traditional property owners than in the interests of commoners;2 by demonstrating how the idea-expression dichotomy in copyright emboldened the mass appropriation of the work of Black artists and inventors;3 or by demonstrating how copyright law doctrines allow a privileged cultural class to silence challenges to copyright’s value hierarchy.4 Other studies demonstrate how patent law’s doctrines display gendered characteristics,5 analyze the cultural gendering of copyright’s fair use doctrine,6 orillustrate how rules regarding “immorality” in trademarks fetishize LGBTQ+ sexualities.7 This Article adds a new critical lens—that of queer analysis—to appraise IP, arguing that IP law and doctrine create a power matrix and cultural order that systematically subjugate certain cultural expressions and creators. IP produces a hierarchy of cultural categorizations that, in turn, channels groups and individuals into a hierarchal social order. More specifically, a queer analysis of IP law asserts that IP constructs creative production as a heteronormative endeavor, abetting the institutionalization of heteronormativity as the dominant cultural format in popular culture and the marginalization of alternative sexual, gendered, and intersectional cultural expressions, resulting in a cultural and a social hierarchy. IP law does so through doctrines that disadvantage queer cultural expressions, such as the categorization of certain queer creative expressions as folklore that is not copyrightable, and through sex-negative and queer-negative attitudes in courts—for instance, in courts’ reluctance to apply fair use provisions for cases involving the use of copyrighted material in sexualized or genderqueer contexts.8 At the same time, a queer analysis of IP also offers a new understanding of the relationship between IP law, mainstream culture, and counter-mainstream culture. The relationship between IP and queer creativity (and other countercultural expressions), this Article argues, is deeper and more complex than meets the eye: queer cultural production is often grounded in the rejection of IP’s concepts, rules, and aesthetics. So, while IP law structures hegemonic notions of cultural production, it simultaneously defines a field of marginal cultural production. Similarly, queer creativity often engages directly with mainstream works (which are often under copyright), transforming, rewriting, and “queering” mainstream culture. A quick clarification of what a queer analysis encompasses can be helpful at this point. While queer theory resists definitions, viewing “queer” as a fluid, plural, and continually negotiated term,9 it is, as Andrew Gilden observes, profoundly “concerned about the relationship between the tangible and the intangible,” much like IP theory.10 Queer theory understands that the organization of intangible things, such as what we see, feel, and touch, shapes our social landscape and the distribution of wealth, happiness, and political power.11 Queer theory maintains that sex and gender are produced through certain patterns that are associated with certain social labels; thus, they are essentially performative.12 A queer analysis would therefore endeavor “to reveal and disrupt narratives, conventions, institutions, and identities” that are structured around sex and sexuality and identify the ways in which certain kinds of stylizations of gender and sexuality are foregrounded and rewarded.13 A queer exploration of IP law then would aim to investigate how IP foregrounds sexuality, normativity, and gender stylizations in cultural production and ask questions such as how the sexualization and gendering of certain methodologies, occupations, creative works, or the cultural landscape result in bestowing or withholding certain legal or social privileges.14 The term “queer” also encompasses a sociological component that is related to, but not to be confused with, queer theory. Queer can also be a (personal or collective) identity, and queer sites can be seen as places where “traditional social correlations of bodies, desires, kinship, and temporality come apart and new ways of imagining their intersections come to the surface.”15 Often, in these sites, queer creativity and culture flourish. Heteronormativity is another term in need of some clarification. It may incorporate several different interrelated dimensions, including sexuality—heteronormativity positions non-hetero sexualities as invisible or deviant;16 patriarchal gender norms—heteronormativity is a constituent dimension of female-male socialization and patriarchal gender roles, rendering sex and desire as normative or non-normative accordingly;17 power matrix—heteronormativity joins a myriad of systematic oppressions at different intersections such as race, class, gender, origin, and sexuality.18 This typology, suggesting several dimensions and manifestations of heteronormativity, is useful for a queer analysis of IP, as the typology indicates that heteronormativity is not merely the privilege of heterosexuality or the alignment of biological sex, sexuality, and gender, but a pervasive force through which rules are linked to social hierarchies.19 Applying queer theory to analyze IP would therefore focus on revealing how IP doctrine foregrounds heteronormative cultural and creative expression, privileging a certain dominant culture and subjugating queer culture and queer communities and individuals. Yet another useful methodology for queering IP is to explore and explain communities and sites in which queer creativity thrives. Exploring such domains can help in identifying what elements might be essential for queer cultural and creative expressions to thrive, the relationship between IP law and queer creativity, and whether and how these domains of queer creativity challenge IP. In addition, this methodology provides important evidence in an exploration of the alignment between queer theory and queer cultural expression in practice. This approach adds a new and important element to commonly used methodologies, as it engages directly with queer creative sites, asking how these domains are constructed and linking the knowledge gained from this inquiry back to the theoretical queer analysis of IP. Notable examples of creative domains where queer creativity thrives

Bey ’22 [Marqius Bey, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University; “Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender”; Duke University Press; 08-2022; doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2rr3g52; accessed via University of Michigan libraries, 07-17-2024] dliang

What I wish for deeply is something we don’t have yet that might emerge from a failure to inherit the lineage bestowed upon us. That which might emerge if we manage to cultivate a conditional refusal of cis alignment and the violences therein, the thing that emerges when its condition of possibility is a constant refusal of what has come to be coercively demanded of us. The question that presents itself to us, in this initial moment, is why? Why do such a thing, why fail to inherit what we are told is our birthright, why give up that which gives us over to the world as the powerful, competent beasts we quite vigorously want to be, be, be?

A 1998 British Broadcasting Channel production. Text appears on the screen: London 1940. The four children walk up to their home on break from school for the holidays, greeted by the prim and proper Mrs. Macready, wizened hair and gray (or grey; this is, after all, the UK) suit, standing regal, bespectacled. The children leave their bags just beyond the entrance and are told that the servants will take them. “That is their function,” Mrs. Macready says. “One must not be deprived of their function. Everyone has their part to play.” I think: there are some whose function is one that disallows others’ functioning, some whose function is cast outward toward disabling others’ flourishing. The part some have to play, a part they decided for themselves and a part that, like bossy children wanting the biggest slice of cake, puts them at the pinnacle of the social order, is a part that might cause trepidation. And fear. And harm. What happens when your part is frightening to you, a part given to you that you do not want, a part that others who have had your part demand you represent flawlessly or you get kicked out of the performance for good, a part that is not only frightening but does not fit you, a part that you have grown out of or never fit to begin with or know fits no one and makes others deeply, deeply uncomfortable, unable to play their parts, unable to act anymore, unable?

The patriarch comes into the room. The Professor. He instructs the servants to bring the children’s meals to their rooms, for they do not wish to converse with an old man upon their arrival. Mrs. Macready disagrees, thinking it improper to dine in one’s sleeping quarters. All things must have their proper place, I suppose. The Professor puts his foot down. “Whatever you say, Professor. Your word is law,” she responds, demurely. And law it is, Professor. Your word, as patriarch, is quite literally law, a discursive and juridical mandate emerging from patriarchal power codified over eras of, indeed, the discursive and juridical mandate that has emerged from you.

One might respond to Warren by claiming that he conflates the Political with all political strategies and possibilities, or that he delimits political struggle to its paradigmatic and structural features, especially those features that define State-centred politics and projects of reform that measure success by the impact on law and policy. While there is something to this concern, I want to stay with a particular intervention by the Black nihilist, one that refuses the compulsory nature of Political hope while opening up space to imagine and practice hope in a manner that will appear unintelligible and non-sensical to the regime of Political hope, a regime that measures our desires and pursuits according to their utility, efficacy, and the capacity to preserve the general order of things (or the commitment to order itself). For Warren, political hope assumes that anti-Black violence can be sutured within and through the very domain that needs to pulverize and get rid of the nothing, the void that subtends being. Even though this is an impossible task, the fantasy of stomping the void out can be maintained by disproportionately directing violence towards those who have been designated as embodiments of the nothing. For Warren, this does not mean that there is nothing that can be done or that we have to accept the ontological and axiological parameters of the human to determine Black worth and value. In fact, as suggested earlier, the fundamental nature of anti-Blackness, which includes the positioning and outlining of the human being over and against Blackness, leads Warren to depart from the realm of (human) being/ontology altogether and embrace practices of the spirit (or practices that involve an openness to the invisible, the mysterious, and the miraculous). As Warren writes, “I would have to suggest that there are no solutions to the problem of anti-Blackness—there is only endurance. And endurance cannot be reduced to biofuturity or humanist mandates. Endurance is a spiritual practice with entirely different aims” (Warren 2018, 172). While he does not flesh out what this spiritual practice consists of, he does indicate that endurance involves going through the “valley of the shadow of death” (172). A reference to Psalm 23, this biblical citation suggests the need for practices and modes of sociality that stay with the lowly, the opaque, the dead and dying, and the death that shadows the reproduction of life. To think with Du Bois’s language, the Black nihilist’s endorsement of spiritual endurance as the only solution to anti-Black violence might be an unhopeful stance but not necessarily hopeless (Du Bois 1994, 128). To put it differently, if there is a space for hope, then this space will be carved out through an abandonment of those repositories of hope and confidence that are tethered to humanism, progress, and other anti-Black paradigms. And yet the language of Black spiritual endurance runs into problems and limitations according to an author like Patrice Douglass. In an otherwise sympathetic review of Warren’s fascinating text Ontological Terror, Douglass broaches a difference between Afro-pessimism and Black nihilism. While the afro-pessimist remains attached to the nothing that Blackness has come to stand in for, Douglass contends that Warren concludes his study with a desire to hold onto Blackness as some-thing, even if that indeterminate thing is aligned with “the soul, psyche, and spirit” (Douglass 2019, 396). For Douglass, Warren “announces that ontological terror is the destruction of something, rather than nothing, that is quite specific” (396). In other words, Warren wants to rescue something; he wants to preserve a spiritual legacy that has enabled Black people to remain in existence under severe duress and anguish. Here we might intervene and underscore that using the language of spirit to describe that which escapes the parameters of what can be conceptualized, measured, quantified, and pinned down is actually all too human and familiar. At the same time, the grammar of spirits and shadows might be the language that best approximates the condition of being forced to give form to the constitutive void, to the predicament of functioning as “equipment in human form” (Warren 2018, 6) while not being completely determined by that anti-Black function.

Through the book we trace the legacy of pathologizing black corporeality in the United States, which singles out black bodies as a site of threat, danger, inferiority, criminality and excessive or aberrant sexuality. It seems to be the case that pathology is one of the concepts that accompanied the development of modern medicine and sociology, and as such is deeply imbedded in the modern discourse on health, race and society. Associated with newly discovered pathogens and denoting a serious disease or a medical condition, pathology was perceived at the beginning of the twentieth century as a thoroughly scientific notion, and came to replace the older terms “illness” in medicine and “social problem” in sociology. Indeed, the beginning of the previous century witnessed an unprecedented rise in the popularity of the term “pathology” in the US academy, in part due to a fascination within social sciences for the language of medicine. Pathology framed the discussion of sociological and racial problems in terms of medical eugenics, invoked “absolutistic connotations” (Sutherland 431, qtd. in Best 535) and saw any problem as a form of social disease (Best 534) that needed to be eradicated. However, after the Second World War the term was a subject to new scrutiny, this probably due to a great extent to its disturbing association with the radical Nazi remedy for what had been said to be social “racial” illnesses. In the American context, the harbinger of change and a marker of a period of transition was Edwin Lemert’s 1952 work Social Pathology (Best 533). As Best argues, even though the book’s title promised the study of social pathology, it in fact examined “social deviation”—the book’s purpose was indeed made clear in Lemert’s posthumously published essay (Best 534). The move away from the study of social pathology—a field well established in the late 1940s—toward the study of more ethically neutral “deviation” signaled an unavoidable shift away from thinking about social disorganization and other problems in medical terms that hence required far-reaching measures to cure such social diseases. Whereas the concept of pathology was approached with ambivalence in Lemert’s work, the verb “to pathologize” and its related nouns “pathologization” and “pathologizing” continued to circulate in academic idiom throughout the 1960s. Given their association with disease and aberration, on the one hand, and the aura of scientific authority, on the other, they have Introduction 3 become catchphrases to describe in a denigrating way those identified as constituting an alien presence in the fabric of the nation. As such, the terms have testified to the longevity of the tendency to turn “others” into a form of a social malady—a habit well entrenched in a racially divided US society. As Piotrowski argues, the ruling majority (“those in power”) decides, through the process of pathologization, what and who are socially acceptable and/or undesirable. The prevailing political, social and/or cultural authority of these actors gives legitimacy to their claims as to what can be considered social failures or wrongs, since “social pathology embraces social problems [… which] are perceived as detrimental and destructive to individuals, groups, or the entire society” (Piotrowski x, italics in original). Since “deviance is the invention of a group that uses its own standards as the ideal by which others are to be judged” (Ladner 75, italics in original), social pathology is an arbitrary concept, resting as it does on the values held and cherished by those who define reality. By contrast, those who are different are seen as lacking desirable qualities (that is, they do not share one’s own characteristics), and thus they are stigmatized by those who represent the established “norm.” As such, the process of pathologization is “normative” and reductive in nature. This assignment of “a mono-role or a uni-dimensional identity” through which people were regarded as “either deviant or normal” (Sawyer 362) served as a means of affirming the superior status of the planter class while legitimizing the need to monitor and punish their human chattel. Given that “white supremacy is rooted in pathological responses to difference” (hooks 27), the historical origins of the discourse of black pathology themselves go back to the times of slavery, when black bodies within the plantocracy were regarded as deficient and deviant,1 while white bodies were normalized. The legacy of this ideological position can still be seen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the ongoing “conscious refusal of whites to accept blacks as equal human beings and their willful, systematic effort to deny blacks equal opportunity” (Gershman 33). As such, racial oppression draws on the process of pathologization, and indeed this is why, according to Clark, “the racial dehumanization Americans permit is a symptom of the deep-seated, systematic and most dangerous social disease of racism” (“The Role of Race,” qtd. in Wilson 10). Modern racial policy in the United States was founded on the widespread belief in black cultural pathology (White 27). Well into the 1940s, at a time when some sociologists, such as Lemert, were expressing their newly awakened ambivalence to the discourse of pathology, others were clinging to the concept. Gunnar Myrdal, for example, in voicing the opinions of many Americans, summarized the racial inferiority of African Americans with these words: “In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture” (928, italics in original). Myrdal follows with a list of factors contributing to black social pathology: 4 Constante González Groba et al. The instability of the Negro family, the inadequacy of educational facilities for Negroes, the emotionalism in the Negro church, the insufficiency and unwholesomeness of Negro recreational activity, the plethora of Negro sociable organizations, the narrowness of interests of the average Negro, the provincialism of his political speculation, the high Negro crime rate, the cultivation of the arts to the neglect of other fields, superstition, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathology which, for the most part, are created by the caste pressures. (928–29) Such a stance (captured in the title of Myrdal’s chapter “The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an American Community”) was, paradoxically, seconded by leading black scholars such as E. Franklin Frazier and Kenneth Clark, and also by politicians (e.g., Daniel Patrick Moynihan), as late as the 1950s and 1960s. Referring to Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1939), Ibram Kendi points out how, even though well intentioned, the book perpetuated the association of problems in black communities with a form of pathology. Frazier’s diagnosis of the ills in the African American community as being “caused by racial discrimination, poverty, cultural pathology, and the introduction of the matriarchal Black family during slavery” was, in Kendi’s eyes, deeply harmful to the cultural perception of the black man (Stamped 343). As Kendi argues, “Completely ‘stripped of his cultural heritage,’ the slave became a brute [… and thus] the slave’s emergence ‘as a human being was facilitated by his assimilation’ of his master’s culture” (Stamped 343). Frazier’s analysis of black pathology inspired Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in his report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), written in his capacity as Assistant Secretary for Labor, saw “a tangle of pathology” in black poverty and gender imbalance in black families. Moynihan’s report, which influenced the rhetoric of President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement address delivered at Howard University, and which was later adopted by the “post-racial” narrative, identified family breakdown as a self-sabotaging factor in the black community. Rather than acknowledging the systemic forces that operated beyond the control of the black community (racism, segregation and discrimination), Moynihan believed that the vicious circle of alleged irresponsibility and a dependency on the welfare estate, as well as unhealthy gender relations in black families, posed a challenge to many black families themselves (Moynihan; Aja). On similar lines to Moynihan, Kenneth Clark, in his Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1967), identified the pathology of black life in ghetto communities in female-headed, welfare-dependent households, with high rates of children born out of wedlock, unemployment, delinquency and crime. However, what sets Moynihan and Clark apart is the approach to the object of study: While Moynihan’s infamous report blamed the black community for its “self-perpetuating pathology”2 (“At this point, the Introduction 5 present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world”), Clark’s study is written from the perspective of somebody who is trying to understand the prevailing systemic injustice and offers suggestions for alleviating the situation of blacks in America. Assimilationists believed that one such way of breaking the circle of pathology was black integration, which, according to Ibram Kendi, “encourages Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals” (Stamped 3). Prior to Clark, others had also believed in assimilation as the only choice for blacks; for instance, Gunnar Myrdal claimed that “it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans” (929, italics in original). However, there were others, like W.E.B. Du Bois, who encouraged scholars and African Americans in general to “regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race” and that they should not “support a prejudice or buttress a lie” (647–48). Du Bois’s appeal to state the truth, which he had voiced as early as 1935, well illustrates the longevity of the process of pathologization. The lies about black lives that Du Bois mentions will later be referred to by Albert Murray as “fakelore of black pathology.”3 Murray explains that whites build their identity through “a folklore of white supremacy” which is contingent on fakelore, which involves inauthentic, manufactured and degrading assumptions about blacks.4 Echoing these assumptions, Joyce Ladner provides a counternarrative of black experiences in Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (1971).5 Contrary to the majority of research into the black community, which deems African Americans responsible for the creation and perpetuation of alleged pathology (Ladner 76), Ladner reconceptualizes pathology and shifts the blame from individuals to systemic inequalities and institutional racism: “There has never been an admission that the Black community is a product of American social policy, not the cause of it – the structure of the American social system, through its practices of institutional racism, is designated to create the alleged ‘pathology’ of the community, to perpetuate ‘the social disorganization’ model of Black life” (77, italics in the original). Her research essentially (re)constructs black identity; thus, in praising black women’s adaptation skills, which allow them to survive,6 Ladner writes: they are able to exercise control over their futures, whereas writers have tended to view this low-income Black community as an all-pervasive force which is so devastating as to compel its powerless residents to succumb to its pressures. Their power to cope and adapt to a set of unhealthy conditions – not as stereotyped sick people but as normal ones – is a factor which few people seem to accept or even realize. (76)

From a practical or historical point of view, the afropessimist story reaches back to Assata Shakur, to the Black Liberation Army, even all the way back to the great Nat Turner, the Dismal Swamp, the Seminole Wars, and so on. But as an explicit body of theoretical work, it begins really with Historian Orlando Patterson (despite his own liberal proclivities). Patterson argued in the early 1980’s that, contrary to Marxist assumptions, what historically defines the slave’s position in society is ultimately not the phenomenon of forced labour. Although frequent, forced labour occurs only contingently or incidentally, and not everywhere slaves are found. The slave relation, Patterson argued, is rather defined by a threefold condition: a) general dishonourment (or social death), b) natal alienation (i.e. the systematic rupture of familial and genealogical continuities), c) gratuitous or limitless violence. This threefold combination gives rise to a being experientially and socially devoid of relationality: the slave relation is a type of social relation whose product is a relationless object. [3]

In the late 1990s Saidiya Hartman, following on the work of cultural theorist Hortense Spillers, added to Patterson’s criteria an ontological dimension: the slave, she argues, is one who finds themselves positioned in their very existence, their being-as-such, as a non-human – a captured, owned, and traded object for another. The ontological abjection of slave existence is not primarily defined by alienation and exploitation (a suffering due to the perceived loss of one’s humanity) but by accumulation and fungibility: the condition of being owned and traded, of having one’s being reduced to a being-for-the-captor. [4]

Given the centrality of the concept of fungibility in my argument and its close ties to Afropessimism, it is worth starting by a succinct exposé of the latter’s central tenets. First things first, Afropessimism under consideration here is the US-version of Afropessimism, which was developed several decades after its original elaboration in Africa (with a different meaning) and largely obscured this prior conceptualization.5 A foundational premise of (US-made) Afropessimism is the claim that humanity was “made legible through the irreconcilable distinction between humans and blackness” (Douglass, Terrefe, and Wilderson 2018, 1). The advent of “human” as category was achieved through the violent negation of humanity to the Black, classified as non-human. This founding relationality in which the Black non-human is the constitutive outside of the Human means that Blackness eludes and exceeds the humanist modes of thinking and world-making. This premise is buttressed by the Afropessimist conceptualization of Blackness as “a paradigmatic position, rather than an ensemble of cultural, social, and sexual orientations” (1), as a “structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions” (Wilderson 2010, 58), which is coupled with a methodological refusal – that of any analogizing/comparison between the regimes of violence that discipline non-Black subalterns (dominated but human) and the one that evicts the Black from humanity. For Afropessimists, any analogizing between Black non-being and subjugated being (whether non-Black migrant, woman, queer, disabled) is misguided, as fungible object is incomparable to subordinated subject, and “the structure of the entire world’s semantic field – regardless of cultural and national discrepancies – […] is sutured by anti-Black solidarity” (58). One can hardly miss the divergence between this Afropessimist precept of incommensurable ontological (anti)Blackness, which foregrounds one true antagonism, the one between Black non-human and non-Black human, while it views “other repressive relations like class and gender” as taking place “on the level of conflict – they can be resolved, hence they are not ontological” (Wilderson n.d.), and the intersectional relational schema which, without treating differences as equivalent and interchangeable, conceives them within a matrix of domination where there is no superordinate antagonism. Thus, Afropessimist relational schema is hardly compatible with intersectional relational schema. While the former builds on the premise of only one true antagonism – that between humans and Blacks which is the core of ontological anti-Blackness – relegating the others to the realm of conflicts, because, it argues, they are not ontological, the latter eschews the idea of a single determination (be it race, class or gender) and focuses on theorizing their context-specific mutual constitution and articulations. From an Afropessimist perspective, Blackness doesn’t belong to the domain of subjectivity, identity, agency and epistemology, but to that of ontology, accumulation and fungibility, as determined by slavery and its afterlife (Hartman 1997). What ensue are structural incommensurability and incommunicability of Blackness vis-à-vis all other subaltern positions, “predicated on modalities of accumulation and fungibility, not [Marxian] exploitation and alienation” (Wilderson 2010, 58) – for slave is an object, not an exploited labourer-subject (Patterson 1982). They produce the “the absolute non-individuality and interchangeability” (Warren 2017, 397) of Blackness. Here, the concept of fungibility is of paramount importance, as the predicate upon which the enslaved Black is evicted from humanity and turned into ontologically (ac)cumulable and exchangeable commodity. Hartman (1997) argues: the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power. (21, my emphasis) Slavery is determinant in the Afropessimist conceptualization of Blackness and its incommensurability with other social positions of oppression. For Afropessimists, “the black is positioned, a priori, as slave” (Douglass, Terrefe, and Wilderson 2018, 1). One may reasonably inquire, but what about post-emancipation? Afropessimists answer this via the concept “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2007) to argue “how the relationship between the slave and their status as fungible property did not substantively change after emancipation” (King 2013, 24). Hartman writes: Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (2007, 6) For Hartman, emancipation is “both a breach with slavery and a point of transition to what looks more like the reorganization of the plantation system than self-possession, citizenship, or liberty of the ‘freed’” (1997, 12). Accordingly, the plantation supersedes its historical site, so does the fungible object status of the ‘freed’ Black. The lingering effects of slavery have an important bearing on my argument about Black feminist intersectionality’s fungibility in present-day academe. If Hartman theorizes Black non-humanity as being predicated on fungibility, i.e. ontological status of infinitely cumulable and exchangeable commodity, from the structural position of the enslaved, her conception of slavery’s afterlife authorizes the deployments of fungibility after and beyond slavery. Such a post-emancipation use of fungibility is obvious in Wilderson’s work, when he argues: As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world and so is his or her cultural ‘production.’ What does it mean – what are the stakes – when the world can whimsically transpose one’s cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? (2010, 56, my emphasis). In so doing, Wilderson not only deploys fungibility beyond the historical site of slavery, but also expands it from Black bodies to their artistic and intellectual productions, which are up for grabs, to be done whatever anyone sees suitable. He writes: The object status of Blackness means that it can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process. Both jazz and hip-hop have become known in the same way that Black bodies are known: as forces “liberated” from time and space, belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking. Anyone can say “[n-word]” because anyone can be a “[n-word].” (2010, 235, my emphasis) Black fungibility under globalized hip-hop brings compelling insights to think through Black women’s fungibility under globalized intersectionality, which becomes intersectionality’s fungibility under globalized knowledge economy. In both cases (globalized hip-hop and intersectionality), Black bodies and intellectual/cultural production are in a state of infinite change and exchange. They are “open spaces of shifting ‘signification and representation’ which humans use to make meaning of their lives” (King 2016, 1023; drawing on Spillers 1987, 75). The enslaved body’s ontological status predicated on fungibility and accumulation hence expands on Black experience and knowledge, turning them into “an open sign that can be arranged and rearranged for infinite kinds of use” (1025).

There is a scholarly consensus that participation of Black men and Black women during World War II was pivotal in the mobilization of self-determination movements in Africa and accelerated civil rights activism in the United States. Also, war veterans such as Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Idi Amin of Uganda became heads of some of these new African states. But there is more. My colleague Cullen Hendrix recently discussed how events like World War II have not only received a disproportionate level of coverage in international relations scholarship, but in security studies, more specifically, they have become the prisms through which many scholars understand conflicts. If the second World War, however unique in its scale and context, has shaped how we theorize about international politics and security, then we must ask ourselves: what is missing from our analytical frameworks, when we do not seriously consider how African actors and agency, and the violent ways African bodies were used influenced the War’s dynamics and how power is presently conceptualized and used in post-colonial Africa? While historians and comparativists have investigated these events, few in IR theory–which at the moment is dominated by Western scholars–consider such dynamics seriously in their research. Traditional IR theory’s fixation with the modern state is part of the problem. Modern African states did not emerge until the 1960’s after regaining their independence from European countries. While there were numerous kingdoms and states in pre-colonial Africa, for most of the 19th and 20th centuries African societies were considered mere annexations to European states. Today, unfortunately, part of the field of IR continues to be influenced by an intellectual tradition of anti-blackness through the erasure of centuries of power consolidation and state formation and other types of social organizations that predate colonialism. IR is not blind to race. For example, Zoltàn Búzás has theorized about the impact on race and threat perception in international security. Yet, IR struggles to face its own racial bias by failing to examine African states and political actors as independent historical subjects, and not simply objects in the dominant global structure. This propensity to minimize African actors was all too evident during the Cold War when the importance of proxy wars was often analyzed through the lens of bipolarity. Moreover, Western bias in the reading of history and distribution of power in international relations scholarship has continuously erased important events from our understanding of global affairs. This was the case following the stalemate at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale (1987-88) during the Angolan Civil War and the Namibian War of Independence. The battle, which was the most important conventional military engagement in Africa during the Cold War era, pinned Angolan troops and Namibian rebels with the backing of Cuban forces and Soviet advisers against the South African Defense Forces and Angolan rebels who were backed by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. The inability of either side to win the battle, after engaging in over a decade of military confrontation, was a turning point in Southern African politics and the Cold War. The stalemate at Cuito Cuanavale pushed the Apartheid government to the negotiation table, which resulted in Namibia’s independence and later opened the door for democracy in South Africa. Even today, too many Western IR scholars fail to consider African political actors as full agents. For example, the bulk of the analysis on Africa-China relations critiques China’s exploitation of African natural resource or the impact of China’s development assistance on some African countries human rights records. However, grounding the discipline in a more global perspective could, for instance, interrogate the myriad ways in which Africa states and non-state actors have chosen to interact with China and how such interactions have contributed to changing the world order. Could Africa be that important to international relations in a nonfictional setting? Decolonizing IR scholarship goes beyond simply including more people of color in our syllabi. In addition to questioning the dominance of western epistemology and methodology, previous intellectual anti-colonial movements have emphasized the need to fight the pervasive erasure of political actors of color and their contributions. It does not involve merely mentioning them in passing. In IR, it also demands that we re-examine their relationships with contemporary political and security architectures and the latter not be taken for granted. Critical security theory begins to question the production of conventional knowledge in the discipline by interrogating the social, historical and political roots of that knowledge. But this practice needs to permeate the entire field.

Possibly the simplest (though perhaps also the crudest) method of determining the role of the slave in producing law is to locate the slave within the earliest institutional expressions of the law – by this I mean within the earliest legal form. What I want to suggest here is that the slave existed almost simultaneously with the emergence of law, and to suggest therefore that this particular human subject was known to law at a point that precedes the advent on to the legal stage of those who would now be perceived to be the more powerful actors within the legal arena. In this regard it is instructive to turn to an analysis of the law of contract as it developed from the ancient law of chattels and other rules governing the acquisition and exchange of commodities. Both legal historians and contemporary critical theorists would tend towards the view that contract, however crudely conceptualised, was an early form of law.20 Indeed Pashukanis is often attributed with advancing the idea that ‘the model of contract preceded all subsequent forms of legality’.21 Thanks mainly to the work of critical race scholars, notably Patricia Williams and Cheryl Harris,22 the constitutive relation of the slave to the moulding of early contract doctrine is now an important, though still marginal, lesson of critical theory and legal history. In a recent keynote address, Patricia Williams was to make explicit the relation between the development of the law of contract, the legal form that according to Douzinas et al (commenting on Pashukanis) was ‘the exemplary justification for the rule of law’23 – and those subjugated or repressed in various ways: Contract law is about alienation, about making strange, putting at a distance, transforming into something else, fixing a price, making interchangeable with the currency of the realm. Contract law is thus in tension with that which American constitutional theory considered ‘unalienable’ [sic] or what can’t be sold: that is notions of corporeal integrity, mental and physical inviolability, the pricelessness of our bodies, the embodiment of our dignity – all that we enshrine in the nation of civil rights and human rights. This tension between what can be sold and what ought not to be sold, is also an overlap or an intersection of course. It is the place where we consider questions such as slavery, indentured servitude, prostitution and trafficking in women and children.24 In posing contract as the exemplary model of law, and in revealing the ‘tensions’ in contract doctrine resulting from the commercial appropriation of human dignity and freedom, Pashukanis and Williams ease the way towards the claim that the slave as chattel and therefore one of the principal ‘objects’ regulated by the early contract form – our exemplary protagonist – existed at the earliest stage in the development of modern law. Whilst Pashukanis’ conception of law emerging from the ‘commodity form of production’25 would not be an idea that attracts universal approval, most legal historians would account some form of contractual relation as the earliest expression of modern law. Although amongst English legal historians there is some dispute as to whether rules and principles governing all forms of moveable goods (chattels) were the earliest known to English law, or whether land laws marked the origin of the common law, the former view appears to hold sway. For instance, Jenks argues that moveable goods made possible private land and associated rights and that the legal recognition of ‘property in chattels’ arose with the much earlier ‘law of theft’.26 The early preoccupation of the law with moveable goods was, according to Jenks, readily explainable by the easy availability of land ‘in primitive times’ and the converse scarcity of resources able to work upon the land. This meant that a somewhat greater premium was placed upon ‘cattle, slaves, weapons, jewels’ and other ‘moveables’ than on any other commodity (emphasis added).27 ‘weapons and jewels’ as the subject matter of this earliest of the concepts and processes that, according to Friedman, comprise the law, what Jenks also observes is the beginnings of an early market system in which chattels or moveable goods were essential components. The importance of chattels to the functioning of this market as well as their relative scarcity was such as to call for some form of regulation over their sale and barter and over alternative means to which they were put to use. The early common law served as the necessary form of regulation and, in so regulating chattels, the early juridical order crucially established a ‘material world’ that could be utterly subjugated to the demands of this early market state and later to the various manifestations of capitalism. The idea of a material world subjugated to power and dominance in whatever form is, of course, crucial to contemporary theorising on oppressed groupings, though this is not the place to elaborate on the idea.28 What needs to be emphasised, however, is that this ‘material world’ is not, as its nomenclature might suggest, inhabited by non-human species only. It simply depicts a particular idea of materiality that appears to have emerged from the construction of the slave. Drawing from the history of early modern law, what was subjugated to the demands of the market was not merely material goods proper and animals, but the human slave (chattel) who appears to co-exist with the emergence of the law of chattels, and thus, arguably, with the doctrinal origins of modern law. The means through which this world of ‘political’ materiality has matured is a complex tale and one somewhat beyond the scope of this inquiry. However, it is clear that one method of constructing such a world is by enabling the control of material things and other living species, formal acquisition being one overriding measure of control: through law, the ownership or control over materiality, including human slaves, was facilitated. To be in a position to dispose of material and in general to use the material as a resource is a means of subordinating it to control by dominant force, and of establishing material in a subordinated relationship to such forces. This world of political materiality was significantly shaped, in the early stages of the law, through the law of chattels. What is significant for these purposes is that it was the law of chattels within which we see produced the first human protagonist – the first human subject made to labour towards the law’s concepts and definitions – specifically to labour towards a definition or understanding of the nature of chattels, and this fact, I argue, is crucial in identifying the first set of doctrines of modern law, and thus to point to the vital but repressed forms of life integral to the production of law.

The flipside of white innocence and disadvantage in affirmative action jurisprudence is Black guilt and advantage. Affirmative action jurisprudence implicitly articulates Black students as “guilty” of exploiting the unfair advantage affirmative action affords them, an advantage that produces “reverse discrimination” against whites.138 The perception of Black students as “unjustly enriched” by affirmative action rests not only on the view that Black students are beneficiaries of and advocates for a policy that is perceived to harm innocent whites, but also on the view that this beneficiary status is unearned: It derives from the failure on the part of those students to satisfy the presumptively race-neutral and otherwise legitimate merit criteria around which admissions processes are structured.139 Importantly, assumptions about white innocence and Black guilt are not peripheral notions in affirmative action cases.140 They are core normative ideas that have helped establish and sustain the strict scrutiny trigger—namely, that any time the government relies on race, even to advance racial justice, its decision is “suspect” and thus warrants “the most searching judicial inquiry.”141 As you will soon learn, concerns about white innocence and Black guilt are also central to the operation of the social regime of strict scrutiny. But that is getting ahead of ourselves. For now, we will continue to focus on the legal regime of strict scrutiny and turn our attention to “justification” and “fit.” To remind you, both “justification” and “fit” kick in once strict scrutiny is triggered. The “justification” inquiry turns on whether the government can articulate a “compelling” reason for its decision to rely on race.142 What goals does the government seek to accomplish? Constitutionally speaking, are those goals compelling?143 The “fit” inquiry turns on how the government seeks to advance those goals. Is there is a tight “fit” between the “means” and the “goals”? Asked more doctrinally, are the means the government employs to effectuate its goals “narrowly tailored”?144 C. Justification: The Compelling Interest Prong Perhaps the best case to illustrate how the Supreme Court assesses what passes muster under the compelling justification prong of strict scrutiny is Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.145 There, the Court had to decide whether the University of California Davis’s medical school’s affirmative action policy was constitutional. Justice Powell’s opinion in that case became the foundation for contemporary race and equal protection jurisprudence, including his analysis of what counts and does not count as a compelling state interest.146 The medical school advanced four justifications for its affirmative action policy that it viewed as “compelling”: combatting societal discrimination, facilitating the delivery of medical services to underserved communities, mitigating the underrepresentation in medical school of students from disadvantaged racial groups, and achieving the educational benefits of diversity.147 Justice Powell rejected the first three justifications and concluded that achieving diversity was the sole purpose for which a university could employ race as a factor in admissions decisions.148 Subsequent Supreme Court opinions have affirmed Justice Powell’s justification analysis.149 Thus, under current law, while diversity may serve as a compelling justification for affirmative action, combating societal discrimination may not. There is much that one might say about this doctrinal arrangement, including how it pushes “societal discrimination”—which Justice Powell described as an “amorphous” concept150—beyond the reach of equal protection doctrine. In Justice Powell’s opinion, Black inequality resulting from societal discrimination has no legal cognizability. Indeed, the opinion effectively constitutionalizes societal discrimination, rendering the existence of the phenomenon consistent with rather than anathema to the commands of equal protection. Instead of treating societal discrimination as a pressing racial reality that the government must remedy, Powell refashions it as an “amorphous” concept that the government must ignore.151 I will not, in this Article, elaborate on the preceding critique of Powell’s opinion, since I am pursuing that project elsewhere.152 For present purposes, it is enough to understand that: (a) any time the government relies on race for whatever reason it must satisfy the compelling state interest standard, and (b) the Court’s application of that standard significantly limits the terms on which the government can promote and defend progressive race conscious interventions. To put a finer point on the preceding two takeaways, whether governmental race consciousness takes the form of affirmative action, voting rights, voluntary integration efforts in K-12 schools, or employment antidiscrimination measures, the Court treats it as presumptively suspect and therefore presumptively unconstitutional.153 D. Fit: The Narrow Tailoring Prong Let’s now turn our attention to “fit.” To do so, we will assume that the government has a “compelling” reason to incorporate race into its decisionmaking. Would a court rule that the government’s decision to rely on race is thus constitutional? Not necessarily. Recall that under strict scrutiny, the government must satisfy the requirements of not only justification, but also fit. Accordingly, the government must demonstrate that the means by which it seeks to advance its “compelling” goals are “narrowly tailored.”154Once again, Bakke is a useful case for demonstrating how the Court employs this prong of strict scrutiny. In Bakke, Justice Powell concluded that the medical school’s affirmative action policy was not narrowly tailored because the school used quotas in its admissions policy. Justice Powell reasoned that quotas are not a “narrowly tailored” way to realize the university’s “compelling interest” in diversity.155 According to Justice Powell, in the context of affirmative action, “narrow tailoring” means treating race as one factor among many in deciding which students to admit.156 Reserving a specified number of seats for particular students on the basis of race violated this race-as-one-factor-among-many standard.157 Twenty-five years later, the Supreme Court would affirm Justice Powell’s strict scrutiny framework in a pair of cases: Grutter v. Bollinger, 158 which implicated the affirmative action plan of the University of Michigan’s law school; and Gratz v. Bollinger, 159 which implicated the affirmative action policy of the University of Michigan’s undergraduate program. With respect to justification, the Court concluded that the affirmative action policies in both Grutter and Gratz met the compelling state interest requirements of strict scrutiny because both polices were structured to advance diversity.160 The Court reached a different conclusion with respect to fit, ruling that whereas the plan in Grutter satisfied the fit requirement of narrow tailoring,161 the plan in Gratz did not.162 The Court reasoned that the Gratz policy failed to employ race as one factor among many in deciding which students to admit.163 Instead, it allocated a predetermined number of points to students on the basis of race.164 That approach, the Court reasoned, did not evidence a close fit between the goals of the affirmative action policy (diversity) and the means the university chose to realize those goals (a racialized point system).165 One way to redescribe what the Court is doing when it performs “narrow tailoring” analysis in the context of affirmative action jurisprudence is ascertaining whether the government is relying “too heavily” on race or, to put the point the way David Simson has, whether race is “too much” of a factor.166 While the Court has not quite said that colleges and universities must employ race only as a last resort to advance diversity—meaning that they should exhaust all formally race neutral approaches to achieving diversity before implementing race conscious affirmative action—it has grown increasingly concerned with how much of a factor race plays in affirmative action admissions.167 The Court has defended this concern as an effort to make race “irrelevant.”168 But it is more accurate to say that the Court’s “narrow tailoring” approach makes race relevant and useful—which is to say, fungible—in a particular kind of way: as a technology through which to elide or delegitimize social relations, or a group-based understanding, of racial power. Central to “narrow tailoring” is the individual, ostensibly unraced. Over and over again, the Court has insisted that it is the individual who matters, not his membership in a racial group.169 Indeed, as Justice Scalia argued, “we are just one race here. It is American.”170 This atomizing, colorblind approach to race—an approach that is not race neutral but deeply racially invested in ignoring or explicitly dismissing contemporary manifestations of racial injustice—helps to explain two core features of the Court’s “narrow tailoring” analysis: (1) why quotas do not satisfy the requirements of “narrow tailoring” (because they are a group-based form of racial remediation); and (2) why the race-as-one-factor-among-many approach does (because it limits the “means” by which the Court may use race as a remedial tool).171 As with my discussion of justification (the “compelling state interest” prong of strict scrutiny), there is far more one might say about fit (the “narrow tailoring” prong). But, here, too I have sidestepped broader critiques of “narrow tailoring” to focus your attention on the rough contours of the doctrine.

Modern liberalism is forged through colonial violence, and slavery is at least coterminus with its ideas and experiences of freedom, if not with the material root of its historical possibility. Thus the ways in which geology underwrites that continuum—of liberal subjectivity and its historicity—and how geology as a praxis materially carries this relation into the future should matter in an epochal swerve. As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life—anthropos—through a universalist geologic commons, it neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations. The racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World, as does the material impetus for colonialism in the first instance. This means that the idea of Blackness and the displacement and eradication of indigenous peoples get caught and defined in the ontological wake of geology. The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practices of extraction, which is to say that the categorization of matter is a spatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation through geographic displacement (and relocation through forced settlement and transatlantic slavery). That is, racialization belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert. Extractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men. Historically, both slaves and gold have to be material and epistemically made through the recognition and extraction of their inhuman properties. These historic geologic relations and geo-logics span Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia through the movement of people, objects, and racial and material categories. Thus becoming post-racial through Anthropocenic speciation is a foil of the humanist trickster (Yusoff and Thomas 2018)—one that places an injunction on the recognition of historic modes of geopolitical mattering while maintaining unequal relations of power through continued environmental exposures. In this moment of reinscribing geology as a property of personhood in the Anthropocene (in the strategy of geologizing the social and socializing the geologic), there is a need to think with its former lives of inscription, not just those currently searched for in the strata. Or, to put it another way, what modes of geologic life[1] (material and psychic) are already imbricated in geologic practices, often in violent ways? Geology is a mode of accumulation, on one hand, and of dispossession, on the other, depending on which side of the geologic color line you end up on. In this book, I ask how geology is being reelaborated in the Anthropocene and consider what historicity would resist framing this epoch as a “new” condition that forgets its histories of oppression and dispossession. This project seeks to write a prehistory that is sufficient to the radical ambivalence of the afterlives of geology—of indigenous dispossession of land and sovereignty in the invasion of the Americas through to the ongoing petropolitics of settler colonialism; of slavery, “breaking rocks on the chain gang” (as Nina Simone sings it), to the current incarnations of antiblackness in mining black gold; and of the racialized impacts of climate change. To redress how geology makes property relations and properties a relation of subjugation is to challenge the incompleteness of address in the Anthropocene. Even as the Anthropocene extends its purview over geology within an explicitly politicalized optic on geomorphic processes, it is a “view from nowhere.” The God’s-eye view is inverted into a lithic-eye view to produce a geologic commons from below (Yusoff 2017b). The unification of its vision across the time and space of geologic practices seemingly offers an undifferentiating and indifferent politic. Apprehending the past in the present colonial mining empires of white settler nations frames White Geology as a historical regime of material power, not a genetic imaginary. In this book, I want to redress how the descriptive qualities of geology’s nomenclature produce what Hartman calls a “cultivated silence” about the normalcy of those extractive modes as deracialized. To address this silence would be to understand geology as a regime for producing both subjects and material worlds, where race is established as an effect of power within the language of geology’s objects. Specifically, the border in the division of materiality (and its subjects) as inhuman and human, and thus as inert or agentic matter, operationalizes race. White Geology makes legible a set of extractions, from particular subject positions, from black and brown bodies, and from the ecologies of place. The collective functioning of geologic languages coded—inhuman, property, value, possession—as categories moves across territory, relation, and flesh. It is not just that geology is a signifier for extraction but that a transmutation of matter occurs within that signification that renders matter as property, that makes a delineation between agency and inertness, which stabilizes the cut of property and enacts the removal of matter from its constitutive relations as both subject and mineral embedded in sociological and ecological fields. Thus I argue that the semiotics of White Geology creates atemporal materiality dislocated from place and time—a mythology of disassociation in the formation of matter independent of its languages of description and the historical constitution of its social relations. The division between the figures of the human and inhuman and its manifestations in subjective life exhibits one of the most terrible consequences of the division of materiality organized and practiced as a biopolitical tool of governance. The division of matter into nonlife and life pertains not only to matter but to the racial organization of life as foundational to New World geographies. The biopolitical category of nonbeing is established through slaves being exchanged for and as gold. Slavery was a geologic axiom of the inhuman in which nonbeing was made, reproduced, and circulated as flesh. This unmaking of subjects constitutes a warp of dispossession in the progressive narrative of collective accumulation or geologic commons in which “we” all share. The rendering of nonbeings in colonial extractive practices through the designation of inhuman or geologic life, its exchange and circulation, demonstrates what Christina Sharp (2009) calls the “monstrous intimacy” of the subjective powers of geology, where gold shows up as bodies and bodies are the surplus of mineralogical extraction. The inhuman is a call across categories, material and symbolic, corporeal and incorporeal, intimacies cut across life and nonlife in the indifferent register of matter. Geology (and its fossil objects) have been entwined with questions of origins, processes of racialization through speciation and notions of progress, as well as being a praxis for inscripting racial logics within the material politics of extraction that constitutes lived forms of racism (from eugenics to environmental racism). To trace racial matterings across the category of the inhuman, and specifically the traffic between the inhuman as matter and the inhuman as race, is to examine how the concept of the inhuman is a connective hinge in the twinned discourses of geology and humanism. It is a hinge that establishes an extractive axis in both subjective and geologic (or planetary) life. Race (and the Human) is tied most noticeably to fossil narratives (Yusoff 2013, 2016) and racialized processes of extraction, but it is also resident in modes of racial discourse in relation to ideas of property, possession, and land use. In the categorization of matter as property and properties, both spatial dispossession of land (for extraction) and dispossessions of persons in chattel slavery (as another form of spatial extraction) are enacted. The slave in this formulation is rendered as matter, recognized through an inhuman property relation—what Saidiya Hartman calls fungibility—as a commodity with properties, but without subjective will or agency (or “flesh,” as Hortense Spiller has it). Rendering subjects as inhuman matter, not as persons, thereby facilitated and incorporated the historical fact of extraction of personhood as a quality of geology at its inception.

How does anti-Blackness manifest itself? No continent has been more impacted by the ravages of colonialism and racism than the African continent. Sadly, even today, Africans are at the receiving end of discrimination, from vaccine apartheid to visa apartheid. The Covid-19 pandemic offers a stunning recent example of anti-Blackness. No continent is less vaccinated and boosted than the African continent [3]. While wealthy nations rushed to clean up the shelves, hoard vaccines, and even throw away millions of expired vaccines, the African region was left last in the line. Despite the efforts of activists and the support of most countries, a few rich countries blocked the TRIPS waiver that could have significantly expanded vaccine manufacturing in the Global South. Two years after vaccination began in wealthy nations, and even as second and third booster shots are being offered in the Global North, barely one in four people in the African region are vaccinated with two doses (as of January 2023) [3]. The African region has also had the lowest Covid-19 testing rate, and access to anti-viral medications such as Paxlovid is practically non-existent. This pattern of discrimination is not new. More than 30 years ago, when anti-retrovirals (ARV) became available, they were considered too expensive to roll-out in the African region. As late as 2001, some experts maintained that ARV treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa was impossible. It took incredible activism, legal action, and community effort before they started becoming available, by which time millions of Africans got infected and died. When the Ebola outbreak ravaged West Africa during 2014–16, it killed more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Even intravenous hydration was seen as being too challenging during this crisis. While an overwhelming majority of the mostly White American and European healthcare workers who contracted Ebola survived, the infection killed two-thirds of West Africans with Ebola. Investments in R&D dramatically increased only after Ebola infections began to be reported outside Africa; in fact, investment for new product development increased more than 900-fold after the outbreak in 2014 [4]. Africa is the only continent where mpox has been endemic for decades. And yet, when the global outbreak occurred, the west was prioritized for vaccine rollout. A giant share of the mpox vaccines is still held by the US, UK, Canada and France–some of the richest nations in the world, while the African region was once again left behind [5]. In the same vein, although sub-Saharan Africa carries the highest burden of cervical cancer cases and deaths globally, access to human papillomavirus vaccines remains very low in most African countries. When the same patterns echo across diseases and across decades, it is hard to call it anything but anti-Blackness. Anti-Blackness is structural and dangerous The de-prioritization of African lives by the rest of the world has harmful and deadly consequences. For example, in the sub-Saharan African countries most affected, HIV/AIDS lowered life expectancy among adults by about twenty years. Earlier access to ARVs could have prevented this devastating impact. Given the low vaccine and booster coverage in Africa against Covid-19, and emerging, highly immune-evasive subvariants, the African continent is poorly prepared to face any new, deadly variant of SARS-CoV2 as well as the consequences of long Covid. Why is anti-Blackness so widespread? Historically, and even today, every aspect of global health is dominated by rich nations in the Global North. The health of Black people in Africa was never a priority for countries that colonized and exploited the continent; rather global health and its precursors grew out of the need to protect colonialists from diseases prevalent in colonised regions of the world. In fact, the act of colonial conquest was so violently disruptive that it radically altered lives and habitats leading to what was referred to in the early 1900s as the “pathological revolution” [6]. Hence, historically, decisions about the health of Black people were made in countries far away and not always in their best interests. Are things better today? Sadly, data show we have a very long way to go. In 2020, less than 10% of the largest global health organizations were head-quartered in the African region, and very few of the global health organizations are led by African nationals [7]. A survey of over 2000 Board seats of global health organizations shows that less than 3% of the seats are held by nationals of low-income countries [8].

The Surrogate Human Effect Like the “others” of the (white) liberal subject analyzed by decolonial and postcolonial scholarship, the surrogate human effect of technology functions first to consolidate something as “the human,” and second to colonize “the human” by advancing the post-Enlightenment liberal subject of modernity as universal.8 The concept of the surrogate brings together technoliberal claims that technological objects and platforms are increasingly standing in for what the human does, thus rendering the human obsolete, while also foregrounding the history of racial unfreedom that is overwritten by claims of a postrace and postgender future generated by that obsolescence. In our usage, the longer history of the surrogate human effect in post-Enlightenment modernity stretches from the disappearance of native bodies necessary for the production of the fully human, through the production of the fungibility of the slave’s body as standing in for the master, and therefore also into the structures of racial oppression that continue into the postslavery and post–Jim Crow periods, and into the disavowal of gendered and racialized labor supporting outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and sharing economy platforms. Framing technologies through the lens of the surrogate effect brings a feminist and critical race perspective to bear on notions of technological development, especially in the design and imagination of techno-objects and platforms that claim a stand-in role for undesirable human tasks. As part of the surrogate effect, the surrogate is a racialized and gendered form defining the limits of human consciousness and autonomy. Saidiya Hartman conceptualizes the surrogate by citing Toni Morrison’s formulation of slaves as “surrogate selves for the meditation on the problems of human freedom.”9 Hartman proposes that “the value of blackness resided in its metaphorical aptitude, whether literally understood as the fungibility of the commodity or understood as the imaginative surface upon which the master and the nation came to understand themselves.”10 The slave, the racialized fungible body, also acts as a “surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and domination.”11 As Hartman elaborates, these racialized structures of the surrogate did not simply disappear after emancipation. Rather, “the absolute dominion of the master, predicated on the annexation of the captive body, yielded to an economy of bodies, yoked and harnessed, through the exercise of autonomy, self-interest, and consent. . . . Although no longer the extension and instrument of the master’s absolute right or dominion, the laboring black body remained a medium of others’ power and representation.”12 While Hartman is referencing the rise of new modes of bonded labor following emancipation that were encapsulated by the liberal formalities of contract, consent, and rights, her theorization of surrogacy as a racialized and gendered arrangement producing autonomy and universality of and for the master is useful for thinking about the contemporary desire for technology to perform the surrogate human effect. The racialized and gendered scaffolding of the surrogate effect continues to assert a “disembodied universality” that actually offers the position of “human” to limited human actors, thereby guaranteeing power and domination through defining the limits of work, violence, use, and even who or what can be visible labor and laboring subjects. Tracking the endurance of the racial form of slavery as the (not so) repressed or spectral frame for the imaginary of what surrogate technologies do, or who or what they are meant to replace, we insist throughout this book that human emancipation (from work, violence, and oppressive social relations) is a racialized aspiration for proper humanity in the postEnlightenment era. In the US context, reading technologies as they reflect the dominant imagination of what it means to be a human thus means that they are situated in social relations of race, gender, and sexuality, as these derive from embodied histories of labor, Atlantic chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and European and US imperialism, to name the most dominant. The preeminent questions of the politics of the subject, and the derivative politics of difference that consume critical theory—questions that are about political consciousness, autonomy with its attendant concepts of freedom and unfreedom, and the problem of recognition—also drive the preeminent questions we must ask of technologies that perform the surrogate human effect. The surrogate effect of technological objects inherits the simultaneously seeming irrelevance yet all-encompassing centrality of race and histories of enslavement and indenture against which the liberal subject is defined. As Lisa Lowe writes: During the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, liberal colonial discourses improvised racial terms for the non-European peoples whom settlers, traders, and colonial personnel encountered. We can link the emergence of liberties defined in the abstract terms of citizenship, rights, wage labor, free trade, and sovereignty with the attribution of racial difference to those subjects, regions, and populations that liberal doctrine describes as unfit for liberty or incapable of civilization, placed at the margins of liberal humanity.13 Lowe explains that while it is tempting to read the history of emancipation from slave labor as a progress narrative of liberal development toward individual rights and universal citizenship, in fact, “to the contrary, this linear conception of historical progress—in which the slavery of the past would be overcome and replaced by modern freedom—concealed the persistence of enslavement and dispossession for the enslaved and indentured” and racialized populations necessary to the new British-led imperial forms of trade and governance “expanding across Asia, Africa, and the Americas under the liberal rubric of free trade.”14 Moreover, according to Lowe, “the liberal experiment that began with abolition and emancipation continued with the development of free wage labor as a utilitarian discipline for freed slaves and contract laborers in the colonies, as well as the English workforce at home, and then the expanded British Empire through opening free trade and the development of liberal government.”15 While the history of capitalism tends to be written as the overcoming of serf, slave, and indentured labor through free contract and wage labor, that is, as freedom overcoming unfreedom, as Lowe demonstrates, it is actually the racialized coupling of freedom and unfreedom that undergird and justify capitalist and imperial expansionism.

Race drugs: BiDil and customizing health ‘‘for blacks only’’

On 24 June 2005, the New York Times announced that: ‘‘the Food and Drug Administration took a controversial step toward a new frontier of personalized medicine yesterday, approving the first drug ever intended for one racial group, African Americans’’ (Saul, 2005). This new pharmaceutical, marketed as BiDil, targeted racial health and promised to both revolutionize biomedical attention to racial disparities and pave the way toward pharmacogenomics—where drugs and drug combinations will be optimized for each individual’s unique genetic makeup.7 According to the pharmaceutical company NitroMed (then owner of the patented drug), BiDil is ‘‘for use in addition to routine medicines to treat heart failure in African American patients, to extend life, improve heart failure symptoms, and help heart failure patients stay out of the hospital longer’’ (NitroMed BiDil, n.d.).

The codified racial discrimination that made intellectual property law the purview of whites in the 1800s did not disappear. It persisted through the continuing racialized entanglements of the principles of Euro-American citizenship with the principles of Euro-American creatorship. Because conceptions of Americanness were and are structured through a trenchant “racial episteme,”4 a frame that a priori constrains possibilities for treating people of color as full persons, let alone full creators, the discourse of citizenship operates as a container for importing race into intellectual property law, even when the law itself purports to be colorblind. The continuing practice of thinking about copyright, patent, and trademark law through romanticized imaginings of American citizenship constrains the manner in which knowledge production/protection can be understood, managed, and adjudicated with respect to race. I do not claim that such racial investments explain the outcome in all intellectual property cases. However, I contend that intellectual property law is organized through a racial episteme that consistently protects the (intellectual) property interests of white people and devalues the (intellectual) property interests of people of color. Tracing “racial scripts” is a tangible method for understanding America’s racial episteme and how it informs citizenship and creatorship/infringement as discursive formations. Racial scripts are historically grounded and flexible racist logics about racial groups that can be accessed at any time to exclude the original or other people of color.5 They operate as shorthand mechanisms for calling upon dominant American ideals of national identity, patriotism, political economy, and personhood without necessarily explicitly invoking racial categories or colonial logics. In this way, racial scripts can be baked into the seemingly colorblind ideals of American citizenship that, in turn, inform intellectual property law. Examining how intellectual property law operates as a space of racial formation in which the meaning of racial categories evolves over time is a prerequisite to undoing entrenched white privilege and democratizing knowledge production and ownership.6 Intellectual property law is also a “racial project,”7 that reproduces particular racial orders, in which people of color are coded as lacking the capacity to create. Unspoken longings, fears, anxieties, and prejudices wrapped in economic and legal language move us to prefer certain intellectual property narratives over others, predictably to the detriment of people of color. When anti-racist, anti-colonial activists grapple with the racial episteme that structures intellectual property law, they can advocate for strategies that resist the underlying drivers of unjust copyright, patent, and trademark policies. While such resistive strategies may ultimately still provide only precarious and fleeting relief, as Derrick Bell famously argues, they confront the fears and anxieties that sustain racial and colonial knowledge hierarchies.8

The concept of true imagination, which became an important doctrinal standard for determining whether creative works were protectable from the 1700s on, functioned as an important mechanism for linking copyright law with race. Copyright was the vehicle that American Republicans used to unify the nation around a rapidly developing print culture as well as one that embraced whiteness as a prerequisite for authorship.33 Because the nation’s citizens were by definition white, not of color, American copyright formally and informally imagined and incorporated a national identity that excluded people of color from its rights and privileges. Yet the understanding of people of color as being outside the boundaries of creatorship and citizenship persisted long after copyright’s formal exclusions ended. The ideological continuity of conceptions of true imagi- nation lasted well into the mid-1900s, before evolving yet again. In the late 1700s, the trial of Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman to publish a book of poetry in the United States, and Thomas Jefferson’s subsequent commentary on that trial formalized beliefs that Black women—and, by extension, other people of color—lacked the capacity to imagine, in part because they were not whole persons. Though primarily formed around anti-Black racial scripts, the framework of true imagination reared its head again in subsequent disputes involving Latinx and Black authors. Even as pushes against formal racism began to succeed, legal cases continued to per- petuate the racial double standards that Jefferson articulated in Wheatley’s trial. The underlying racial scripts that were determinative in these cases— i.e., that Black people lack the creativity, work ethic, and intelligence to imagine in a manner consistent with copyright law—operated to denigrate Latinx authors. In other words, racial scripts of anti-Blackness became ve- hicles for dehumanizing other people of color as well.34 All evidence suggests that the young Phillis Wheatley did not set out to become the first African American to publish a book of poetry in 1790. Publishing the book was no small feat, and it happened only with the en- couragement of her owner, Susanna Wheatley.35 In order to receive copy- right protection for her work, Wheatley was forced to prove to eighteen white men, who declared themselves the “most respectable characters in Boston,”36 that she indeed possessed the creative capacity to write the poems that she claimed as her own. While Wheatley ultimately convinced those men that she had produced copyrightable poetry, she did so at great cost, both personal and racial.37 Wheatley’s continuing difficulties high- light the extent to which her struggle was not simply about the quality of her work; it also had to do with the racial scripts and racist sentiments around Blackness at the time. Despite the complex legal negotiations over the vocabulary of copyright, specifically the standard of originality, that emerged in the 1820s, there does not appear to be any white analogue to Wheatley’s trial. Proving originality, a legal doctrinal standard that became more re- strictive in the early and mid-1800s before becoming more liberal, none- theless would not likely have given rise to suspicions about an inherent lack of capacity to imagine, as it did with Wheatley.38 Instead, as Wheat- ley’s trial demonstrates, the presumptions against Black creatorship were unique and ingrained in American culture. For centuries after the trial, African American writers and artists sought to refute the claim that Black people lack imagination and, therefore, the ability to create with originality. Moreover, the anti-Black spectacle of Wheatley’s trial mobilized racial scripts that could be applied to other groups, such as Indigenous peoples and Latinx persons, thereby articulating and amplifying racist and colo- nialist sentiments about their incapacity to create. In 1781, Thomas Jefferson, who had never met Phillis Wheatley, de- scribed her as lacking the capacity for true imagination. Jefferson’s racialized proclamations about the capacity to create and the definition of true imagination, with analogues to “imitation,” came to be embedded in copy- right law’s originality standard as continuing justification for racism. In essence, true imagination and imitation evolved into shorthand for racial scripts about Black creatorship. At a time when the violence of Jim Crow operated as a structural barrier to full equality for African Americans in the South, the phrase worked to demarcate white creativity from Black creativity. Jefferson, who crafted a secondhand racist and sexist account of Wheatley, commented in Notes on the State of Virginia:

Gilden ’20 [Andrew Gilden, Associate Professor of Law at Williamette University; “Intellectual Property’s Queer Turn”; The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, chpt 30, pp. 549-564, Oxford Handbooks, Oxford Academic; 01-08-2020; https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.001.0001; accessed 07-11-2024] dliang

Contemporary IP scholarship also grapples with an intellectual tradition that severs creativity and human expression from the social contexts in which they operate. Much IP theory has critiqued the romantic, classically liberal notion of creativity and authorship—that fully formed individuals act upon the world and make something new out of the raw materials they discover in a proverbial state of nature.10 In this view, creators may need the law to provide some legal assurances that their labor will not be appropriated without compensation or consent, but they don’t need anything else in order to engage in their craft—creativity is purely a “personal reaction of an individual upon nature.”11 IP scholars, even those expressly embracing moral rights theories, recognize the limits of such a romantic view of creativity. Creativity is an inherently social activity; what a creator does is tightly wound up in the domain of culturally available ideas, images, and texts, so any limits on the “raw material” of creativity (whether due to cost, law, or technology) will shape the possibilities of creative expression.12 Creativity does not exist without culture, and culture is never static, and accordingly IP scholarship now almost universally recognizes that creativity and culture build upon themselves, piecing themselves together as today’s creators build o their peers and predecessors to produce tomorrow’s cultural landscape.13

So nothing lies outside this more general state of powerlessness, not even language, which, as Spillers shows, reproduces the terms of racial ownership by which slave offspring are “possessed” and fathered “without whatever benefit of patrimony” (74). In this way, by means of the loss of the patronymic, Spillers shows how the confusion of tongues becomes a figure for the confusion of inheritance in the Middle Passage: the literal suspension of the grammar of kinship has been succeeded by the issuance of owned-created property; and this was both the achievement of slavery and its failing; in short, it gave birth to a subject that can only perpetuate, in consequence, the decadent excess of social death as its own most extravagant expenditure. Spillers shows the importance of the invasion-elision of black kinship ties; using the term “ungendering,” she focuses on how fathering-reproduction relies on a production that is also an evacuation or emptying-out of kinship. The slave child is exposed through its servitude to an elision that delivers it over to insecure kinless being. There are exclusively historical and social reasons for this transformation, which emerged alongside the modern capital-plantation system, but what I want to stress here is the affect of the slave’s obedience to its own extravagant elision, which demands that it reproduce itself as a being that has no symbolic immanence as a modern subject. And it was because the condition of the black slave was that of a zero sum that s/he[they] could be so decadently stripped of human being and turned into a commodity. And in this way it is as the excess of a generalized impropriety that white plantation culture managed to line up sexual interest with its idea of virtue, the idea of a forced and forcefully used-up subject with that of partus sequitur ventrem – literally “that which is brought forth follows the womb.” The whole idea of an extravagant, socially dead subject issues from this condition of the slave, whose systematic effacement as a zero sum is the route to its wealthy reconversion – all this is described effectively by Spillers as a “perversion of judicial power,” but there is no outside of this perversity by which black property becomes identified with a pleasure that enslaves itself and is, therefore, socially dead (78). Here again, Spillers can only see the sexual intimacy between masters and slaves as an example of “unrelieved crisis” in “the customary lexis of sexuality” (76). But such intimacy cannot be said to be perverse by virtue of humanism, since sexuality here isn’t so much outside the customary laws or lexis of human recognition as it is the extravagant enjoyment of its destruction – the first act of which is to proscribe pleasure as a paradoxically useful, profitable remnant. Let us say that this is an enjoyment that always signifies destruction as a “property plus,” in which coitus is an excretory reabsorption (65). I am deliberately choosing an oxymoron to speak of the unity here between ejaculation and enjoyment-domination. This locution permits us to glimpse how the raping and torture of slaves is always a pleasurable enrichment in which the right to power is bound up with the operation of violence and rule. That pleasure is moreover an operation that makes the slave, shorn of all sentiment and symbolic value, enslaved by its own passionate attachments to reproduce life as social death. At the same time, this presumed desire for enslavement contains another consequence: For if mastery is always presumed to be sovereign in its rapacious domination, doesn’t the master too end up submitting his desire to property law? Is not this extravagant enrichment through sex already slavish in having its issue made into flesh, in losing its ancestral name to flesh, in reproducing a profit that borrows from social death a lien of social virtue as symbolic extravagance? That is why, even with the death of the slave, the endless expenditure of mastery remains the negative truth of a supernumerary economy, rather than the sign of a lasting sovereign power. This would also mean that all racial mastery is necessarily servile. But this conclusion is immediately impaired by another: such social death meets its necessary limit in a kind of decadence that cannot finally be captured by the moral legacy of humanism, and whose pleasure cannot be said to be located either exclusively in language (whether of nouns or names) or in a sovereignty that is slavishly perverse.

It is February 2021. I am writing this article while my mother is without electricity or water. She lives in Houston, TX, one of the most technologically advanced and diverse cities in the world. Her case is not singular; she is fortunate. I am grateful. Reports have documented the numerous individuals who have died over the course of several days due to the “winter storms” and infra- structural collapse that has been underwritten by capitalist greed. No water. No heat. No electricity. Limited food. Bone-chilling temperatures. People are suffering due to deregulation, privatization of the energy sector, and what could be understood as general legislative malprac- tice or a cavern of ethical emptiness. Black low- and no-income folks will most assuredly feel the brunt of this disaster, as have they with the environmental and political disasters in the United States that preceded (and continually haunt) this moment: COVID-19, police brutality, The Flint Water Crisis, Hurricane Katrina, the “War” on Drugs, Jim and Jane Crow segregation, kitchenettes, Rosewood, Tulsa, lynching, sharecropping, capture and enslavement, the spectacular and mundane forms of anti-Blackness. These examples index the ways Black people are terrorized and extracted from for the maintenance of racial capitalism and white supremacy. To say that Black people in the United States—and globally—are structurally vulnerable and experience suffering and premature state sanctioned death would be to utter an understatement (Dumas, 2014; Jones,

2001; Warren, 2018). Although the aforementioned examples are reflective of exogenous or out-of-school contexts, U.S. schools are cocooned by, created within, and cohere to these socio-political contexts. As a central institution of United States statecraft and a critical element in racial formation, U.S. schools, too, play a significant role in the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of structured vulnerabilities, racial stratification, and anti-Blackness (Dancy & Edwards, 2021; Givens, 2016; Henry, 2021b; Woodson, 1933). As early as 1848, educator Horace Mann suggested that education is the great equalizer. This narrative has continued to prevail in political, public, and popular discourse. While not having access to quality schooling certainly ever decreases one’s odds at “upward mobility” and “quality of life”—both spurious and unstable categories under regimes of anti-Blackness—schools, in fact, continue to perpetuate inequity. This inequity is often categorized around the “achievement gap.” Yet, scholars such as Ladson-Billings (2006), Carter and Welner (2013), and Douglass Horsford and Grosland (2013), have broadened our conceptualization of the gap, moving against deficit notions by not situating the imbalance or problem within the child, their family, or their communities, but rather by focusing on the racialized and classed contexts that animate and construct the “gap.” Ladson-Billings (2006) goes on to reframe the achievement gap by suggesting what we face is an education debt. In Ladson-Billings’ articulation, the education debt is accumulative and made up of the historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral debts society owes Black people and children. These large-scale debts are emblematic of disinvestment and expose the faulty utility of seeing schools as the great equalizer.