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The year 2019 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in British North America. The origin story of the ensuing Black freedom struggle in what would become the United States of America then can be traced back to 1619, a defining moment in American and global history. Jamestown offers the racial origin story of what would become the United States of America. For Black America, the subsequent four centuries have produced a long struggle for citizenship, equality, and freedom that continues into the present but remains rooted in the nation’s original sin of racial slavery. Today, slavery’s aftermath hovers over contemporary American race relations in deep and profoundly disturbing ways, including how textbooks attempt to ignore the unsavory parts of this history, going so far as to characterize enslaved Africans brought to American shores as “workers” in a misguided effort to sanitize this painful chapter in our national story. Black History Month offers a window on the American past through the at times heartbreaking saga of the struggle for African American dignity in the United States. It subverts mainstream conventional narratives of American history by centering the grandeur and travails of the Black Freedom Struggle. While the history of Black people descended from the African Diaspora is global and spans millennia, the last four hundred years represent a crucial, though long ignored, erased and misunderstood history. The saga from racial slavery to freedom and the hope for equal citizenship contour Black freedom struggles as both social and political movements and as cultural and historical narratives focused on liberation, democracy, and civil and human rights. The Black presence in then British North America proved to be the single most important ingredient to the creation of what would become the United States of America and the modernization of global capitalism. Racial slavery proved to be the “magic” elixir that allowed dreams of freedom, democracy, wealth creation, and the pursuit of happiness to thrive alongside the degradation of Black lives. Black lives mattered in 1619 to the extent that they facilitated the creation of the world’s most expansive industrial and consumer economy, riches that were built by the unpaid labor of African Americans. Some of the best recent historical scholarship on slavery has, bolstered by a wealth of new archival resources and featuring unflinching narrative clarity, documented the intimate relationship between Black labor, the rise of white supremacy, and the invention of global capitalism. At their best these histories offer a thick description of why, historically at least, Black lives (at least in the manner they could be cultivated, exploited, and profitable to the production of liberal democratic capitalist institutions dominated by white power) have always mattered in America. This history, the struggle from slavery to freedom in America, remains stubbornly resisted by the vast majority of Americans despite the heroic efforts of pioneering Black scholars and activists, most notably Carter G. Woodson, the Harvard-trained historian who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and, eleven years later, Negro History Week. Expanded to Black History Month in the wake of the Black Power Movement, its significance has grown thanks to the explosion of Black studies programs and departments at major colleges and universities, the growth of Kwanzaa celebrations by millions of African Americans, and the increased interest in Black popular culture as a result of both racial progress and the persistence of anti-Black racism. Politics and pedagogy inspired the movement to study Black history. Narratives of American history after the Civil War used racist history as a weapon. Before the invention of “fake news,” stalwarts of the defeated Confederate States of America innovated what might be called “fake history.” These histories spun Reconstruction as an unfair assault on white supremacy, an attack on white womanhood, and a betrayal of democratic values that elevated unqualified Blacks to elective office only to be driven out by the heroic actions of Klansmen and white supremacists. This narrative caught fire, through books and the modern technology of cinema in the early twentieth century. The same year Woodson founded the most venerable historical association for the study of Black life in American history, D. W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, a nakedly racist and technologically ambitious retelling of Reconstruction that cast White actors in blackface seeking to rape and assault virtuous White women only to be quelled by racial terrorists reimagined as patriots. The film dazzled President Woodrow Wilson, who watched from the comfort of the White House the silent era’s first cinematic blockbuster.While American presidents no longer screen such racist films in the White House, blackface and the cultural nostalgia and admiration for the Klan, Confederate flags, and other symbols of white supremacy continue to capture the American imagination, most often to the great detriment of the pursuit of racial equality and the protection of Black lives. Contemporary American political culture remains in the thrall of white supremacy and anti-Black racism that is the direct by-product of racial slavery and a still potent caste system that marked Black bodies—by virtue of their skin color—as both noncitizens and objects of systemic exploitation, ritualized violence, and cultural derision. The politics of racial disenfranchisement that began during slavery and continues into 2020 with the practice of voter suppression is a reflection of a society that still has yet to come to terms with its history. Black history remains more relevant now than ever, precisely because of its insistence on presenting an unvarnished look at American history. Yet many people seem to have either missed or purposefully ignored this important message. The good, bad, and ugly parts of this history cohere in the astounding juxtapositions of racial progress alongside racist tragedies. That history, at its best, is less invested in the single heroic achievements of Great Black Women and Men and more concerned with the lived-in reality of the Black quotidian, the ordinary Black folk whose courage, resilience, and intelligence guided the transformation of the community from slavery to freedom and in the process helped to reimagine American democracy. Malcolm X, the Black Power icon and most important Black working-class organizer of the second half of the twentieth century, famously observed during the 1950s and 1960s that Black Americans had endured four hundred years of racial oppression in speeches, interviews, and lectures. The relationship between Black identity, racial slavery, citizenship, and democracy represented perhaps the most powerfully cogent themes of Malcolm X’s rhetoric and political and cultural organizing. During the Civil Rights Movement’s heroic period—between the May 17, 1954, Brown Supreme Court desegregation decision and the August 6, 1965, passage of the Voting Rights Act—Malcolm X boldly linked contemporary struggles for Black citizenship with a long history of racial slavery, violence, subjugation, and Jim Crow. Malcolm insisted on speaking truth to power by denouncing American democracy as a corrupt political system poisoned by an ideology of white supremacy that both threatened and exploited Black lives across the nation. Malcolm’s political organizing, rooted in Black nationalist and pan-African traditions embedded in the Black Freedom Struggle, sought to frame the African American experience of racial slavery in a manner both easily digestible and politically revelatory to Black impoverished and working class audiences. If Malcolm defined the period from racial slavery to the civil rights–Black Power era as a revolutionary struggle for Black dignity, Martin Luther King Jr. defined this same period as part of a long search for Black citizenship. For King, Black citizenship encompassed more than just legal and legislative breakthroughs, which he staunchly lobbied and agitated for as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the most important civil rights mobilizer of his era. Citizenship meant not only the absence of negative structures of injustice and violence, but the positive ability of democratic institutions to nurture racial integration, environmentally safe neighborhoods, quality public schools, good jobs, adequate housing, health care, and a living wage. In truth, the Black Freedom Struggle from 1619 until 2019 encompasses the search for Malcolm X’s radical Black dignity and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Black radical citizenship. Despite major and minor political differences Malcolm and Martin came, over time, to shape and influence each other. King, especially after Malcolm’s assassination on February 21, 1965, came to appreciate the need for Black pride and political self-determination. During the last three years of his life, King became a vocal critic of war, racism, and white supremacy in a manner that recalled Malcolm’s words of fire. Malcolm, in private and in public, acknowledged the necessity of King’s goals of Black citizenship even as he, following Frederick Douglass, argued that Black freedom would ultimately be achieved via ballots or bullets. The reverberations of the African arrival in Jamestown helped to fundamentally shape the core of American democracy. Racial slavery formed the beating heart of the new world’s most unlikely and innovative democratic experiment. Black Americans found themselves in the star-crossed position of championing America’s vision of liberty, freedom, and citizenship while standing on the margins of freedom dreams articulated by the Founding Fathers and their political heirs. Between 1789 and 1865, racial slavery proved integral to America’s rapid geographical expansion and financial growth. The rise of abolitionism paralleled these developments, with Black women and men—through public advocacy, slave narratives, and acts of resistance that included organized escapes, rebellions, and work slowdowns—helping to lead these efforts. Perhaps none did more for the enslaved than Frederick Douglass. The modern civil rights struggle represented a second American Reconstruction, the sequel to the nation’s original post–Civil War attempt to fundamentally remake the nation as a true democracy. These efforts ended in the heartbreak of massive anti-Black violence, lynching, imprisonment, and land dispossession. By the end of the nineteenth century, America had indeed been remade, not as a racially integrated democracy, but an apartheid state euphemistically referred to as Jim Crow. The dogged political self-determination of the Black quotidian and the organizing efforts of African American women and men transformed America during this period, despite an onslaught of legal, legislative, and racial assaults expressly designed to strip Blacks of citizenship while exploiting their forced labor, conscription, imprisonment, segregation, poverty, and death in the name of profit and a new vision of white supremacy. Frederick Douglass’s assertion that “slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot” proved to be remarkably prescient. But it also proved to be incomplete. Citizenship encompassed far more than the vote just as white supremacy transcended the Klan and the crudest vestiges of racial hatred. Citizenship meant dignity, human rights, environmental justice, personal safety, and the ability to acquire political and economic power. Reconstruction is usually framed as the period from 1865 to 1877 that witnessed the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments, which ended racial slavery, institutionalized birthright citizenship, and provided the vote for Black men, respectively. Black activists such as Callie House organized for reparations—in the form of government pensions for freed people—as part of a larger, sprawling political and social movement to reimagine American democracy. Reconstruction birthed the rise of public schools and social welfare that nourished democratic systems and that, over time, offered important access to Black communities in search of justice and citizenship. The subsequent period of 1877–96 featured the systematic disenfranchisement of Blacks through organized racial terror, lynching, and state and local laws that “redeemed” white supremacy in the South. The historian Rayford W. Logan famously referred to this period as the “nadir” of African American history. While racial violence in the form of lynching proved to be the most spectacular kind of violence during this era, it was far from the most enduring. The criminalization of Black bodies truly began in earnest during this era, something that an extraordinary new wave of scholarship is beginning to document with meticulous detail. The rise of mass incarceration, which helped to spark the twenty-first-century Black Lives Matter Movement, is rooted in white supremacist efforts to thwart Black citizenship following the end of slavery. In truth, the period of Redemption was part of the Reconstruction era. The hopes that interracial democracy could usher in Black citizenship through a literal and figurative reconstruction of American democracy coexisted alongside an emerging Jim Crow regime that eventually achieved bipartisan support among White members of both major political parties. But a substantive transformation did, in fact, take place. The Jim Crow system enshrined in law, upheld by the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, and guaranteed through the violent subjugation of Black bodies murdered by night riders, incarcerated through convict-lease systems, and slaughtered in racial pogroms that formed archipelagos of tragedy across the United States fundamentally altered the nation-state. Jim Crow represented more than a system of racial and economic apartheid, demarcating the life chances of Blacks and Whites along a color line that transcended cities, regions, and neighborhoods around the nation. Racial segregation marked a caste system that, in small and large ways, denied Black Americans citizenship rights. Reconstruction gave rise to both a new ascendant community of Black politicians, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, social reformers, intellectuals, and artisans, and an aggrieved class of Whites determined to hold back these symbols of progress by any means necessary. If racial slavery represented the problem of race and democracy during the nineteenth century, the color line imposed by Jim Crow demonstrated its twentieth-century evolution. Ida B. Wells, an ally of Frederick Douglass, emerged as the most eloquent African American activist organizing against lynching in America. A brilliant and outspoken journalist, Wells confronted racism and sexism in her efforts to cull a new meaning of Black citizenship in a world scarred by Jim Crow. In this sense, Wells represented a long-standing Black feminist tradition within the Black freedom movement, one that identified the intersectional nature of racial oppression in America. The search for Black dignity and citizenship inspired millions of Blacks to leave the South for more fertile and welcoming geographic territories that fundamentally reshaped the Black experience. While the majority of Blacks still resided in the Old Confederacy, their presence along both coasts and in midwestern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis turned major American cities into veritable Black metropolises. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Jamaican-born activist who admired the conservative Black nationalist educator Booker T. Washington, became the most important Black political mobilizer between the First World War and the Great Depression. In essence, Garvey modernized Black nationalism, turning a political philosophy based on racial solidarity, political unity, and the cultural importance and cohesiveness of descendants of the African Diaspora into an organizing juggernaut. The Universal Negro Improvement Association affected millions of Black people across several continents and the Caribbean, innovating a sprawling network of cultural and political activism that forever reshaped the tenor of Black life in the Americas and beyond. The New Negro, perhaps most famously and enduringly identified by the Black philosopher Alain Locke, encompassed the intellectual ambitions of participants of the Harlem Renaissance, the quotidian strivings of Black migrants eagerly leaving the South, and Garvey’s own Pan-African dreams. Black conceptions of race and democracy grew as the century progressed. Black activists, intellectuals, and organizers adapted their conceptions of freedom to the times, utilizing labor, feminist, religious, liberal, socialist, Marxist, and conservative philosophies, organizations, and movements on behalf of Black liberation. What we have come to characterize as the Civil Rights Movement represents perhaps the most visible strand of a longer history of African American resistance to white supremacy and determination to achieve full citizenship through the transformation of American democracy. Nationally, Americans celebrate the most recognizable chapters of this long struggle, which took place during the 1950s and 1960s, some of the hottest years of the Cold War. However, the Black Freedom Struggle made unprecedented gains during the freedom surges of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Civil righters, Black nationalists, socialists, liberals, Marxists, and feminists forged movements for freedom, citizenship, and democracy that paralleled, overlapped, and intersected with each other during this period. W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading Black scholar of his or any generation, helped to lead this struggle for Black citizenship alongside NAACP and labor organizer Ella Jo Baker, the singer and activist Paul Robeson, and labor leader Asa Philip Randolph. The “Double V” campaign announced that the victory over fascism in Europe required the elimination of domestic racism and white supremacy at home. The two-front struggle found Black soldiers resisting the small indignities of Jim Crow seating in public accommodations and waging larger battles to gain fair treatment from the military during the war, including equitable access to the GI Bill, which offered education and housing benefits for veterans after the fighting ended. Martin Luther King Jr. served as the major political mobilizer during the Civil Rights Movement’s heroic period. Bookended by the legal integration of public schools and the passage of voting rights, this era represents the first half of the Second Reconstruction. The subsequent Black Power era, which King lived to see for its first three years, ratcheted up the civil rights struggle’s push for radical reform by offering a structural or systemic critique of racism, war, poverty, inequality, sexism, and violence. King’s radical legacy continues to be overwhelmed by his iconography at the exact time we need it the most. The radical King spoke truth to power to sitting American presidents, questioned the fundamental unfairness of capitalism, blasted the Vietnam War, and railed against militarism, racism, and materialism. King marched alongside Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael in the withering heat of Mississippi, accused the United States Congress of being unapologetically racist, and planned a campaign of massive civil disobedience in Washington, DC, under the banner of poor people across the racial spectrum. If this sounds familiar, it should. Contemporary social justice movements and the forces of racial oppression, white supremacy, economic injustice, and violence that have spurred these struggles echo aspects of the First and Second Reconstruction. America’s Third Reconstruction is rooted in a historical context that produced the watershed presidential election of Barack Obama; the Great Recession of 2008 and its continuing impact on communities of color; the fires of Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, in the throes of New Jim Crow oppression; and American involvement in continuous global warfare. Dr. King’s contemporary legacy can be seen in the Black Lives Matter movement and its subsequent policy agenda calling for a massive redistribution of wealth and resources toward racial and economic justice around the nation. Movements to end mass incarceration, racial segregation in housing and education, unemployment, hunger, and violence plaguing urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods in America represent the direct results of King’s radical political activism. White supremacy altered Reconstruction, popularized in the imagery of the Ku Klux Klan and other expressions of organized racial terror. Large numbers of White Americans participated in Black subjugation through active participation in segregated churches and in civic, political, and social groups, and through the quiet consent of flourishing anti-Black violence. Recently, one aspect of that violence has been memorialized in the Lynching Memorial founded by human rights activist Bryan Stevenson. White racists during the Civil Rights era organized under the banner of White Citizens Councils. Composed of some of the leading citizens of the South, the councils gave a respectable face to the political, economic, and racial status quo. Their organized efforts at “Massive Resistance” against the integration of public schools helped resurrect nostalgia for the Confederate flag, funneled public taxes into the creation of all-White private schools, and provided moral authority for violence and murder of civil rights activists. America’s Third Reconstruction features some of the same historical cast of characters operating, once again, under a new name. Massive resistance against Black citizenship and racial integration and the quest to redeem White privilege still persists. Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential election and subsequent administration have provided ballast for multiple forms of white supremacy—civic, political, religious—that have sanctioned the racial and religious scapegoating of Blacks, immigrants, Muslims, women, and a host of marginalized groups. But this era, like the nation’s first two periods of Reconstruction, has witnessed dynamic movements on behalf of racial justice and deep democracy. Certainly, the presidency of Barack Obama, whatever its shortcomings, offered a thrilling reimagining of the contours of American history. Obama’s presence in the White House reaffirmed some of the nation’s highest civic ideals and captured the imagination of a generation of young people. However, Obama, unlike King, was no social movement leader, but a president constricted by the limitation of the office. King’s ninetieth birthday provided an extraordinary opportunity to examine how far we have traveled as a nation toward the dream of racial and economic justice for all, and the distance that still remains in achieving his notion of a beloved community. Struggles thought to have been won—like voting rights—continue to be debated in courts throughout the nation, with the current stalemate resulting in the kind of voter suppression unseen since the days of Jim Crow. New rights arenas have been revealed by LGBTQ+, Muslim, non-able-bodied, LatinX, and other communities that build upon, while expanding, the fights King led. The revolutionary King searched for universal social justice for all through the particular movement for Black citizenship. He defined Black citizenship as not merely the absence of racial injustice but the right to a guaranteed job and income, decent housing, safe and racially integrated communities, health care, food justice, and a society where those who felt left out could marshal the “right to protest for right.”The year 2020 marks the 401st anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, the dawn of the Black experience in the west. Racial slavery and its afterlife mark the core of the American story, a narrative that King claimed as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame. This history continues to be mistaken by some as a burden when it should instead be recognized as a tremendous responsibility. It is one that a new generation now bears and will be better able to shoulder by wrestling with the way in which King’s holiday and life represent not just a celebration of the past but a window into a liberated and more humane future for us all. The murder of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, by Minneapolis Police on May 25, 2020, sparked the largest movement for racial justice in American history. Over the course of the following six weeks, over 4,700 separate demonstrations took place, with between seven and twenty-six million Americans self-identifying as participating in protests. Black Lives Matter 2.0 unleashed a national and global moral and political reckoning on race and democracy that can be dated back to 1619. Racial justice uprisings in the wake of George Floyd came on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, which amplified and accelerated racial disparities in education, housing, employment, health care, and criminal justice. Black America confronted, suffered, and died from COVID-19 at largely disproportionate rates compared to their White counterparts. The mass unemployment triggered by shelter-in-place orders that upended the US and global economies also greatly affected Black families, including children who were more likely to lack computers and technologies that could allow them to continue their education amid the crisis. The unprecedented participation in demonstrations by White allies inspired an outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter, perhaps most remarkably from the NFL, that included corporations issuing statements that proclaimed their solidarity with the Black community. Antiracism, which has been the hallmark of the Black Freedom Struggle since before Jamestown, became the lingua franca of a new national era of racial justice consciousness. Black scholars, writers, and thought leaders have found themselves in demand like never before and enjoyed the accolades and exposure from seeing their work on best-seller lists for the first time. Monuments of white supremacy came tumbling down as demonstrators literally toppled and in other cases pressured local authorities to remove Confederate symbols that were erected as part of campaigns of racial terror during Redemption and the Civil Rights era. America’s Third Reconstruction, then, unfolded in the shadow of commemorations of two earlier efforts to institutionalize Black dignity and citizenship. Racial violence contoured the fire this time, as it had in earlier eras. Law enforcement violence against largely peaceful demonstrators became so rampant on social media as to offer a definitive explanation for radical policy agendas—including calls to defund the police and abolish prisons—that were advocated by Black Lives Matter and other Black radical organizers for some time.The added presence of White support helped to illustrate the remarkable durability of a racial caste rooted in slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, and the continued denial of Black citizenship. National protests in support of Black Lives Matter also exposed tensions and vulnerabilities within the system of white supremacy. The incompetence and corruption emanating from the White House exposed the dangers of American democracy’s open embrace of white nationalism fueled by racism, fear, and hatred. Millions of White Americans became receptive, for the first time, in listening to Black people offer an alternative explanation for the unfolding national racial and political crisis, one that replaced narratives of American exceptionalism with a more troubled history stretching back to 1619.Perhaps most important, Black intellectual traditions rooted in Black feminism have helped to lead the nation to this particular moment. Movements for intersectional justice forged in the crucible of slavery, patriarchy, and racial capitalism have been the hallmark of Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells, Lorraine Hansberry, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Fran Beale, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Beth Richie, Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Keisha Blain, to name a few. The grassroots organizing of Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, Brittany Packnett, Tamika Mallory, and many others helped to produce the most radically inclusive social justice movement in American history, one that recognized that to make all Black Lives Matter required rejecting homo- and transphobia and embracing sex workers, the mentally and emotionally ill, as well as the non-able-bodied, homeless, cash-poor, and incarcerated. Parts of the Black Freedom Struggle that have—both through state-sanctioned violence and internecine conflicts—seemed to fragment and shatter into thousands of pieces have been reconstituted as a movement of incandescent beauty and breathtaking potential. The movement for recognizing Black humanity in all of its fullness has, after 401 years, taken firm hold of the narrative of American identity, citizenship, freedom, and democracy. We must never let it go.

Section II of this Article critiqued etiological reductionism which seeks to adjust health disparities studies for all SES variables. In exchange, this Article offers reparational analysis as a heuristic device for health disparities research. Reparational analysis modifies some of the methodologies and assumptions in the epidemiological literature on disparities in Black health. In research design, reparational analysis questions all adjustments for confounding variables which are themselves associated with a history of racial injustice. For Blacks, income, wealth, education, housing, and employment have all suffered under parallel histories of oppression. No matter how the strands are twisted and knotted, racism was a major cause of disparities in each of these variables. Reparational analysis reverses the decision to adjust for many SES variables, and will result in finding larger Black health disparities than are now reported. As a policy making tool, reparational analysis is also more holistic, reminding us that many factors influence health other than health care. The causes of ill health include major structural and societal components, including residential segregation, wealth and income disparities, inadequate investment in public health, and employment disparities. If these factors are just intermediate causes of disparities in Black health, then the remedies must run broadly and deeply. Some of the most interesting work on health disparities takes this approach, connecting the health care system to other social factors such as racial segregation, education, employment and public health. This research is also helpful in identifying the appropriate remedies. Opponents of reparations deride the notion of giving large sums of cash to Blacks, including people of mixed race or recent immigrants. Remedial programs in health will address Black disparities without cutting checks on the basis of skin color. One possible remedy would be specific performance, making the changes necessary to equalize Black health. Even if the damages were limited to the cost of first-class health care for the balance of their lives, the monetary value of this award would run to hundreds of billions of dollars, similar in magnitude to much broader Black reparation claims. 264 Eliminating Black health disparities is a much more significant claim (in dollars) than other Jim Crow strategies, particularly single-event suits like the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. To truly address Black health disparities would require changes to many of the confounding variables described in Section III, supra, such as unequal distributions of income, residential segregation, education and employment. Repairing Black health fully would require fundamental changes in American society. Even if one limits the remedy to the health care system, much would have to be done. Professor Sidney Watson identified four prongs to any program to remedy racial disparities in health: health care financing (financial access); attracting sufficient providers to the inner cities (geographic access); combating discrimination (enforce Title VI); and developing a health care system which is responsive to 265 the needs of the population (cultural competency). More recently, she has called for using quality improvement tools to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health.266 Major structural changes will be required. Eliminating the second-class nature of Medicaid will require reimbursement of providers on the same basis as Medicare, and tying Medicare and Medicaid participation together. Massive changes in the system of educating providers would be required. Public health investments would be strongly supported, and not merely as a defense against terrorism. These and other remedies will not only improve Black health, but will have positive spillover effects to other minority groups and society as a whole. In the law, the reparations heuristic moves us beyond the atomistic search for intentional individual discrimination. The focus shifts to disparate impact and institutional discrimination. The absence of de jure discrimination has done little to reduce disparities in Black health. Waiting many generations for the situation to correct itself is not a morally tenable option. Focusing on institutional discrimination may involve the law more meaningfully in the process of improving Black health: Medicaid cannot continue to offer second-class care with limited provider participation. Data must be collected to illuminate the scope of the problem and to guide remedial and enforcement efforts. Title VI cannot continue to be a dead letter. Reparational analysis also avoids the tyranny of presentism. 267 The Black reparations movement connects modern disparities in Black health with the historical record. As Williams and Rucker stated: [W]e can only regard these [racial health disparity] findings as surprising if we take an ahistorical and decontextualized view of the data.. .Throughout the history of the United States, non-dominant racial groups have, either by law or custom, received inferior treatment in major societal institutions. Medical care is no exception.268 This historical approach has many practical implications. For example given the history of political under-representation and agency indifference, relying on government agencies in a Chevron269 mode is ill advised. As Alexander v. Sandova 270 and its expected progeny further restrict private rights of action under Title VI, the situation becomes dire. Reparational analysis suggests the need for a private right of action, placing the case in front of a life-tenured federal judge, rather than relying on majoritarian democratic politics as mediated through interest group politics. The historical approach also avoids the tendency to blame the victim, as some observers lay the blame for some health disparities upon cultural preferences. These cultural preferences - such as a distrust of the formal medical system - must be understood in the context of the history of medical abuse and neglect described in Section III above. Finally, the historical record also suggests that the remedy will not be cheap and easy. The injury spans many generations, and inflicted a remarkable crime against humanity. The remedy is likely to be equally powerful. Finally, the reparations heuristic may also facilitate the resolution of otherwise intractable issues, such as racial differences in the allocation of kidneys for transplant. The authors of an important article on this topic in the Vanderbilt Law Review appealed to something akin to the concept of reparations, although not by that name: [R]esponding to this disparate racial access can be justified as an attempt to eliminate the effects of past discrimination. Kidney failure is associated with a number of other factors that may be exacerbated in black communities because of past discrimination - including poverty, stress, alcohol use, and poor medical care. To the extent that past discrimination has left blacks disproportionately poor and that poverty induces higher rates of kidney failure, these lingering effects of discrimination also supports society's corrective concern. At a minimum, we believe it is incumbent on society not to ignore the equitable claims of blacks in favor of other possibly less pressing equitable claims... 271 Other examples include affirmative action in education, which could be supported on reparational grounds independent of Justice O'Connor's diversity rationale.272 Two potential problems with the heuristic must be mentioned. The first is very practical. Programs to eliminate health care disparities have some recent momentum in Congress, with support from both sides of the aisle.273 The Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist (R-TN), is the sponsor and leading proponent of some of these programs to reduce racial disparities in health, but is probably not an ardent supporter of Black reparations. Why undermine Republican support for the program by linking it with Black reparations? The second question is also political. The heuristic supports a special warrant for groups that have been uniquely oppressed. If one accepts the general analysis that Blacks have been subjected to crimes against humanity, where does that leave other groups with racial disparities in health, but a different history? To the first question I would say that many reform programs move forward with multiple philosophical foundations, even contradictory foundations. The anti-slavery movement in the 1 9 th Century united religious abolitionists and hard-nosed businessmen, cynical politicians and idealists. It ultimately did not matter that they 274 supported anti-slavery for different reasons. As for the second question, the Black reparations movement does not oppose the elimination of all racial disparities in health. It merely stakes uniquely powerful claims for Black equality. Successfully equalizing Black health in America would require such major social changes that the spillover effect for all other groups would be significant. This rising tide would lift all boats.

From Garveyism to the Black Panthers, from campaigns to free political prisoners to the current fight to #FreeThemAll, imprisoned Black activists and their allies have deployed expanded conceptions of human rights. These anticarceral organizers have internationalized the struggle against state violence by condemning genocidal police and prison practices at the United Nations, building global solidarities, and appealing to the world. In redefining traditional understandings of human rights, imprisoned Black radicals have called forth a right to breathe in the face of state killings, a right to resist in individual and collective self-defense, and a right to repair in restorative and abolitionist terms. Rethinking human rights through the imprisoned Black radical tradition offers insight into the genealogy of a major anticarceral thread of Black internationalism that has been reanimated in the current phase of the global struggle for Black liberation. In the fall of 2021, former Black Panther and renowned prison organizer Jalil A. Muntaqim’s Spirit of Mandela campaign convened an international tribunal to investigate violations of US-held political prisoners’ human rights. Invoking Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment in apartheid South Africa, they called for the return of international jurists to reexamine the treatment of political prisoners in the United States under the United Nation’s Nelson Mandela Rules. Along with the investigation itself, the campaign aims to expose the hypocrisy of the US human rights record, broaden the base of antiracist and anti-imperialist unity, build international solidarity, create a commission to remedy FBI persecution under COINTELPRO, and provide an official report to the United Nations, and “hence to the world.” Muntaquim launched the Spirit of Mandela campaign from inside New York’s “Southport Gulag,” three years before his release in October 2020. The coalition behind the campaign—including the Jericho Movement, the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, and the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee—views it as the latest action in a series of appeals asking international jurists to investigate human rights violations in the United States. Indeed, Muntaqim began drafting his first appeal to the UN from inside San Quentin in 1976, which gathered 2,500 signatures from prisoners across the country before it was filed in Geneva by Amnesty International lawyer Kathleen Burke. The campaign also directly references the 1978 petition submitted by human rights lawyer Lennox S. Hinds, which was carried forward in the 1990 International Tribunal on Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War. While anticarceral campaigns that have emerged from US prisons have included rigorously theorized arguments about torture, genocidal violence, and the status of political prisoners and prisoners of war under international law, they have also used the language of human rights as a practice of worldmaking. From Garveyism to the Black Panther Party, from campaigns to free political prisoners to the current fight to #FreeThemAll, imprisoned Black activists and their allies have deployed expanded conceptions of human rights. These anticarceral organizers have internationalized the struggle against state violence by condemning genocidal police and prison practices at the United Nations, building global solidarities, and appealing to the world. In redefining traditional understandings of human rights, imprisoned Black radicals have called forth a right to breathe in the face of state killings, a right to resist in individual and collective self-defense, and a right to repair in restorative and abolitionist terms. Rethinking human rights through the imprisoned Black radical tradition offers insight into the genealogy of a major anticarceral thread of Black internationalism that has been reanimated in the current phase of the global struggle for Black liberation. Across the long history of struggle against racialized state violence, Black activists in the US prison movement have pushed for an international theory of change, rooted in a decolonial analysis of racial violence and an expanded framework of human rights. The conceptualization of anticarceral internationalism builds on foundational scholarship on the history of Black prison organizing, the feminist fight to end violence, and the imprisoned Black radical tradition. It draws on a shared commitment in African American studies to attend to the questions and theory that movements of the most aggrieved people fighting for justice produce from the ground up. As pathbreaking scholars in critical carceral studies have demonstrated, the most incisive indictments of state violence and trenchant articulations of racial justice have emanated from within the harshest instrument of state repression, the prison itself. From organized rebellions to internationally coordinated hunger strikes, demands of the state, and appeals to the world, the prison movement’s political vision has been remarkably expansive, in spite and because of conditions inside prisons.The place of rights-based strategies in the US prison movement in particular, and the Black freedom tradition more generally, remains contested. This stems from the rootedness of policing and prisons as a system of “gendered racial terror,” producing conditions of domination, elimination, and abject rightlessness, while reforms have been revealed to have enabled racist retrenchment. Yet, the prison movement has also won important legal cases and rights-based victories. Imprisoned members of the Nation of Islam secured key formal protections for the exercise of religious freedom inside prisons, for instance, and Supreme Court cases like United States v. Muniz and Fulwood v. Clemmer opened an avenue for prisoners to seek legal remedy in federal court, as historians Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier have shown. Over the years, prisoners and their allies have fought crucial legal battles against state-sanctioned executions and the torturous conditions of solitary confinement. Rather than focused on legal victories alone, the whole history of American antiprison activism might be seen as a “broad-based human rights movement,” Berger and Losier argue, showing how it has always been more capacious than a demand for “prison reform” or “prisoner rights.” Black activists and their allies in the prison movement have long held a deep skepticism for the promise of domestic rights-based activism alone, especially those reforms that have reinscribed underlying racial and colonial logics of the carceral state. Prison abolitionists in particular work from a thoroughgoing critique of domestic criminal legal and punishment systems as a cause of racialized and gendered violence, and a studied opposition to relying on state mechanisms to redress state violence. As abolitionist-scholar Dylan Rodríguez puts it, rights-based activism has been central to the historic arc of “reformist narratives,” in which “the tragedy of multiple, mind-boggling, undeniably racial-colonial, eviscerations of human populations” are treated as “staging points for America’s exceptional will to vindicate egalitarian justice, individual opportunity, and the incorporation of respectable, rights-bearing citizens into the futurity of imperial optimism.” This reformist kind of future making is continually challenged by an “insurgent abolitionist futurity” that takes on the root causes of suffering and upsets long-standing structures of entitlement and immiseration. As Joy James recently reiterated, differences in strategies and tactics arise out of lived experience, class divides, proximity to risk, and commitment to the struggle for Black liberation. Indeed, she warns of the destabilizing consequences of “airbrushing” the history of revolutionary struggle, by erasing the devastating impact of FBI COINTELPRO infiltration and tactics of warfare against Black activists. Embedded in her critique of the politics of liberal “civil/human rights mandates” lies an expanded understanding of human rights itself. If the survivors of the Attica prison uprising waged a “human rights rebellion,” as she puts it, their revolutionary direct action might be seen as part of an expanded set of Black human rights practices. Debates over the place of international rights-based strategies in anticarceral movement building have paralleled wider debates in the Black Freedom Movement. Appeals to international law, treaty obligations, and institutions like the United Nations have had mixed results, even as the language of human rights has been used forcefully to condemn racist state and white vigilante violence in the United States. Indeed, the mainstream liberal version of human rights has had a vexed relationship with the Black Freedom Struggle overall. In the early years of the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, as historian Carol Anderson has shown, many believed that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) had the “language and philosophical power” to address not only political and legal inequality but also underlying structural conditions in education, health care, housing, and employment. The ultimate tragedy, she shows, was that Cold War politics twisted the more robust definition of human rights into the narrowly defined arena of abstract political and legal rights, forcing some prominent Black activists and organizations, like the NAACP, to remove the “Soviet-tainted” goals of economic and social entitlements from their agenda. “The resulting inability to articulate the struggle for black equality as a human rights issue,” she finds, “doomed the subsequent Civil Rights Movement to ‘a series of glorious defeats.’” It was not until the 1970s that the “last utopia” of the modern human rights movement emerged, which historian Samuel Moyn characterizes as a social movement that transcended government by providing a “new paradigm of global aspiration.” Older internationalist human rights campaigns, he argues, were locked into a paradigm seeking political self-determination, national sovereignty, and state-protected individual rights as opposed to a transnational “moral displacement of politics” around the globe. This last utopia was not enough, Moyn explains, and it actually displaced competing global visions of safety, equity, and justice, namely, in the forms of communism, socialism, decolonization, and Third World movements.In his work on the Black prison movement, Berger shows how “Black prison nationalism” synthesized histories of anti-imperialism, prison protest, and the currency of national liberation: “It offered an explanation of imprisonment and a personal praxis for resisting it, each one rooted in an internationalist sensibility that saw the United Nations as a possible ally.” In his recent study titled “A Human Right to Reparations,” Losier documents how Black People Against Police Torture, a grassroots group of survivors, family members, and seasoned activist lawyers like Standish Willis, used international human rights law and institutions strategically to pressure US officials and win concrete local breakthroughs, cutting against the grain of the scholarship on the insufficiency of human rights. African American studies scholars have seen the global political vision of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) as carrying forward a form of Black anticarceral internationalism. As historian Gerald Horne points out, the M4BL platform announced: “Patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and White supremacy know no borders. We stand in solidarity with our international family against these ravages” and against human-made climate change and war. Recognizing the tension inherent in attempting to use domestic or international criminal law to combat state violence, he looks to the relatively recent rise of frameworks like “universal jurisdiction” and raises the question of whether “lawfare” might be used in “judo-like fashion” to help the movement. But, he warns, that would be a departure from the Black internationalism pursued by activists like Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and William L. Patterson. Anticarceral internationalism has been used as a practice of world making, extending beyond the rights of individuals, international institutions, and a vastly unequal world order, much in the way, as political theorist Adom Getachew shows, that movements for anticolonial self-determination opened a transformative process that was broader than the single end point of nationalism. In the hands of imprisoned Black radicals, an alternate Black human rights tradition has been one of the primary means by which to internationalize the struggle against violence and domination and reenvision human flourishing. For many in the imprisoned Black radical tradition, human rights has actually been a way to mark the distinction between more thoroughgoing, revolutionary social change and more incremental, reformist, civil rights–based activism. Far from only a bid for legal recognition or redress, this tradition of human rights activism has sought to pry open the very underpinnings of the unequal world system and ground an anticarceral Black human rights tradition in a global framework of antiracist, antisexist decolonization that seeks total transformation. In June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, his family joined the families of Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, and Philando Castile and over 600 advocacy organizations, in calling on the United Nations Human Rights Council to convene a special investigation into police killings and repression of protests in the United States. Delegates from fifty-four African nations also came together to call for the special session on human rights violations and systemic racism against people of African descent in the United States, while no US delegates attended, as they had been withdrawn from the Human Rights Council altogether two years prior. George Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, told the council that the way his brother was “tortured and murdered on camera is the way Black people are treated by police in America.” Six years earlier, in 2014, a delegation of Chicago youth calling themselves We Charge Genocide (WCG) traveled to Geneva to testify to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. They were part of a constellation of groups protesting police killings in Chicago, historian Barbara Ransby explains, including the #LetUsBreathe Collective, Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and Women’s All Points Bulletin. Inspired by the WCG delegation, activists in Ferguson, Missouri, raised money for Michael Brown’s family to travel with lawyer Justin Hansford to testify before the UN. They traveled with members of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial, Black People Against Police Torture, and the National Council of Black Lawyers. The delegation charged the Chicago police with genocide, while others testified about Chicago police chief John Burge’s torture cases, the murder of Rekia Boyd, the rape of Black women by police, and the abuse and imprisonment of transgender women of color. As abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba relays, WCG member Sarah Macaraeg captured the essence of their trip when she noted that “by the time the delegates left, they had staged both a walk out and a silent protest inside the United Nations” in response to the US representatives’ testimony. “In two days, they changed history. The story of Dominique Franklin Jr. has now been covered around the world, affirming the belief that his life mattered, as all young Black lives matter.” Moving the issue from individual acts of “police brutality” to systemic racial violence and ongoing murder, Dylan Rodríguez points out, was an ingenious act of abolitionist praxis consistent with a long Black, youth, and feminist radical tradition. These recent appeals to antiracist solidarity and movement building around the world, particularly in international forums like the United Nations, activate a deep history of using human rights language to condemn Black people’s premature death at the hands of the police and prison system in the United States. Imprisoned Black radicals and their family, friends, and allies began articulating a human right to breathe, in contrast to the more abstract right to life, in response to the pervasiveness of racial terror in the form of lynching, police killings, and imprisonment immediately after the passage of the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, over seventy years earlier. In their Black feminist manifesto, A Call to Negro Women (1951), the Sojourners for Truth and Justice described the suffocating ubiquity of racism, making plain they could not eat, live, work, play, rest, or breathe free of racial discrimination and violence anywhere they went. “We cannot, must not, and will no longer in sight of God or man sit by and watch our lives destroyed by an unreasonable and unreasoning hate that metes out to us every kind of death it is possible for a human being to die,” they proclaimed. “We have watched our husbands and fathers burned, quartered, hanged, and electrocuted by hooded and unhooded mobs. We have seen our brothers beaten, shot and stamped to death by police. We have seen our sons rotting in prison.” Referring to the imprisonment of Rosa Lee Ingram in Georgia, they continued: “We have seen our daughters raped and degraded, and when one dares rise in defense of her honor she is jailed for life.” As they prepared to march on Washington, DC, in 1951, they beckoned: “Come, you widows of the legally lynched. Come you wives of those imprisoned and threatened with prison. Come you widowed by police brutality.” The Sojourners for Truth and Justice were a veritable who’s who of Black women activists, as historians Erik McDuffie and Ashley Farmer point out, including the likes of Charlotta Bass, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Dorothy Huton, Eslande Goode Robeson, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones, who sent her support from confinement on house arrest. In their statement, they outlined a framework that connected state and white vigilante violence, policing, and prisons as entwined forms of racist terror suffocating Black people. As they marched, they carried Rosa Lee Ingram’s defense campaign to the nation’s capital.In her call for a million-signature international campaign and United Nations action to free the Ingrams, Claudia Jones further articulated the right to breathe free of gendered violence and racial terror. As she wrote in An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women (1949), no case dramatizes the oppressed status of Black women better than that of Rosa Lee Ingram, who was sentenced to death for defending herself and her two sons against a neighboring White sharecropper who attacked and pistol-whipped her with his gun. How could the Truman administration claim to be exporting democracy and human rights to the world, Jones wrote, while keeping this courageous Black mother “under lock and key.” Black women were forced to raise their children in an atmosphere of lynch terror, segregation, and police brutality so pervasive it choked the air. Through her own imprisonment and her prisoner defense committee organizing, Claudia Jones developed a critique of the US prison system, which she characterized as genocidal by design. Responding to the persecution of Black Communists under the McCarren and Smith Acts, Jones herself was arrested for her political activism and was imprisoned four times between 1948 and 1955 before being deported from the United States altogether. In the “Free Claudia Jones Now!” campaign, Jones’s family, friends, and allies appealed to the UN for support. In her pamphlet defending Harlem’s Black Communist congressman Benjamin Davis Jr., Jones wrote that no one could understand better than Black people how it came to be that he was framed for his political beliefs. “A people like ours can easily understand that the Government is perfectly capable of framing fighting Negro leaders like Ben Davis,” she wrote. “The history of more than 300 years of our people stands up to charge America’s rulers with unpunished and monstrous crimes.” Along with Jim Crowing Black people’s social, economic, and political life, she laid out the list of lynchings, bombings, courts-martial, frame-ups, and persecutions of the Scottsboro Boys, Angelo Herndon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and others. Black people stand up to charge America’s rulers with “the crime of genocide,” she pronounced, “springing from the racist intent to destroy a national or religious group, entire or in part.” The treatment of Black people inside prison was both a microcosm and an intensification of US racist oppression. Channeling David Walker’s Appeal (1829), Jones wrote, “Be not afraid or dismayed,” even in the face of “prison Jim Crow.” Ben Davis’s legal work from inside the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, thoroughly exposed “the genocidal practices of prison life” for Black people in America, she announced. She also knew, in a deeply embodied way, how prisons slowly killed even those sentenced to relatively short sentences, having herself suffered repeated heart failures while imprisoned and being diagnosed with hypertensive cardiovascular disease upon her release. This “brazen practice of prison Jim Crow is another stench in the noses of democratic Americans” she wrote, which further exposes the “hypocritical prattlings” of the US State Department, which claimed the moral capital of “a ‘free America in a free world.’ ” Despite the hard work of the Harlem Committee to Free Ben Davis and delegations led by the likes of Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson to the Federal Parole Board, Jones exclaimed that “he is still not free!” “Free Ben Davis and demand amnesty for all political prisoners,” she thundered. Centering political repression, arrests, and imprisonment as technologies of racially targeted mass murder in charging the United States with genocide, she placed “prison Jim Crow” and “the genocidal practices of prison life” into a global human rights framework viewed as larger than the international institutions of the prevailing world order. In so doing, she was perhaps the first person in the modern Black anticarceral internationalist movement to center the prison as the core technology structuring racial domination and death, using a human rights framework to charge the United States with genocide. She therefore could be considered the cornerstone for subsequent Black human rights critiques of the prison system, much in the way the Civil Rights Congress’s We Charge Genocide (1951) petition has been seen in efforts to charge the United States with genocide for police killings, racial violence, and premature death. When William L. Patterson brought the We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations in 1951, he too had been jailed for his political beliefs, harassed and detained for internationalizing the Black Freedom Struggle. To ensure the document would make it there, he sent different pieces of the petition to friends in Europe and reassembled it upon arrival. On behalf of “every Black American whose voice was silenced forever through premature death … we fervently believe that the truth recorded here will be made known to the world; that it will speak with a tongue of fire loosing an unquenchable moral crusade, the universal response to which will sound the death knell of all racist theories.” Racist government policy in the United States, the Civil Rights Congress warned, was the concern of people everywhere given its tendency toward war. “White supremacy at home makes for colored massacres abroad. Both reveal contempt for human life in a colored skin.” Black people in the United States, as they had carefully documented and went on to explain, were being systematically targeted for premature death. “Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet.” Killing Black people has become police policy, they concluded. We Charge Genocide indicted the United States for the mass murder of its own people, condemning the “institutionalized oppression and persistent slaughter” of Black people on the basis of race which has been practiced, in one way or another, for three hundred years. “Out of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty, and disease.” Mass murder is abhorred by the “conscience of the world,” and these terrible injustices constitute an ever-increasing violation of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. International law, they maintained, should “supersede, negate, and displace” racist domestic law on the books in the United States. Yet, the petition also clearly outlined a political vision that was more expansive than a rights-based legal appeal to either domestic or international law. Declaring their belief in establishing “people’s democracy on a universal scale,” they concluded: “But above all we protest this genocide as human beings whose very humanity is denied and mocked.” Drawing on this foundational framework of anticarceral internationalism established by Claudia Jones, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, William L. Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress, over the proceeding decades imprisoned Black radicals and their allies continued to charge genocide as a way of pushing open the more narrow modes of redress offered by domestic and international legal systems. The Black Panther Party newspaper ran a picture of Patterson over the story “Let the People Speak to the United Nations” in 1970, arguing that petitioning against racism and genocide would expand the purview of the UN. Just as “Winston Churchill had no intention of presiding over the fall of the British Empire,” they wrote, “these founders of the United Nations had no outlook that included the elimination of racism or its accompanying terror.” The UN must be made to work for the people everywhere, they argued, which begins by standing up to US racist violence. This should be of paramount concern to the world, they warned: “American racism has become an export commodity spreading the germs of dehumanization.” It is time to put an end to the “race wars this government is waging at home and abroad.” After Jalil Muntaqim and fellow imprisoned activists launched the National Prisoner Campaign to petition the UN Human Rights Commission, international jurists came to investigate in August 1979. Drawing on the definition of human rights and freedoms delineated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, they found many imprisoned Black activists human rights had been and continued to be violated. These political prisoners were defined as: “a class of victims of FBI misconduct through the COINTELPRO strategy and other forms of illegal governmental conduct who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions.” Indeed, even the US Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, acknowledged the existence of hundreds of political prisoners in the United States, and the Senate’s own investigation found COINTELPRO, the FBI’s “counterintelligence” program, to be an illegal and unconstitutional abuse of government power. Yet, political prisoners themselves remained locked up. When the United States finally ratified the Geneva Convention on the Prevention of Genocide (1988), imprisoned Black radicals responded by pushing for a definition that included new “scientific forms of genocide” taking place inside US prisons. Mutulu Shakur, Anthony X. Bradshaw, Malik Dinguswa, Terry D. Long, Mark Cook, Adolfo Matos, and James Haskins drafted Genocide Waged against the Black Nation (1988) to circulate to political prisoners and for the Research Committee on International Law and Black Freedom Fighters in the United States to present at a human rights conference in Switzerland. Written by those who experienced behavior modification firsthand, they chronicled the impacts of “psychological warfare” through techniques such as targeted segregation, isolation, sensory deprivation, drugging, and diet: “We specifically charge that the government of the United States is practicing genocide through behavior modification and counterinsurgency and low intensity warfare techniques in its penal system.” Referring directly to the Geneva Convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide, they argued that the behavior modification program in the US penal system amounts to a “scientific form of genocide” waged against the Black Nation. Pushing for a wider international response, they explained: “The world can see what goes on in the tomb of America as Black people are being slowly strangled and suffocated to death.” They concluded by putting it on permanent record before the world: “We charge the American Government with genocide. In clear, unequivocal terms, we charge the American Government with genocide against the captive Black people in America who are perpetually under siege. While the BREATHE Act unveiled by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) Electoral Justice Project in July 2020 stops short of explicitly charging genocide, it activates a deep history of struggle against premature death at the hands of the US police and prison system articulated in terms of a right to breathe. In invoking George Floyd’s repeated refrain—“I can’t breathe”—as he was asphyxiated by the Minneapolis police, it boldly calls for defunding the police and investing in new visions of safety. In connecting militarism abroad to state violence at home, it specifically demands an end to the infamous 1033 Program, which is the primary mechanism by which military equipment is transferred to local police forces, and cutting back Department of Defense spending. In mobilizing the Black Lives Global Network in pursuit of domestic legislative change, The BREATHE Act also sits squarely in the tension between legislative and rights-based approaches and a more expansive abolitionist strategy, which has been articulated as “non-reformist reform” and “revolution as policy.” That process involves removing chokeholds from necks and money from budgets, along with articulating and living new visions of human flourishing. A human right to breathe free from racist state and white vigilante violence has been called forth in the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, and so many more. It represents the next phase of the tradition of anticarceral internationalism that sees the local as inseparable from the global. The We Charge Genocide, Chicago Torture Justice Memorial, and Black People Against Police Torture delegation’s successful application of an internationalist strategy, Losier explains, drew upon a human rights framework “less as a panacea” and “more as a mechanism for putting pressure on US officials.” Similarly, when survivors, organizers, and lawyers submitted the Chicago police torture cases to other international bodies, as critical legal scholar Allegra M. McLeod shows, they articulated an “abolitionist conception of justice” in contrast to “existing ideas of legal justice.” The #LetUsBreathe Collective, as McLeod and G. Flynt Taylor illustrate, settled on the language of human rights to emphasize the “international scope” of torture and to connect the Chicago police torturers’ racial violence to the brutality of slavery. In so doing, they were conscious of the ways that using the language of human rights in international forums like the United Nations has a greater impact than merely appealing to international law. Likewise, as Justin Hansford reports, Michael Brown’s family chose to employ a human rights framework to emphasize the “ethical nature of the crisis” and to make the case before the global community. “We spoke to the UN Committee Against Torture of the grave injustice of mass incarceration, militarized police culture, and an unaccountable juridical structure,” he explains. “We felt both legitimized by the international community, and saddened that we had to travel halfway across the world to have our dignity legitimized.” As they traveled halfway across the world, they also traveled across time, invoking the tradition of anticarceral internationalism, stretching back to Claudia Jones and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, as well as to William L. Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress. In reflecting on a “Universal Right to Breathe” in relation to ongoing racially differentiated proximity and vulnerability to death in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, political theorist Achille Mbembe amplifies the power of witnessing in preventing others from being “expropriated of their breath.” Mbembe concludes: “From a universal perspective, not only is it the right of every member of humankind, but of all life. It must therefore be understood as a fundamental right to existence. Consequently, it cannot be confiscated and thereby eludes all sovereignty.” At once more concrete and more expansive than an abstract right to life, a human right to breathe as articulated by these successive movements of Black people against state and white vigilante violence has insisted on naming and undoing systematic gendered violence and racial terror. When George Jackson was killed by guards at San Quentin prison on August 21, 1971, his mother, Georgia Jackson, appealed to the United Nations to investigate and protect the human rights of those “whose bodies remain incarcerated” in California’s “barbarous penal institutions.” They may have murdered the body, his mother declared, but “his spirit did not die.” His murder set off an immediate wave of protest, including the Attica prison uprising. Having become politicized in prison, at the time of his death George Jackson was the bestselling author of Soledad Brother and had just completed Blood in My Eye mere days before. Angela Y. Davis credits him with the theoretical insight into the prison as the primary institution connecting criminalization with racialization, and his militancy made him an enduring symbol of resistance, an “imprisoned Che Guevara” and “American Frantz Fanon,” Dan Berger writes. George Jackson expressed an “abiding internationalism,” connecting regimes of racism across the United States, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa, and signaling solidarity with Third World anticolonial movements of the Global South. Indeed, like the spirit of Mandela, George Jackson’s spirit has animated ideas and practices of anticarceral internationalism ever since. Absent from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and from the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, is any robust articulation of a right to resist. Indeed, the preamble of the former makes clear that it is essential that human rights be protected by the rule of law in order to prevent people from rebelling against tyranny and oppression. As Angela Davis pointed out writing from the Marin County Jail in 1971, “despite a long history of exalted appeals to man’s inherent right of resistance, there has seldom been agreement on how to relate in practice to unjust, immoral laws and the oppressive social order from which they emanate.” Conservatives invoke specters of anarchy to legitimize their demands for “law and order,” she explained, while liberals almost never advocate methods of resistance that “exceed the limits of legality.” Meanwhile, Black people are cautioned to be patient. “In the heat of our pursuit for fundamental human rights … we are advised that as long as we remain faithful to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings.” But Black people worldwide have learned through bitter experience to see the “glaring incongruity” between true democracy and racial capitalism that cannot be reconciled through electoral or legal channels alone.George Jackson’s murder sparked a decade of resistance, often called the “prison rebellion years,” that was met with overwhelming state violence and brutality. The state’s response, like the killing of thirty-nine people in Attica prison, was clearly intended to terrify and debilitize people across the entire prison system. Quieter modes of repression, like the response to the Bedford Hills (New York) women’s prison uprising (1973), worked to reinforce normative ideas about gender as those charged with documenting the resistance and reaction had certain incentives to cover it up. Indeed, as historian Alan Eladio Gómez finds in the case of resistance movements at the US penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, all different forms of state terror are “designed to kill the spirit, the will to resist, and the will to struggle.” Yet, in spite of and because of this, the theoretical underpinnings of a human right to resist in the Black prison movement have been informed as much by Black feminist conceptions of self-defense and collective care as by theories of guerilla warfare and armed struggle for survival.Prisoner defense committees organized by the Black Panther Party (BPP) and others in the 1970s used resistance to signify both legal defense and the right to resist interpersonal assaults and racist state violence more generally. As Shirley Hewitt of the BPP’s Southern California legal defense cadre put it in a statement supporting political prisoner Bruce Richard, “Bruce doesn’t have to justify any attempts on his part to gain a little bit of humanity for him and his people. His human right to resist has already been established by the years of oppression we, his people, have endured.” The feminist defense committees formed to fight for the freedom of Joan Little, Inez García, Yvonne Wanrow, and Dessie Woods forged an intersectional, anticarceral theory of self-defense and self-determination by centering Black and “Third World women,” as historian Emily L. Thuma has shown. They did so in part by elaborating a human right to resist across multiple scales, building on the legacy of Claudia Jones and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice’s defense campaigns for women like Rosa Lee Ingram.As Afeni Shakur explained in her International Working Women’s Day statement, Joan Little “struck a blow at the violations of internationally recognized human rights” from a county jail cell, where she refused to be raped by her jailer. “We were all struck by that great feeling of outrage that caused Joan Little to strike out and kill the would-be invader of her body. … Because we need to salvage the mirage of human rights that Joann Little sought to protest! We need to sound an uncompromising cry for victory over those who seek to invade our bodies.” Black women fighting for justice have been defined as criminals, carted off to jail, and shot like wolves. Assata Shakur “like thousands of other blacks in the 60’s and 70’s was an activist involved in a national struggle against United States human rights violations, both here and abroad,” declared Afeni Shakur. Assata Shakur’s escape from prison on November 2, 1979, reverberated across the world as an act of profound resistance. In her statement to the UN Human Rights Campaign, she invoked the long history of persecution. Every leader that has spoken out for human rights has been killed or gone to prison, she wrote. In order to build “a strong human rights movement,” she explained, “we’ve got to build a strong prison movement. We’ve got to build a strong Black Liberation Movement and we’ve got to struggle for liberation. … We know what we are fighting against—namely, genocidal treatment—now it is time to determine what we are fighting for: land and nationhood.” The idea of a human right to resist is at the center of a long history of armed Black self-defense in the 1960s and 1970s. The right to defend oneself, one’s family, and community was theorized not in the abstract but against actual racially targeted police killings and “no-knock” home invasions. Following the New Orleans Police Department raid on the home of Clavon Johnson in the middle of the night, the New Orleans Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), an offshoot of the BPP, reminded local residents that “for Black people there has always been a no-knock law.” The Johnson family, NCCF, and Black people in New Orleans accused the police of being “the real criminals,” condemning them for “every act of terror and brutality” that has been leveled against them, proclaiming: “we have a human right to defend ourselves.” The US Constitution had failed them, had not guaranteed their economic, political, or social rights, and allowed their human rights to be violated daily. “It does not even guarantee and protect our most basic Human Right, the right to LIVE.” Or, as C. H. Jackson reported from Greensville, South Carolina, after sixteen police cars invaded the housing projects and officers kicked down the door to Eugene Johnson’s home, “the President is crying about human rights in Russia and Uganda, while the fascists here in Babylon continue to violate people’s human rights in this country to the point of brutality and murder.” Robert F. Williams and his wife Mabel Robinson Williams profoundly influenced the Black Panther’s internationalist understanding of a right to resist. As the head of the “most militant” NAACP chapter in the South, the Williamses had come into direct conflict with racist police and white vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan, and Robert Williams’s persecution by authorities shaped his understanding of Black internationalism. Williams had garnered international attention to pressure the governor of North Carolina to release the nine-year-old and fourteen-year-old boys who had been jailed after being kissed by a White girl, in what came to be known as the Kissing Case. In his campaign to support the “Monroe defendants” from racist persecution, he announced, “To the World: Take Note of Monroe. … We have started a world-wide campaign for signatures to a petition which will be presented to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. It demands an immediate international investigation into the denial of human rights in Monroe.” When the FBI put out a warrant for his arrest on a bogus kidnapping charge a few years later, he escaped to Cuba, where he and Mabel Williams published The Crusader and created Radio Free Dixie, sending out broadcasts to Black southerners and the Caribbean diaspora. While in Cuba, he wrote Negroes with Guns, his influential book on Black self-defense. When he came back to the United States in 1969, returning to face his own frame-up, he was extradited from Detroit to North Carolina to stand trial. Owing to the efforts of his defense committee, the charges were all eventually dropped. Racial criminalization has been a primary tool of political repression. As Angela Davis and others have theorized, it has been deployed through the weaponization of language as well as guns, along the axis of damning keywords like “criminal,” “communist,” and “terrorist.” As Robert F. Williams pointed out, “every American should realize that every movement for freedom, human dignity, for decency; every movement that seeks fairness and social justice; every movement for human rights is branded as ‘communistic.’” Out of this experience with political persecution and imprisonment has emerged an expansive human rights framework that has been used to internationalize the Black liberation struggle. As deployed in the US prison movement, the right to resist has included acts of self-defense, armed movements for community defense, and collective mobilizations against the gendered racial terror of the carceral state. The genealogy of Black resistance can be traced to slave uprisings, Maroon fugitivity, and everyday acts of collective care. The anticolonial theory and practice of resisting racial domination is inherently more transnational than the forms of militarized resistance enshrined in the so-called age of revolutions that gave rise to modern nation-states. Over the years, a right to resist became a necessary mainstay of anticarceral internationalism. Upon his release on bail from the Tombs jail in New York in 1923, world-famous organizer and cofounder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Marcus Garvey declared: “Whatsoever happens, the world may know that the jail or penitentiary has no terrors for me. … I am as much at home in jail for the cause of human rights as I am in my own drawing room.” Labeled by J. Edgar Hoover “the most notorious Negro agitator,” Garvey had been surveilled and persecuted by Bureau of Investigation spies and informants who sought to infiltrate and bring down the UNIA. He was convicted of mail fraud charges and sentenced to five years at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, before being deported to Jamaica. “If I die in Atlanta, my work shall then only begin,” Garvey wrote from prison. “Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you,” he declared: “I shall come and bring with me countless millions of Black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and by the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for liberty, freedom, and life.” In his prison writing, Marcus Garvey crystallized his anticolonial analysis of oppression, decolonial view of human rights, and a path to repair, more than two decades before the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The basis of Marcus Garvey’s human rights framework, as with nineteenth-century Black reparations campaigns, was land and a global view of human populations. The UNIA’s mantra—“Africa for the Africans”—symbolized the centrality of controlling land and resources in the creation of intergenerational wealth and human thriving. In his “Last Word before Incarceration,” Garvey told the jury, “I repeat, that if they think they can stamp out the souls of 400,000,000 black men, they make a tremendous and terrible mistake.” The UNIA’s transnational organizational structure posed an explicit challenge to the traditional theory of rights of sovereign states, citizens, and subjects: neither the state, nor existing international order, was in fact the sole or final arbiter of human rights. “I am saying to the Negro people of the world, get armed with organization,” Garvey wrote: “That is your weapon. Their weapons in the past have been big guns and explosive shells; your weapon must be universal organization.” This principle of land and global Black organizing as cornerstones of anticarceral internationalism was carried forward in Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity’s (OAAU) human rights proposals. “Civil rights means you’re asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something we’re born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth,” Malcolm proclaimed in April 1964: “Expand the civil rights struggle to the level of human rights, take it to the United Nations, where our African brothers can throw their weight on our side, where our Asian brothers can throw their weight on our side, where our Latin American brothers can throw their weight on our side.” Even as Malcolm X spoke of dragging the United States before the “world court,” his organizing strategy was much broader than using international law as an end in and of itself. He used human rights as a means to build solidarity and connection with anticolonial liberation movements around the world. “So when we saw that we were up against a hopeless battle internally, we saw the necessity of getting allies at the world level,” he wrote. As long as the struggle fell under the “jurisdiction” of the United States, it would be difficult for them to lend real support: “We decided that the only way to make the problem rise to the level where we could get world support was to take it away from the civil rights label and put in the human rights label.” In his “Appeal to African Heads of State,” Malcolm explained that the Organization of Afro-American Unity had sent to the historic African summit “to represent the interests of the 22 million African-Americans whose human rights are being violated daily by the racism of American imperialists.” Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere proposed that the summit pass a resolution condemning the mistreatment of Black people in the United States and supporting the “freedom struggle for human rights.” By framing the Black Freedom Movement as part of a worldwide struggle for human rights against colonialism, Malcolm expanded the meaning and use of the concept. “The greatest weapon the colonial powers have used in the past against our people has always been divide-and-conquer,” he explained: “America is a colonial power. … She has deprived us of the right to be human beings, the right to be recognized and respected as men and women.” If the freedom movement is confined to the domestic boundaries of the nation-state, he reasoned, then Black people will be seen and treated as the minority. But if you look to the “world stage,” then “dark mankind” clearly outnumbers the so-called White population: “On the world stage the white man is just a microscopic minority.” This reality was deeply threatening to representatives of a white power structure who must have felt the moral precariousness of being a small settler minority on the world stage. Drawing on the international organizing strategies of the UNIA and the OAAU, members of the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) likewise centered targeted assassinations and systematic imprisonment in their articulations of a human right to repair. After the FBI, US marshals, and the New York Police Department raided BPP homes and offices in New York in April 1969, some Panthers fled overseas to places like Algeria to set up the BPP International Section. As Sekou Odinga explains in “Still Believing in Land and Independence,” for example, he and other Panthers like Donald Cox, Larry Mack, and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver engaged in international defense committee organizing for the NY Panther 21, as those arrested in the raid came to be known. As Eldridge Cleaver put it at the time, “Black people must have a guarantee, they must be certain, they must be sure beyond all doubt that the reign of terror is ended and not just suspended, and that the future of their people is secure. And the only way they can ensure this is to gain organizational unity and communication with their brothers and allies around the world, on an international basis.” “They must have this power,” he continued: “There is no other way.” The eventual acquittal for the Panther 21 in June 1971 was a major victory for the BPP amid a time of constant onslaught, however. The trail “exacted a heavy price,” déqui kioni-sadiki recalls, in the form of “psychological, emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and financial toll of coping with constant police attacks, friends being killed, children and parents harassed, dangerous and pernicious stereotyping,” and so forth. Still, the Panther 21’s collective autobiography, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, invokes the spirit of Garveyism to propel the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black Freedom Movement. In August 1971, the FBI raided the RNA headquarters in Jackson, Mississippi, and arrested eleven members, who became known as the RNA-11, including RNA president Imari Abubakari Obadele. Obadele spent twenty-one months in jail in Mississippi before being transferred to the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute and then at Atlanta. The RNA had developed an internationalist analysis about the way Black people in the United States had been treated like an internal colony, forming a nation within a nation. Writing from federal prison in Atlanta in 1978, Obadele called out the hypocrisy of the US human rights record in an open letter to Jimmy Carter: “There is, Mr. Carter, a war of genocide being conducted against Black people, New Afrikans, in the United States.” Pursuing policies that deliberately inflict conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group, in whole or in part, he continued, the US government has also in particular targeted those Black people who resist poverty and oppression. Illegal FBI COINTELPRO raids, militarized campaigns, assassination plots, and imprisonment all “suggests to so much of the world that black lives mean less to you than white lives.” When the New Afrikan Prisoners Organization proclaimed “We Still Charge Genocide” (1977), they outlined a decolonial theory of racial violence, oppression, as well as an agenda for reparations that used the language of human rights while expanding it beyond UN definitions. The RNA’s anticarceral internationalist strategy drew on what Obadele called the “Malcolm X Doctrine.” The center of the RNA’s political program has always been the demand to “free the land.” Through their political work, historian Dan Berger shows, the RNA centered reparations as an ethical and organizing imperative for twentieth- and twenty-first-century social movements. In his “musings on Malcolm,” renowned journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal likewise sees an expansive vision for human rights. Malcolm X saw the “scourges of American racism” as an “evil against humanity.” “He stood for—and died for—human rights of self-defense and a people’s self-determination,” writes Mumia, “not for ‘civil rights,’ which, as the Supreme Court has indeed shown, changes from day to day, case to case, administration to administration.” As Mumia Abu-Jamal explains, the Black Panthers’ prison organizing, for instance, was animated by the writings of anticolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon and by a global vision inspired by decolonial independence movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The international campaigns to stop the planned execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal in the mid-1990s were also often framed in the language of human rights. There were mass demonstrations in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe and pressure from foreign governments, international organizations, and labor unions. Interfaith religious organizations came together on Robben Island in South Africa to issue a global call for restorative justice and to halt Mumia’s execution. In their own appeal, US political prisoners and prisoners of war stated: “The urgency is not just because a precious life is at stake, but also because of the implications for political and social movements.” In fighting for Mumia’s right to live, they laid out a right to repair as essential to their global vision of justice: “We stand for self-determination for all oppressed peoples, for an end to racism, for women’s liberation (equality), and for economics centered on human need rather than corporate greed.” As political prisoners, they have been long imprisoned for a range of resistance activities, including “struggles against white supremacy and colonialism, opposition to the economics of global plunder and class exploitation, efforts against sexism and discrimination,” and above all, “a general unwillingness to abide the multiple ways human beings are demeaned and delimited in this society.” Responding to a series of new international resolutions against torture, genocide, and racism in the 1980s and 1990s, imprisoned activists, lawyers, and scholars organized an International Tribunal on Violations of Human Rights of Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in United States Prisons and Jails, charging the US government, president, attorney general, FBI and CIA directors, Federal Bureau of Prisons director, and state governors with human rights violations. Pointing to the release of Nelson Mandela and political prisoners around the world, the tribunal carefully made the case for the release of US political prisoners and prisoners of war. Over the preceding year, delegations had petitioned the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, and now they were making the case in New York. Longtime movement attorneys Lennox S. Hinds and Jan Susler drew up the indictment, while J. Soffiya Elijah outlined the false convictions, excessive sentencing, and abusive conditions, including the targeted use of control units, solitary confinement, and psychological warfare techniques, that political prisoners endured. The tribunal drew on UN conventions for human rights and genocide and made the case for freeing all political prisoners and prisoners of war, for their protection against genocidal practices waged by the US government, and for self-determination for Black people, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans. In the lead-up to the UN’s World Conference on Racism in South Africa in 2001, survivors of COINTELPRO persecutions, targeted jailings, and police killings again testified about the violations of their human rights to the US Congressional Black Caucus and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. As Kathleen Cleaver put it, the Black people who remain locked up dedicated their lives to the transformation of this country. They sought “to end brutality, racism, economic discrimination, imperialism, and war,” Cleaver explained: “When we raise the issue of human rights, we are told you are the criminal … back through Black history to the trials of Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, Angela, Bobby. … Our fight for human rights continues today.” “The issue was always human rights. The government tried to redefine our struggle for us, to minimize the international, broad concept of human rights that motivated us and turn it into something smaller and less threatening. We have to get this story told, have a clear understanding of where we are, who we are, know our own human rights struggle,” she continued, “and move to bring these prisoners and these freedom fighters out of the dungeons.” The main current of Black resistance, she writes, is the ongoing fight against the afterlives of slavery, segregation, and the “legal, social, psychological, economic, and political limitations still being imposed on our human rights.” Finally, after the United Nations General Assembly passed a resulution titled the “Right to Remedy and Reparation” (2006), the Jericho Movement again pushed for congressional hearings on past and ongoing human rights violations within the United States. Comparing the documented police torture of Jalil Muntaqim and Herman Bell to the victims of torture at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Base, they acknowledged the limits placed on self-determination and called instead for progressives to push for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that would try to “heal America’s racial trauma.” In a joint statement from prison, the San Francisco 8 called for investigation into the abuses of COINTELPRO, writing: “Let us, together, build a sustainable and durable initiative that redresses civil and human rights violations.” While Jalil Muntaqim and his fellow imprisoned Black activists have been recognized for their commitment to the global human rights movements by such international luminaries as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the US government has yet to alter its official position. It was this tradition of anticarceral internationalism that activist groups like Black People Against Torture, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, We Charge Genocide, Black Youth Project 100, and others drew upon in pressing for accountability for Chicago police chief Burge’s torturing and false imprisonment of hundreds of people and Chicago police murders of Black residents. In establishing an important precedent for “A Human Right to Reparations,” as Losier shows, Black People Against Torture successfully employed an internationalist human rights strategy to gain local, state, and federal breakthroughs, such as the historic Chicago Reparations Ordinance (2015). In so doing, he explains, they drew on a human rights framework to put pressure on US officials. There are multiple streams of anticarceral internationalism that come together in articulating a right to repair, one in the form of truth-and-reconciliation-style commissions and another in the form of redistribution of land and essential resources. The payment of settlement money, while always an inadequate valuation of human life, falls somewhere in between. Yet, beginning with imprisoned Black radicals like Marcus Garvey and continuing through imprisoned members of the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika, a decolonial analysis of repair has come to rely on an alternative, more expansive, human rights based framework that centers the slave trade and internal colonialism, along with afterlives of slavery in the form of mass criminalization, targeted imprisonment, and murder as the crisis of modernity. Taken to their logical conclusion, these global theories of racial justice rely less on courts and state mechanisms to redress state violence and increasingly call for an even more expansive right: to reenvision. Amid the worldwide uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in the summer of 2020, the UN issued a statement condemning systemic racism in the United States. What this means for those who have died, are dying, and whose lives are daily threatened by unjust imprisonment during the ongoing pandemic, remains to be seen. The 2020 uprisings of some twenty-six million people against racist state and white vigilante violence in the United States are now considered the largest and broadest protest movement in US history. They build on years of organizing for Black Lives Matter and have inspired solidarity protests around the world. Demands to free longtime political prisoners and release all people from dangerous and unnecessary confinement in jails and prisons are intensifying, as the COVID-19 virus continues to disproportionately kill people who are imprisoned. As guards continue to target Black prisoners inside prisons and federal and local police target protesters on the streets, it is clear that centering those forcibly held at the epicenter of state repression and racial violence is essential to the work of internationalizing the ongoing Black Freedom Struggle, seeking repair for the damage done by state violence, building a global anticarceral movement, and reconceptualizing what it means to be human altogether. As new freedom dreams, policy proposals, and future-making practices take shape, many are looking to the Black radical tradition of antiracist organizing and movement building for inspiration and lessons learned. Across the long history of struggle against racialized state violence, activists in the US prison movement have pushed for an international theory of change, rooted in a decolonial analysis of racial violence and an expanded framework of human rights. When the Black prison movement invokes the spirits of Marcus Garvey, Claudia Jones, George Jackson, Nelson Mandela and countless others who have been targeted for premature death, they are animating a human rights framework that centers slavery as a crisis of modernity, one that leads through truth and reconciliation on to reenvisioning repair in abolitionist terms. The strategy of anticarceral internationalism that people in the imprisoned Black radical tradition, antiprison activists, and their allies have developed over the years employs a decolonial conception of state and white vigilante racial violence. Out of experience with racial criminalization, persecution, and racist state violence has emerged an expanded framework of human rights, including a right to breathe, a right to resist, a right to repair, and a right to reenvision. The imprisoned Black radical tradition’s expanded vision of human rights lays the groundwork for the burgeoning global abolition movement. Prison abolitionism is not only about tearing down outmoded structures of racial domination but also about building new modes of collective care. In that way, as historian Sarah Haley writes, it is also an Afrofuturist project.The anticarceral internationalism of the US prison movement poses a profound challenge to mainstream notions of human rights. International human rights law faces a parallel set of constraints as domestic regulations around policing and prisons. The central contradiction is that they both rely on law and criminal courts to redress the violence of policing and the criminal punishment system. And in so doing, they actually help legitimize the same asymmetries in proximity to death. Abolitionist praxis, on the other hand, as Dylan Rodríguez explains, “addresses carcerality as a logic of power that generates multiple, overlapping, and differently scaled carceral regimes. … Thus, eliminating carceral-state violence via prisons, jails, police, detention centers, and military bases is but one aspect of the broader rethinking—and remapping—of collective insurgent ‘power’ that simultaneously asserts liberated autonomy from and posits a radical challenge to long historical relations of gendered, racial-colonial dominance.” This is why leading abolitionist scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others have long been making the case not just to tear prison systems down, but to do the crucial work of repair needed to “change everything.” What, then, of the human in rights-based talk and action? For Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter, the struggle of our time is against the overrepresentation of the particular Western bourgeois rights-bearing subject, cast as “universal man,” pretending to be the only definition of “the human.” Indeed, mainstream liberal human rights discourse has presumed this universal version of rights-bearing citizen-as-man, masquerading as the human, which has again and again limited the aspirations of human rights movements to the political power nation-states. Wynter shows how Black critique, on the other hand, has been distinguished by its willingness to think from the vantage of the enslaved, the imprisoned, and those said not to even have the right to have rights. “Les damnés,” drawing on Frantz Fanon’s phrase, the criminalized Black and Brown peoples, refugees, homeless, jobless, welfare moms, drug “offenders,” and so forth, she explains, are used to populate the anti-Black categories that structure racial hierarchy on a local and global scale: “So that if we see this category of the damnés that is internal to (and interned within) the prison system of the United States as the analog of a global archipelago constituted by … the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ areas of the world,” she writes, “a systematic pattern emerges.” Quite the opposite of the White, universalizing, status quo–maintaining version of the universal-man-as-human, embedded in claims like “all lives matter,” then, is the more powerful position that thinking from a particular history of racial, sexual, and gendered violence—one that centers the worldwide catastrophes of colonialism, slavery, and genocide—is essential to reenvision what it means to be human altogether. This is where Black liberation offers, in turn, to liberate everyone. “Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self,” Mumia Abu-Jamal writes in Live from Death Row. While a person is “locked away in the netherworld,” children grow into adulthood and loving relationships “wither into yesterday’s dust.” Indeed, “the mind-numbing, soul-killing savage sameness that makes each day an echo of the day before … makes prison the abode of spirit death.” If the prison has been the epicenter of spirit death, following Mumia’s formulation, then activating the spirits of Marcus Garvey, Claudia Jones, George Jackson, and Nelson Mandela signals the continued significance of the decolonial framework to combat gendered violence and racial terror. As people in the prison movement have understood, the liberation of Black people within the United States was, and continues to be, intimately connected to the liberation of people in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and every part of the formerly enslaved and colonized world. If anti-Black racial violence is so ubiquitous as to be literally suffocating people, so must be the struggle against it. This will require more than a set of abstract rights and protections in a deeply unequal and asymmetric world system. As Achille Mbembe puts it in making the case for a universal right to breathe, humanity must start afresh: “To survive, we must return to all living things—including the biosphere—the space and energy they need.” It is this energy that resonates with what those in the imprisoned Black radical tradition have said to look for, everywhere, in the whirlwind and the storm, and in the very air we breathe. The arc of anticarceral internationalism bends toward the abolition of policing and prisons. While it may have been more common to speak and write in the language of internationalism during the New Negro era of the 1920s and 1930s, and of solidarity with Third World liberation movements of the Global South during the Civil Rights and Black Power era of the 1960s and 1970s, now discourses and practices of police and prison abolition are ascendant in the latest phase of the struggle to overthrow global white supremacy in the form of racist state and white vigilante violence at home and aboard. Drawing power from the imprisoned Black radical tradition’s long genealogy of thought and organizing, perhaps anticarceral internationalism will take the form of full-fledged prison abolitionism and become the new human rights paradigm, as it moves from the last utopia to the next.

The six essays comprising the Freedom as Marronage symposium began as papers presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philosophy Born of Struggle, and Western Political Science Association. Thank you to Charles Mills, Juliet Hooker, George Ciccariello-Maher, Jane Gordon, Andrew Dilts, and Keisha Lindsay for taking the time to revise these thought-provoking pieces for publication; James Martel for deftly framing each author’s contribution; and Jo Anne Colson for expert copy-editing. Jane Gordon deserves particular mention for assembling the essays and organizing several logistics in a timely manner. Many thanks also to Kennan Ferguson and James Martel for including the forum in the journal’s special twentieth-anniversary issue. Theory & Event is an important venue both for its rigorous engagement with the ideas of scholars and activists seeking to connect concepts and real-world events, and its availability online, which facilitates greater circulation of works via email and social media, especially to persons and communities that greatly benefit from its discourses who otherwise may not have known about its content were it only in print form. Rather than reproduce overviews of the essays’ respective arguments, which Martel already lucidly offers, I have three objectives. First, I provide autobiographical reflections that help to frame why I wrote the book. Second, I discuss black politics, Afro-Caribbean thought, the meaning of radical, and the black radical tradition. Therein I argue that marronage provides a suggestive philosophy and political imaginary to radicalize the black radical tradition in more useful ways than alternative contemporary discourses and debates. Third, I respond to the most challenging constructive critiques in terms of common themes posed by the commentators, using the reply as an opportunity to elaborate on core principles underlying the theory of freedom as marronage. Sylvia Wynter declares in the Jonkonnu play Maskarade, “The rule is love,” and Frantz Fanon observes in Black Skin, White Masks, “Today we believe in the possibility of love, and that is the reason why we are endeavoring to trace its imperfections and perversions.”4 My response, like the contributors’ essays, echoes these adages: good faith reasonings, asserted out of love and respect, seeking to distill the strengths and weaknesses of argumentation. I also include the implications of the symposium and book for understanding freedom and slavery’s integral role in its articulation. The recent fiftieth anniversary of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the #Black-LivesMatter movement six-pillar policy manifesto A Vision for Black Lives, calls for reparations for historical injustices across the Antilles, the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student movements in South Africa, Brexit, and more, deserve careful study but are beyond my reply scope. I hope others take up these issues with regards to freedom. September 11th augured the writing of Freedom as Marronage although I wouldn’t realize it until years later. I traveled to commence doctoral studies at the University of Chicago on September 10, 2001. However, my original departure from Reagan National airport in Washington, DC, where I had previous residency, was on 9/11. The aircraft was scheduled to depart close to the time the second hijacked plane of the terrorist attack flew into the Pentagon. The trajectories of the two planes, it turned out, crisscrossed in what could have been a mortal result. I’d changed my itinerary less than a week before following a request by my soon-to-be faculty advisor to meet a day earlier. My family didn’t know of my ticket shift. The next morning, my sister frantically tried to reach me, wondering if I was alive (I didn’t have a cell then). After she finally located me in Chicago, only hours upon my arrival to the city, and allayed that understandable worry, she told me over a landline phone to turn on my television. Fire. Smoke. Destruction. Death. The world wasn’t the same. Then came the questions and explanatory hypotheses. But the logic of discourses on freedom that followed marked a troubling impasse. There ensued a public resurgence of civilizational Manichean language pitting “Us” versus “Them” and asserting persons in the so-called “West” knew and valued what freedom meant unlike those in the “non-Western” world. The state of society in the wake of the neoliberal turn and the persistence of coloniality in the postcolony only exacerbated misguided contentious convictions. “4The West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place,” wrote Martinican philosopher and novelist Édouard Glissant.5 Those rampant discursive utterances lent credence to this dictum. Even among persons rejecting this Manicheism, debates on freedom transpired that separated entirely freedom’s meaning from slavery, a condition I contend, not without controversy, that is the foundational human condition. Moreover, the lack of inquiry into Afro-modern figures, movements, and ideas and the meditations of Afro-modern actors on politics, the political, and what it meant to be free baffled me. For instance, from among the rich modern tradition of Afro-Caribbean thought, where were the conversations on Wynter, Fanon, Glissant, Mary Prince, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ash-wood, Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Wifredo Lam, Walter Rodney, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Maryse Condé, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Tosh, Audre Lorde, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Stuart Hall, Derek Walcott, Erna Brodber, Edwidge Danticat, Gloria Rolando, Paget Henry, the New World Group, the Haitian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, Vodou, Santería, and Rastafari? Why wasn’t there significant discursive ruminations on Afro-Caribbean articulations of republicanism in relation to the opinions of African-American political thinkers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Frederick Douglass, and Angela Davis, and European and Euro-American intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Thomas Jefferson, Judith Shklar, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, who attempted to address similar questions? Where was the broad conversation on textual forms—written, oral, visual, digital—and resources we use to explain freedom as a concept and phenomenon? Why hadn’t we acknowledged our creolized modern world, whose dynamism and movement operative everyday couldn’t be explained by crass declarations of universalisms, static mixture, and comparison? I was determined to tell a different story, a decolonial story that didn’t claim inventionism but instead captured the dialectic of slavery and freedom in a manner representative of long, vibrant traditions cultivated at what Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel6 calls the “underside of modernity”; a story that would expose not merely silence but the more pernicious disavowal of slavery and slavery agency at the heart of hegemonic modern conceptualizations of freedom; a story that wasn’t anti-Western but post-Western; a story whose effects would be, as the Caribbean Philosophical Association adage states, “shifting the geography of reason;”7 a story, in short, about the world we’ve lived in and how an idea of freedom, forged in a particular historical milieu, could describe the transhistorical phenomenon of flight applicable throughout space and time. Freedom as Marronage and the concept of marronage (flight) buttressing it is that story. Surprisingly, the widest reception of the book thus far has been among historians and persons with historicist interests.8 This was quite unexpected. For starters, I avowedly push against fundamental premises on the meaning of marronage established by historians over the last few centuries and vigorously defended as convention by subsequent historians and anthropologists.9 Two, I assumed, perhaps with naiveté, that scholars in black studies, Caribbean thought, philosophy, and political theory would be the main ones to wrestle with the text initially. That we are having this symposium in Theory & Event indicates a chord, however discordant, has begun to play in the latter field, with the verdict still out on its melody. I’ve also never considered myself a historian, though I agree with others who believe the late modern mythos of a “history”/“theory” binary is erroneous. Theory and history are mutually reinforcing, not opposing.10 We’re never outside of history, and I employ the historical whenever context to present the theoretical warrants it. To millions, there’s an acute sense of urgency of interpreting this all in the Age of Trump. The worry, or perhaps downright climate of fear, is that freedom may not only be on the retreat for those living a free life; but that large populations might never be able to experience what it is to be free. The November 2016 US Presidential election of an undeniable authoritarian reminiscent of Jefferson Davis who relishes in demonstrating his authoritarian personality and doesn’t distinguish between “rule” and “governance” has national, hemispheric, and global repercussions.11 Struggles and resistance to authoritarianism and its mob enforcers have started. And more struggles await us. Yet these obstacles, arduous as they are, aren’t new.They’re the story of slaves.It’s easy to forget that, as long as there’ve been attempts to contain and suppress the enslaved, slaves have resisted arbitrary interference, domination, and sovereign power. In addition, the enslaved have visualized their desired naming, state of society, modes of constitutionalism, blueprints of freedom (vèvè architectonics), interactions with self and others, and non-sovereign ways of being and doing. To reduce the imaginings on freedom of the enslaved either to negative or positive notions, or to a singularity, is to misapprehend freedom’s contours. Humans are plural and multidimensional, and freedom is a relational condition comparative in nature.The actions and creativity of multifaceted individuals and masses in the face of unfreedom have fostered—and continue to foster—imaginings on alternative visions of freedom. Flight is perpetual, constant, never static, and subject to contestation, the outcome of which may be progress or regress. This is hard for some to accept, yet I argue it more accurately reflects the range of human experiences. “But then again,” as I wrote in the book’s fifth chapter, “the absence of a struggle to survive on the landscape would mean that we had never experienced the process of becoming free in the first place.” May the lessons of Freedom as Marronage serve as a resource to reassess the past, evaluate our present plight, and prepare for what the future holds. Now let me take a step back. How might we develop a conception of freedom that underscores the historical while revealing the theoretical and generalizable throughout time and space? How can we reconceptualize freedom to bridge the gulf between its hegemonic articulations in the two main traditions in Western thought—negative freedom (freedom as non-interference and non-domination) and positive freedom (freedom as autonomy, self-mastery, generality, and pluralistic humanism)? How may our rethinking repudiate such notions as positing freedom in immutable, static terms; account for individual and collective imaginings of the free life; indict orders of unfreedom, or existence in what Frantz Fanon calls the zone of nonbeing; and discern the possibility for the realization of revolution? I delved into processes of creolization, conceptions of freedom within and across myriad epochs, and the architecture of the black radical tradition. The breadth of this tradition is transnational, as scholars including Angela Davis, June Jordan, Achille Mbembe, Paul Gilroy, Robin Kelley, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Lewis Gordon, Fred Moten, Oyèrónke Oyĕwùmí, Carole Boyce Davies, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, Walidah Imarisha, and Cedric Robinson have noted, and it contains perceptive insights into the imagination, the interior and the exterior, and interstitial experiences.13 I sought, as a consequence, to gain clarity on our understandings of “black politics,” “radical,” and the “black radical tradition” undergirding how I’ve come to conceive of the free life. Black politics comprises viewpoints, ideologies, and actions spanning the political spectrum. Scholars in the United States, however, unfortunately tend to think of black politics in provincially nationalistic or hemispheric terms. In Not in our Lifetimes, for instance, Michael Dawson defines black politics as “African Americans’ ability to mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials, and contribute and influence American political discourse, all in the service of black interests.”14 Dawson reaffirms this definition in “The Future of Black Politics” and his Du Bois Lectures Blacks In and Out of the Left.15 Such a framing obscures genres of black visions between past and future. Black politics includes and exceeds the US and the wider Americas, and there isn’t anything intrinsically radical about its various articulations. As Walter Rodney, Donna Murch, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Lester Spence note, the neoliberal turn in black politics, reflections on international development, and black political economy are reminders of the heterogeneity of black agents’ opinions on black interests notwithstanding important areas of issues convergence.16 Black radicalism, however, describes a political tendency within black politics, not merely its critique. To be radical is to be left of center and often in recent years to the left of “progressive”—which is a vague classification of a political disposition that at times encompasses the liberal yet is frequently short of the radical. Just look at which authors The Nation magazine publishes now compared to the 1990s and before and you get the point. If the radical isn’t necessarily a progressive, then is the radical a “militant” as Alain Badiou argues?17 Or something else? In vol. 1 of The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Garvey writes, “‘Radical’ is a label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom.”18 Garvey, though, specifies a compelling outlook on the object of the radical instead of defining the agent. What exactly is a radical? Radical, from the Latin radicalis, originally meant: “Of or relating to a root or to roots.”19 Transformations of the term in Middle English, Middle French, and thirteenth to fifteenth century British English introduced definitions of radical denoting plant roots, a foundational mechanism, bodily organs, humors and moisture vital to human life functioning, and roots of a word. The long eighteenth century, or Age of Revolution, brought about another definitional mutation. Not only did radical come to refer in mathematics to “forming the root of a number or quantity.” For the first time, radical acquired a political valence: “change or action,” “advocating thorough or far-reaching political or social reform,” “representing or supporting an extreme section of a party,” and, most importantly for our purposes, “Now more generally: revolutionary.”20 It’s unsurprising then that Hannah Arendt located the shift from revolution’s astronomical, backward-looking denotation to its modern forward-looking political meaning—a new order of things, a birth, natality—at the same historical moment that radical obtained a political denotation.21 The repercussions of how Arendt wrote about this through exploration into the American and French Revolutions but without reference or analysis of the Haitian Revolution and Arendt’s overall disavowal of the agency of slaves are also crucial for us to comprehend. Black radical thought for centuries has responded to silences as well as the intentional simultaneous acknowledgments and denials of events.22 The black radical tradition, therefore, may be understood as a modern tradition of thought and action begun after transatlantic slavery’s advent, concerned centrally with revolutionary politics, and preoccupied with freedom for the souls of black folk. In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson furnishes a classic genealogy of it. A distinguishing feature of Robinson’s account is the analysis of “racial capitalism” and the extent to which black radical politics and attendant modes of resistance respond to the phenomenology of unfreedom experienced by blacks in Africa and the African diaspora due to slavery. Robinson examines Marxist theory, thereby distilling a unique lineage of black radicals who were also Marxist scholar-activists. Robinson’s text culminates in case studies of three figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright. Additionally, Robinson emphasizes movement, situates accurately the tradition’s transnational character, and rejects the bifurcation of theory and history, developing theoretical assertions within meticulously documented historical milieus. While Black Marxism shall remain a vital tome, it does have limitations. Black women radicals, Marxist and otherwise, receive little treatment.23 It also contains a useful but all too concise delineation of marronage that only broaches the surface of its true significance. Subsequent treatises on black feminist thought and the black radical imagination are essential correctives. More rethinking, however, is needed.  Exploring marronage philosophy further offers us a way out of these limitations and a heuristic to radicalize the radical wing of black politics. The radicalization of the black radical tradition highlights how the lives and lessons of the damnés, the enslaved, are essential bulwarks between past and future for revolutionary change and cultivating freedom. Acts of marronage in their different types, and inquiry into the liminal and transitional spaces of slave escape between poles of political imagination, exemplify this. Freedom is not from-to but rather as. So why marronage and how, as Angela Davis asks,24 do we know we’re free? Marronage is a noun that means “flight,” yet it has the effect of a verb. The vocabularies of contemporary philosophy and political theory have been unable to explain the activity of flight and the mechanisms operational in its occurrence. Furthermore, their overwhelming descriptions of unfreedom and freedom as static states belie marronage’s perpetual nature. Marronage defies inertia. The ongoing act of flight, which transpires in multiple dimensions, encompasses what I contend are the four interrelated pillars of distance, movement, property, and purpose, with movement serving as the central fulcrum connecting the others. Whilst facets of these pillars pertain to the turn to diaspora, diaspora cannot capture their full import. The framework of diaspora describes flight either in a single direction or the return to a beginning location in the manner of a boomerang. Yet it assumes transformations aren’t occurring both at and between the points and spaces where an agent leaves and arrives. Additionally, diaspora can’t explain genres of fugitivity, evanescent flight, and intrastate flight focused on attaining the free life via the macro-level reorientation of state institutions and civil society exemplified by revolutions. If, per one of the polemical assertions of my theory, all human beings are born enslaved, then, to borrow from The Matrix and Glissant’s ruminations on antillanité (Caribbeanness), humans negotiate distance, movement, property, and purpose to exit slavery and become free.25 Freedom ossifies in the process of becoming itself. Freedom results from acts of flight informed by our experiences and valences of the psychological, physical, social-structural, cognitive, and metaphysical. Freedom encompasses moments that are episodic, durable, and overlapping. Freedom is, in short, a condition, not a place.The debate between Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists is indicative of two contemporary positions that take seriously the condition of the enslaved and the question of freedom.26 However, despite differential articulations of their respective camps and divergent opinions on whether slaves ever avoid, in the language of Claudia Rankine, the condition of constant mourning,27 Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists startlingly share a fundamental conviction: the belief that slaves across epochs exist in a state Orlando Patterson prominently calls social death in which, as a consequence of powerlessness, dishonor, and natal alienation, slaves are said to lack an inherent capacity for action.28 To be socially dead is to be a living zombie. To be a racialized slave in late modernity, for instance, is to be a non-agentic being subjected to relentless antiblackness. A slave can never be free, the logic goes, unless a free agent grants terms of the free life to the slave. Classic examples are manumission enacted by a master and emancipation proclamations resulting from a polity’s decree rather than slave resistance. The premises of social death are misguided and antithetical to marronage philosophy. Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists also mistakenly conflate the notion of social death with Fanon’s concept of the zone of nonbeing. Whilst a slave’s existence in the zone is hellish, the zone of nonbeing is “an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge.”29 Experience inside the zone of nonbeing actually furnishes the possibility for consciousness-raising, individual and collective flight, and the becoming that is freedom. Acts of marronage demonstrate the intrinsic agency of slaves. It’s the degrees of materialization of purposive movement that in part distinguishes slaves and non-slaves. It’s for these reasons and more why marronage still matters. Discourse on marronage, which distills the aforementioned, conventionally refers to two forms: petit marronage (individual fugitive acts of truancy) and grand marronage (isolationist, autonomous, territorially bounded communities outside the parameters of a regime of unfreedom). These are models of flight normatively accepted in both extant anthropological and historical scholarship on maroon societies and archival documents. Studies on these types of marronage emphasize their manifestation in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, but they have been and are still present throughout the globe, the United States included. The recent National Geographic feature story on the Great Dismal Swamp and Colson Whitehead’s 2016 National Book Award-winning novel, Underground Railroad, underscore this.30Underground Railroad issues a searing portrayal of the protagonist-cum-fugitive slave Cora and the communities and activities Cora confronts and participates in. The protagonist takes flight from her plantation in Georgia and traverses the Carolinas, Tennessee, the North, and subsequently a new frontier, often with the assistance of the underground railroad network. Cora’s flight initially is in conjunction with another fellow dreamer and fugitive named Caesar and later it is in the manner of petit marronage on her own. Grand marronage ossifies when Cora reaches Indiana farther into the story. Whitehead’s underground railroad contains elements of Afrofuturism, particularly in its depiction of the railroad as just that: an actual series of locomotives and underground stations rather than railroad as metaphor commonly understood. Yet this makes sense. Robin Kelley remarks in a forum on black art matters and aesthetics of the black radical tradition that, whilst “Afrofuturism is wonderful,” “it is also a new word for a longer Black radical tradition of Marronage, seeking out free space, liberated territory.”31 Whitehead captures much of this in Cora’s tale. Petit and grand marronage, especially the second form and the politics of recognition habitually connected to it,33 nevertheless frequently encounter problems. They don’t aim to dismantle at the structural level the social and political orders of slaveholding polities, thereby remaining unreflective of mass revolutionary politics seeking to shatter the entire fabric of the state of society. Embarking on these modes of flight, however, can be linked to revolutionary processes as the brilliant writings of Frederick Douglass attest, for the psychological, cognitive, and metaphysical valences of freedom are noteworthy in this regard. “Fight versus flight” is often a mantra classifying acts of marronage. I reject this. There are types of flight wherein the fight to exit regimes of slavery are paramount. Sovereign marronage and sociogenic marronage are terms I’ve coined to denote two other types of flight and models of freedom that address mass revolutionary politics unencumbered by an individual’s wants or collective isolationist desires. Whereas sovereign marronage posits freedom emanating from the authority of a sovereign entity such as a lawgiver-political leader and subsequently trickling down to a mass of people, sociogenic marronage refers to the non-sovereign forging of freedom by the masses from the bottom up. Sovereign marronage risks sullying the radicalism of marronage on a mass scale by the very concept of sovereignty that can stunt the input and visions of everyday people. Sociogenic marronage reflects the idealized scale and vision of versions of revolutionary politics, and by extension the most suggestive articulations of politics within the black radical tradition, devoid of hierarchy and the quest for unanimity sovereign moorings foster. Traditions, we must remember, still have multiplicities and competing ideals. Modern traditions after the Treaty of Westphalia operate overwhelmingly within structures of the nation-state. The nation-state, however, doesn’t interrupt marronage. If anything, the nation-state, with its modern and late modern shortcomings, catalyzes marronage in its fugitive and longue-durée challenges to statecraft legitimacy. Structures of rule and governance mutate across time and types of marronage exist prior to, during, and after moments of transformation. I argue the four types of marronage simultaneously manifest themselves in the world. Taken as a whole, they allow us to bridge the gulf between the negative and positive streams of freedom theorizing in Western thought. The symposium commentators posit five main critiques in their analyses of Freedom as Marronage (henceforth FM): 1) the scope and ambition of the book is too broad; 2) the assertion of slavery as the foundational human condition is wrong; 3) the examples of, and categorical relationship between, sovereign marronage and sociogenic marronage are questionable; 4) the idea of social death gains a premature dismissal; and 5) experience-based politics is messy and impedes proper interpretation of freedom. Charles Mills directly interrogates the first objection. Mills’ adroit usage of words to make his case is on full display. Mills situates FM within a trajectory of scholarship from the Global South aiming to de-colonize forms of knowledge. He reads FM as “black liberation from ‘white liberty’”; that is, a study that disrupts de-historicized, de-raced narratives of freedom all too prevalent in whitewashed treatises in modern philosophy and political theory. “By taking this subaltern history as his archive,” writes Mills, “Roberts demonstrates what rich political raw materials lie waiting for the theorist with the courage to stray beyond the bounds of the Western estate” and “investigate those parts of the estate which are now mysteriously fenced off, with NO TRESPASSING signs prominently posted above chained doors.” What words! So much parrhesia there. But Mills has reservations. He’s skeptical about how much marronage can explain. Mills claims since freedom is such a precious value and unfreedom the experiential reality that has characterized the majority of the world’s peoples, then flight might not be the rubric we should embrace to discuss freedom. Yet the failure of enslaved agents to attain the free life doesn’t mean they haven’t engaged in acts of flight all along. Mills is hesitant to apply marronage to the struggles facing genres of white feminism, class-based politics, and other movements. Yet are scholars doubtful when applying Machiavelli to feminist politics, Plato to Black Panther theory, or Rawls to claims for racial justice? Maybe we should be. If we’re doubtful of marronage’s scope, then we should hold the same standards of adjudication to ideas emanating from all intellectual traditions. Mills also has his own understanding of “movement.” I suggest that, were Mills to adopt my usage of movement and notion of flight, he may agree that marronage is indeed quite useful to the various movements he contends would dilute marronage’s conceptual utility. I fully agree, though, that marronage isn’t an interpretive panacea. I’ve sought to make it a valuable one nonetheless, both to those working in the black radical tradition and to a larger array of interlocutors. Jane Gordon’s probing essay presents so many stellar questions I’m unable to address here, but I’ve learned greatly from their posing. I shall, though, address two of her key points, one later and the first now surrounding my treatment of “the existentialists” and its pertinence to the second main objection to the book. Gordon asks why I defend the position that slavery is the condition humans are born into while simultaneously employing the work of various existential thinkers. She wonders if accepting the view that humans as born both free and constrained would actually bolster my theory. This is where we must return to the intersections of history and theory. To declare all humans are born free is, to me, unsubstantiated in history, in our current moment, and likely into the future. In writing FM, I grappled with the implications of the opposite premise, for it appeared to have the weight of history in its favor. If humans indeed were born enslaved, I thought, then how would they become free? Marronage is my answer. Existentialists and other theorists of existence are helpful in describing an agent’s state in the world, the struggles we encounter, and our being and becoming in the wake of struggle. Gordon correctly notes that, in spite of this crucial disagreement with existentialists I define elsewhere as “inverted foundations,”35 existential thought is of enduring impact on my thinking. Juliet Hooker and George Ciccariello-Maher both shift focus, emphasizing not only the micro- and meso-, but also the macro-political vis-à-vis sovereign and sociogenic marronage. Hooker wonderfully phrases in the interrogative the vantage point of FM when stating, “What does it mean to theorize freedom from the perspective of the enslaved?” Hooker meditates on the repercussions of the book’s foregrounding of slave agency for black studies and political theory. Whereas she finds the examination of Douglass’ concept of “comparative freedom” among the more persuasive aspects of the text, the elucidation of sociogenic marronage puzzles her. This isn’t because Hooker contests the idea of collective flight implemented by masses from the bottom up. Rather, Hooker argues, with striking precision, there’s insufficient exploration into the actions of the enslaved themselves who comprise the very revolutionary agents FM contends we should study in order to learn from. Hooker doesn’t observe, for example, a similar dissonance in my account of sovereign flight, the actions of lawgivers, and the elucidation of Toussaint L’Ouverture as emblematic of the sovereign marronage model. On this charge, Hooker is right. I hoped the book’s third part would further illuminate sociogenic marronage’s meaning, yet the examples in the Saint-Domingue sections in part two could have been expanded. Hooker highlights conversations on marronage in the Caribbean and United States that FM generates, but underscores its missed opportunities on freedom discourse by not including marronage in Latin America, particularly Brazil. Such inquiries are welcome, though the iconic case of Brazilian grand marronage Hooker invokes, Palmares, had its own limitations we can explain using the fourfold marronage typology. We shouldn’t forget, as Hooker notes, that along with Brazil’s august legacy of grand marronage, Brazil was the last polity in the Americas to abolish racial slavery. There’s a reason for that. Ciccariello-Maher scrutinizes the categories of sovereign and sociogenic marronage and invites us to rethink the radicalism of grand marronage. Like Mills, he writes with poeticist verve. Yet in this instance, there’s a trade-off between intoxicating prose and justifiable argumentation. Ciccariello-Maher objects to my labeling C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins—a classic text illustrating sovereign marronage via its portrayal of the Haitian Revolution told through the lens of Toussaint—a black Jacobin philosophy. He remarks, “Roberts is absolutely correct to insist that, ‘Black Jacobinism is freedom from above,’ but I argue that James was ultimately ambivalent toward his own chosen title. While the title Black Jacobins certainly evokes the view from above of a hero bringing freedom to the masses—and while this title might have reflected James’ original purpose, to write a biography of Toussaint— this vision effectively unravels during the course of the text.” This reading elides the content of the original 1938 and revised 1963 editions. And one doesn’t have to take my word for it. James, in his “Lectures on The Black Jacobins,” confirms this during the comparison of his methodology to that of W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America.36 Readers can consult FM chapter 3 where I discuss this. On the sovereign/sociogenic marronage relationship: Ciccariello-Maher is most convincing in flagging junctures of categorical fluidity. He writes, “[Jean-Jacques] Dessalines provides a bridge from sovereign marronage to sociogenic marronage, albeit not in a way that Roberts intends, and in so doing threatens the very distinction between the two categories that he hopes to establish.” What Ciccariello-Maher fails to mention is that I describe this very example in the book’s fourth chapter (!) and the complexities of the marronage in the Saint-Domingue revolution and the revolution’s afterlife. That’s why I wrote the third part of the book, which he neglects to address. In upholding the value of grand marronage for radical politics, Ciccariello-Maher asserts: “isn’t the move to categorize grand marronage as isolationist itself a sovereign and even a colonial act, since it entails  accepting sovereign and colonial borders as given?” He remarks additionally, “grand marronage as a reservoir of power for an eventual counterattack aimed not only at the abolition of slavery, but the abolition of the very ontological and social structures that are its most pernicious legacies.”Grand marronage may be a region of refuge, but central to its conception is an isolationism that obliterates slavery only for inhabitants within its borders. Grand marronage more often than not yields complicity between inhabitants and colonial powers culminating in the signing of treatises reifying—not abolishing—colonial territoriality and the agreement that community members turn over new runaways. Grand marronage communities that have resisted treaty signings usually have had temporal limits to their existence. FM chapter 5 deals with this thorny issue and the promise and perils of grand marronage for catalyzing either revolution or acquiescence. Andrew Dilts issues the fourth critique in his fascinating revisiting of the notion of social death and its bearings on social life. His perspective, as James Martel observes, is from one of respect that nevertheless holds nothing back in its questioning. Dilts nicely frames his commentary around three points: social death and social life, Fanon’s phenomenology, and prison riots. Dilts acknowledges that my exegesis of Patterson’s thought includes works of Patterson before and after Slavery and Social Death. Nonetheless, instead of rejecting outright Patterson’s notion of the slave as socially dead, Dilts presses me to account for two types of social life (parasitic, and non-parasitic) he suggests we may locate in Patterson’s articulation of the theory of social death. Dilts contends. “As I read it, Roberts’ basic response to Patterson is to offer a divergent account of social death which refocuses our attention on the psychology of the slave agent, in so far as the practice of flight itself ‘creates possibility for actualizing revolutions against slavery through natality embedded in its processes of movement.’” I fear my response here is inadequate because, as stated earlier with regards to Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists, I think, in Patterson’s rendering, the slave can never be an agent. Marronage unsettles this epistemological assumption. Fanon is a critical bridge to points one and two. The zone of nonbeing and exit from its hellishness reveals non-parasitic forms of human social life and parasitic activities masking themselves as apparatuses of the free life. The seventh chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin details this best. And speaking of Fanon, I was surprised Dilts interpreted FM as separating Fanon the psychiatrist and revolutionary from Fanon the phenomenologist. That wasn’t my intention. I aspired to build upon Fanon the existential phenomenologist who, in Black Skin, “Racism  and Culture,” plays, psychiatric journal articles, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, The Wretched of the Earth, and Toward the African Revolution cultivated lived theory for consolidation of “healthy,” non-parasitic ways of living.. To point three, marronage has great significance for describing and even encouraging prison breaks, riots, and uprisings in the domains of the cognitive, metaphysical, and physical. Look at the writings of imprisoned intellectuals. Think of the prison as the zone of nonbeing. Rationalize “abolition-democracy” as involving actions internal and external to the agent and the territoriality of the prison itself. Examining the US is vital, but so too are examples outside America. I didn’t devote enough attention to Angela Davis’ transnational abolitionist politics. I have a long forthcoming essay on Davis that tries to answer unexplored vistas in the book on flight, prisons, and abolitionism.37 With Keisha Lindsay’s adroit intervention, we confront a final major critique: the messiness of experience-based politics for our discernment of freedom. Lindsay has us contemplate “the value or the lack thereof of experience-based politics.” She accomplishes this by mapping the implications of the disavowal of slave agency described early in the book onto modes of resistance to unfreedom explicated subsequently. The discussions of Douglass and sociogenic marronage are her argumentative hinges. Lindsay ponders the “contradictory state of affairs” Douglass epitomizes “in which some slaves critically contemplate their experience of oppression in ways that are both anti-racist and anti-feminist.” She states further, “it is not enough to simply conclude that Freedom as Marronage details how experiencing oppression motivates slaves to embrace the progressive politics of sociogenic marronage. This is so because Roberts also acknowledges something else—that slaves can and do reflect on their experience of oppression in ways that not only challenge but also perpetuate particular kinds of oppression. Lindsay interrogates how I define masculinism, its manifestations in the 1805 Haitian Constitution and Douglass’ middle autobiography, and the tensions between concepts drawn from experience and their potentially anti-progressive political ramifications under auspices of types of marronage such as petit and sociogenic. While Lindsay recognizes my distinguishing of “masculinism” from “patriarchy” and “misogyny” and accepts that agents may be dually masculinist and “pro-feminist,” she implores me to ascertain the full import of black feminist scholarship on the politics of experience. It’s an important observation.Lindsay highlights my claims that marronage is inertia resistant and subject to flux, and rethinks how anti-racist politics might challenge their sexist presuppositions. Gordon has a different nuanced view of Douglass that refrains from castigating his masculinism. For Gordon, “if a particular slave writer is gendered as well as racialized, doesn’t seeking adulthood mean desiring to be a man or a woman? After all, Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs, in addressing a primarily female audience, emphasized their desires to live a particular conception of womanhood. Finally, if Douglass was able to seek a version of manhood that was neither patriarchal nor misogynist, would that not fundamentally belie the conventional gender roles of his day?” Although their opinions differ on Douglass and masculinism, Lindsay and Gordon agree that the phenomenology of slaves, their experiences of liminality, their vèvè architectonics, their beliefs in alternative worlds, their struggles to achieve Wynter’s Human after Man, and their capacities for transformation are messy, unfixed, indeterminate, and exciting all at once. Such is marronage between past and future.

POLITICAL AUTONOMY AS A FORM OF REPARATIONS: In addition to arguing that affirmative action is an inadequate reparative remedy, I have also made the case that cash payments, if pursued, would similarly be wrong-headed. I have discussed three fatal problems (1) the problem of design; (2) the problem of public opinion; and (3) the problem of the courts. As I have shown, these same problems have been present throughout the history of reparations for African-Americans. At the same time, I have suggested that statehood for African-Americans is a third alternative. That said, it is only fair to test political autonomy against these problems in order to ascertain its usefulness to supporters of reparations for African-Americans. A. Design The first problem seems to be completely resolved by a resort to political autonomy. To summarize, both monetary transfers and nonmonetary transfers seem to have had little effect in terms of eradicating institutional racism, or improving the condition of the majority of African-Americans. To a certain extent, the problem of effectiveness is made nearly inapplicable by resorting to political autonomy. Today much of the racism against African-Americans is embedded in the structure of U.S. institutions. 143 Affirmative action and monetary transfer can do little to ameliorate this state of affairs. Unlike anything tried before, political autonomy calls for a separate nation and, of course, completely new institutions. New institutions would not be handicapped by a legacy of racism, like that present in U.S. institutions. These new institutions would be controlled by African-Americans, and, therefore, could hardly operate to entrench white wealth. Some may argue that political autonomy may create all new institutions plagued by the same kind of racist ideologies. Along these lines, one author writes: Those who argue that the blacks in America are an oppressed nation (and therefore favor the establishment of a separate black state) miss the point that a class based, private property capitalism system is the material base of oppression-of well as race-and that a separate black state is likely to contain the same base of oppression.144 Admittedly, African-American controllers of all-new institutions may distribute social services and contracts as unevenly among themselves as the mal-distribution observed in the United States. There is no reason to believe that an African-American state would not manifest discriminatory practices very similar to those found in the United States. The few African-Americans who made it to Liberia, for instance, dominate that country in virtually every measurable sphere and completely out of proportion to their size.145 And there is no reason to believe that in a new nation for African-Americans, a similar situation would emerge. Certainly, in large part, this contention would depend on what types of institutions were set up in an African-American state. If American institutions were transplanted to the new state lockstep, than perhaps these fears have some basis. Even then, however, an African-American state with African-American institutions would not have the kind of institutional racism that stems from a history of slavery as in the United States. By definition, an African-American state would have all new institutions that do not include a history of slavery, or permanent underclass status. The citizenry would be able to start with clean slates, and create a system that afforded opportunities equally. B. Public Opinion Secondly, although in certain ways political autonomy may exacerbate race-relations, in other ways it seems likely to resolve some of the problems associated with other forms of reparations. In a nutshell, the problem of public opinion has been that: first, the public loathes preferences based on race; and, second, race-based preferences stigmatize African-Americans. Indeed, the public has been increasingly in favor of race-neutral policies and political autonomy seems, at first blush, to cut exactly the other way. Still, affirmative action has dragged on for decades, has not improved the condition for the masses of African-Americans, and there does not appear to be an end to it in sight. Part of the American belief system is a belief in finality. Thus, to the extent that there is a perception among white Americans that affirmative action has entered the land of virtual perpetuity, this certainly causes some resentment. Political autonomy, by contrast, promises a 'once-and-for-all' solution. Moreover, political autonomy would in all likelihood bring to an end programs like affirmative action, set asides, and quotas that many Americans criticize. Furthermore, other forms of reparations may actually hurt AfricanAmericans by engendering a victim-status and inducing a backlash from whites. Much of the public opinion problems results from the perception among whites that reparative remedies are reverse discrimination; i.e., that these type of remedies reward African-Americans (and, in most cases, other minorities) at the expense of whites who feel they have played no role in oppressing African-Americans. 146 In contrast political autonomy does not suggest that whites should compete against African-Americans who might have an advantage based on race. On the contrary, political autonomy suggests separate nations: it suggests, in other words, that whites should compete against whites; and African-Americans should compete against other African-Americans. Finally, political autonomy would significantly alter the victim status of African-Americans that other policies perpetuate. As I have shown, other types of remedies, notably affirmative action, may cause African-Americans to be seen as victims. In contrast, necessary byproducts of political autonomy are Black Nationalism and black autarky. Black Nationalism will go a long way in countering some negative images of African Americans. C. The Legal Arena In significant part, the legal problems, which other remedies have faced, stem from the fact that there are no tight legal precedents for the courts to follow with regard to the other remedies. In contrast, in the case of political autonomy, there is at least one precedent: the creation of Israel. 147 Following World War II, the Jewish community began pushing for a nation of their own. This drive in many ways resembles the backdrop for a potential African-American nationalist movement. For one thing, the discrimination the Jews suffered at the hands of Hitler parallels in significant respect to the discrimination African-Americans have faced throughout the history of the United States. A Crisis editorial, comparing the discrimination faced by the Jews before the War, declares the similarity between Jews in Central Europe and African-Americans in the United States. The Jews were disfranchised; so were Negroes in the South. Both were discriminated against in education and employment. Jews were either excluded from beaches, playgrounds and parks or were restricted to recreational facilities specifically designed for them. Jim Crowism humiliated Negroes in a similar fashion. Propaganda of the vilest variety calculated to incite hatred for Jews characterized the German educational system from kindergarten to university. In white America the school system buttressed society's pejorative image of the Negro. Lastly, both Jews and Negroes were treated with great cruelty. 148 African-Americans did not miss the irony in the treatment of Jews in Europe at the hands of Hitler, and their own persecution at home. In fact, the plight of African-Americans has been aptly referred to as "American Nazism." 149 At least one impetus to the Jewish momentum to create an autonomous separate state was the treatment of Jewish persons during the war. Jewish immigrants fleeing from Hitler were refused refuge by many Western powers, and that refusal feeds a latent sense of Jewish nationalism. 150 The African-American community, likewise, has suffered at least as much because of discrimination. African-Americans have been oppressed by centuries of slavery and endured seemingly permanent second class status. Moreover, the Jewish community felt that Western powers owed them something for loyalty, their service, and their suffering at the hands of Hitler during the war. The commitment to reparations throughout history, despite countless failure, may be construed as testimony of a similar sentiment among African-Americans. Thirdly, the Jewish community has exemplified a culture synonymous with nationalism. Some might argue that, in contrast to the Jewish community, there is no such thing as Black Nationalism as an ideology to begin with, and, therefore, discussions of political autonomy are ill conceived. 152 However, in much the same way as there is a Jewish culture, there is a distinct African-American culture. 153 Certainly, the African American culture is on display in music, literature, language, and many other mediums. Historically black colleges and universities have become an important representative feature of the black culture. Finally, the Jewish community was able to stage a major lobbying effort in the United States, which had something to do with their success before the German courts and in the legislature. 154 While it is true that the African-American lobbying effort has not been nearly as effective throughout U.S. history as the effort staged by members of the Jewish community right after the war, there is plenty of potential. AfricanAmericans, after all, represent a sizeable minority within the United States, have a relatively resourceful middle class, and are represented noticeably in the legislatures and on the courts.

The concluding argument concerns late modern figurations of the body in pain. Spectacles of pain have proliferated in many forms in the contemporary American public sphere if indeed pain hasn't become its primary and all-pervading obsession. Confessional TV shows exchange narratives of personal trauma and hurt for public intelligibility; cinematic spectacles of suffering, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to torture-porn favorite Hostel (2005), exhibit the body in pain for profit, thrill, and public outrage; news reports narrate national-scale catastrophes through individual testimonials of pain; reality game shows such as Survivor measure their contestants' bodily pain capacities against their resistance to (or aggressiveness in) traumatizing and abusive group dynamics. There is also a proliferation of political discourse disclosing the injuries caused by contemporary forms of governing: public movements raise consciousness for excluded and abjected forms of living, feeling, and aching in Western democracies; critical discourses continue to shed light on the structural violence of regimes of power; the interventions of identitarian movements and groups successfully expand public recognition of social and political injury, changing the scope of intelligibility in the process. These diverse affective phenomena are not always readily distinguishable in neoliberal regimes. Scholars such as Wendy Brown or Sara Ahmed have pointed out the coopting of identitarian politics in contemporary govermental regimes. These critical voices urge "Ic]aution ... against the assumption that 'speaking out' and 'making visible' within so-called radical politics can be separated from the conventions of self-expression in neo-liberal forms of governance" (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 4). Bill Clinton's infamous tagline "I feel your pain" or Barack Obama's ongoing focus on a "politics of empathy" are only the presidential cases in point for an ongoing politics of pain that links recognition of suffering to democratic progress. Academic debates have matched this capitalization on pain and compassion as necessary ingredients to the development of politics, ethics, or community making, such as in Rosi Braidotti's call for the unification of feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender identity politics under the label of a "community of the suffering."' The various diagnoses of America as "wound culture" (Seltzer 1998) or "trauma culture" (Kaplan 2005), in this view, describe a highly disparate, tension-laden, and ambivalent field of affective discourse, rather than a unified or unifying fixation on pain in contemporary Western societies. Lauren Berlant has argued that these politics of affect dictate the continuous envelopment of the political in sentimental rhetoric. Sentimentalism holds up the promise that subjectivity is granted in the recognition of pain and that democracy is realized as the participation in an ideal of common suffering and compassion. Sentimental discourses "locate the human in a universal capacity to suffer and romantic conventions of individual historical acts of compassion and transcendence. [They imagine a nonhierarchical social world that is ... 'at heart' democratic because good intentions and love flourish in it" (2008, 6). Sentimental rhetoric produces a public sphere assembled around pain bonded by feeling with what is unspeakable: a commonality of passionate and compassionate bodily subjects, or a "fantasy of generality through emotional likeness in the domain of pain" (Berlant 2008, 6). These arguments suggest a fundamental link between the sentimental evocation of pain and the discourses imagined as "at heart democratic." Indeed, the emancipatory project of democracy relies on articulations of pain, the recognition of those suffering, and a unified politics as remedy of this suffering. This is certainly true for American culture and its foundational ideas of promise and exceptionalism. The cultural sites I have pointed to participate in this evocation of a public sphere, where oppressive hurtings and social injuries are "counted in toward a better politics of integration, understanding, and recognition. The sentimental linkage of emancipation through the circulation of pain and compassion as politics indicates a larger genealogy that dominates American culture and that this book has tried to elucidate. This genealogy was traced back to America's emancipatory foundation as a nation freed from colonial injury, and informed by a national history of successful incorporations of marginalized subjects into the national project (suffrage, abolitionism). American dolorologies has related this discourse to an apparatus of cultural technologies such as compassion, testimony to oppression, and articulations of affect and pain, and the materializations of race and gender they covertly enact. My analysis concurs with Berlant's observation that the various claims to pain as identity disarticulate their marginalizing effects in a rhetoric of universalization: In the liberal tradition of the United States [testimony of pain] is not simply a mode of particularizing and puncturing self-description by minorities, but a rhetoric of universality located, not in abstract categories, but in what was thought to be, simultaneously, particular and universal experience. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that sentimentality has long been a popular rhetorical means by which pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and citizenship. (2000, 34) This connection of pain, nation, and subjectivity has, on the one hand, led to the public sphere becoming more and more a site of intimate "affect" exchange. This transformation is visible in the proliferation of mediatized forms of confession, testimony, and other articulations of traumatized selfhood, such as reality TV or the culture of therapeutic discourse. These governmental forms of achieving public subjectivity through speaking pain imitate and appropriate the critical formulations of differential experience from identitarian movements, at times becoming indistinguishable from them: "We can also see a ... collusion between liberal, capitalist forms of mass entertainment and individualist therapies, and the feminist importance of the personal" (Ahmed 2000, 12). The achievement of public visibility through the articulation of trauma and pain is furthermore supplemented by mainstream political discourse becoming compassionate and revolving primarily around the recognition of bodies in pain.? Both forms of discourse-personal claims to pain as identity and hegemonic gestures of compassion, recognition, and inclusion--are intimately connected and dependent on each other, in that they both enact a paradoxical simultaneity of the particular and the universal: the hegemonic gesture transforms personal pain into universal concern ('I feel your pain"), and thus marks compassion as both ethical and democratic practice. Simultaneously, it fixates identity as social and corporeal injury, and via recognition, restabilizes its own ideal (of politics, law, nation) as "pain- free. 99 On the other hand, interventionist critiques articulate common histories of pain and injury against this fantasy and demand recognition and incorporation in that utopian space. They thus inevitably perform a "fetishization of the wound," an equation of identity and suffering fixating the "identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions" (Brown 1995, 27). Both positions are in this view invested in similar structures: the collusion of the sociopolitical and the bodily, where individual hurt is remedied by social redress; and, the ideal projection of the political as a pain-free space: "The object of the nation-state in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom" (Berlant 2000, 34). Furthermore, both employ a rhetoric of sentimentality that produces a quasi prediscursive, unspeakable, but incessantly evoked body in pain, which is simultaneously interpreted as specifically "suffering from in a sovereign sentimental gesture, which grounds differences in bodies. These sentimental discourses, while evoking a universal affective core of democracy that is reproduced by pain and compassion, are closely tied to what throughout this book I have called biopolitical meanings of pain. While the previous chapters have demonstrated the historical alignments of the sentimental uses of pain and the biologizing circumscription of feeling bodies, I'd like to briefly point to recent knowledge productions within the life sciences that illustrate how topical these alliances are. Especially neuroscience, which has repeatedly engaged in the issues of torture, painful affect, and compassion or empathy,+ currently rearticulates the biopolitical meanings of "feeling" and "feeling with." George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, for example explains compassion as a "biologically" democratic feeling: We now know from the study of mirror neuron systems in the brain that empathy is physical, a capacity built into our very bodies. It is what allows us to feel what others feel and appears to be the basis for human connection and the capacity to care about others. Our native neural capacities for empathy can be strengthened by how we are raised, or it can decay when empathy is not experienced or we can be trained to develop neural circuitry to bypass natural empathy. ... I have found, in studies of largely unconscious political conceptual systems, that empathy is the basis of progressive political thought, and the basis for the very idea of social, not just individual, responsibility.. It is the same neural system that creates human connections with others. And the same neural system that lies at the heart of political democracy. Turning it off is turning off humanity, and with it democracy. (2009; my italics) Lakoff's argument updates eighteenth-century views of the "fundamental sociability of man" • (Knott 2009, 6) with neuroscience vocabulary, and crucially demonstrates how scientific knowledge can serve to introduce the terms degeneration and heredity (see ch. 3) into the doctrine of democratic affect. By constructing compassion as a "neural capacity" that can "be strengthened" by murture or "decay" when it is not experienced, Lakoff invokes-in a fusion of nature and murture, of biology and the social the family (and by extension the nation) as the primary site where the individual body's capacity for democratic sentiment is healthily cultivated, "trained" to discipline, or abjected to morbidity. While thus-in a markedly Burkean fashion (see ch. 2) the "neural body" is retained as a site of universality, factors such as education, genetic disposition, neural training, or good/bad parenting install measures of differentiation between bodies that are properly "hardwired for democratic compassion and those that are not. Similar to the calculations of civilization levels at work in mineteenth-century eugenics, these knowledge productions deploy thus primarily a biopolitics of affect and compassion, which can facilitate discriminations within the biological domain between those bodies capable of reproducing democratic affect and those that beget regressive political sensibilities. Such biologizing discourses receive their modes of differentiation and categorial clarity from popular cultural archives that also deal in questions of humanity and affect, and articulate them in the urgent modes of sentimental discourse. Without trying to relativize the important empowering successes achieved through articulations of pain and social injury, my book has aimed for a "dialectical history of promise and damage" (Seitler 2003, 83) that sheds light on the objectivist discourses fueling, and the material repercussions resulting from, the persistent connection of pain/subjectivity and compassion/democracy. My historical account of pain and its biopolitical and sentimental uses concurs with Robyn Wiegman's remark on the problematic relation between today's critical, identitarian discourse and its historical precursors. She argues that contemporary political interventions often fail to attend to the continuity between the ideology in the text and our own politics and subject positions. Accordingly, she recommends that the rethinking of historical shapes of Western constructions of humanity and culture and thus the critical arsenal of cultural studies-should be a "vehicle for shifting the frame of reference in such a way that the present can emerge as somehow less familiar, less natural in its categories, its political delineations, and its epistemological foundations" (1995, 202). My readings, which have targeted a genealogy of the systematically and politically powerful evocation of different bodies in pain- a discursive constellation I call dolorology-thus aim at defamiliarizing the rhetoric of pain and trauma common to contemporary cultural studies and democratic discourse.

Imagining Anew: Reparative Futures. In the concluding section, I discuss the guidance that the two examples discussed above can provide for churches attempting to address questions of reparations, redress, and restitution for their participation in the system of slavery in the United States. Instead of a straightforward exchange of money that does little to disrupt the existing racial and economic power dynamics between Black and white Americans, I envision repair as an extended, transformational, and relational process that affects all involved. Similarly, I argue that racism is too often seen as an issue that primarily or exclusively pertains to Black people. White Christian frameworks that have historically been used to evaluate and describe race are therefore challenged as I argue for an ethical analysis of racism that relies on relationality, materiality, and the primacy of whiteness within systems of racial capitalism. I trace parts of the history of reparations movements within churches in the interest of following the courses and developments of theological claims about reparation for the institution of chattel slavery. It is deeply instructive– for me personally, for congregations engaged in the work of repair, for local organizers of demands for repair– to better understand some of the contours of legacy and the weight of history in relation to claims for economic and racial redress in the United States. Over the last ten years, calls for reparations have grown louder and louder in the public sphere in the United States. In 2014, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations,” a long-form article exploring the histories of reparations movements in the United States, plantation capitalism’s continued exploitation of Black land and labor, and again elevating the call for reparations for racism in the national conversation.53 Cities, nonprofits, individual churches, and sometimes entire denominations are taking ethical and material stances on the issue of repair, redress, and reparations for the economic sins of white supremacy and racial capitalism. Since the widespread protests in the summer of 2020 in response to the police murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims, this reckoning with the legacies of racial and economic injustice has grown especially prominent in some Christian institutions. Because of the prominence and possibilities of such calls for repair, I see the work of this research as vital to bettering church-based reparative efforts. It matters how reparations are approached. Charity models may reify existing economic disparities without challenging the economic, political, theological, and social dynamics that have created and maintained plantation capitalism in the first place. In most of the examples of reparations programs that exist in the United States, the congregation, organization, or municipality first spends time conducting research and partaking in collective political education in order to identify specific historical legacies and ongoing instances of racial injustice, displacement, urban renewal, housing segregation, or other instances of harm in which they as a group or congregation are implicated. Many historically and majority white churches throughout the United States are engaging in collective political education and action on the issue of redress for chattel slavery and racism.54 Congregations vary in both their identifications of historical racial injustices and in their approaches towards repentance and repair. Definitions of reparations vary widely– some churches establish housing programs, some do direct payments to descendants of enslaved Africans, some make donations to nonprofits that serve the Black community, others establish pension funds for Black parishioners. These differences offer a vital point of departure for how to approach education, conversation, and action around issues of economic and racial justice. While no amount of money can undo the twin legacies of enslavement and colonization with which we live in the United States, wealth redistribution through church-based reparations programs focuses on first formally acknowledging collective responsibility for the history of wrongdoing that many white and Christian institutions have enabled in the United States. A theology of reparations based in deep solidarity needs to attend deeply to matters of the interdependence of life on earth. This task can only be done by using the tools of class analysis that does not self-reflexively or carelessly limit itself to whiteness and maleness. Rieger writes, “a theology in the Capitalocene needs to develop the theological concerns for interconnectedness and interdependence in relation to the topic of solidarity as it grows out of collective experiences of exploitation and extraction and an analysis of class.”55 While religion and theology have both been a core part of the problem of slavery, economic oppression, and ecological destruction, they have also been a key part of struggles against those same forms of oppression and exploitation. In the last chapter of their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason Moore argue for the importance of developing an intellectual and cosmological shift beyond the epistemologies and ecologies of capitalism. They argue that capitalism needs to be understood “as a world-ecology of power, capital, and nature helps us see how deeply each half of these is embedded in the other, how mightily the powerful have worked to police the sharp boundaries between them, and how forcefully those boundaries have been contested.”56 Plantation capitalism is not merely an economic system; it shapes visions of the divine, understandings of the human, and all the relationships between the human and other than human world. Patel and Moore continue in that same chapter to define “reparation ecology” as a radical vision of the future which may be able to provide for such a shift in theology, cosmology, and economy. Reparation ecology is a reimagination of the world-ecology of plantation capitalism that is grounded in addressing the material realities of its histories, which requires recognition, reparation, redistribution, reimagination, and recreation all in turn.57 While considering demands for reparations, it is important to recognize that they also include requests beyond money, namely the removal of important aspects of life (such as housing, healthcare, and education) from the totalizing conditions of the market. Reparation ecology involves reevaluating what justice, humanity, and nature all imply. Theology can be and has been developed such that theological conceptions of justice, liberation and deep solidarity create both resistance against and alternatives to the matrices of domination that are embedded in plantation capitalism. Reparative theologies should engage with histories of resistance and theories of change that think beyond the logics of plantation capitalism. Therefore, reparations are not an issue of charity, but an issue of justice. In early 2023, Peter Jarrett-Schell released the book Reparations: A Plan for Churches, which argues for the importance of reparations beyond moral imperatives. He writes that this debt should be paid, not out of obligation, but rather “for its potential to help break the Episcopal Church from the gilded shackles of white supremacy that have defined our history. Until reparations are paid, they will define our future as well.”58 The shift implied by a reparation ecology requires examining the legacies of European knowledge production within theological understandings of humanity and the divine. Dealing with questions of race, capitalism, and colonialism in an essay titled “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” Sylvia Wynter offers a challenge to her readers: she calls to find ways to ethically unsettle systems of knowledge that rationalize European coloniality and plantation capitalism while making white supremacy commonsense.59 These include theological systems, educational systems, and social systems. Reparations are one step in a larger disruption of the dominant ways of being and knowing in the world, confined by the logics of plantation capitalism. Part of the work of reparations, as understood through Patel and Moore’s conceptualization of reparative ecology, is to unsettle the commonsense interactions of capitalism: continued experiences of exploitation and extraction based on race and access to capital. Our present normative modes of collectively living in and knowing the world keep this system as is, and present the system of plantation capitalism as normal, natural, and unalterable. Research, writing, and teaching are tools to be used in the task of unsettling recursive colonial systems of knowledge and creating breaches– spaces for new ways of living in and with the world to form. Racial and economic oppression is not a natural phenomenon but rather, like the global capitalist system, is manufactured and maintained by the work of human hands. It can be undone by the work of human hands. That is what a theology of reparations calls on us to do: to engage in the process of repair, develop connections of deep solidarity, and think beyond the logics of plantation capitalism.

The great historical crimes of the last two centuries--slavery, genocide, mass internment, strategic bombing of civilian centers, Stalinist political repression, Maoist political "re-education'-mix elements of both these categories. On the one hand, these crimes exemplify the denial of their victims' humanity. Indeed, political leaders brought about many of these crimes precisely by getting the direct actors (soldiers, commissars, police, pilots) to see their victims as non-human. Either the victims' suffering simply failed to register; or the suffering was not seen as suffering at all but as a form of healthy discipline for the victims. This suggests that the mechanisms of reparative justice, namely confrontation and compensation, could be an important part of the moral reconstruction of the nation. This is part of the justification for the creation of international criminal tribunals to prosecute human rights violations and war crimes, for example, in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. And it occupies a central role in the contemporary U.S. movement for slavery reparations. Slavery's individual victims and perpetrators are long departed, but its institutional legacy lives on in many forms: mate-rially, in white-black disparities in wealth, income, and education, and socially, in white-black differences in status and vulnerability to official power. The point of reparations in this context is not, by and large, individual book-balancing, but rather mustering a national will to confront and take collective responsibility for slavery's long-term legacy.? On the other hand, often the very possibility of efforts at reparative justice only arises with a change of regimes, when many of the political leaders and direct offenders have disappeared from the scene (as well as their victims in the more lethal instances).® Confrontation in these cases will often be impossible, as will compensation for the victims them-selves. Moreover, even if the perpetrators are accessible to justice, the only legitimate sentence in cases of genocide or human rights violations will be life imprisonment. Repair of the personal relationship between victims and perpetrators is beside the point. When the relationship between perpetrators and victims is irrecoverable, the aim of reparative justice is not, strictly speaking, repair at all. It is, rather, the creation of a new political community, one less likely to create classes of victims, with a future lived in the shadow of its past. Post-war Germany's undertaking of massive reparations was aimed at restoring the lives of Holocaust survivors, and at protecting international Jewry through support of Israel; but another significant desired effect was that, in paying the reparations, the German public would be forced to accept a long-term burden of atonement. In short, gestures of repair help constitute the identity of a transforming nation. Despite the truth in Ernest Renan's famous aphorism, that forgetting lies at the heart of the nation, collective memory is also essential to the construction of a national identity.I° A chief function of reparations movements is to create and hallow a particular set of mem-ories, to restore to collective consciousness events otherwise obscured by official histories and "common sense" as defined by dominant groups. More ambitiously, a reparations movement oriented around recovery from an entire regime, as in Eastern Europe or South Africa, aims at the birth of an entirely new national consciousness. It is with such movements that the truth of Renan's observation re-emerges. He referred to the wars and conquests among peoples bitterly divided that become, in national myths, stories of ancient racial or religious unity. Reparations movements also aim, paradoxically, at instilling a forgetting, erasing an injustice and the festering resentments that resulted. The ideal of equal citizenship at the heart of democratic culture is one that can be sustained only through a forgetting of the differences in status and power that run through any nation. (In this sense, the ideal of democracy itself is a forgetting of facts of dominance and inequality, replaced by a dream of equality and the common good.) A different form of forgetting accompanies collective demands voiced by cultural or ethnic minorities who seek the return of traditional and sacred lands and buildings. Their wish is to restore a way of life made unlivable by prior regimes. Even if the land is unreturnable, for example because profaned, groups may seek money reparations to pay for rebuilding and relocation, or to try to reverse a diasporic trend by attracting former and would-be members of the group. The wish here is not for political inclusion but, to use Charles Taylor's term, recognition of the group's distinct identity and history." As Taylor argues, demands for recognition are claims of dignity, claims that the distinctive cultural formation of a group is not merely a curiosity but a splendor of the nation. Claims of recognition are, in effect, demands that members of the dominant group learn to see in a certain way; that they bring into focus the distinct normative contours of individuals or groups otherwise obscured in a nation's history of expansion, colonization, or cultural homoge-nization. This is a democratic appeal as much as an aesthetic pitch, for the claim is not (just) that a culture matters because it has produced something of beauty. Rather, a culture's beauty consists centrally in its being a presentation of its creators' humanity. Contra Joseph de Maistre, such claimants demand to be seen both as members of a nation and as (hu)mankind.'2 It follows that a dying culture's appeals are not simply calls for a new truth-telling in history, for they are invariably acts of creative nostalgia, and so are also acts of Renanian forgetting. As with the construction of national identity, so the reconstruction of a tribal identity involves an imagined past, a consolidation of tradition and ritual. Indeed, a reparative movement, whether or not successful, may be one of the only ways for a cultural group to create unity out of frag-mentation. (As I will argue below, the claim of necessity gives cultural groups priority over other claimants to reparative justice in the European context.) Across all these contexts the demand for reparations shares a common function: to demonstrate the legal and moral subjectivity of the victims. The demand for repair makes clear not just that suffering occurred, but that it was felt by a person, someone with interests akin to those of the injurer. In the political analogue to this moral point, victims seek re-inclusion in the community as moral and political agents, subjects of a universal kingdom of ends. To skeptics of moralism, the demand for repair represents a form of magical thinking according to which an actual history of subordination of the dominated to raw power can be replaced and reversed through subordination of the dominant to justice. Part of the appeal of the reparations movement is the power it gives to the claimants to determine the state of the national conscience. We need not agree with Nietzsche that morality's triumph represents victory of subterfuge over strength to see that morality does represent a form of power for the weak-indeed, to see that as its virtue. That power should breed fantasies of revenge, cloaked as demands of repair, is simply to acknowledge its attractions.

Troubling traditional understandings of capital, Robinson argues that ethnic and racial difference predates the development of modern economies. Racism was not just a convenient ordering system for Europeans to categorise non-Europeans, but instead, its “genesis is in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples” themselves (Robinson 2000:2). Capitalism and its attendant identity positions are not a radical departure from feudalism as traditional Marxists would understand it, but instead, capitalism emerged from feudalism and in a context already and everywhere infused with racialism (Bledsoe and Wright 2019; Kelley 2017). As a result, capitalism produced a world economic system “dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide” (Kelley 2017). European society was rife with difference, and these differences grafted onto changes in the political economy as feudalism gave way to mercantilism and colonialism. Thus, it becomes necessary to see race not epiphenomenally or as something outside of capital, but as central to the very making and unfolding of capital relations themselves. Robinson’s perspective is essential for understanding how and in what ways capital unfolds and for tracing its socio-spatial trajectories (Pulido 2017). First, by challenging the idea that racism can be reduced to class, racial capitalism opens space to understand a range of revolutionary movements and moments that Robinson identifies as the “Black Radical Tradition”. Defined as an “African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation” (Robinson 2000:73), the Black Radical Tradition sits outside of traditional understandings of revolutionary consciousness or conceptualization of change as driven by class solidarities or politics (Pulido 2006). The Black Radical Tradition is outside what many would understand as traditional ways of knowing (Woods 1998) and incorporates a range of practices that open space to understand various resistant traditions. Understandings of racial capitalism also challenge ideas about the emergence of racism and its connection to colonization; conceptions of race are central to the production of differentiated human value, which is a cornerstone of capitalism and its exploitative realities (Robinson 2000). As a result, “[r]ace is and always has been foundational to our economic and geopolitical order. Abroad colonialism was made possible through racial capitalism. In America white appropriation of black labor and red land provided two of the fundamental pillars of the nation’s wealth” (Ranganathan 2016:21). As we demonstrate, the contours of racial capitalism are central to understanding the unfolding of Lehman Brothers and the growth of their fortune and, ultimately, their downfall in the 2007 financial crisis. It also lays the foundation for broader work on reparations as an inherently geographical project that, by centring resistant traditions in Black radical thought, attends to abolitionist imaginaries of freedom. Third, racial difference is a cornerstone in making the “variegated landscapes that cultures and capital can exploit to create enhanced power and profits” (Puldio 2017:7). Perhaps Melamed (2015:77) has captured this imperative best when she writes, “[c]apital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups”. These inequalities are manifest in a range of socio-spatial practices and realities, and as a result, geography is central to the way racial capitalism unfolds. Focusing on how the current political economy comes to see deep poverty as a profit centre (Wilson et al. 2009) means seeing these realities not as accidental to the system, but instead central to the reproduction and expansion of the system itself. Understandings of racial capital necessarily shift discussions about what constitutes justice and equity and the limits and possibilities of traditional reparation claims. Understanding Reparations within a Geographic Framework Beginning from the starting point that “freedom is a place” (Gilmore 2017:227), we argue geography is central to projects related to reparations for the enslaved and their descendants. Focusing on geography, we argue, opens up space for a more sustained and potentially transformative practice around reparation debates (Gilbert and Williams 2020). Moving beyond the view that transatlantic slavery is confined to the past, or that reparations must solely focus on monetary remuneration, we outline an understanding that locates reparations within a Black Radical Tradition. Such a perspective expands the bounds of what counts as reparations, locating the debate within a broader framework focused on a set of interlocking and spatially grounded projects that seek to undermine the realities of racial capitalism and invest in Black communities in ways that strengthen and nurture Black institutions and landscapes. Arguing reparations must be, at its core, a freedom making enterprise focused on abolition practice, we contend that an expanded understanding of reparations that draws from abolition democracy is necessary (Du Bois 2004). Abolition praxis, at a basic level, is “resistance to organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2020). Abandonment, broadly defined, can refer to removing jobs, schools, institutions, factories, or communities’ benefits and can take various and distinct forms depending on the specific geographic conditions present in specific places and times (ibid.). As we outline, abandonment is not only central to the Lehman story, but is the key to understanding how capital works. As a result, we see abolition practice as the effort to “seek liberated life-ways through a commitment to radical place-making” (Heynen and Ybarra 2020). Radical place-making in relation to reparations is necessarily focused on the landscape and how abolition practice can resist abandonment and variegated landscapes of difference and posit new human-centred ways of being. To understand how abolition practice is central to reparations, we discuss what Katherine McKittrick (2014) describes as the “mathematics of black life”. Arguing the archival record of slavery is a “death sentence” and “a tomb to display a violated body, an inventory of property”, she documents the ways the archive, through ledgers, court documents, and other artifacts of dispossession, locates the “slave’s status as object-commodity, or purely economic cargo” thus foreclosing the slave subject’s humanity and reinforcing and affirming Blackness as always and everywhere dying (McKittrick 2014:17). This not only obscures the humanity of Black peoples but, in myriad ways, locates contemporary blackness within an anti-black knowledge framework that always and everywhere renders contemporary “black subjects as less than human” (McKittrick 2014:18). Saidiya Hartman (2008), in her work Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, argues that processes of abandonment, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002:16) describes as racism’s “death-dealing displacements”, are located within a political arithmetic begun during slavery, but that continues to impact Black communities today. In other words, the abandonment of Black humanity is not only a precondition for creating differences and naturalising the abandonment of place that is at the heart of racial capital, as we illustrate through our work on Lehman Brothers, but it is the way slavery has an afterlife, the way slavery continues to structure modern workings of racism that are central to the processes of abandonment themselves (Hartman 2008). Thus the mathematics of slavery is both “a numerical moment through which anti-blackness came to underwrite post-slave emancipation promises” and a moment that un-numerically provides “the conditions through which many Black subjectivities articulated an anti-colonial practice that did not (and cannot and does not) twin the emancipatory terms that set blackness free” (McKittrick 2014:20). The duality between the actual material realities of slavery and the cost owed to the enslaved, coupled with realities that the full cost and weight owed for slavery can never be fully calculated, sits at the heart of reparations debates. Put differently, in the years after the US Civil War, efforts to collect back wages, land redistribution schemes, and efforts to provide access to educational resources were central to debates around reparations. These efforts were grounded in a kind of mathematics of redistribution that sought to make good on centuries of stolen labour and the reality that slavery had left large swaths of African American communities devoid of financial capital. Building on the insights of Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman, respectively, we argue a limit to this kind of calculation, used to compute, understand and determine a kind of actuarial accrual of wrong that animates much of the historical and contemporary understanding of reparations for the enslaved. These accountings largely leave untouched the violences inherent in a system built through anti-Black racism. As McKittrick (2014:16) argues, the accounting that stands in for traditional understandings of reparations is “filled with bodies that can only come into being vis-à-vis racial-sexual violence; the documents and ledgers and logs that narrate the brutalities of this history give birth to new world blackness as they evacuate [or to use Gilmore’s term abandon] life from blackness”. Hartman (2008) argues that the end of slavery did not bring freedom, but instead brought other modes of unfreedom into being, including incarceration, new forms of colonialism, Jim Crowism as well as the continuation of processes that obscure black humanity and central to anti-Black racism. Moreover, we argue the contemporary mathematics of reparations fails to articulate, much less directly address, the continued ways that racial capital is left inscribed in the landscape, and how racial capitalism has been reiterated through processes of abandonment and the creation of variegated landscapes of difference that come to reinforce anti-Black racism and the workings of white subjectivities (Hartman 2008; Sharpe 2010). Sharpe (2010:4) notes that, within contemporary frameworks on race, Black bodies become the knowledge bearers of abandonment, whereas white bodies are marked through an “exuberant freedom”. The duality of this dilemma, the latent spatialisations of slavery, which McKittrick (2013) points out in her work on plantation futures, and the layered and ongoing spatial manifestations of racial capitalism, which rest uneasily within and amidst each other in the current political and spatial moment, pose questions for reparative geographical approaches that cannot be dealt with enumeratively. As our work on Lehman Brothers documents and as Gilmore notes, racial capitalism is always multi-scaled and multi-dimensional. Therefore the growth of racial capitalism within the US is tied to much larger global trade processes; the foundation stones of racialised inequity in the US are always and everywhere local and global. Further, the ongoing processes of racial capitalism represented so chillingly in the ongoing violence against Black bodies, the realities of Covid-19, and the concentration of deaths within communities of colour, as well as the continued practices of voter suppression and displacement, amongst other examples, point to the need for reparations to deal with the brutal systems of racism and white supremacy still at work in enumerating, marking and spatialising differences. A geographical case for reparations, therefore, we argue, is both spatial and temporal. It raises questions not only about how to identify the interlocking ways that white supremacy works at different geographical scales and times but most importantly, is focused on strengthening and supporting those knowledge systems and practices that animate Black freedom movements and which are foundational to the freedom aspirations of Black peoples within the US. Finally, enumerative approaches to reparations have failed to recognise and respond to the myriad ways that Black people within the United States had and did resist slavery and efforts to undermine and erase Black humanity. The “embodied cultural practice of resistance” (Wright 2020:1137) found within Black communities and institutions forged a politics of resistance that not only was life-affirming but was central to the development of radical abolition politics that helped to destroy the institution of slavery itself. We argue that this focus, the resistance to erasure, needs to be central to the creation of radical politics that centre practices of reparative justice. To illustrate the geographic imperative of reparations and abolition democracy we now turn towards a discussion of the Lehman brothers.

Haunting If we think of the petrochemicals as coming to tell us stories, to communicate their inhuman messages, we might also be invited to think about oil as a kind of grand-kin, highlighting the connection of our life force now with the lives of those long-dead organisms that appear as oil. But these more-than-human relations have been unearthed, weaponized. These are not easy relations but rather ones that disturb multiple boundaries of time, memory, the living, and the dead. Oil could be invited, as Zoe Todd asserts, as a reminder of the ancient life that came before ours, that is still a part of us, that makes our lives possible through intergenerational knowledge, through a deep indebtedness to our ancestors, through evolution. Recognizing these long-dead organisms, feeling their vibrancy, could be an invitation to a profound sense of interconnection. But these organisms have been unearthed from their resting place without their consent. As Todd writes, “To turn the massive stores of carbon and hydrogen left from eons of life in this place, weaponises these fossil-kin, these long-dead beings, and transforms them into threats to … the ‘narrow conditions of existence,’ which Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear reminds us we are bound to.” Instead of an invitation into an evolutionary and intergenerational acknowledgment of the ways that our lives are made possible through the knowledge and creativity of so many others, human and other-than-human alike, we have turned these potential grand-kin against themselves. They appear as specters, all their compressed time and stores of energy unloosed to wreak havoc on the living. In a brilliant article, Eve Tuck and C. Ree compare the different versions of haunting and ghost stories in American and Japanese films. They note that in America the narrative asserts the possibility of appeasement. As long as the protagonist does the right thing, the vengeful ghost will rest at last. Once the innocent hero destroys the monster, balance will again be restored to the world. In the Japanese films, on the other hand, the ghost often cannot be appeased, and “the hero does not think herself to be innocent, or try to achieve reconciliation or healing, only mercy, often in the form of passing on the debt.” Instead, people are forced simply to live with these ghosts. Tuck and Ree use these two genres of horror films to talk about two different approaches to settler colonialism. In the American version of the ghost story, the settler is an innocent bystander incomprehensibly attacked by a specter that will not leave them alone. We could read this as the continuing demands for land back, reparations, or abolition that fall on the uncomprehending ears of white settlers, or the narrativization of white fragility that includes death paranoia. The Japanese narrative describes something else. It describes a reckoning with the total violence of slavery and settler colonialism. It describes the way that there is no resolution or reconciliation, only the possible hope of mercy. It describes a temporality that is indeterminate, that refuses progression, and instead asks us to sit with what has been done, understanding that the harms committed are permanent, the lives taken cannot be returned. Tuck and Ree continue: “Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop.” This understanding of the ongoing and insistent legacies of plastic as an extension of the ecology of white supremacy functions precisely “in its refusal to stop.” For the toxicities unearthed through plastic are not going away. The examples of southern Louisiana and the photographic practices that have also etched their marks in Rochester, New York tell of the ways that this haunting plays out in particular forms. Black and low-income communities are left with a devastating mess, a place that is no longer their place, a grief that has set into the land without a clear sense of how to clean up or move on. Plastic’s increasing production mean that these harms will become more commonplace. Instead of turning away in horror or fear, plastic’s multiple and conflicting temporalities need to be taken seriously. Settlers need to learn the lessons of haunting, even as we are being haunted by this material that refuses to let us go. Full reparation here, carrying the meaning of the attempts to repair and also the desire to account for immeasurable loss and violence, is impossible. This does not mean that we should not be held accountable; on the contrary— accountability or reckoning may appear as a haunting. For we, white people, are certainly not innocent. Instead of moving so quickly to evade the present, producing times that circle violently forward and back, what would it mean to sit with this refusal, this total violence, white supremacy? What might we learn if we listened to what these chemical media were transmitting? Under the conditions of white supremacy, knowledge systems and institutions are not well versed to be attuned to these hauntings, to all that has been lost. This is especially true because the social is built on the disappearance of those losses, but these memories, these hauntings and losses, give us a much richer sense of our present moment and offer a different, I would argue, decolonial, knowledge. For haunting involves a “transformative recognition” rather than “cold knowledge.” To make a world otherwise will only be possible when we face what has been lost. For haunting is an animated state where this violence is making itself known. It is a forced seeing, sensing feeling of that which has been repressed, excluded, or forced out. Through the commingling of ancient beings with raced and classed bodies, this violence comes to the fore, as a refusal to stop. Avery Gordon, in her account of haunting, points to its strange potentiality: “To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its utopian grace.” This is a utopian grace barely recognizable as such, an opening that offers little safety but potentially some solace through lines of relation that open onto ancestors, those to come, and the more-than-human world.

Indeed the fate of minority property has been perhaps the major impediment in the study of intercommunal relations in the late 19th and early 20th Eastern Mediterranean. As Maryline Crivello points out, this has led to the formulation of exclusive national narratives reinforced by insecurities related to the recently established –and therefore still contested- homogeneity of Mediterranean nations and the legitimacy of their states.103 In other words, any explicit reference to the illegitimate ways in which property belonging to other ethnic minorities is perceived by officially-sanctioned histories as a threat to the legitimacy of the nation-state itself. But “[c]ontrary to the ordered memory of the archive,” as Iain Chambers writes, “to the filed away names, events, and explanations, there is the persistent murmur of a world whose insistent ‘noise’ betrays the order that seeks to regulate, and in the end, remove it.”104 More and more researchers have indeed chosen to pay attention to this “murmur,” override the various forms of cultural or sometimes legal censorship to explore the dissonance, throughout the region, between nationalist narratives and unofficial or marginal memories. Recent work on the confiscation of Armenian property by the Young Turks and the Turkish Republic or that of Muslim and later Jewish property in Salonica/Thessaloniki by the Greek state highlight the often denied destructive nature of nation-state formation around the Mediterranean following the gradual collapse of the Ottoman Empire.105 Rebecca Bryant’s research on post-intercommunal conflict Cyprus also reveals the often very material foundations of what she calls the “partition of memory” between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Property seized, Bryant notes, is never fully appropriated by its new owners; it is a site without a past or rather with a hidden past that resists any attempt at obfuscation. And so, “these remains of history become history’s remainders, pieces in a past that do not fit, and hence reminders of a past that is unfinished and so capable of molding the present in new and unexpected ways.”107 Indeed, by directly confronting the selective amnesias of official histories, such work highlights the political difficulty in writing about intercommunal relations in the modern period. Whether scholarly or meant for a broader readership, these studies also underscore the corrupting effects of denial on tolerance to diversity, supposed to be the bedrock of contemporary democratic polities. Yet this paper suggests that the violence that put an end to erstwhile multicultural settings -and its consolidation through property transfers- is not the only reason behind “partitions of memory” and the production of soliloquous narratives in the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed a careful reading of our sources seems to suggest that interactions across communal lines were tenuous and formal long before the trauma of separation. To return to our Rodesli testimonies, there seems to be a genuine element of surprise at the fact that certain Greeks applauded the 1944 deportations or, on the contrary, at the readiness of Muslim families to provide shelter to persecuted Jews. Indeed, if the deportations revealed anything about intercommunal relations in Rhodes, it is that the island’s different communities seemed to have known little about one another. To the extent that Rhodes may be considered as an emblematic case in the Eastern Mediterranean, this observation does call for a corrective to that quintessentially Mediterranean trope, “cosmopolitanism,” which is often considered to have characterized pre-national Eastern Mediterranean regions. Of course this notion of a pre-national cosmopolitanism, coterminous with a post-Braudelian understanding of the Mediterranean, has been undergoing sustained critique for the past thirty years.109 Mostly research has been concerned with an uncritical usage of the notion of cosmopolitanism, impervious to the power relations that enabled an economically and politically privileged elite to be “cosmopolitan,” that is, to entertain a semicolonial, cross-cultural sociability at the expense of a local, poorer, and as a consequence culturally much less fluid population.110 What our sources do suggest, is how speculative it is to assign any a priori quality to pre-national cross-cultural interactions. Establishing that different religious groups coexisted for a long period of time in a specific location is not sufficient to allow us to infer anything about the nature of their mutual relations. And so we find ourselves facing the central question running through this paper: how do we use soliloquous sources to imagine past societies defined by their cultural diversity without falling in the trap of invoking “multiculturalism” or “cosmopolitanism”? 111Interestingly, in seeking to grasp an intercommunal past without reverting to idealized references to cosmopolitanism, many students of the Eastern Mediterranean invoke the “ghosts” of past –deported or annihilated- communities in any given setting, from mainland Greece to Anatolia, through Cyprus and Israel and Palestine. This figure of the ghost, which literally pervades the literature on the region, is meant to evoke the violence of the destruction of a given community and the lingering signs of its erstwhile existence in the built environment, oral testimonies and traditions and in documents. The ghost becomes both a metaphor for, and the witness of, vanished culturally diverse societies.112 Overall however, the “ghost” in this literature remains a rhetorical figure rather than a proper analytical concept. A major reference in helping us shoring up the analytical purchase of the figure of the ghost is Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In this series of lectures aimed to devise a hauntology as an approach and a method able to address what Derrida considers to be some of the innate flaws of ontology and phenomenology, the author writes that all hegemonic discourses –historical and otherwise- necessitate in their formulation the concealment of signs that contradict their unifying principle.118 But because these repressed traces can never be suppressed, they permanently haunt and threaten univocal narratives.119 To break out of this logic leading to ever more coarse devices used against the stubborn presence of ghosts, it is necessary, according to Derrida, to learn to live with them, in their companionship, how to “talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech,”120 to allow them to “work” and make us work.121 For the purposes of this paper, this means acknowledging that the sheer existence of apparently incommensurable sources dealing with the same events force us to forsake, in our own accounts, any unifying principle –such as characterizes “collective memories”- and accept to “gather under a single roof the apparently disordered plurivocity”122 of different recollections. As a reading and writing technique this would require a bold departure from the time-honoured “synthesis”: the goal would thus no longer be to use one discourse as a corrective to the other with a view to finding a presumably more plausible version of the past. Indeed proceeding in such a way would not resolve the basic problem of competitive memory inherent in the very production of the sources; the brittle consensual memory established in this manner would not resist long before temptations to restore a “hierarchy of suffering” that seems to be congenital in much of the historiography of the Eastern Mediterranean. Instead, the various sources at hand should be treated on equal –and “disjointed”- terms, an approach respectful of their difference.

III. INTERESTS IN “SLAVERY” AND IN SLAVERIES OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE The Black Diaspora has interests in the word “slavery” and in slaveries of the past, present, and future. The ongoing legacy of diasporic enslavement gives a special status to Diasporic Blacks regarding matters of slavery. The Word “Slavery” My exploration of Black interests in slavery challenges the (mis)appropriation and (mis)use of “slavery” and the ways in which it is used to diminish understanding of and remove attention from Diasporic Black ancestral slavery and its continued legacies. I question the use of the word “slavery” where it is used to restrict the gaze to only the subset of severe forms of exploitation that elicit official outrage and funding and whose exposure serves the interests of the powerful, while ignoring endemic forms of exploitation in which states and economic, political, and social structures are involved and complicit.47 The inherited status embedded in genotype and phenotype and ongoing multigenerational trauma give to Diasporic Blacks a quasiownership interest in the word “slavery” as it is used in contemporary global society. Blacks have a particular interest in that use, rooted in the double-edged psychological harm of either remembering or not remembering (or misremembering) their ancestors’ slavery. Ancestral enslavement can be honored, and the Diaspora’s survival celebrated fully, only when the descendants are enjoying the fruits of freedom. The descendants experience psychological harm from hearing the word “slavery” as it is increasingly bandied about in the media, official reports, and everyday conversation. That harm stems from invocation of the dehumanization of Diasporic ancestors and reminders that the ancestors’ subordinated and exploited status was transmitted to and inherited by their descendants, including contemporary descendants. The psychological harm is intensified when the word is used instrumentally and superficially to appear to address contemporary forms of exploitation, while ignoring the ongoing harmful experiences of ancestral enslavement, including racism and its consequences. Already conflicted about remembering and honoring ancestral experiences, Diasporic Blacks now witness the contemporary exploitation of their ancestors’ experiences in the past, even while their own subordination (and, perhaps, enslavement48) is normalized in the dominant culture.49 “Slaveries” Contemporary reality is the legacy of the past and connects the past and the future. That legacy shapes perceptions, actions, and policies today and, unless challenged, reframed, and disrupted, will (mis)shape our futures. Black interests in slaveries include more widespread and knowledgeable individual, societal, and institutional understanding of and structural reckoning with both Diasporic ancestors’ exploitation as chattel slaves and the legacies of that exploitation in the present. Understanding and reckoning would entail, among other things, recognition of the globally relevant foundational nature of transatlantic slavery,50 including unearthing, connecting, and shining a light upon ancestral enslavement’s relationship to contemporary experiences, as well as identifying and warning about the prospectively damaging future legacies in order to disrupt their transmission to our descendants. To fulfill and implement these interests necessitates institutional (policy) and individual (interpersonal) recognition of the unique nature of the 400-year-long enslavement of Africans in the Western Hemisphere. This requires, for example, recognizing the unprecedentedly successful “innovation” of permanent subordination that was achieved through the intended and ongoing permanence of enslavement and enslaveability (signaled by dark skin and African genetic and racial heritage)51 and the depersonalization and dehumanization of human beings through imposition of positive law.52 Engagement with “slaveries” demands acknowledgement of the essential role played by positive law in service to economic and political empowerment of Western empires and in support of the lasting legacies of those empires. We must analyze the movement away from the dominance of natural law theories to the triumph of positivism and its use to construct permanent legal subordination and transmute human persons into chattel property.53 Past—Knowing and Understanding In an earlier article, I stated: “We should learn from the past, and not merely exploit it for emotional gain.”54 In the present, we must learn about and engage with historic slavery, including responding to the concept of whether “slavery” ever ended or, instead, endlessly evolves and mutates in place and time. The Role and Impact of Slavery Black interests in the past are centered around knowing and understanding ancestral enslavement in order to reclaim the humanity of enslaved Black ancestors and provide the means of challenging negative contemporary legacies. A central pillar of Black interests in slaveries is the incorporation of deeper contextualized knowledge of history and understanding of the constructed nature of our default perceptions and norms. This requires engagement with and deep inquiry into the who, when, what, where, and why of transatlantic enslavement, in all of its complexity. The inquiry goes beyond superficial knowledge and understanding of historic slavery. From a deeper knowledge of our ancestors’ chattel slavery, and its causes and contexts, and appreciation for transatlantic slavery as a fundamental and intrinsic part of the Industrial Revolution, Diasporic Blacks will gain and share a deeper understanding of the ways in which ancestral exploitation was founded upon economic imperatives of global labor demands, resource exploitation, and wealth creation and concentration. Knowledge of history and of slavery’s role in creating the powerful institutions and power structures of today will provide tools to reject perceptions of intrinsic racial subordination—so will understanding of the ways in which slavery was integral to the economic, social, cultural, and political structures upon which New World colonization relied and slavery’s role in facilitating Western colonization and Western monopolization of global resources. Claiming the Ancestor Ancestors experienced the theft of their persons, their children, the fruits of their labor, and their descendants’ futures and future prosperity. Black interests in slaveries past include reclaiming the humanity of their ancestors. To do so, Blacks must recognize that transatlantic slavery took place within the context of a brutal world. Transatlantic slavery arose and became a dominant form of exploitation in an era of many forms of contemporaneous exploitation (i.e., slaveries) that would fit within contemporary definitions of human trafficking and of “modern forms of slavery.”55 These included systems of serfdom in some European countries, British press gangs that kidnapped individuals to become sailors aboard British Navy vessels, public executions, Barbary piracy, and the permanent deportation by English authorities of their fellow English persons convicted of minor offenses into virtual slavery across the globe (first the American colonies, then Australia).56 The “innovation” of transatlantic slavery and a major cause of its ongoing negative effects is the permanence of the subjugation and exploitation enabled by the dark skin color and African features of Africans and their descendants. Role of Law Laws shape default understanding of human and other interactions. International law was conceptualized and structured to permit and facilitate slavery, as well as colonize and exploit non-Europeans.57 The dominance and longevity of the transatlantic slave trade was made possible by the triumph of positive law over natural law.58 Black de jure and de facto demotion from persons to quasi- and non-persons through the mechanism of legal enactments and interpretations,59 as well as customary practices,60 led to the entrenchment of quasi- and nonpersonhood in historic and contemporary social and cultural norms and mores. Pursuant to the concepts of positivism, enforceable law was produced only through the enactments of human legislators and entities, not pursuant to natural laws—rights and obligations inhering in all humanity that were superior to the enactments of sovereigns and legislators. As a result, since no natural law mandated recognition of nonwhite humanity and legal personhood, neither the prior occupation of territory nor the equal humanity of non-Europeans had to be recognized and protected. It is through the conveniently expanding dominance of theories of positive law that the non-European indigenous people of the world were dispossessed of their territories, personhood, and labor. It is through the power of positive law that the humanity and rights of nonEuropean “others,” including Africans, could be ignored, circumscribed, and then eliminated. Social and cultural reactions to the legal reordering of humanity gave full permission for and implemented the dehumanization of Africans, Native Americans, and Asians. Economic might earned through the industrialization fueled by slave trade proceeds61 funded expansion into other areas of the globe. Military conquest and use of force were the de facto mechanisms that allowed the imposition of legal non-personhood.62 Cognitive Dissonance and Racial Discrimination Black interests in slaveries include the imperative to understand the origins and nature of racism in the individual countries where the Black Diaspora resides. Although hostility to the outsider appears to be rooted in human DNA, with a seemingly automatic “us versus them” heritage of humanity’s tribal past, anti-Black racism has a special place in contemporary global life. American and Western European anti-black racism and its enduring virulence was entrenched by the cognitive dissonance engendered by the contradictions between the Enlightenment era’s theories and soaring language about human equality and the de facto dehumanization of fellow human beings. Commitment to the economic and power benefits of African enslavement, however, demanded that White Americans and Europeans construct a rationale and theoretical foundation that legitimized the exploitation of Africans. That theoretical foundation was and continues to be racism. AntiBlackness was built on a scaffolding of legal mechanisms that extinguished African humanity in the eyes of Western law and transmuted Africans and those of African descent into chattel beasts and the normative consequences of those laws on individual, social, and institutional mores.63 From working side by side with Africans while in conditions of indentured servitude, lower-class whites’ status rose inevitably with their acceptance and support of the legislative, physical, and psychological theft of their former companions’ legal personhood and humanity. The scientific racism that undergirded Europeans’ theoretical understanding of their place in the world during much of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries was another reaction to that cognitive dissonance, one that facilitated acceptance of the permanent enslavement and inferiority of Africans and their descendants.64 The legacies of the construction of anti-Black racism continue to be experienced worldwide today. The historic dehumanization of the dark other lay the groundwork for contemporary forms of exploitation and the default expectations of inferiority and subordination of non-whites and created and structured the vulnerabilities that give rise to contemporary forms of exploitation. Present—Today’s Slaveries: Identification and Placement in Historical Context Contemporary systems of Black subordination and human exploitation are the progeny of transatlantic slavery and the concentration of wealth and power that founded the modern world. Black interests in the present include identifying contemporary slaveries and mapping their relationship to ancestral enslavement. The forms of exploitation that have elicited concern and contemporary use of the word “slavery” include, for example, sexual exploitation of women and minors, coerced and indebted labor, child labor, and underage marriage. Those efforts and condemnations have been focused on individual private actors and the wrongdoings of transnational organized crime syndicates. For the most part, the slaveries that states, NGOs, and other activists seek to eliminate turn a blind eye to contemporary slaveries committed and facilitated by state actors—today’s black slaveries. Today’s Black Slaveries? Blacks are pathologized and criminalized throughout legacy slave societies and in the broader global structure. Members of the Black Diaspora are the target of institutional racial subordination in all aspects of their contemporary existence. They experience the subordination from birth through death and include, among other things, health disparities (such as medical apartheid),65 housing segregation, and criminalized existence (e.g., mass incarceration66 and unlawful killings). The Black Diaspora’s criminalized existence is perhaps the starkest example of today’s black slaveries. Black life is policed such as to facilitate the continued weight of the state, which, even after the legal abolition of slavery, has continued to take the lead in facilitating enslavement and exploitation in accordance with positive law. This includes, for example, traffic stops and unlawful killings.67 United States law enforcement shoot and kill unarmed black persons at a high rate.68 High profile shootings include the killings of Michael Brown, Philando Castille, and Tamir Rice.69 If indicted, officers are usually found not guilty.70 It is Blackness and its permanent link to ancestral enslavement that is the key. In one of the latest of such incidents, a Black immigrant from the Caribbean was shot and killed by a white officer who claimed to have mistakenly entered his apartment, believing that it was hers.71 Consider also the killing of African immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999.72 His black skin, and its presence and meanings in the United States, not ancestral enslavement, made him law enforcement prey. Although the state constructs, implements, and polices the contemporary iterations of Black slaveries, private actors also play their role in policing the lines of subordination, unbelonging, and quasipersonhood.73 White-identified U.S. residents’ roles have been exposed through the prevalence of cell phones and the dissemination of video images through social media that show in vivid color their policing of Black subordination (“living while Black”). These incidents include going to Starbucks while Black, sleeping in one’s own college dorm while Black, barbequing while Black, selling lemonade while Black, and renting an Airbnb while Black.74 Diasporic Blacks and the societies in which they live subordinated lives need to understand and treat these as part of a systemic legacy, not as disaggregated singular acts driven only by individual animus. Exploration of Black interests in today’s slaveries reveals the need to focus on linking the slaveries identified as part of the anti-human trafficking movement and today’s Black slaveries. Isolated attempts to combat a subset of severe forms of contemporary exploitation can yield only superficial results. The real work of contemporary anti-slavery is to unearth the historic roots of vulnerability, map their relationship to contemporary structures and cultures of exploitation, dispel the foundations of the racist ideologies, and apply pressure to the structures. Additional Consequences It is time to acknowledge the ways in which slavery harms both the descendants of the enslaved and of the enslaver. Those tools of subordination of members of the Black Diaspora have had far-reaching effects and have also swept in poor whites. State and private mechanisms deployed to subordinate Blacks can be, and have been, used to subordinate other groups. Acceptance of and participation in the targeting of Blackness is linked to the targeting of other groups. This includes the imposition on them of some of the economic disadvantages intended to target Blacks. For example, poor housing policies may target Blacks but also have consequences for economically disadvantaged whites.75 Other examples include anti-Blackness social welfare policies that have negative consequences for and increase the vulnerability of persons of all racial and ethnic origins.76 Contemporary structures depend on exploitation of racial animus to gain and maintain support of lower-class whites for policies that are against their interests. They play a role in policing the boundaries of human and non-human through the reproduction and innovation of laws and social norms whose origin is transatlantic slavery. Future—Disruption A fundamental interest of the Black Diaspora is universal liberation from the current and future negative legacies of ancestral enslavement. Negative effects of historic and contemporary slaveries will continue to fall most heavily on the Black Diaspora and other people of color and affect our descendants. Black interests in future slaveries focus on disrupting and challenging the engrained racist assumptions of Black inferiority built into contemporary global structures. If we unearth the relationships among contemporary slaveries, historic slaveries, and today’s Black slaveries, the vulnerability of people of all races and genders reveals that discrimination and racial hatred is both a product of and justification for enslavement and exploitation. Knowledge about historic slavery and its contemporary legacies will contribute to the fight against future slavery and can be used to disrupt the negative legacies. This will be attained through enriched and more widespread understanding of law and its limitations. Law and the legal system created and policed slavery and exploitation—and continue to do so today. However, contemporary legal prohibition of slavery coexists with state and private systems that facilitate exploitation. We must uncover the ways in which laws and private behavior create a web of vulnerability and disadvantage. Today’s Black slaveries are the canary in the coal mine: they reveal the inadequacy of legal prohibition, where innovative laws are adopted, interpreted, and implemented to continue the subordination. They reveal the intricate interweaving of legal, economic, cultural, and social actions that create a web of subordination and contemporary exploitation. Other similar webs that ensnare the vulnerable of any race will be more easily identified through methodologies adopted to disrupt future Black slaveries. Lastly, will the prevalence and identification of the severe forms of contemporary enslavements lead toward an understanding of a global humanity that could challenge the conceptual foundations of white racial supremacy? That is, if anyone can be enslaved or exploited, no matter race, ethnicity, national origin, or other origin, might the foundational concepts of racial superiority and inferiority be shaken? IV. CONCLUSION In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela said: “The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. . . . I kn[o]w as well as I kn[o]w anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.”77 The present is the child of the past and the parent of the future. For Diasporic Blacks, the sacred charge from the past (the ancestors) and to the future (the descendants) demands understanding and acknowledgement of the legacy of the past in the present and acknowledgement that the seeds of the future lie in our actions today. We are all “slaves” to the past, unless we can disrupt the transmission of its legacy into the future. The acknowledgement of Black interests, inclusion of Diasporic voices and their insights into the contemporary anti-exploitation discourse and design, and implementation of structural anti-exploitation and anti-subordination policies are essential to a systemic and structured fight against severe forms of contemporary exploitation. Knowledge about slavery’s past and its relationship to contemporary systems of exploitation can lead to disruption of those legacies in the future.

Conditions of domination and exploitation that reach further into the past, however, are also extended into the present of bad debt through subprime loans that are difficult to repay. 59 Dispossession by slavery, and the prevention of ownership of property and other assets by ‘freed people’, remain at the root of the asymmetrical economic relations of debt in the present. A repetitive white moral discourse inculpates non-white borrowers as being responsible for their own plight and therefore ‘not credit worthy’, which was what caused them to (again) take on unpayable debts and live beyond the means allotted to them.60 This unpayable guilt/debt is ascribed to debtors through sexist-racist constructions of subordination and lack, thus rendering invisible the entanglement of capitalism and racism in slavery and colonialism. In this discourse, the racially marked body is not allowed to fully cultivate the subjectivation that a loan contract demands. Endless indebtedness corresponds to the status of being not-yet-white; in the white ideology of superiority, work on the ‘black’ self always falls short of the white norm.61 And this was precisely what allowed financial profit to be made from subprime loans. Already with the end of slavery in the US in 1865, freedom and recognition as a self-responsible subject capable of entering into contracts was not an instant right, but something that freed people had to prove themselves worthy of. Corresponding to the Latin meaning of the word emancipatio, emancipation literally meant being discharged from the hand (manus) of the pater familias, the slave-holder, to be set free by him. In this logic, distinct from the logic of white self-liberation as a sovereign act, former slaves became freed people, but not free people.62 Even after 300 years of enslavement, whites still feared that black workers, supposedly characterized by sluggishness and laziness, would not comply with a capitalist production system based on free labour and possessive individualism. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman has shown how, by means of advice books first and foremost, freed slaves were to be trained and disciplined as free workers.63 In order to counter the refusal to become a working subject capable of signing contracts, white discourse promoted a ‘willingness to endure hardships, which alone guaranteed success, upward mobility and the privileges of citizenship’.64 In fact, coercion and violence were the more usual means of compelling freed people to sign labour contracts and subject themselves to labour discipline, means that went far beyond those used in capitalist labour relations otherwise, and that were predicated on inequalities created by racist conditions of domination. The subordination demanded of the former enslaved workers marked the continuities between slavery and freedom. As emancipated persons made competent to sign contracts, of necessity they had to behave in accordance with liberal individualism as both dutiful subordinates and rational, self-responsible individuals.65 Particular to the racist ambivalence of subordination and freedom, however, was its basis in the construction of the guilt and debt of emancipation, which meant that there was no prospect of freed people ever achieving the ideal autonomy of white heterosexual masculinity. The freedom granted by the whites was seen as a gift from the ‘benefactors’ to the enslaved, for which they needed to demonstrate gratitude and worthiness, and which put them in debt to the whites, making them guilty and increasing the compulsion to discipline. ‘The burden of debt, duty and gratitude [was] foisted onto the newly emancipated in exchange or repayment for their freedom.’66 In the entanglement of autonomy and (self-)responsibility, the white ‘investment of faith’ was viewed as moral debt to be paid back, as an investment which the involuntary ‘borrowers’ had to prove themselves worthy of through sustained repayment. ‘To be free was to be a debtor – that is, obliged and duty-bound to others.’67 This racist guilt/loan relationship is upheld by the linking of guilt/debt and time. The freed were bound to the past by means of an indebtedness for their freedom, because as free(d) autonomous individuals they were now made responsible for the deeds attributed to them, including ones from the past. Should they fail, the concessions could be revoked. This temporality of guilt/debt is a linear time that assures compliant behaviour. It binds the present to the past and grafts a present full of deprivation onto the promise of becoming a worthy and respected citizen some day in the future.68 According to this cynical logic, the ‘freed people’s’ guilt/debt for emancipation continues to bind them even today, in an inverted responsibility to the past: the lasting individualized guilt/debt enables the construction of a white national innocence and widespread amnesia with regard to slavery. 69 This racist bad-loan logic supports the construction of white superiority, for which repayment of the loan can never end. For the whites, it is a necessarily non-returnable debt. The white guilt/debt discourse demands of its others a double subjection: selfdiscipline as a free(d) subject and the affirmation of eternal guilt in relation to white superiority, driven by the promise of and desire for future independence, for a freedom which releases one from social connections. For this reason, too, credit is asocial and uninterested in care.

S.V.H. — But I think there's a certain integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider obscene: the attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually the project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1970s, who were trying to locate the agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration, as if there was a space you could carve out of the terrorizing state apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in particular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was an argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of looking at the status of the slave. F.W. — That's very interesting, because it's something I've been thinking about also in respect to Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon suggests that Gramsci breaks down hegemony into three categories: influence, leadership, and consent.5 Maybe we could bring the discussion back to your text then, using the examples of Harriet Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,7 a white anti-slavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this. Now, what's really interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only explain how the positionality of black women and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness disarticulates the notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You write: "[BJeing forced to submit to the will of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery" (5, 110). In other words, the female slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fungible object, which is to say that she is ontologically different than a white woman who may, as a house servant or indentured laborer, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this case, sex] is required to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option. . . . Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very notion of subjectivity is predicated upon the negation of will" (5, 111). S.V.H. — Once again, trying to fit into the other's shoes becomes the very possibility of narration. In the chapter "A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl's Life," the question for Jacobs is how she can tell her story in a way that's going to solicit her white readership when she has to efface her very condition in order to make that story intelligible to them. I look at this messy moment as kind of a vortex in Jacobs' narrative, where in order to fashion herself as a desiring subject, she has to deny the very violence, which elsewhere she said defines her position as a slave: her status as a thing and the negation of her will. In one sense, she has to bracket that so she can tell a story about sexuality that's meaningful in a white dominant frame. And I think this is why someone like Hortense Spillers raises the question of whether gender and sexuality are at all applicable to the condition of the captive community.8 That's what I was working with there, that impossibility or tension between Jacobs as an agent versus the objective conditions in which she finds herself. This is something you talk about in your work as well, this existence in the space of death, where negation is the captive's central possibility for action, whether we think of that as a radical refusal of the terms of the social order or these acts that are sometimes called suicide or self-destruction, but which are really an embrace of death. Ultimately it's about the paradox of agency for those who are in these extreme circumstances. And basically, there are very few political narratives that can account for that. F.W. —And we have to ask why. In my own work, obviously I'm not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the trajectory of our life (within our terrain of civil death) is bound up in claiming — sometimes individually, sometimes collectively — the violence which Fanon writes about in The Wretched of the Earth, that trajectory which, as he says, is "a splinter to the heart of the world"9 and "puts the settler out of the picture."10 So, it doesn't help us politically or psychologically to try to find ways in which how we live is analogous to how white positionality lives, because, as I think your book suggests, whites gain their coherence by knowing what they are not. There is tremendous diversity on the side of whiteness and tremendous conflict between white men and white women, between Jews and gentiles, and between classes, but that conflict, even in its articulation, has a certain solidarity. And I think that solidarity comes from a near or far relation to the black body or bodies. We give the nation its coherence because we're its underbelly.11 S.V.H. — That's what's so interesting for me about Achille Mbembe's work, the way he thinks about the position of the formerly colonized subject along the lines of the slave as an essential way of defining the predicament. Essentially, he says, the slave is the object to whom anything can be done, whose life can be squandered with impunity.12 F.W. — And he's suggesting that what it means to be a slave is to be subject to a kind of complete appropriation, what you call "property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and nefarious uses of slave property" and then demonstrates how "there was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery" (5, 24). So. Not only are formally enslaved blacks property, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibility of becoming property is one of the essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intriguing about your argument is the way in which you demonstrate how not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the property of white enjoyment, but so is — and this is really key — the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that too belongs to white people.13

In the nether regions of the indigo plantation, Black bodies may merge/ mate with plants and create the commodity dye. Black bodies as hybrid plant bodies assume another level of nonnormative and nonhuman sexual excess when situated within the context of the emergence of modern sexu- ality. Black open, porous bodies both traffic within discourses of sexuality as slippery, wet, and always open and transgress the purview of the sexual. The Black enslaved body embedded within ecotonal processes that tropi- calize the landscape of the plantation present new racial and sexual coordi- nates of human alterity. Black bodies (at the place of the pore) are gender- less, sensual, penetrable, sexual, fecund, and boundless in ways that queer theory cannot give an account. Attending to flesh/pores at their encounter with the pores of indican moves into proximity with the ways that Spillers “breaks” the gender speci- ficity of Black flesh under enslavement. The ostensibly male slaves who par- ticipated in indigo processing were susceptible to the same kind of stain- ing, abjection, and sometimes death (likened to cancer) related to toxic exposure as “female flesh unprotected.” At the level of pores, the Black bodies in Dash’s movie and those working the indigo on the map are un- gendered by their capacity for porosity and functioning as sites of tran- sit for chemicals. In fact, gender ambiguity and genderlessness (or the un- gendering of the captive) is part of the reason that Blackness gets scripted out of coherent human genres.47 These indigo Black bodies are also sites of open and unbounded exchange and entry at their pores. These kinds of fluid and open bodies become signs of sensuality, movement, and ex- change and often metaphors for the sexual. While the stained Black pore as a sign of sensuality, movement, and transit runs alongside the sexual, its penetrability is not solely linked to the genital-anus complex. Nor do Black bodies achieve nonnormative status primarily through sex and the sexual metaphors proffered by queer theory. Homosexual/queer subjects (contemporary LGBT individuals) and theory begin in and with the new genres of the human that emerged in late nineteenth-century sexology. During this era of White sexual differen- tiation and particularity, Dash’s characters contend with the generational poisoning and staining of their pores as sensual and, therefore, deselected beings. I stress this point for a few reasons. One reason is that mainstream queer theory does not do an adequate job of conceptualizing how Blackness re- configures Western gender and sexuality. Furthermore, queer theory arro- gantly assumes that Western gender and sexuality—and their modalities of nonnormativity—can be mapped onto the corporeality of Blackness. For example, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s assertion in the introduction to Beauti- ful Bottom, Beautiful Shame that the work of antiracist Black literature has led to a congealing of Blackness is an example of this kind of arrogant mis- reading. Moreover, Stockton argues that Blackness truly becomes a con- tagious and spreadable matter only on the back of queerness. When con- sidering the speculative and imaginative work of Dash and of other Black diaspora scholars (particularly those focusing on the Atlantic, oceanic, fun- gible, and the fugitive), I question Stockton’s reading of Black literary and cultural production. If anything, Blackness enters Western modernity from a place of spreadability and boundarylessness made possible by the Middle Passage and various processes that render it outside of coherent and con- tained human coordinates. It is also from within this place of spreadability, diffuseness, abjection, and nonhumanness from which Black people seek an alternative mode of being human.48 As Spillers suggested in 1987, as cap- tives turned into malleable “territories of political and cultural maneuver,” the community of ex-slaves had “nothing to prove.”49 Stockton attempts to establish the foundations for an argument that the Black literary and cultural imagination needs to be queered and made a spreadable contaminant. Before Stockton can have White queer theory make this intervention or augment the Black antiracist literary tradition, she must read Blackness as congealed. Stockton confidently reads Black antiracist and queer literature as rigid or solid(ly) afraid of its own spread- ability as a contagion.50 In contrast, queer (read White) activists and theo- rists (e.g., Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edel- man, Joseph Litvak, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner) “have worked to restate ‘queer’ as ‘strange,’ to break against any scripted iden- tities for ‘gays’ or ‘homosexuals’—to break with congealment, as it were. And yet, in a sense, they would willingly, gladly, spread contamination. They would make supposedly ‘normal’ sexualities confess their strangeness and, therefore, their queerness, lending ‘normal’ sex a whiff of their slang.”51 Celebrating the queer and contaminating nature of White queer strangeness and its embrace of the nonnormative, Stockton juxtaposes Blackness as conservative, normative, and fearful of leaking out of bounds. Stockton observes, “As for ‘black’ there’s a different dynamic. A dynamic nearly opposite. . . . The range of contaminating significations sticking to ‘black,’ even so, has led, in rather remarkable fashion, to politically sensitive forms of congealment on the part of some anti-racists advocates.”52 Rather than rehearse the “antiracist” traditions that have refused the politics of respectability and used Black otherness and nonhumanness as a resource, I challenge Stockton to make this claim stick. Stockton is clearly reading outside the interdisciplinary tradition of Black studies that has already em- braced Black deviance and nonnormativity as a mode of life outside liberal humanity.53 Before Black queer theory emerges, Black literary criticism already con- strues Black diasporic movement, migration, cultural production, and self- making as boundaryless. Black cultural studies in particular traces Black diasporic lifeways among Paul Gilroy’s rhizomorphic oceanic flows of the Black Atlantic that exceed and spread beyond normative units such as the nation-state. Gilroy traces this history of Black oceanic and spreadable cul- tural flows even before the nineteenth century. Black spreadability was an essential, if not constitutive, part of Black diasporic and Atlantic episte- mologies before the advent of White queer theory. Black studies has not had to reach for or enact spreadability and contamination in the way that nonintersectional queer theory has had to exert itself to take up the con- tamination of nonnormativity. In fact, Black studies, as a social field both within and beyond Black queer theory, has argued that both LGBT identity claims and queer theory work from a space of normative identity. Greg Thomas traces how the “be- yond” in Wynter’s work takes us beyond humanist aspirations and the in- ternal epistemic revolutions of the West and how Wynter attributes the “specific articulations of both heterosexuality and homosexuality to the Darwinian reinvention of Man (2) in 19th century Europe.”54 As Wynter tracks the emergence and reproduction of Man, she scrutinizes how the reconfiguration of the nineteenth-century human reshapes itself through the inclusion of queer or homosexual diversity. Marx’s worker as subject in the nineteenth century can also be a rational wage-earning homosexual (or female) proletarian. The laborer as woman or homosexual knows itself as a free wage laborer (with the choice of sexual expression and identity) through the captivity of the fungible slave who also labors. The European White proletarian who has achieved sexual liberation and identity (hetero- and homosexual) through the individuating power of the wage becomes an intensified Foucauldian individual and subject in relation to the en- slaved, nonwage work of Blacks, who are expelled from the boundaries of the rational human wage worker and sexual subject.

While these protests are an issue, there are much more pressing issues and examples of anti-LGBTQ+ movements and organizations, such as the American Family Association, the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI), the Family Research Institute, Positive Approaches To Healthy Sexuality (PATH), among others. A majority of these organizations and institutions seek to criminalize homosexuality and support conversion therapy as a legitimate way to change one’s sexuality. These organizations are actively creating false information and bias research as a way to support their own claims against homosexuality. This process is much more complex and dangerous than holding a sign during a protest and representing these ongoing threats to the queer community as a single, small group of protesters who “need to calm down” minimizes those ongoing struggles.

The lyrics also appropriate queer lingo, similar to how Black vernacular is appropriated by White people for profit (Smitherman, 1998). For example, the line: “Cause shade never made anybody less gay” borrows the word “shade” from queer communities of color; the term was popularized by Dorian Corey in a documentary titled, Paris is Burning about New York ballroom culture.5 When someone throws shade it means that they are insulting someone, often playfully and indirectly, but it is a term and a popular pastime of those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Thus, this appropriation is two-fold of drag/ballroom culture, and people of color who popularized the phrase. By talking about anti-LGBTQ+ organizations and protestors throwing shade, Swift is characterizing hate speech, slurs, and anti-LGBTQ messages as “shade,” thereby further trivializing the protestors’ actions and undermining the original meaning of the term.

Queer theory has lost sight of the ways political power and identity come to be and hold meaning in the present. Once a powerful advocate for queer concerns, queer theory today finds itself in an unfamiliar terrain with archaic tools in a rapidly evolving technological era. Concerns of the disciplinary age do not hold the weight they once did; Gay marriage has been legalized, LGBT+ characters have emerged on television, and information technologies absorb queer identity and experience along with everyone else’s. Deconstructing oppression does not hold much weight when LBGT+ bodies are being appropriated at rapid speeds by information technologies and neoliberal policies. For queer theory, the threat of extinction via irrelevance now looms. It is my intention to reimagine critique of identity and power through a reassessment of goals, tactics, and ontology, by way of a sober assessment of neoliberal politics and technology.

Queer studies began to emerge in the 1980’s with works such as those of Adrienne Rich, Catherine Mackinnon, and Eve Kosofksy Sedwick which questioned and interrogated an inherent heteronormativity that permeates Western ways of knowing and being. It was the argument of these scholars that without recognizing the internalized heterosexual structure within our thinking and culture, that critical scholars could not adequately grasp or make strides in the plight of gender and sexual inequality. Queer theorists are concerned with the ways that language and other symbolic modes of human comprehension are mediated through a heterosexual lens, such as those which dominate law, medicine, and the media, normalizing and disciplining bodies to heteronormative practices and knowledges, while violently excluding those who do not perform gender and sexuality in ways that adhere to heterosexual norms and logics (Wittig, 1992, p. 21-22). Thus, the task of queer theory is to locate, deconstruct, and reimagine these closed discourses through a plurality of techniques that open up possibilities for non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative expressions of bodies and minds. Queer theorists borrow from feminist theorists the notion of partiality, and place a necessary ethical and epistemological focus on the social location of the researcher and the possibilities that emerge from one’s distinct and unique social vantage point. Acknowledging partiality is in part a relation to a skepticism of the mastery of any discourse that works to promote discovery and ways of knowing that speak to a wider representation of bodies and ways of being in the world (Hall, 2005, p. 6).

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance. The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy are enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the “now” to which performance addresses its deepest questions valued. (This is why the now is supplemented and buttressed by the documenting camera, the video archive.) Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as “different.” The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.

The idea that economics creates the world rather than describes it has been the subject of several debates (Aspers, 2007; Felin & Foss, 2009a, 2009b; Hodgson, 2010; Miller, 2002; Mirowski & Nik-Khah, 2007). Indeed, claiming that a theory, even if wrong at first, can shape the world and become right seems too strong for many economists, especially if they consider themselves heterodox economists. This affirmation seems too radical because then any theory could be true if it becomes a social norm. From its conceptual point of view, ANT assumes that people act in the markets in accordance with their expectations of other agents’ behavior. These expectations are based on a stock of information and economic theories associated with this stock. Therefore, agents’ expectations can be similar to the concept of expectations used in economic theory: ‘I believe that others act according to a specific theory and I believe that others believe the same thing as I do.’ Thus, the theory gradually becomes a coordinating device (Callon, 2007, p. 322), and there would be no wrong theory per se. Two kinds of criticism follow: (1) Firstly, Mirowski and Nik-Khah (2007) but also Miller (2002) emphasize the conservative way in which performativity theory is engaged when it claims, in opposition to most critics of rationality assumptions, that homo oeconomicus does exist, because of the embeddedness of the economy in economics. To argue that economic theories shape the world is to stop any critics of dominant theories that effectively influence the world. (2) If economics matters in the construction of reality, we need to explain how and why. A recent debate brings this question to light (Felin & Foss, 2009a, 2009b; Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005, 2009). The key question is: If science has the nature of a convention in the market place, is this convention purely arbitrary? If not, it is necessary to understand why, in a situation of competition between several economic theories, that one is adopted and not the others. Even if we consider this choice as a purely ideological one, ‘an immediate question then is which of many competing ideologies ought to be adopted and why?’ (Felin & Foss, 2009b, p. 676). Felin and Foss call for a ‘reality check’ and argue that only true theories impact social reality because agents only choose to keep a theory after its confrontation with reality. This contests the direction causality. With performativity, a theory T is applied, and then influences agents’ expectations. Felin and Foss reverse this: a theory T is a good description of the social reality; this is why it is used by agents. I think these debates could be endless because the definition of performativity is vague. I also think Felin and Foss’s idea of a ‘reality check’ idea is important. Nevertheless, their concept of truth is problematic because it ignores the main idea in performativity theory which is its constructivist stance. So I propose rebuilding the theory of performativity using some classical tools of economists. Economists themselves have focused on the impact of theory on economy (Brisset, 2012a, 2012b). This interest has gone hand-to-hand with the issue of predictions in social sciences. Morgenstern (1928, 1935, 1972) first emphasized the problem of interaction between social scientists and agents in concluding that social phenomena cannot logically be foreseen. His reasoning rests on a logical analysis: given a certain prediction or explanation, the economist knows that agents will react to it. As a consequence, he anticipates this reaction and revises his prediction which, he also knows, will be taken into account by agents, etc. This process is known as the Morgenstern Paradox.4 It is the starting point for several works on the predictability of social events when agents react to the predictions of economists: a public economic theory is reflexive. Two important articles, Simon (1954) and Grunberg and Modigliani (1954), focus on the possibility of public prediction regarding a vote were the result. Their main goal is to escape from the infinite regress of Morgenstern’s reasoning. The core argument is that there exists at least one fixed point in the agents’ expectation function – i.e. the way agents build predictions regarding economists’ prediction – provided the variables predicted have upper (K) and lower bounds (k) and a reaction function that is continuous over the interval k ≤ P ≤ K, where P is the public prediction (Grunberg, 1986, p. 478). In other words, there exists at least one prediction which remains correct even if agents take it into consideration in forming their expectations: ‘The fixed point theorem demonstrates, when its assumptions are satisfied, only that there exists at least one point, F, in which the actual vote (or the expected vote in the probabilistic case) equals the predicted’ (Simon, 1982, p. 610). This prediction is, thus, self-fulfilling. 5

But where does this vagueness really come from? A characteristic way to challenge the performativity thesis is to claim that the ‘pure’ cases of performativity in its most interesting, ‘strong,’ or ‘Barnesian’ form— when the reality, after being represented by economics, converges with its theoretical portrayal—are rather rare and it is thus not clear why the rest should interest us (Santos and Rodrigues 2009). For coming to grips with performativity, it is essential to recognize that these critics often repro- duce the ‘linear’ view of innovation Callon (2007b, 312ff.) so fiercely rejects. This view implies that there is a separate entity called ‘economics’ (or a group called ‘economists’) that should have real ‘effects’ and exert ‘influence.’ However, the ANT perspective rejects this simple unilateral causation and treats economics as a Hegelian ‘moment’ in the complex heterogeneous world (or network, as Callon and Latour would say)— in the totality of devices, theoretical claims, policy briefs, university text- books, experimental practices, statistical measures, ratings, rules, and so on.12 What really matters for Callon and his followers is the back-and- forth, uncertain, and staggering movement of performation—for which nothing can be guaranteed. But it does not mean that the attempts to perform economic ideas do not exist. They all should be accounted for— within a more nuanced perspective on economics, markets, and society as their general frame or element. And it is this nuanced perspective that should both overcome Callon’s alleged naïveté when treating ‘economics’ as ‘economics at large’ (Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2008), and provide non- trivial answers to the familiar question on why some forms of knowledge become performative while others do not.