Search the archive.

(Charisse, AfricanaStudies@Carleton, 9-20)

Oliver Cromwell Cox offered a scathing critique of An American Dilemma, arguing that it brought “to finest expression practically all the vacuous theories of race relations which are acceptable among the liberal intelligentsia and which explain race relations away from the social and economic order.” Interestingly, Cox’s indictment of this evasion of social determinants in favor of a moralistic interpretation of American society applies almost perfectly to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent attempt at analysis, “The First White President,” published in the October 2017 issue of The Atlantic. The article epitomizes the fundamental aporia of Coates’ brand of Black liberalism: that whiteness and racism constitute and stabilize U.S. politics even as they present an “existential danger to the country and the world.” In other words, whiteness and racism are totalizing structures, both thesis and antithesis. Much like Myrdal’s erroneous explication of racism as a set of individual attitudes, Coates disastrously employs “whiteness” as a type of metaphysics that is neither contextually specific nor historically situated, and that defies any grounding in social relations.

(George, Phil@Duquesne, Introduction: Black Philosophy and the Crucible of Lived History,” The Black Scholar, Volume 43, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp. 5-10)

Although above I point to the middle passage as the matrix in terms of which black identity is shaped, we must be cognizant of how black identity and black subjectivity can be erroneously tethered to that moment in time and physical space, which then raises the issue of how a specific black historical narrative can function monolithically and thus exclude those black bodies that don't narrativize the middle passage in the same way or even at all. While I will not pursue this issue here, I want to be clear that there is a diverse "terrain of blackness" in terms of the changing landscape and meaning of blackness and that this change impacts differential experiences for those who consider themselves black people. Indeed, such differential experiences have an impact on how we think about the dynamics of black identity and black philosophizing, and the latter's key normative assumptions, modalities, and different morphologies of questions and responses that emerge. My point is to remain critically cognizant of the ways in which I privilege the middle passage and how that privileging might function as a historical gap for black people who nevertheless see themselves as black and yet whose experiences are shaped differently, though not incommensurably vis-à-vis other black people who contend with anti-black racism. Black philosophy and its role are fundamentally linked with existential struggle. The lived experiences of struggle and resistance (etymologically, "to take a stand") speak to the fact that the social ontological structure of the world is not a metaphysical fait accompli. Black philosophy acknowledges its historical conditionality and emergence against the backdrop of white racism, violence, colonialism, dehumanization, enslavement, oppression, and objectification. It recognizes this backdrop as constituted through lived embodiment and configurations of thought and action that were not necessary, but that are predicated upon contingent sites of power and hegemony that are linked to oppressive ideologies and the possession of material power to superimpose such oppressive ideologies. Hence, relevant to black philosophy is its clarion call: ''The world is not as it ought to be!" It is the power of "ought" that points to the openness of human history, agency, and counter-hegemonic praxis. The "ought" implies slippage, excess, lacunae, and the capacity to create. The subtext here is that one can reconfigure the world, reshape its direction, undo its normative repetitions, and create new and ever freeing forms of political formation, relationality, and performance. The role of black philosophy, then, having its point of origin within a matrix of oppression, even as this oppression was/is diasporic, is antagonistic and iconoclastic; indeed, resistant to claims of philosophical universality that are actually forms of discourse that are predicated upon a philosophical anthropology that is, in this case, underwritten by whiteness as the transcendental norm and that valorizes its vision of the world and the meaning of humanity at the exclusion of others. Hence, to engage in black philosophy on conceptual terms set forth here is to affirm one's humanity in the face of those who deem you a sub-person, ersatz, ontologically nugatory.

(Brandon M., Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope: Black Nihilism Reconsidered in Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Warren treats (black) suffering as the central evil of existence, and seeing no way to eliminate antiblackness in its totality or to impose a sovereign will upon the antiblack world, suggests, like Schopenhauer’s ascetic, withdrawal. He counsels us to turn the will away from the world itself, and instead look inward, toward the worldly hopes, strivings, and desires that intensify our suffering instead. Such advice not only unjustly deepens our responsibility for our own suffering, as Nietzsche warned, but reflects, like Schopenhauer, the view that it would be best if the world did not exist. Here, West’s early attempts to develop a “tragic” pragmatism allows for a persuasive response, insofar as its overlap with Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein aims for a therapeutic approach to some philosophical problems. From this vantage, the arguments that Warren musters—from his sense of the irrelevancy of political organization to his broad dismissal of the enlargement of human flourishing occasioned by black political struggles to his paralysis in the face of the unintended consequences of political action—suggest a picture that lies behind his apostasy from political hope. This picture, which ennobles sovereign agency, the philosophy of the will, and an apolitical epistemology, may simply—like the view from nowhere or the fantasy of total consensus—be a picture that holds the pessimist captive. It may lead him to bludgeon the hard-won victories of the world as it is, with the image of a world that belongs more to God than the kind of beings we are. Insofar as Warren tells us that the ethical standard that authorizes his pessimism is the demand that recognition and flourishing, love and meaning, be placed “beyond extant structures of violence and destruction,” and constructed upon foundations of self and society that are not “subject to shift, transform[ation], and decay,” this is a standard of purity that is beyond any possible world, for blacks or anyone else.95 This lurking ideal of purity and perfection authorizes the judgment of everything in history as profane and ironic and is, in the last instance, the most sweeping source of nihilism in Warren’s account. If, as West argues, nihilism demands a “politics of conversion,” one essential and under-emphasized element of it must be about uprooting these fears, of ourselves and the world, that are reflected in such attachments to permanence and purity. Such a politics of conversion must aim, at bottom, to cultivate an ethos of care for the plurality, agency, and natality that makes life worth living, and the world worth our concern precisely because of our tragic fragility and finitude.96 It does so, not simply through critique but through critique and praxis. 97 For West, even historical “evidence is dynamic, it is not static. It can be changed based on what we do.”98 The defense of political hope this mode of historical imagination engenders, contra Warren, is not rooted in optimism but the epistemic humility of tragedy. As West writes, “the decline and decay in American life appears, at the moment, to be irreversible; yet it may not be. This slight possibility—the historic chance that a window of opportunity can be opened by our prophetic thought and action— is, in part, what keeping faith is all about.”99 We do not lack for voices of those who claim to see nothing but darkness, in the past and on the horizon, but as West argues, “sometimes you have to create the light.” The light—a metaphor that opens Arendt’s Men in Dark Times—“is concretized, exemplified in your courageous thinking and courageous action,” and the exemplarity that such thought and action might engender in the subversive memories that follow. The exhaustion of emancipatory ideals and struggles that would make nihilism victorious, and perhaps even true, can become “ubiquitous only when you reach the point in which everybody chooses to be cowardly, everybody chooses to be complacent, everybody chooses to be conformist.”100 The subversive memory of a past where such exhaustion did not come to pass stands as a perpetual rejoinder to this threat, making our historical imaginings and the genre of their articulation pressing questions of vice and virtue, hope and despair.

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

There are four broad, overlapping tendencies in contemporary oppositional studies which weave through the literary theory world, but not there alone: individualistic careerism, romantic particularism, luxury production (insider trading), and organic praxis. Briefly, these trends are as follows. The first, individualistic careerism, is the competition to know the most about some aspect of the politically and oppositionally “new”—the new text, performance, tune, theory. This competition, driven as it is by the market anarchy of late capitalism, is characterized by a lack of connections. As Margaret Prescod puts it, careerism promotes one particular aspect of social change without integrating that struggle into the larger struggle for social change. In academic work, “careerism” assigns primary importance to the fact—and survival—of oppositional studies within the intellectual and social structure of the university, the master’s house. In this regard, “individualistic” refers both to the practitioners of such cloistered studies and to the studies themselves. Their disarticulation from the larger struggle for social change enables the system to reproduce itself through a multiculturalized professional managerial class. The class is disinclined to or incapable of bringing about realignment of what Stuart Hall has called “the fatal coupling of power and difference.”

(Corey, PoliSci@Brooklyn, 9-24)

JC: I found one aspect of this attenuated black nationalist sensibility especially bracing and puzzling: your discussion of what you call the “white Constitution” and the carceral state. On the surface, Thomas’s embrace of the carceral state doesn’t feel like black nationalism. But you think if you scratch the surface, you can see that it is of a piece with his black nationalism. Can you say a little more about that? CR: There’s a wonderful book by James Forman, Jr., called Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017), which is about the building of the carceral state, particularly in Washington, D.C. Foreman argues that there was a real effort at decriminalization and liberalization of the criminal justice system in D.C. in the 1970s. It was perceived by many African American activists and leaders in D.C. as a white, liberal project, which, coming on the heels of the heroin epidemic that had ravaged so many communities, seemed like it might simply introduce more drugs into D.C. And so that decriminalization was strongly, strongly resisted in many parts of the black community in D.C., including the more nationalistically inclined leaders and activists. They essentially viewed decriminalization—and I’m going to put this very crudely—as a threat to black independence and autonomy. I think people often flinch, for understandable reasons, at some of Thomas’s writings on the carceral state. They think, “Well, this seems very different because black nationalists oppose the state.” But, historically and contingently, that’s not always the case. I think for many people on the left, Clarence Thomas is just a monster, and that’s the beginning and the end of it. The book, I think, ends up showing that there’s a much more disturbing and unsettling monstrosity at the heart of his jurisprudence that you can’t understand unless you begin with some of these questions about black nationalism and racial pessimism; that is, because his monstrosity initially began from a place that, I think, many of us on the left can at least understand and imagine. The news ends up being worse than if you were to focus just on the familiar Clarence Thomas that people know. But by the end of the book you begin to see that at the heart of Thomas’s jurisprudence is this belief that, in some ways, Jim Crow was a golden age for the development of black self-organization and black virtues. A word that recurs throughout Thomas’s writings is “survival,” which is a word that also features quite prominently in a lot of Afro-pessimist writing. He thinks that under Jim Crow, black people developed the habits, organizations, independence, and self-sufficiency to survive against all the odds; they managed to build up a thriving civilization and culture. And here is where I would say his thinking moves more into the territory of traditional conservative thinking. It’s really a notion that, under conditions of the most abject adversity, there will be a summoning of more heroic spirits. For Thomas, those heroic spirits are found in black patriarchs; his is a very patriarchal vision. He thinks that the liberal rights revolution—whether it was on questions of criminal justice or the sexual revolution or economic rights— undid these conditions of adversity, thus creating generations of black men who not only cannot take care of women and children and their communities, but who cannot take care of themselves. What the white carceral state does is to recreate these conditions of adversity from decades and centuries past. And, for Thomas, there’s a horrible hope at the heart of that, which is that a new generation of black patriarchs will emerge under these conditions of adversity and will shepherd their people to safety and survival. Not to emancipation, not to the promised land, but to something like survival. JC: Of course, there is a condition of adversity greater than Jim Crow: the condition of slavery. And there’s a similar argument that people have made about the exercise of agency under those conditions—that plantation life was not like concentration camps, but a place where people built community. I feel like I’m in danger of shooting the messenger here, but I’m wondering whether the logic of Thomas’s position is that maybe slavery wasn’t so bad. CR: That’s an interesting question. Thomas will sometimes throw slavery in with Jim Crow, but I think the overwhelming reason why he doesn’t go there is that Jim Crow, in his mind, allowed for the creation of separate black institutions. JC: I found it helpful in reading the stuff about the white Constitution and the carceral state to distinguish two themes. One is that the carceral state provided protection for the innocent victims of crime and violence in inner city neighborhoods. And the other, and this is the more bracing theme, is pedagogical: that the carceral state also provides lessons in self-discipline through its conditions of adversity—through its threats and through the fear it imposes. CR: Absolutely. And that moral pedagogy has multiple dimensions. I don’t know if I called it this in the book, but one strand of Thomas’s jurisprudence I was really struck by is this kind of carceral capitalism—that part of the pedagogy is to create market actors and market selves. The most repellent figure for Thomas, aside from the rapist, is the beggar, the vagrant, the person who has no property or money. Part of what he hopes to see in the white, carceral state is the creation of capable market actors. Because it’s going to be through the market that black men accumulate the resources to create havens of protection for the black community. JC: Sounds like Foucault, but with a different political valence. Let’s shift now to the second theme, which is that Thomas’s conservative black nationalism structures and informs his legal reasoning. Maybe you could illustrate the point by sketching the argument you make about Kelo (2005)? CR: Sure. So, Kelo v. the City of New London was a case about eminent domain, the use of public power to take possession of private property for the sake of public use. This case didn’t involve any racial dimension. But Thomas uses the case as a window into decades of liberal urban planning, which often used the power of eminent domain in order to restructure downtowns, clear slums, and revitalize urban spaces. In the 1950s and 1960s, urban renewal became a focus of political contestation throughout the country, particularly among African-Americans. James Baldwin captured the concern when he said “urban renewal means Negro removal.” In other words, programs to revitalize urban spaces came at the expense of African Americans. Thomas’s opinion in Kelo actually includes that Baldwin quote, and he proceeds to list statistic after statistic showing that urban renewal is a form of racial dispossession, really a kind of ethnic cleansing—that it’s a way of eliminating black worlds from white spaces. Furthermore, he invokes the famous “footnote four” from Justice Stone’s opinion in the 1938 case of United States v. Carolene Products Company. Part of the New Deal jurisprudential project was for the Supreme Court to be deferential to legislators and to get the courts out of the business of overruling democratically elected legislators. In his footnote four, Justice Stone discusses when the judiciary has to intervene. The court needs to step in to protect a “discrete and insular minority” that lacks access to the political process and can’t count on democratic procedures and institutions to protect their interests. Thomas is entirely out of sympathy with this liberal jurisprudential project. But he does an amazing thing in Kelo. He summons footnote four, and says, essentially, “if ever there were a case when the court should be stepping in on behalf of a discrete and insular minority, it is when the government uses the power of eminent domain for the sake of public use.” He says the value of poor people’s land and property, such as they have it, will always be less than whatever it is the state can do in its alliance with private business interest. They will always be vulnerable. He often he speaks explicitly about African Americans and sometimes it’s a little bit more implicit, but by the end, he’s completely turned liberal jurisprudence on its head and is now saying that the courts need to be looking at the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment—which is this part of the Constitution that’s very important to conservatives—and using it to defend the interests of African Americans. So, race is referenced throughout this opinion and underlies the entire way Thomas conceives of this problem. This kind of race-conscious detour happens a lot with Thomas. At some moments, you feel like Thomas is just being trollish and tweaking liberals by invoking race in a really crude way. But more often, it’s like what I’ve just described, and you have to ask yourself why. Other conservatives reach the same result without the “detour.” But with Thomas, there is a pattern. It is a much more systemic project that he’s trying to develop. JC: To continue this thread about how conservative black nationalism shapes Thomas’s jurisprudence, let’s talk about affirmative action. The standard conservative objections to affirmative action policies take two forms. One is that white candidates, say, in college admissions, would have gotten in had it not been for the use of racial classifications: so affirmative action is unfair to those candidates. The second is that we’re aiming to be a colorblind society, and the best way to get to colorblindness is to start being colorblind now. Thomas has neither of those. CR: Yes, this is another area where he really distinguishes himself from other conservative accounts. What’s so striking in Thomas’s opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)—a case concerning an affirmative action program at the University of Michigan Law School—is how much he focuses on white people. But it’s not the white people who, as you just said, are allegedly the victims of affirmative action. It’s the white people who are the perpetrators of affirmative action. For him, all these institutions that are run by white people, their first commitment, before anything about race, is elitism and selectivity. There are all kinds of ways you could create more diverse institutions if you wanted to. You could eliminate the LSAT, which Thomas—and the University of Michigan—says is racially skewed. But Thomas thinks these institutions will never do anything like give up the LSAT because they refuse to give up their selectivity and elitism. And yet, they also want diversity—not because it has an educational benefit, as they claim; if that were the case they would be making diversity much more of a priority than they do. And it’s not because they really think that understanding a diverse society is important for the nation’s ruling class. What he thinks they really care about is what he calls “racial aesthetics.” These are words that you see over and over again with Thomas: “aesthetics” and “racial aesthetics.” White people want a kind of patina. They want the class to look right, because white people—and he’s thinking of the professional managerial class—want to think of themselves as cosmopolitan and multicultural. Openness and comfort in multicultural spaces is part of the self-understanding of the American ruling class. So, the combination of elitist exclusivity and a racial aesthetic, he says, leads to affirmative action. What affirmative action perversely does, according to him, is to elevate whites not only to be paternalistic, but to have discretionary power over questions of race. They get to select that perfect black person who they think will fit in. Were you to change your admission standards—for instance, as I said, getting rid of the LSAT or simply requiring graduation from a certified institution or passing a test demonstrating knowledge of the subject—you would have a much more automatic system of admission. But the University of Michigan, like so many elite schools, wants to preserve the element of discretionary power. What affirmative action does, Thomas says, is to consolidate the paternalistic power of white people. And for black people, whether they got in under affirmative action or not, the ultimate consequence is that they are stigmatized as affirmative action candidates. Affirmative action, for Thomas, functions in the same way that enslavement stigmatized all African Americans—whether they were free or slave—as inferior. It’s an extraordinarily different analysis from the type that you’re going to get in a figure like Rehnquist, or Roberts, or Alito. JC: But much like Stephen Carter’s analysis in Reflections of An Affirmative Action Baby (1992). How do you think Thomas reconciles these concerns about the stigmatizing, patronizing qualities of affirmative action with the argument about the pedagogical benefits of the carceral state? Affirmative action is demeaning; the carceral state is morally instructive. How does that work? CR: This is something I really wrestled with. And there are even more dramatic contradictions than that one. For instance, his dissent against the gay marriage decision. When people say that prohibiting gay marriage is an assault on the dignity of gay people, Thomas says, “How can you say the state is taking away the dignity of gay people? The state can never take the dignity away from anyone. Slavery didn’t take away the dignity of African Americans.” So, he has this notion of dignity in certain instances that is absolutely impervious to what the state is doing. And then he turns around and says affirmative action not only stigmatizes but demeans and takes away the dignity of black people. There appears to be a stark contradiction. The best version of the argument that I can give—and it again points to some very dark and unsettling elements in his jurisprudence—is that he thinks that certain kinds of beneficial state action, such as the pedagogy he sees in the carceral state, are not intended by white people to help black people. It’s not that state officials think they’re doing something for African Americans. If anything, he accepts that these are pretty brutal people. If black people develop virtues, skills, and talents in the face of those brutal practices, those virtues, skills, and talents are attributable to black people. They’re not attributable to the intentionality of the state. So, when state action is constraining, coercive, and authoritarian, Thomas sees the black progress that happens in spite of that action as something like plants squeezing up through the cement: the plants reveal their strength. But when that action is designed to help, it reaffirms white paternalism—and then that sense of collective self-ownership over your achievements is lost. JC: Can you think of either an individual case or an area of Thomas’s jurisprudence where, because of his conservative black nationalism, he ends up on a different side of the issue from other conservatives? I ask because I want to see how exactly his conservative black nationalism is genuinely structuring his jurisprudence, not simply leading him to offer some glosses about race in the course of opinions that are otherwise the same as his conservative allies—putting lipstick on a pig, so to speak. CR: The recent case of Flowers v. Mississippi (2019) is a good example. This was a horrible case coming out of Mississippi, where a man was repeatedly brought up on criminal charges with a trial, and the prosecutor, who was white, was systemically keeping black people off juries. Thomas’s position on this, which goes back to his first term on the Court, is that you should be allowed to strike down jurors based on race. And his reasoning is white racism is a pervasive feature of jury trials and that juror preemption—simply because a potential juror is white—is the most important tool a black defendant will have in order to create more racially balanced juries. Notice that Thomas does not take the obvious liberal path of relying on the higher courts and the state to head off racial imbalances; instead, he wants to leave that task in the hands of African Americans through their power to strike potential jurors, again, merely because those jurors are white. Gorsuch joined him for part of the Flowers dissent—the part that had to do strictly with the facts of the case. But when Thomas then starts going off in the direction I just described, Gorsuch leaves, and Thomas is all by himself. In another example, he was the lone dissenter in Virginia v. Black (2003), which was a case about cross burning in Virginia. And what really divided the Court was the question: can you ever say there’s a form of cross burning that is pure, expressive speech, and not racial intimidation? And Thomas said, “No, it’s intrinsic to the practice. It’s always a form of racial intimidation.” So, there have been a couple of cases where he does actually end up on a different side. And often people want to look for that—the moments when Thomas’s racial pessimism leads him to vote the opposite way of conservatives on the Court—but the argument of my book is not that Thomas is a black nationalist; it’s that he’s a conservative black nationalist. The interesting thing about Thomas is that he shows how, from a position of black nationalism, one could come to embrace conservative positions, even a conservative worldview. The most interesting moments are not when he’s completely breaking from the Court, but when he’s finding a way into the same positions, but with very, very different arguments. And I think Thomas has been clear about his desire to create a conservatism for black people—not in the narrow partisan sense, but in the broader sense of political philosophy or political ideology. So, when you characterize his comments about race as “lipstick on a pig”—just glosses, not really structuring his legal argument—you really have to ask why he would do that. Because it’s not necessary for him to do any of this—he doesn’t gain anything. Conservatives already have a lipstick on the pig argument: color blindness. That’s the most simple, morally attractive argument that the right has been able to come up with. And it’s one that he has often rejected. JC: You say in the book that lots of people, especially people on the left, share Thomas’s sense of racial despair, the sense of permanent racial division and animosity. Do you really think that? CR: I definitely do. And I don’t say this in an accusatory way. All of us are living in the wake of a very great defeat, and it’s something that African Americans were coming to terms with in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some people say, “Well, African Americans have always known this. This is the eternal wisdom in the black community.” But that’s not fair to the black activists who were fighting for transformation and who actually thought they were making progress. When they stopped making progress, the shift was dramatic and noticeable. We’ve been living with the consequences of that defeat; the sense of political impotence radiates out in all kinds of directions, including climate change. So, in the book, I am genuinely raising this as a question: What do we do when we see a voice like Thomas who’s on the other side and has reached very different conclusions, but began with very similar premises? At its best, the left tries to do two things at the same time. One is to paint a picture of oppression, domination, and injustice and to say, “these are not just isolated incidents of cruelty that can be fixed with tinkering—they are systemic.” But at the same time that the left paints this systemic portrait—and Marx is the greatest example of this—it also needs to identify points of vulnerability. It needs to say that the system is not perfect, and then identify interventions and points of pressure. Albert O. Hirschman, the social theorist, wrote a wonderful book many years ago called the Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991). He said that futility is the most powerful right-wing response to revolutionary reformist change. It’s not saying that the change is going to threaten something else; it’s to say that whatever you do, it’s pointless. It’s absolutely futile. And the coda to that argument is that there’s a sometimes superficial, sometimes not so superficial, resemblance between those arguments from the right for futility and arguments from the left about the deep, systemic structural nature of oppression. One can bleed into the other, particularly in moments of defeat, and you can lose that sense of political plasticity, of the vulnerability of the regime you’re opposing. My concern now is that our arguments about the systemic nature of racism are leading very close to what Hirschman warned against in his writings on the futility thesis. We need to recover that sense, from the black freedom struggle, that the institutions of racial domination in this country have been created through politics—not through neuropsychology or culture, not through personal or private attitudes, but through political institutions and political movements and political leadership. We need to recover the sense that if all the accumulation of racial domination was made by politics, then it can be unmade by politics. Our task is to find the tools of the making in order to do the work of the unmaking.

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

But the Harlem intellectuals were so overwhelmed at being “discovered” and courted that they allowed a bona fide cultural movement which issued from the social system as naturally as a gushing spring, to degenerate into a pampered and paternalized vogue. —Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro lntellectual The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider I’m not of the Frankfurt School. One must live a life of relative privilege these days to be so dour about domination, so suspicious of resistance, so enchained by commodification, so helpless before the ideological state apparatuses to conclude there’s no conceivable end to late capitalism’s daily sacrifice of human life to the singular freedom of the market. Yet, in the context of an avalanche of words on contemporary “bona fide cultural movement”—especially movement by the young, formerly enslaved, or colonized; urban, everyday, popular—Cruse’s assessment of the political failure of the Harlem Renaissance rings true. We are in an epoch of social revolution—capitalism hasn’t won, but not for lack of trying. It is both possible and necessary to pass the word that these times too might pass, but not inevitably toward a more secure fascism. At the same time, (passive) counterrevolutionary forces are pampering into being an intellectual comprador class comprised of some of the very people who have been engaged in the post-1945 freedom work to decolonize our minds. The late poet-warrior, Audre Lorde, warned that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As with any theoretical premise, Lorde’s caveat is useful only if the elements whose paring away enables its elegance and urgency are added back, so that the general truth of the abstraction has concrete meaning for day-to-day life. The issue is not whether the master uses, or endorses the use of, some tool or another. Rather, who controls the conditions and the ends to which any tools are wielded? Control is not easy. In the culture of opposition, control, tentative at best, results from risky forays rather than documentable ownership through capital accumulation. Lorde proposes a decisive seizure whose strategy works toward multiple ends. First, Lorde’s focus on tools requires us to concentrate on fundamental orderings in political economy. If the master loses control of the means of production, he is no longer the master. Thus, relations of production are transformed in the process. Second, her focus on the master’s house guides our attention toward institutions and luxury. The house must be dismantled so that we can recycle the materials to institutions of our own design, usable by all to produce new and liberating work. Thus, the luxurious is transformed into the productive. Without both parts of the strategy at work, nothing much is different at the end of the day. In the past decade or so, an astonishing number of people housed in and about the relatively secure luxury of institutions of higher education have picked up the work a few politically committed souls began in the earlier postwar decades. The purpose of the work—called variously cultural studies, Black studies, and so on—had been to try to understand the means through which ordinary people do or might organize, promote ideas, and bargain in the political arena. Such understanding might be achieved through figuring out how people make sense in and of their lives. Activist/scholars pursued their inquiries by studying cultures and “subcultures” as politically vital forces in the anatomy of society. Today’s plethora of intellectuals who think about marginal, or oppositional, or simply non-Arnoldian, cultural practice are often in, or influenced by, literary theory. Sensibly enough, the realm of literary criticism “from the margins,” as bell hooks might say, has focused on a formidable assemblage of neglected letters—both art and polemic—snatched from the dustbins of history by the diligent graduate-student laborers of such Black studies stars as Henry Louis Gates Jr. These texts occasion many reflections: what was said, in forays into the printed page during the last and current centuries, that will tell us what happened and what might happen? How is literary production a political act? What theoretical work might be hidden in a story, a character type, a way of telling? How can the interpretive skills refined through these processes of thought be turned toward understanding cultural expressions that are not bound to the page, such as the various arenas of popular culture—music, dance, movies, costume, language? What are the processes of creating audiences? And, most of all, why bother? Intellectuals studying these questions lay consistent claim to politics as both cause and effect of their work, harking back to the practitioners (themselves mostly still at work) who shook higher education to free up some intellectual and material resources on behalf of the always already excluded.

(Brandon M., Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope: Black Nihilism Reconsidered in Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

So for West, like the Afropessimist, history is indeed catastrophic. Indeed, he explicitly invokes Benjamin’s melancholy contention that, for the oppressed, the state of emergency is the norm, not the exception.87 He argues that the “gravitas of the catastrophic” obligates us, in a spirit of mourning, to make “radical disappointment and profound disenchantment our constant companions” and be aware that we have an overwhelming chance of failure in our attempts to realize any utopian aspirations. However, we must persist “with a level of integrity and a quest for moral magnanimity” in the struggle for democratic justice. What allows us to keep faith with this demand is, in part, “a subversive memory in the folks that survived, and the texts that were written, and the stories that were passed on, and the narratives that were bequeathed to us.” West is worth quoting at length on this point: Here I would fall back on Adorno when he says that any exhaustion has leftovers even in defeat. Even the memory of those lost doesn’t fit within commemorations, because deep remembering is dif­ferent than conventional commemoration. And so our task is to never lose sight of the leftovers, or what the great Arthur Miller would call “the misfits,” the people who don’t fit in, the experiences, and the doings and sufferings of fellow human beings who can’t find a place in a moment of exhaustion, even though the exhaustion never goes all the way down. . . . You start with the leftovers, you start with the defeated, you start with the subjugated, and you start with the ways in which, even in the moment of exhaustion, they are not subsumed under the vocabulary of the exhausted.88 West’s approach here calls for the cultivation and protection of a specific mode of historical consciousness, and resonates with the approach to history that Seyla Benhabib has characterized, building on Arendt and Benjamin, as “fragmentary historiography.”89 The thinker who uses this fragmentary historiography breaks “the chain of narrative continuity . . . [inherent in] chronology as the natural structure of narrative, to stress fragmentariness, historical dead ends, failures, and ruptures.”90 The aim is one consonant with recognizing the dignity of past actors and the ideals and principles they championed, even though they will not benefit from it. Dignity could be said to enter into historical judgment through the hope “to do justice to the memory of the dead by telling the story of history in terms of their failed hopes and efforts.”91 More fundamentally, the incorporation of a duty to show reverence to dignity (thinking from the standpoint of others) into historical judgment, is above all, a rejection of those overarching approaches to history that refuse to place the value of “defeated causes” and their proponents at the center of historical judgment, or fails to take seriously the hermeneutic challenge of seeking out the “thought fragments” that might speak powerfully to a present changed by intervening developments.92 Tragedy, given its focus on human agency, even amid epistemological limitations, unintended consequences, and the fleeting opportunity structure for particular actions, can bear more easily accounts of history that emphasize the interpenetration and semi-autonomous logics of various political practices (e.g., antiblack racism, capitalism, sexism, and colonialism) rather than inflating one axis to a comprehensive, seamless totality and flattening out all human desire and action along its arc. Such a stance trains our judgment to see the seams for movement that emerge through the interpenetration of power systems and their emergent properties that no one can predict in total. Contingency is crucial. The hopes embodied in struggles are only possible and not guaranteed—meaning that natality and tragedy go together in tandem. Thus, the recognition of the interrelation helps steel us against both the fetishism for spectacular eruptions that dominate romantic narrations and the paralyzing disappointment that governs ironic thought. Narrating the complex, long-term web of actions that coagulate into the statement of important ideals or, even, the achievement of partial victories helps orient political struggles toward the kinds of dispositions needed for what Du Bois, in one of his more prescient, if less lyrical moments, called “the long siege”— an appropriate description for emancipatory struggle without guarantees if there ever was one.93 This subversive, tragic imagination also helps inoculate us against a particular form of nihilism, one born from the lack of epistemic humility at the heart of the historical imagination promoted by Afropessimism. The insistence on, and demonstrated recovery of, contingency, unpredictability, and natality give reason to be critical of Afropessimism’s unwarranted faith in the (metaphysical) ability to predict a permanent future of antiblack abjection. This epistemic arrogance is “sustained,” as Theodor Adorno wrote of such doctrines, “by the false inference that because there has been no progress up until now, there will never be any.”94 While Warren excoriates “optimists” for shielding themselves from critique by appealing to an unknown and unknowable future, his futural gestures toward the “impossibility” of alternative political arrangements are even more insulated in a posture devoid of epistemic humility. This is especially bewildering given that, for Warren, black abjection is not ordained by God, written into cosmology or biology, forged in a messianic transformation, or even the necessary outcome of human history. The antiblack order, insofar as one can discern from his account, is the artifact of a complex, interdependent web of human decisions, ideas, practices, desires, and other myriad strivings and sayings of human beings that fused to create the African slave trade, imperialism, and antiblack racial ideology. It is unclear how, without escaping these human dynamics into the realm of metaphysical speculation, the Afropessimist can presume, a priori, to predict the whole range of possible outcomes of interpenetrating complex systems of scientific research global governance, economic markets, cultural production, etc. It is impossible to avoid the sense in which the most extreme blend of ironic history and pessimistic prophecy is extraordinarily flattering to its proselytizers’ supposed oracular, spiritual, and cognitive gifts.

(Barbara, Interviewed by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (AAS@Princeton, though none of her words are underlined, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective)

Mm! So I wonder if you could say more about that. And let me—I’ll just add that I think that there’s certainly a right-wing kind of ridiculous caricature of identity politics. But I think that the concept is also sort of seen in a particular way by liberals or the left, in that for some the notion of identity politics seems to be that unless you suffer a particular kind of oppression, that you have no role in the struggle against it. And so there’s this real emphasis on experience as the main sort of—as the main kind of way that gives you the ability to fight a particular oppression. That if you don’t have that experience, then you really have no role. And so it’s almost as if by embracing one’s identity, that you give up on any sort of hope or notion that there is such a thing as solidarity. We never meant that. I mean, we actually worked in coalitions. I just described working in coalitions with socialist feminists. We worked in coalitions with other people, too. We certainly showed up for causes that might not be the expected ones for people who had the identities that we had. Demita [has] talked about standing up for union organizing, and for men of color who were being excluded from work sites and from construction jobs, because of racism. And I often cite that example, too, because I guess both of us will never forget the looks on the faces of the guys—who were primarily guys—who were demonstrating. And then we come, you know, and we demonstrate with them. You know, they didn’t expect that to be the case. So as I said, we absolutely believed in coalition building and solidarity. It’s a real misapprehension of what we meant by it. And I don’t know why people skip it. I mean, to me, all the explanation that’s needed is in the Combahee River Collective statement, about what it is we stand for, and who we think we should be working with. But as I have explained, the reason we used the term “identity politics” is that we were asserting at a time when Black women had no voice. At a time when Black women were being told to walk seven steps behind and have babies for the nation. At a time when Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture said—when asked what is the position of the Black woman in the Black struggle, and his response was that Black women’s position was to be prone. He actually meant supine. Now is a time when much solidarity is needed, because the nation-state is in freefall. It’s not like I’m a worshipper of the nation-state. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But it is a little bit unsettling when you see what was thought to be basic assumptions about how that nation-state functioned go completely out the window. [laugh] This is a time for solidarity. I mean it’s like just because I—and I’m doing a theoretical “I” here, or a figurative “I”—just because I have health coverage doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be standing in solidarity with those who stand to lose it under this regime. Just because I have a US passport and full legal status in the United States doesn’t mean I’m not supposed to be standing in solidarity with people who are undocumented. Who have every right to be here as well. So, as I said, it’s a misunderstanding and a distortion of what it was that we stood for. And I think that sometimes that notion that you just outlined as, “If I don’t have a particular identity, I’m not allowed to work on a particular issue”—that sounds to me like an excuse. That sounds to me like Okay, so that’s what somebody decides if they’re not really willing to go there, and go through the struggle of crossing boundaries and working across differences. The concept of This Bridge Called My Back is an incredibly powerful one, and that book was catalytic in the women’s movement, and in certain parts of the left. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s essay, which was not originally an essay, it was an article based upon a speech—that concludes Home Girls—I always tell people, the reason “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” is the last piece in the book is because that’s what I wanted people to leave the book with: the idea of working together across differences. Coalitions. “This Bridge Called My Back” as a concept. Why are those so important? Because of the fact that that’s the only way we can win. The only way that we can win —and before winning, the only way we can survive is by working with each other, and not seeing each other as enemies. There’s far too much of the perspective of: “You’re not like me. I’m not like you. I’m not a transgender person. I don’t give a damn whether you can go to a bathroom or not. And the fact that you’re being murdered summarily, and that your income levels keep you in poverty far more likely than somebody who is cisgender—that’s not my problem!” Those are bad politics. Really, really bad politics. And the reason it’s important, as I said, is because that’s how we win, and that’s how we survive in the meantime. There are ethical principles of struggle that you can see in any significant political intervention in history. You will see—one of the things that you should see in positive movements forward toward justice—not toward power—because there are many interventions that were just about the accrual of power, where you didn’t really have that mentality and that principle of “We must all be in this together.” But if it’s a forward movement toward justice, you will see that people of different backgrounds and different places in a social structure actually at times come together. The abolitionist movement comes to mind. Because there were white people who actually stepped away from their white skin privilege at a critical time in US history, because they could see as plain as the nose on their face that enslaving other human beings was wrong. And they decided, like, “Okay, yeah, I guess I’m white, but I guess I love humanity more.” And of course, there were people who were abolitionists who were racists. Who really thought that Black people were inferior to white people. I’m not that big of a fool that I think [laugh] that everything was just . . . lovely, and everybody was just really conscious and open. No. I mean, there were abolitionists who actually thought Black people were inferior, and actually wished for them, once we were freed, to get on the first boat sailing. [laugh] “Go back somewhere else, not here!” But be that as it may, they still lost social standing, paid prices, speaking out for people whose situation they didn’t have to be concerned about—what difference did it make to them? You know, they were still white in the United States. Things could have been really nice, you know? That’s a great example of when people see an incredible wrong, an incredible injustice, and they decide that justice is more important than their status and their privilege. And those are models that we need to adhere to, I believe. I love when we see examples of people pushing themselves far beyond the status quo and far beyond the average, and speaking up and speaking out and acting for justice. I always say that the people I can work with are the people with whom I share political values and goals and priorities. So that means just about anybody as far as ethnicity, race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t have a litmus test for, like, “I only work with certain kinds of people who share my specific identities.” I’m going to be a political idiot if I only work with Black lesbian feminists and refuse to work with anybody else. I mean, I wouldn’t know the things that I know about Black feminism and about organizing if the only people I had ever worked with were Black feminists who were lesbians. Don’t get me wrong. I have learned a tremendous amount from working with people whose specific identities I share, but I also would have lost a lot if I had never worked with people who are different from myself.(Kindle/no pages)

(Yasmin, , 11-30)

So how and why does something become a controversy in the first place, and what do those notions of cultural purity reveal about power? Let us return to a controversy from the summer of 2017, over “Open Casket,” the artist Dana Schutz’s attempt to represent the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. His mother Mamie Till displayed his utterly smashed and broken face and body in an open casket, saying, “I want the world to see what they did to my baby.” In Schutz’s painting, Till’s face occupies much of the left side. The painting is tentative, more like a study for a later work. At the bottom right is a Hallmark-y touch, a rose. “Open Casket” is unlike the rest of Schutz’s work, which demonstrates a keen, deep, abiding and definitely unsentimental curiosity about the limits of the human body. Take, for example, her series “Frank from Observation,” in which paintings depict the various stages of a fictional white man who is also the last one on earth. We watch him in what we might think of as a series on “White Man in His Various Natural Habitats,” as his body, exposed to the elements, ages over time. The view of Frank is neither cruel nor sarcastic but it’s also not realistic or worshipful of the male form. Schutz uses the idea of the apocalypse to foreground a body that has long been central to representation (consider the entirety of Western art), and in doing so she makes manhood and the state of the world subjects neither to be contemplated as things of beauty nor to be derided, but to be considered anew and askew. In “Reclining Nude,” Frank is mostly pink, and while he is caught in a classical posture, the shades of his skin — and the flaccid penis draped over his thigh — belie any sense of majesty. Schutz isn’t making a commentary here; her interest is in seeing how far she can take the very idea of a body in the world. In “Sneeze,” she engages in her fondness for grotesquerie, turning an everyday moment into a hideous exposure, a multi-hued, x-ray look at a convulsion of snot. In “Open Casket,” Schutz may have wanted to explore the grotesquerie of violence as a natural extension of her dominant themes. She had and has a right to do that — an artist needs to be free to come at a subject from any possible angle, even if the work seems at odds with many might consider a desirable mode of representation — in this case an overt political message that what happened was horrific. And yet, “Open Casket” is less grotesque than the standard Schutz work, and that makes it a much less worthy piece. It’s inferior in its formal technique, rough and unfinished in a way that seems less deliberate than sloppy. And it’s conceptually bad in that it does little more than sentimentalize the view of Emmett Till’s body that we’ve long been familiar with (her painting is derived from the famous and widely circulated photos of his casket). Here, it’s as if she began with a more considered representation, but somewhere along the way, lost her nerve. It’s probably her worst piece in an otherwise deeply interesting body of work. All of which is to say, Dana Schutz is a damn good artist, but “Open Casket” is a piece of crap. Yet the outrage that poured out at her had nothing to say about the quality of the work. Instead, it centered on cultural purity and appropriation. The artist Hannah Black demanded in an open letter that the work be destroyed. She went on, “Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist — those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s....” Schutz’s response to the controversy was to evoke — and hide behind — her status as a mother: “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son...My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother.” With those words, she set women’s art back, well, several centuries; we might recall that Mary Cassatt, despite the breadth of her work, is still mostly well-regarded for the non-threatening visions offered by her paintings of mothers and children. Coco Fusco has pointed out that Black misrepresents Mamie Till’s display of the body, implying that she only meant it to be seen by Black people when she wanted it to be seen by the world. Fusco is right to raise this point, because so much of the response to Schutz is overdetermined by a similar misunderstanding. One palpable strain of criticism dictates that moments like the murder of Till lie outside representation itself. Following from this is the argument, made by Black and others, that representation can claim ownership, and this is the logic by which critics decided that Shutz as a white woman had no right to represent Till. But even if, say, Till’s mother had actually said, No white person can look at or represent my child, that statement would not be inviolable. The force of the sight of Till’s face moved forward what we call, in the most unsatisfactory set of words because it describes so little, the Civil Rights Movement. It went beyond solidifying a movement, and it went beyond the actors we know and can name. Fusco herself writes of her own mother being shaken by the images; the photographs made the brutality of white supremacy comprehensible to both black and white viewers. If we limit representations of Till only to black artists, we’re also demanding that they come up with acceptable representations vetted by an unseen but powerful board, the court of public opinion. The irony is that Schutz’s painting is exactly what a Black artist might have come up with, when restricted by the demands of the open letter: a tremulous, hesitant work, marked as a Proper Representation by a single, sentimental rose. In contrast, consider a work that also appeared in the Biennial, Henry Taylor’s “The Times They Ain’t A Changing, Fast Enough!” At first glance, the painting looks like a failed and overly simple collage of images culled from the video of the shooting of Philando Castile. But a closer, longer look reveals a representation of the exhaustion of the subject itself: the exhaustion of the representation of black death in a genocidal police state as well as the psychic exhaustion that comes about from watching the scene and so many others like it on an endless loop as a collective, as we do and are compelled to do. In such conditions, all that can emerge are the bit parts of the scene, a white arm and a purple-black gun, a white shirt, a black man’s torso leaning back in the last gasp for breath. Consider that both Taylor and Schutz are working from representations of historical moments that have been so widely circulated that we might imagine there is nothing else to say about them. But the genius of art is to make things new, and here Taylor succeeds as markedly as Schutz fails. Taylor’s work is representational but only in the sense that it draws from an all-too-real rendition of what happened; it is abstract in that it distills all the elements of the event into parts that are both recognizable (here is a gun, here is a white arm, here is a black man in a white t-shirt) and shockingly rendered as what we had never seen before (the inside of the car is a garish purple, there is a wisp of blue in the center, and so on). It’s a more formally interesting abstraction than Schutz’s work because it dares to delve into the unthinkable and reformulate the whole. Could work like Taylor’s be produced by a white woman? Now and in the foreseeable future, it’s unlikely that any white artist will venture such abstraction for fear of being denounced as disrespectful, for fear of having the rest of their life’s work come under threat of constant attack (Schutz’s critics tried to have a later retrospective of her work at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art cancelled, even though it did not feature “Open Casket.”) The backlash against Schutz, expressed in a letter that reads like a pastiche of every Woke Statement Ever Put on Twitter may well also mean that work like Taylor’s will be harder to come by. Schutz will be fine. It’s clear that she can only represent race and related matters with the sensibility of a Nice White Lady and a Mom. Like many white artists, she grants her white subjects a depth and complexity that she cannot give to any non-white character. White liberalism can only think of non-white subjectivity through ready-made tropes, and attempts at abstraction end up like Schutz’s work on Till: clumsy, and made recognizable through readily recognizable cultural narratives, filtered through sentiment, affect, and dread at Being Wrong. As a prominent and rising white artist, she has the support of the art world, and has already garnered a much-desired public relations piece in the shape of a fawning profile in the New Yorker, no less, following the debacle, a piece clearly designed to rehabilitate her image. Hannah Black will be fine. In a 2015 interview, she said, “I don't think art or at least my art should aim to be activist. All I can do is to express a relationship to my own conditions of being.” The words might have surprised those who took her open letter so seriously as to physically block people from looking at Schutz’s work and who continue to berate her. A few weeks after the Biennial letter, Black appeared in a new performance piece at MoMA PS1. Both will be fine, but the loss is ours, doomed as we are to sterile images that question and probe nothing, offering only vast oceans of purity, with no one daring to go beyond the sentimental and clichéd representations that comfort us with their benign solace.

(Coco, Andrew Banks Endowed Chair in Art at the University of Florida, https://hyperallergic.com/368290/censorship-not-the-painting-must-go-on-dana-schutzs-image-of-emmett-till/)

Black and her supporters argue that the painting is evidence of white insensitivity; that a “painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist” cannot “correctly” represent white shame; that it’s an example of an unacceptable practice of white artists transmuting black suffering into profit; that white artists who want to be good should not treat black pain as material because it is not their “subject matter”; and that Emmett Till’s mother made her son’s dead body “available to Black people as an inspiration and warning” (my emphasis). The mainstream media’s “willingness” to circulate images of black people in distress is equated with public lynching. Despite attempts by her supporters to suggest that Black doesn’t really want to destroy the artwork, she recommends this explicitly in her opening line. The insistence that white people cannot understand black pain and only seek to profit from the spectacle of black suffering is reiterated throughout. It is difficult to reason with the enraged, but I think it necessary to analyze these arguments, rather than giving them credence by recirculating them, as the press does; smugly deflecting them, as museum personnel is trained to do; or remaining silent about them, as many black arts professionals continue to do in order to avoid ruffling feathers or sullying themselves with cultural nationalist politics. (As a commercially successful young black artist once confessed to me over dinner, “My dealer says collectors don’t want to hear about my problems.”) Hannah Black’s letter can and should be unpacked separately from an interpretation of Schutz’s painting as a painting, or as the expression of a white person’s sentiment. Black makes claims that are not based in fact; she relies on problematic notions of cultural property and imputes malicious intent in a totalizing manner to cultural producers and consumers on the basis of race. She presumes an ability to speak for all black people that smacks of a cultural nationalism that has rarely served black women, and that once upon a time was levied to keep black British artists out of conversations about black culture in America. Her argument is laced with an economically reductionist view of artistic practice and completely avoids consideration of the visual strategies employed by Schutz. Some of her supporters assert (without explanation) that abstraction in and of itself is illegitimate for representing a traumatic figure, a claim that ignores key 20th-century aesthetic debates about the problems with realistic depictions of extreme violence. Furthermore, in her letter, Black does not consider the history of anti-racist art by white artists. She does not recognize that the trope of the suffering body that originated in Western art with the figure of the Christian martyr informs much representation of racialized oppression — by white and black artists. She does not account for the fact that black artists have also accrued social capital and commercial gain from their treatment of black suffering. Numerous black artists have depicted enslaved bodies, lynched bodies, maimed bodies, and imprisoned bodies in the early stages of their careers — and then moved away from such politically charged subject matter without having their morality or sense of responsibility impugned. Others, like Kara Walker, who delve into complicated racial fantasies that are tinged with abjection or eroticism, have been on the receiving end of character assassinations by black people who find the work disrespectful or prurient and claim to speak for “the community.” Whether Black intends it or not, her dismissive treatment of Schutz’s painting, her essentialist position on black and white racial identities, and her use of offense as a rationalization for censorship reinforce elitist and formalist views that ethical considerations don’t belong in the aesthetic interpretation of art. The authority to speak for or about black culture is not guaranteed by skin color or lineage, and it can be undermined by untruths. My 25 years of teaching art have shown me that a combination of ignorance about history and the supremacy of formalism in art education — more than overt racism — underlie the failure of most artists of any ethnicity to address racial issues effectively. Many young black artists harbor deep insecurities about their capacity to “represent the race” because their Eurocentric art education leaves them with few tools or references to work with. Only a privileged few hail from socially engaged families committed to exposing their children to black art, history, and cultural traditions. They also face intense social pressure from teachers, peers, and art world power brokers not to “rock the boat” with political discussions about race. I myself was once grilled at a job interview by the white male search committee chair about whether I agreed with black artists’ criticisms of Kara Walker — which I understood immediately to be the litmus test of my acceptability at an elite institution. As a teacher I’ve been privy to dozens of confessions from students of color at elite art schools who have been scrutinized and intimidated by visiting artists, professors, and peers if they’re perceived as obsessed with race or overly concerned with politics. I’ve been screamed at by frantic students who are afraid of calling themselves “black artists” because arts professionals have warned them not to do so. While elite art schools deploy tokenist inclusion strategies to create the impression of diversity, they actively avoid revising curricula and discourses of critique; the end result is that they produce artists and curators who lack formal opportunities to engage with critical race discourses and histories of anti-racist cultural production. In the absence of informed discussion, we get unadulterated rage. Hannah Black claims to know more about black suffering than Schutz, but her treatment of history could use more accuracy and depth. She claims that Mamie Till wanted her son’s body to be visible to black people as an inspiration and a warning; however, according to Emmett Till’s cousin Simeon Wright, who was with him the night of his capture and attended his funeral, Mamie Till said “she wanted the world to see what those men had done to her son” (my emphasis). There was no exclusion of non-black people implied, nor was it a deviation from the custom of having an open casket. That casket was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture by Till’s family to be on view for all, not just black, people. Scholar Christina Sharpe’s assertion in an interview with Hyperallergic that if no white people attended the funeral, no whites were supposed to see the casket doesn’t hold. The trial of Till’s murderers was filmed and shown widely, as were photographs of his funeral. Those photographs galvanized the Civil Rights Movement: activist leaders strategically and adeptly circulated them to encourage blacks and whites in the North to join the struggle, and in order to shame politicians by casting doubts on America’s adherence to its democratic ideals. My mother, a Cuban immigrant, arrived in New York shortly before Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. She was not physically present at his funeral, but saw pictures of him in the casket and learned about his death from the news. She was so appalled by the violence that she never got over it. She talked to me about the Till case throughout my childhood and refused to let me or my brothers visit the Deep South. She was a pathologist who performed hundreds of autopsies, but the image of a disfigured Emmett Till in the casket left an indelible mark on her memory as the archetypal representation of American racism. Black claims that Schutz’s painting is yet one more example of white representation of black suffering as an exercise in commercial exploitation. She also suggests that such representations cater to a morbid fascination with black death that she associates with lynching as a public spectacle. It is undeniable that reality TV shows lionizing cops in pursuit of an endless stream of black and brown men are extremely lucrative for their white producers. It’s also true that there are plenty of examples of simplistic and fetishistic representations of black bodies in Western art and advertising. However, it is reductive and inaccurate to claim that all treatment of black suffering by white cultural producers is driven by commercial interests and sadistic voyeurism. Black overlooks an important history of white people making anti-racist art, often commissioned by Civil Rights activists. That history extends back to 19th-century abolitionists who used photographs of the branded hands and scourged backs of slaves to denounce the inhumanity of slavery and to target white audiences in the North. It includes the works made by white artists Paul Cadmus and John Steuart Curry, who drew and painted blacks struggling against white mobs for the 1935 exhibition An Art Commentary on Lynching, organized at the behest of the NAACP in support of its anti-lynching campaign. It also includes Charles Moore’s and Danny Lyon’s celebrated documentary photographs of police brutality toward black Civil Rights activists that circulated among white people at home and abroad, and helped push a reluctant US Congress to pass Civil Rights legislation. It encompasses the Minimalist sound piece “Come Out,” composed by avant-garde musician Steve Reich in 1966 for a benefit for the Harlem Six upon the request of a Civil Rights activist. Reich’s piece consists of a looped sound recording of Daniel Hamm, a young black man in Harlem who was a victim of false arrest and police violence. The speech fragment repeats his explanation of how he turned his physical suffering into spectacle, making one of his bruises bleed visibly so that the police would finally take him to a hospital. In citing these examples, I do not mean to suggest that all artistic representations of black oppression by white artists and all curatorial efforts to address race are well intentioned, or that they are all good. However, the argument that any attempt by a white cultural producer to engage with racism via the expression of black pain is inherently unacceptable forecloses the effort to achieve interracial cooperation, mutual understanding, or universal anti-racist consciousness. There are better ways to arrive at cultural equity than policing art production and resorting to moralistic pieties in order to intimidate individuals into silence. Indeed, the decolonization of art institutions that Black’s supporters claim to want entails critical analysis of systemic racism coupled with a rigorous treatment of art history and visual culture. Arguing that Schutz’s painting must be destroyed because whites aren’t allowed to depict black suffering, blaming Schutz for capitalizing on the entire history of racist violence in America, suggesting, as some have done on social media, that she’s tainted by having collectors who are heartless real estate developers, while ignoring the work by a dozen or so black artists in the biennial is not going to advance anything. Over the past 40 years, critics, cultural historians, and artists themselves have devoted a good deal of attention to the problems they see with such exhibitions as Harlem on My Mind, The N*gger Drawings, and “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art and such white artists as Rob Pruitt and Kelley Walker, whose treatments of black subjects have been deemed exploitative. Black British artist Isaac Julien and art historian Kobena Mercer first gained international attention in the 1980s for their critical analysis of white artist Robert Mapplethorpe’s depictions of black men, launching an extensive debate that eventually resulted in Mercer altering his original stance to acknowledge more complexity and complicity in interracial relations within gay subcultures. My point here is that reasoned assessment involves more nuanced evaluative criteria, ones that do not essentialize racial identity, impute intent, or ignore the way distinct cultural forms hold differing degrees of power when it comes to racial relations. The impact of an individual artist’s single, non-mass-produced artwork is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the coercive power of an advertising campaign or a Hollywood blockbuster, and to discuss their effects as if they were the same is hyperbolic and unjust. True, Dana Schutz did not create her painting at the request of Civil Rights activists — however, the fact that she was stirred to resurrect the image of Emmett Till’s open casket is a sign of the success of the Black Lives Matter movement in forging awareness of patterns of state violence by politicizing the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, and others. The specter of Till’s death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan lingers behind these more recent deaths at the hands of the police. Though six decades apart, the circulation of images from these tragedies serves the same function — and sadly signals how little American society and race relations have changed. That is not what mainstream public education teaches American children, and it is not what white liberals would have Americans believe. Schutz is stepping out of line with the dominant culture in underscoring the connection. Schutz has stated clearly that she never intends to sell the painting, so there is little evidence that she’s seeking to enrich herself by it. Artists, myself included, often explore what troubles them for reasons other than personal gain — and if I want an art world that can handle more than pretty pictures and simplistic evocations of identity, I understand that I will have to support not only difficult subjects but clumsiness and mistakes. Though Schutz is not known for painting works about social issues, her inclination to respond to a heightened awareness of violence and injustice is hardly unusual and not inherently opportunistic; other white artists have changed their approach and focus in times of intense social unrest.

(Brenna Bhandar, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Alberto Toscano, Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical , Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

White nationalism, with its fascist potentials, appears (in 2022 as in 1992, we might say) as a crisis ideology, which is also to say a revanchist victimology haunted by demotion and loss, by vulnerability to psychic and material dispossession: “The idea and enactment of winning, of explicit domination set against the local reality of decreasing family wealth, fear of unemployment, threat of homelessness, and increased likelihood of early, painful death from capitalism’s many toxicities.”44 Racial ideologies do political-economic work, as civilizational narratives and geopolitical imaginaries fueled by ressentiment find outlets in policy platforms, exploiting “the need for an enemy whose threat obliges endless budgetary consideration”—as writ large in the ensuing trajectory of mass incarceration. Gilmore’s words from three decades ago continue to resonate with the present: The very crisis which we must exploit—the raw materials of profound social change—is the tending toward fascism through the romance of identity, forged in the always already of the American national project. Our work is to rearticulate our own connections in new (and frightening) forward-looking moves in order to describe, promote, organize, bargain in the political arenas.45 It is this work of political rearticulation, buffeted by crisis and confronted with state and para-state violence, that requires the collective forging of “infrastructures of feeling,” embodied traditions of the oppressed—as well as new figures of intellectual work and “scholarship-activism.” Eschewing a catastrophic conception of liberation or a punctual image of revolution, it requires reinventing, while attending to the “discipline of the conjuncture,” abolitionist strategies of non reformist reform. Over half a century ago, André Gorz had defined a reformist reform as “one which subordinates its objectives to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system,” while a “not necessarily reformist reform is one which is conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands.” Crucially—and this is amply explored in Gilmore’s accounts of anti-prison coalitions, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children,46 or abolitionist projects engaging in “grassroots planning” (“future orientation driven by the present certainty of shortened lives”47) across multiple intra- and international sites—Gorz set as a condition of his vision of structural reform that it be “by definition a reform implemented or controlled by those who demand it.”48 In her foreword to Dan Berger’s The Struggle Within, Gilmore has set out, with combative clarity, how that Gorzian distinction can be repurposed to define the stakes of abolition: The purpose of abolition is to expose and defeat all the relationships and policies that make the United States the world’s top cop, warmonger, and jailer. Practicalities rather than metaphors determine the focus and drive the analysis, because the scope of prison touches every aspect of ordinary life. Thus, it is possible and necessary to identify all those points of contact and work from the ground up to change them. This ambition makes some people impatient, as well it should. Abolition is a movement to end systemic violence, including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going. In other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death … The distinction sketched out above is the difference between reformist reform—tweak Armageddon—and non reformist reform—deliberate change that does not create more obstacles in the larger struggle. Some of the timidity in the fight against warehousing humans in cages for part or all of their lives results from the lethal synthesis of abandoned optimism and calculated convenience … Contemporary oppositional political society seems to be constantly reorganizing itself into fragments. While the assertion of particular needs, struggles, and identities must necessarily be part of the project to free ourselves, the structural effect of everyday political disintegration is fatal.49 From the earliest text collected here, with its call for “resisting and denouncing the re-objectification of the subaltern subject” and working out “the semiotics and histrionics of critical performance,”50 Gilmore’s writing is deeply attuned to the vexed question of how to foster a political culture “on our enemies’ land.” Besieged as we are by representations of the intellectual that often serve to debilitate, distract, and disintegrate—rather than to orient or organize—there is much to be gained by rethinking, along with Gilmore, what scholarship/activism as “organic praxis” might mean in the present.51 This is a present that daily reminds us that only the most capacious and intransigent vision of liberation can stand a chance against the catastrophe in permanence organized under the aegis of the anti-state state and exacerbated by its fascistic progeny. Such a vision was sketched out by Gilmore in a 2020 interview, in words that can also serve to frame this collection of interventions, inquiries, and illuminations: Abolition has to be “green.” It has to take seriously the problem of environmental harm, environmental racism, and environmental degradation. To be “green” it has to be “red.” It has to figure out ways to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community, which then will extend to all people. And to do that, to be “green” and “red,” it has to be international. It has to stretch across borders so that we can consolidate our strength, our experience, and our vision for a better world.52

(Susannah, JewishStudies@Dartmouth What Manner of Man Is the Prophet? Cornel West, Abraham Heschel, and the Hebrew Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Yet West demurs from Afropessimism. Yes, like the Afropessimists he analyzes the production of racism by modernity and indicts the “forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity as well as aesthetic and cultural ideals” that “require[d] the constitution of the idea of white supremacy.”18 He is strong in articulating the impact of racism: “The sheer absurdity of being a black human being whose black body is viewed as an abomination, whose black thoughts and ideas are perceived as debased, and whose black pain and grief are rendered invisible on the human and moral scale is the New World context in which black culture emerged.”19 West’s analyses of white supremacy, while severe, come with a crucial distinction from the Afropessimists. While West recognizes despair, he rejects pessimism as “a species of cowardice fearful of life and too spectatorial in its detached practice! It lacks the heightened vulnerability of deep love and the passionate uncertainty of genuine struggle for justice!”20 Sorrow, suffering, mourning, and melancholy are essential elements of the religious life, but there is no room for holiness and transformation in pessimism. Pessimism does not inspire activism, nor does it encourage the empathy and relationships that heal; it is nihilistic and prophetic. West is joined in his critique by the philosopher Lewis Gordon, who writes of Afropessimism, “Do blacks, for instance, suffer social death in relation to each other?” and then asks, “Why must the social world be premised on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? Why don’t blacks among each other and other communities of color count as social perspectives?”21 A key element of West’s affirmation of Black suffering and culture focuses on sound. He writes that “the ‘urtext’ of Black culture is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan—a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition.”22 Moreover, his Christian commitments, especially prophetic hope, do not allow him to abandon hope for this-world redemption. He writes that Christianity is an extension of prophetic Judaism.23 Heschel’s phrase that “some are guilty, but all are responsible” finds emphasis in West’s work. The prophetic for West is not simply an extension of the pragmatic, nor does the prophet simply dream of a future; here West is misunderstood by the philosopher Richard Rorty, who imagines “the pragmatist as the dreamer who first glimpses the concrete outlines of a better future.”24 The intellectual independence that has always marked West’s career generates criticism in an era when the most radical and pessimistic voices are misperceived as the most interesting and significant. Yet what West offers is precisely what the Afropessimists ultimately wish to attain, what Kevin Quashie calls “Black Aliveness,” the title of his recent book, and what Sithole calls the “Black register,” a form of language that capacitates Black subjects to speak about their conditions, and what Elizabeth Alexander calls “The Black Interior.”25 Racism may indeed be the ultimate form of necropolitics, as Jackson asserts, but West keeps alive the souls of Black folks, the intellectual, cultural, religious, and musical vitality that is too precious, in his words, to be ignored or discarded as nothing more than a defensive response to white antiblackness. The nihilism of those theorists is far removed from West’s description of “the profoundly tragicomic character of black life,”26 with its “individual and collective black resistance predicated on a deep and abiding black love.”27 Black souls, for West, are infused with the prophetic spirit, which articulates devastating critique of societal injustice yet also insists on the cultivation of the inner life of compassion for others. Prophecy brings together the exterior and the interior of human life, suffering with hope, devastating sorrow with redemptive love. As West puts it, for the Christian “a deep sense of the tragic is required, yet the world is not inherently tragic.”28 Too much tragic is also unacceptable. West writes: “My fundamental problem with Du Bois is his inadequate grasp of the tragicomic sense of life—a refusal candidly to confront the sheer absurdity of the human condition. This tragicomic sense—tragicomic rather than simply ‘tragic,’ because even ultimate purpose and objective order are called into question—propels us toward suicide or madness unless we are buffered by ritual, cushioned by community, or sustained by art.”29 Addressing and ending America’s economic, military, and political exploitation requires, for West, a combination of Socratic questioning, prophetic witnessing, and the power of democratic institutions. Here is where his critique of Afropessimism is sharpest: his emphasis on the prophetic as a source of compassion as well as critique, of vision and hope as well as demand for social change, an offer of optimism as well as rage at cruelty, an insistence on the spiritual dimension of our individual humanity as well as calling out the systemic racist structures that try to exert sovereignty over us. And, ultimately, West’s insistence on cultivating the relationship between our interiority and the exteriority that define our lives: “My painful quest for wisdom is an endless journey that tries to delve into the darkness of my soul to create a more mature and compassionate person. My political project of deepening democracy in the world is a perennial process of highlighting the plight of the wretched of the earth and broadening the scope of human dignity.”30 West insists that three pillars—the Socratic, the democratic, and the prophetic—are essential, with each a corrective of the other. Socratic critical thinking is essential and yet the dry, rational tradition of the Socratic requires the passion and compassion of the prophetic. He writes in his 2004 book, Democracy Matters: “We must out-Socratize Socrates by revealing the limits of the great Socratic tradition. My own philosophy of democracy that emerges from the nightside of American democracy is rooted in the guttural cries and silent tears of oppressed people. And it has always bothered me that Socrates never cries—he never sheds a tear. His profound yet insufficient rationalism refuses to connect noble self-mastery to a heartfelt solidarity with the agony and anguish of oppressed peoples.”31 The limits of the Socratic—the absence of emotion, compassion, passion— lead West to define the crucial role of the prophetic. He draws from Heschel in understanding the prophet giving voice to suffering. The prophet, Heschel writes, is not a messenger of God, but “a person who stands in the presence of God (Jeremiah 15:19).”32 That marks the difference, West would agree with Heschel, between philosophy with its proofs for the existence of God, and the crucial prophetic distinction: to be a witness to God.33 Socratic questioning, however clever, will not help people living in agony and the prophetic demand for justice becomes meaningless if it is only a dry, well-articulated argument. Here West shifts from prophecy as a message to prophetic subjectivity.

(Chris, CompLit@SantaCruz, Race and the Politics of Recognition in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory , ed Best, Bonefeld, O’Kane)

Contemporary black studies scholars have increasingly challenged the pluralist, coalitional logic at the core of liberal multicultural state and institutional policy. Offering a comprehensive theory of antiblack racism dubbed ‘Afropessimism’, scholars such as Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton have rejected a liberal multicultural imaginary ‘wherein cultural diversity is managed as a depoliticized term of experience’ (Sexton, 2008: 247). Both theorists also argue for the structural impossibility of attaining of recognition for black subjects. This cohort returns to the concept of race contra culture as a set of what Wilderson calls ontological positions: whiteness, blackness, and the indigenous ‘Savage’ (Wilderson, 2010: 23). For Wilderson, Sexton, and other Afropessimist critics, blackness is less as an affirmative ethnocultural identity than a negative social category. On this view, the sacrificial expulsion and subordination of blackness guarantees the coherence of civil society and its subjects. Framing blackness as existential abjection, non-relationality, and non-communicability has led critic Fred Moten to offer a sympathetic though critical interrogation of Afropessimism’s capacity to think the relation between antiblack racism and black subjectivity and political agency (Moten, 2013). For both Wilderson and Sexton, the severity and historical durability of antiblack racism is ultimately grounded, not in colonial domination or capitalist exploitation, but in the psychic pathology of nonblack subjects structured by what Wilderson calls the ‘libidinal economy of civil society’ (2010: 15). That psychic economy simultaneously conditions a history of nonblack enjoyment of and empathy toward black suffering (Hartman, 1997). These theorists thus elaborate blackness as a structural category defined primarily through historically durable forms of antiblack racism: gratuitous violence, non-sovereignty, existential abjection, literal and metaphorical fungibility, and what sociologist Orlando Patterson has called the ‘social death’ (Patterson, 1985) of the slave condition. For Afropessimist theorists, the politics of nonwhite interracial coalition encoded in multicultural ideals fundamentally depend upon a form of permanent structural misrecognition of the singularity of antiblack racism. That misrecognition is enforced through spurious racial analogies that render ‘equivalent slavery and other forms of oppression’ (Sexton, 2008: 293). Afropessimism’s critiques of indigenous studies has occasioned ongoing debates over the historical relationship between black chattel slavery and US settler colonialism (Sexton, 2014; Day, 2015; Coulthard and Simpson, 2016). At the same time, Afropessimism’s ontological turn, grounded in a conception of an unchanging and originary libidinal economy of black suffering, has been the target of criticism for its anti-materialist, radically dehistoricized conception of black racialization (Dawson, 2016). Despite breaking from a prior multicultural logic of coalition, therefore, Afropessimism’s ontologization of blackness as a racial position, or perhaps the singular racial position, raises the question of the historicity and internal homogeneity of the category of blackness itself. Considering blackness as a unitary ontological condition of permanent civic nonrecognition faces three broad theoretical challenges. First, the ontological turn raises the question of the relationship between antiblackness and blackness, or between an ascriptive condition and the affirmative heterogeneity of black life (Moten, 2009; Shelby, 2009). Second, accounts of the psychopathological roots of antiblackness have been challenged by scholarship on the changing articulation of black subordination within capitalist social relations (Hall, 1996) from the political economy of black chattel slavery (Oakes, 2016) to the racialization of wagelessness and contemporary surplus populations (Johnson, 2011). This scholarship has often attempted to register the impact of deepening internal economic divisions within black populations on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century black political movements (Reed, 1999; Dawson, 2001; Johnson, 2007; Dawson and Francis, 2015). Finally, treating blackness as an ontological category raises the question of racial unity, and the subsumption of other cross-cutting axes of social differentiation, that has been a persistent object of critique for contemporary black feminist critiques of black nationalism (Collins, 1998; Lubiano, 1998) and theories of intersectionality (Hancock, 2016). (940-1)

(Yohann, , 8-5)

The rise of Afropessimism is a bleak sign for the likes of Gilroy, schooled on Stuart Hall’s argument that race is made politically meaningful through the struggle against capitalism, which is itself not eternal. Gilroy sees Afropessimism as part of an “ontological turn” – ontology is the study of being – in which race becomes an unassailable barrier between the self and the world, and anti-black violence an immutable fact. “What’s interesting to me is how resonant the Afropessimist outlook has proved to be,” Gilroy said. “I can’t help thinking that it’s got something to do with the fact that it absolves you of having to do anything at all. That really what you have to do is just be black. And there’s a sufficiency in that.” In sharp contrast, Gilroy wants to reinvigorate an old ideal: humanism. In some scholarly circles, calling oneself a humanist can sound not just antiquated, but suspect. It was, after all, the name of the woolly ideology of equality propagated by Europeans at the height of empire, who spoke of the liberty of man while denying it to millions. But to Gilroy, there is hope in the promise of a radical humanism, illuminating a post-racial world. This, he believes, is the humanism of figures who regularly appear in his work such as Du Bois, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison and the French-Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon. If thinkers who had lived through the 20th century’s abominations could hold on to the idea of a humanism worthy of the name, then so can we.

(Camilla, Geo@SantaCruz, Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century Geography Compass, 13(11) https://escholarship.org/content/qt04h2968t/qt04h2968t.pdf)

Black Geographies asserts the inherent spatiality of Black life—the spatial imaginaries, spacemaking practices, and senses of place rooted in Black communities. Starting from the understanding that all social relations are grounded in spatial relations, this scholarship privileges Black world-making practices in all of their multiplicities. Such an emphasis counters longstanding trends in the discipline of geography, in which Black people were seen as lacking geography (due to the upheaval of the trans-Atlantic slave trade); or as victims of geography (due to ongoing practices of displacement and spatial segregation). Taken together, these modes of analysis efface a Black sense of place (McKittrick, 2011) and perpetuate a dangerous understanding of space as transparent—of geographies as static, inert, and self-evident, and of current spatial arrangements as natural, innocent, and ahistorical (McKittrick, 2006, pp. 5–6). The lens of transparent space elides the relationship between racism, racialization, or racemaking, and the production of space. In response, Black Geographies scholarship asserts that racism is also a spatial practice—space is not just a blank canvas upon which racist activity unfolds. As Lipsitz argues in his classic text How Racism Takes Place, space both reflects and (re)produces racisms (Lipsitz, 2011). Indeed, one of the primary ways in which anti-Blackness functions is by positing Blackness as perpetually “out of place” or as placeless (Domosh, 2017). Central to this argument is an understanding that Blackness and Black knowledge, while embodied, are not rooted solely in the biocentric body. As McKittrick explains, an overemphasis on the Black body (even in the form of well-intentioned critiques of scientific racism) detracts from the study of Black life by “singularizing” and “flattening it” into mere biology (McKittrick, 2016, p. 6). Similarly, an understanding of Black knowledge as necessarily tethered to such a “violated body” denies the existence of multiple forms of Black knowledge—including spatial knowledge. The idea that Blackness emmanates from the body is central to the current “ontological turn” in Black studies (Warren, 2018; Chari, 2017, 170 - see note 4), rooted in a particular reading of Fanon's “zone of nonbeing” (Fanon, 1952/ 2008). Shifting the lens of analysis from the body to space and place (after all, Fanon was also deeply concerned with the spatialities of colonial racial hierarchies [Sekyi-Otu, 2009]) allows for a reading of Black life as not reducible to racism, violence, and death (Woods, 2002). By de-centering the body as the primary unit of analysis, Black Geographies in turn opens up new avenues for the study of racism and Black resistance. Food has been a particularly generative site of engagement, bringing traditional geographical concerns with nature, agrarian production, and political economy together with questions of Black space-making. This work studies Black spatial knowledges as they relate to food production, as well as the ways Black communities past and present craft food security and sovereignty in the face of racialized dispossession (Carney, 2001; McCutcheon, 2015; Ramírez, 2014; Reese, 2019; Walker, 2015). Finney similarly takes up questions of Black space-making in relation to ideas of “nature,” upending dominant narratives about Black alienation from the environment (Finney, 2014). Scholars have also brought geographical analytics to bear on questions of diaspora, examining how Black subjectivities operate both within and against hegemonic understandings of nation, race, place, and membership (Brown, 2005; Walcott, 1997). And, influenced by Black feminist and queer theory, a growing number of researchers have foregrounded the rich spatial imaginaries and space-making practices of Black queer communities (Bailey & Shabazz, 2014; Eaves, 2017; Ellison, 2019; Hamilton, 2018). Geographies of racial capitalism Black Geographies has also contributed important insights to political economic analysis. Specifically, Black Geographies emphasizes the mutual significance of the material and the symbolic, rejecting simplistic economic determinisms and base/superstructure binaries in which racism is understood as being of secondary importance to the means and relations of production. Robinson famously argued that capitalism and racism coevolved, such that capitalism had been thoroughly suffused with race and practices of racial differentiation since its emergence out of feudalism (Robinson, 1983/2005). As Kelley argues, Robinson's intervention was to transform the concept of “racial capitalism” from the description of a specific system (i.e., apartheid South Africa) to the characterization of capitalism as a whole (Kelley, 2017)—a shift that in turn centered slavery and colonialism in the history of capitalism. For geographers, then, the task is to study how capitalism's tendency to racially differentiate takes spatial form. Gilmore argues that while there has been a range of approaches within geography for contending with racism and race, they generally share two assumptions: “(1) social formations are structured in dominance within and across scales; and (2) race is in some way determinate of sociospatial location” (Gilmore, 2002, p. 17). As she explains, once scholars recognize the interdependency of power and structure, it subsequently becomes necessary to untangle the ways power is distributed within a structure (Gilmore, 2007, p. 17). This in turn requires a finely grained, spatial analysis of the relationship between racism and capitalism.

(Brenna Bhandar, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Alberto Toscano, Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical , Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

Race and space are mutually constituted across a multiplicity of scales and across distinct if interconnected geographies shaped by crisis and struggle, “power-difference topographies (e.g. North, South) unified by the ineluctable fatalities attending asymmetrical wealth transfers”15—living, mutable legacies of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide but also of the liberatory projects arrayed against strategies of domination. From a variety of angles and cleaving to specific conjunctures, the essays collected in this volume provide an extremely original and fecund spatial translation of an understanding of racism as “always historically specific” and conjunctural,16 manifesting in practices, subjectivities, and regimes that are always “makeshift patchworks” and “contrivances, designed and delegated by interested cultural and social powers with the wherewithal sufficient to commission their imaginings, manufacture, and maintenance”—that is to say their reproduction and repair.17 This is a racism that “does not stay still; it changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function—with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances to that system.”18 Gilmore’s crucial contribution to critical theories of the nexus of race and capital is to make palpable the violent abstraction and the concrete, sited specificity that attaches to race-making as it operates through and by physical and political space. We cannot rest content with a “sentimental political assertion” about the uninterrupted legacies of slavery (or colonialism), with “the uncritical extension of a partial past to explain a different present.” Abolition geography is a dialectical, not a sentimental proposition. In Gilmore’s words, Instead of imagining the persistent reiteration of static relations, it might be more powerful to analyze relationship dynamics that extend beyond obvious conceptual or spatial boundaries, and then decide what a particular form, old or new, is made of, by trying to make it into something else. This—making something into something else—is what negation is. To do so is to wonder about a form’s present, future-shaping design—something we can discern from the evidence of its constitutive patterns, without being beguiled or distracted by social ancestors we perceive, reasonably or emotionally, in the form’s features.19 Abolition geography, as the determined and determinate negation of specific regimes of racial capitalism, calls for this geographic, historical and materialist sensibility. As Gilmore’s granular and systemic analyses of the mutable strategies of mass incarceration and coalitions of resistance against it demonstrate, a static comprehension of the articulations of race, state, and capital is immensely debilitating. Far from defining an untrammeled continuum, birthed by the transatlantic slave trade and fundamentally unchanged today,20 racial capitalism can be understood and fought only if the historical dialectics of its form are attended to.

(Brandon M., Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope: Black Nihilism Reconsidered in Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

From a particular vantage, however, nihilism may contain something laudable. In its “active” form, at least, nihilism rejects the “lies we should like to tell ourselves” about the depth, certainty, or significance of human suffering. It breaks with the forms of “self-narcotization” (e.g., distraction by entertainment, nostalgia, ressentiment, fanaticism) by which we evade the terrible truths of our condition or descend into “passive” despair.40 A particularly deceptive and self-deluded myth, Nietzsche argued, by which the most “level-headed are led astray,” is the idea of “Progress,” where both time and everything in it marches forward toward developing the highest human ends or goods together.41 In Nietzsche’s view, the past is “a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered throughout ages, while there are untold failures, and all order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking.”42 For West, the vital rejoinder to romantic notions of progress is not the cultural degeneration that animated Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism, but instead “the pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world,” and the ghastly wreckage of past injustice.43 In this sense, West shares much in philosophical orientation with the well-known passage from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the latter describes the mythos of “Progress” through the image of Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, which: shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.44 An “active” nihilism, then, may at least pave the way for a more clear-eyed recognition of the extent of human suffering, now and in the past. Yet this raises for West an immediate question. How can this honest confrontation help us overcome nihilism and find redemptive meaning and value in the resistance, travails, and disappointments we inevitably confront as finite beings pursuing our goals? After all, judgments of pessimism about the ability to overcome or redeem such suffering can lead to despairing skepticism or ironic condescension on the value of any particular political program and the worth of politics, collective agency, and even life itself. Without some form of hope or a sense that the sufferings and strivings that constitute African American life have import and value, West sees no opening for struggle, resilience, and reverence for the dignity of the oppressed. Without these, it becomes impossible to keep the possibility of “hard-won progress” in particular domains alive.45 A courageous confrontation with the abyss of suffering, in other words, may lead some to a judgment that misery and despair are inevitable and treat this fact as a condemnation of the world or life itself. Against this temptation, those like Nietzsche and West seek orientations to the world that are “life-affirming.” Since some degree of suffering is inevitable, as a fact of the human condition and as part of any struggle to improve it, this practice of philosophy champions modes of being that create redemptive meaning within and through suffering. It is incumbent upon us not to flee from the pain and disappointment germane to human life but to transfigure it as best we can. For Nietzsche, such transfiguration would not, for example, affirm the excellences, ideals, or values of creative geniuses who create despite suffering but also affirm even the suffering and resistance that occasioned or constituted such creativity.46 While West shares with Nietzsche an interest in genius cultivators of artistry and creativity that transfigure the value of suffering rather than deepening it, his distillation of nihilism’s threat is ultimately sparer and more egalitarian.47 West’s concern to convert people away from nihilism is not primarily about cultural vitality as a way of life or radical aristocratic perfectionism. It is, fundamentally, about refusing to allow despair the last word over whether the lives of oppressed peoples are worth living, whether their traditions and exemplary instances of fortitude and moral courage are worth celebrating and sustaining, and whether it is worthwhile to struggle and strive in pursuit of justice and good.48

(Brandon M., Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope: Black Nihilism Reconsidered in Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Unfortunately, as with many inquiries into the ethical life of black peoples in the New World, the reception of West’s argument has largely been misguided and confused. The shallow, albeit persistent, criticism insists that West, in naming a black nihilism, inadvertently bolsters the neoconservative and even racist ideology of black pathology.10 For such critics, describing a sizeable cohort of black ghetto denizens as having “a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world,” or “a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook,” was to reproduce the terms of racist discourse and pathologizing stigma that undergird antiblack stigma in the post-Jim Crow era (Race Matters 14). Yet any attempt to reduce West’s argument to unwitting conservatism fails in two respects. First, it fails to read the essay alongside West’s longstanding neo-Marxist analysis of the interpenetrating structural, ideological, and aesthetic foundations of racial and economic domination.11 As he briefly reiterates in “Nihilism in Black America,” his views on these matters are in stark opposition to conservative social theory. To describe a condition of “black nihilism” is not to endorse an explanatory social theory of black disadvantage that gives causal priority to abnormal cultural patterns that prevail in the ghetto. Nor does it deny the causal or ethical significance of the “basic structure” of society, with its historically cumulative and unjust patterns of group-based inequalities.12 Nor, moreover, does West’s worry that the decline of civic associations and social institutions helps engender nihilism commit him to the argument, made famous by Robert Putnam among others, that an objectionable spirit of individualism and technology-enabled withdrawal is chiefly responsible.13 Instead, West points the blame for social fragmentation at the effects of economic inequality and the intensifying privatization and marketization of all spheres of human life. Such forces destabilize neighborhoods and institutions, with profit imperatives proving particularly corrosive to the ethical ideals of churches, schools, and other domains once more insulated from such pressures (Race Matters 24–25). Second, it is incumbent upon such critics to clarify whether they think that nihilism of any sort is possible. If so, we might ask whether such a phenomenon could have any meaningful social consequence or whether it is possible to diagnose it through any extant form of cultural criticism or social theory.14 While West’s attempt to connect the interpretation of some range of self-undermining or objectionable practices that were apparently increasing or intensifying in black communities (e.g., violence, drug addiction, and suicide) to the broader philosophical literature on nihilism was indeed novel, the claim that forms of hopelessness and meaninglessness embedded in particular practices or stances toward the world represent an existential threat to the flourishing of some members of the group is a familiar one in black letters. James Weldon Johnson, for example, wrote of a “general spirit . . . of hopelessness or acquiescence” amid the wake of Reconstruction’s defeat and the “triumphant materialism of the age.”15 Mary Church Terrell, at the end of the Great Depression, lamented how the “colored man . . . resigns himself to his fate” in “a sort of stoical despair” created by “the helplessness and the hopelessness of the situation in this country.”16 James Forman likewise complained that in Mississippi, before the civil rights insurgency, “years of terror, economic intimidation, and a total, grinding, day-in, day-out white racism had created a black population numb with fear and hopelessness.”17 The psychologist Kenneth Clark despaired, in the 1970s, of the “racial prisons of America’s ghettos” and argued that the “frustration, despair, and a sense of hopelessness” forged by such domination is manifest in drug abuse, crime, and other behaviors.18 Perhaps most stridently of all, Malcolm X argued that a clear-eyed assessment of ghetto conditions “is primarily responsible for the ever-increasing sense of frustration and hopelessness that exists” and is manifest in substance abuse, violent crime, and other vices. “We are trapped,” Malcolm warned, in “a vicious cycle of economic, intellectual, social, and political death. . . . Giving birth to children who see no hope or future but to follow in our miserable footsteps.”19 The persistence of such claims does not dissolve, of course, the reasonable debate over what behaviors or dispositions might persuasively express, enact, or embody “nihilism” in particular contexts. Nor are such voices, despite their admirable commitments to black liberation, immune by default from the habituated contempt toward the poor or the fear of deviance characteristic of so much modern social thought. We should treat charges of “nihilism,” therefore, in a spirit of receptivity and fallibility. Assessing such judgments should obligate us to produce or reconstruct comprehensive accounts of what our interlocutors think constitutes flourishing and dignity, rather than enervation and degradation. Perhaps even more important, nihilism-talk must remain open to revision and reformulation in response to arguments advanced in defense of the practices or dispositions described in such fashion.20 Nonetheless, the accumulated weight of this tradition amounts to a view that critics of nihilism-talk would do well to take seriously. Forms of hopelessness and the threat of meaninglessness have proved so persistent in the face of intergenerational oppression that they may not be waved away by triumphalist romanticism about “resistance” or rationalist evasion of the darker currents of psychic life. This is because, in part, they reflect genuinely reflective ruminations on whether life is worth living in the face of suffering and evil.

(RL, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racism-afro-pessimism-reparations-class-struggle)

Though Coates has never explicitly cited it as his theoretical framework, the dour outlook of his work evokes the themes of Afro-Pessimism. The pivot to the ontological that is apparent in Coates’s rhetoric is a hallmark of Afro-Pessimism. “Ontology by definition is the study of being, and to speak of Blackness as an ontological condition means analyzing the state of Black bodies through the lens of slavery,” Afro-Pessimist scholar Michael Barlow, Jr., writes in the academic journal Inquiries. However, for Barlow, the relation of slavery that ontologically defines blackness is not a matter of political economy, but rather a “libidinal economy.” In this telling, labor and ownership — that is, political economy — are merely incidental to racial slavery. Instead, it’s the white imagination and its depraved “metaphysical desires for Black flesh” that both predated and catalyzed racialized chattel slavery. Racism is reduced to the spiritual, more a matter of a sinful nature than a political struggle. Coates has echoed this retreat to interiority, to the spiritual, to consciousness. It’s the ontological pivot that leads Frank Wilderson, perhaps the world’s foremost Afro-Pessimist, to declare in his foundational text “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” that black people are no more than cows in a slaughterhouse. Wilderson posits that “death of the black body is foundational to the life of American civil society,” just as a cow’s death is essential to the slaughterhouse. Flippantly, Wilderson asks, “how would the cows fare under a dictatorship of the proletariat?” Coates adopts a similar sense of impotence. He characterizes struggle as aimless toil — an apolitical end in itself. “The struggle is really all I have for you,” he tells his son, “because it is the only portion of this world under your control.” Yet how are we to struggle against earthquakes and physical laws? How can we fight gravity? Both Coates and Wilderson speak of power in terms of dreams. Coates writes of monolithic white “Dreamers,” those whose investment in the American Dream requires a faith in their own whiteness. Similarly, Wilderson sees America as enacting two distinct dreams. For Wilderson, “the dream of black accumulation and death” is separate from “the dream of worker exploitation.” Ultimately, in both Coates’s and Wilderson’s respective frameworks, solidarity is unimaginable and class struggle is rendered futile. Though Coates does not go to the lengths Wilderson does to position himself in opposition to materialist politics, the result is effectively equivalent: a separation of race and class combined with a deep skepticism of class-based solidarity, reforms, or even revolution. This is a turn away from the Freedom Tradition embodied by Fannie Lou Hamer. For her, the problem of racism wasn’t cosmology or ontology — it was an expression of politics implicated in class antagonism. Fannie Lou Hamer stood “with the masses,” both white and black. Solidarity through struggle from below, including class struggle, formed her path to victory. Coates’s ontological pivot is more muddled than Wilderson’s. Fleetingly peppered throughout his work are allusions to material reality, betraying the imposition of metaphysical abstraction that ultimately drives his perspective. “We did not choose our fences,” he writes. “They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible.” Coates knows that Virginia planters did not invent gravity or earthquakes. Yet this historicizing impulse does not prevent him from essentializing racism when he confronts it head on. In string of tweets from December 2016, Coates conceded that racism is not transcendental, noting that “at its very root it was always economic.” But acknowledging racism’s economic impact has not led him to embrace class struggle. Even Frank Wilderson can acknowledge that racism has an economic impact, but he still believes that class struggle and racism exist on distinct planes. Coates holds a similar belief; that racism is wholly different in kind from class. In the same series of tweets, he concluded that “in America, ‘class’ isn’t the only kind of class.” Just as he mystifies racism, even while locating its impact in the bodies of black people, here he again pivots. Coates cannot address material politics on its own terms, preferring instead to retreat to a contrived mystification. He replaces action with interiority. As he recently told an auditorium of eager Northwestern students, “The process should not be… people looking out at the world and saying, ‘I would like for there to be change in the world, how do I do that?’” Instead, he implored the crowd to engage from the “inside-out, not outside-in… because if you are in the business of justice, and making this society more democratic, you might get a lot of disappointment.” Consciousness matters, of course. “Baby you just got to love ’em,” Fannie Lou Hamer would say of the white segregationists who routinely threatened her life. “Hating just makes you sick and weak.” This was Hamer in a reflexive moment, but it was no retreat. In the very next breath, she warned, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” Fannie Lou truly was her mother’s daughter. Reflection, whether through intergenerational story or her own thoughts, enhanced her resistance. The same cannot be said of Coates. Instead of finding relief in political action, Coates finds it in a cookout at Howard University’s homecoming, surrounded by black people. He fantasizes that he is “disappearing into all of their bodies,” as the music and dancing, the black cultural zeitgeist of the moment, cure him of the “birthmark of damnation.” The curse is lifted. Blackness is transfigured, becoming a space “beyond the Dream.” It’s another ontological pivot, this time allowing Coates to conclude that The Mecca’s” — his term for Howard — cookout has a “power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill.” It’s a fantasy of retreat, as if black culture were beyond the machinations of capitalism, as though black cultural expression existed in the world but was not of it and were enough to take us to a new one. Between the World and Me concludes with Coates considering climate change. He sees climate change as a manifestation of a polluted white consciousness, rather than the unfettered excess of industrial capitalism. It is a “noose around the neck of the earth,” allegedly resulting in large part from white flight, the mid-century exodus of negrophobic white families to the suburbs and the pollution caused by the cars that took them there. Coates’s words here are poetic but grossly inaccurate. They mimic Afro-Pessimism’s emphasis on the white libido, relegating his rhetoric to the realm of interior life, the souls of white folks, and stopping well short of the political domain. For Coates, the Civil Rights movement was not a struggle to alter a material world; rather the “hope of the movement” was merely to “awaken the Dreamers.” Black politics is only relevant as far as it can arouse white consciousness, which he sees as a largely futile exercise, due to “the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.” Coates sees common interest between the black elite and the black poor, as he marvels at “the entire diaspora,” from lawyers to street hustlers, present at Howard’s homecoming. Yet he cannot conceive of anti-capitalist class solidarity across racial identity. He has a darker vision, of a kind that Corey Robin has described as “apocalypticism.” Coates’s ultimate hope is not in collective human action, but rather the total annihilation of the world and all those living in it— another feature that unites him with Afro-Pessimism, which calls explicitly for the “end of the world.” As he says of the Dreamers, “the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.” Paradoxically, though he can see a collective fate in apocalypse, he rejects shared struggle for liberation. “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves,” he declares. The problem is, the whole of capitalist enterprise, both past and present, cannot be reduced to race as Original Sin. Left out of Coates’s mythology is the fact that colonial enterprise, in what would become the United States, relied first on European indentured servants, most of whom died within a handful of years after arriving on the continent. It’s Coates’s reading of race as sin that pushes him to imagine a perverted form of salvation in the fantasy of apocalypse. In this racial fatalism, reparations for slavery emerges as the anticipation of the inevitable Judgement Day. It is therefore no surprise that Coates has taken up racial reparations as his cross to bear — not to change the world, but to condemn it.

(Arun, Geo@MN, A date with destiny: Racial capitalism and the beginnings of the Anthropocene EPD: Society and Space 0(0) 1–23)

In Christina Sharpe’s influential theorization (2016), blackness is a hole in human “being” itself, the reduction of a part of humanity to thinghood. Like others in the Afropessimist idiom, Sharpe (2016: 11–14) challenges the hegemonic assumption that the Shoah embodies modernity’s most radical evil, noting the violences of trans-Atlantic slavery not only include the still-ongoing eradication of sociocultural rootedness but have been neglected and misrepresented. In a move parallel to Coulthard’s on settler-colonialism, Sharpe conceives slavery not as a past event but the anchor of the structure of (EuroAmerican) society, which is in itself “antiblack” in that it is premised on the total suppression of black subjecthood. She thereby formally emulates a line of European thinkers like Giorgio Agamben on the role that the absolute abjection of Auschwitz plays in constituting the humanist mythology of modernity: if the intrinsic link between modernity and the Shoah must be disavowed for humanity to continue conceiving itself in liberal-progressivist vein, the more unspeakable disaster for Sharpe is that of slavery. But while European Jewishness constituted itself successfully after its near eradication—controversially in the form of Zionism—black being is for Sharpe always already a structural impossibility (black as written in Heideggerian typography by Warren, 2018). Rethinking blackness by way of modernity’s effort to extirpate it, Afropessimism’s position is radical, and it is conscious of the risk of repeating the oft-noted exceptionalist manner in which Israel puts the Shoah to use towards settler-colonial ends (see Wolfe, 2016). Black activists including Angela Davis (in a YouTube video, 2018, with Gayatri Spivak agreeing) have taken issue with this exceptionalist tendency, as inscribed in the term antiblackness and the resurgence of a black nationalism (see also Olaloku-Teriba, 2018 amongst others). Notwithstanding Sharpe’s eloquence in tracing antiblackness from the Middle Passage to refugee drownings in the Mediterranean, a Deleuze–Guattarian approach to racial capitalism differs markedly in that it seeks to map the specific modalities, gradients, and absurdities of institutional racism. Comprehending police brutality, for example, requires concepts like gentrification, securitization, and masculinity, and cannot follow directly from a negativity of blackness at the metaphysical level. We thereby avoid the quasi-theological dispute about which group has historically endured the most suffering. And while the global archives of violence against black peoples must continue to be elaborated, is it the case that slavery and racism seek to absolutely evacuate humanity from the enslaved or incarcerated body? Is it not precisely as humans capable of resistance, farming, crime, and sex that slaves were savagely oppressed? While conceptualizing blackness as dehumanized “nonbeing” makes sense in a Heideggerian framework, for Deleuze and Guattari and (broadly internationalist) feminists like Davis and Spivak, there can be no such sweeping binary between black and everything else (another critique of Afropessimist binarization is found in Day, 2015). Finally, the historical question is how genocide and slavery prepared for capitalism. The integration of the United States of America as a white-majority nation-state and superpower could only be achieved with rapid immigration, urbanization, and fossilfuelled transport. During the time when “pioneer” families and farmers were moving in, there were still sizeable areas controlled by Native confederations. When we look at specific regions like William Cronon (1991) does with the Midwest, the eradication of Native ecosystems and the concomitant creation of new European-derived ones—what Alfred Crosby (1986) from a more conservative angle calls “Neo-Europes”—became possible with aggressive new urban assemblages and foodways. White farmers and Indigenous populations have lived in constant tension on the Great Plains. What environmental histories like Cronon show, complementing accounts like Coulthard’s, is that there was a decisive shift in the settling of the American interior when banks could supply loans for parceling land and establishing large infrastructure and industry projects. Tellingly, movies and museums fantasize about the fleeting symbiotic relationships which are supposed to have existed between Indigenous and white. In retrospect, however, such fantasies and the ensuing lamentations about the vanishing Indian were but ideological fig leaves hiding how industrialization in Britain, intra-European imperial wars, and mass consumerism conspired to continue genocide by other means (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). If Indigenous populations had somehow become resistant to Old World diseases and continued using guns and horses efficiently, it is conceivable a patchwork of white and Indigenous states might have persisted, if it were not for a giant wave of capital and migrants coming over from Europe (and later elsewhere). With Indigenous Americans contained and plantation slavery and its quasi-feudal and patriarchal ways outlawed, capital could wipe the continent clean for a new megamachinic arrangement. Hence ontologizing racial capitalism as always already tethered to slavery and/or genocide avoids the question when exactly “modernity” and the Anthropocene started. For the perspective I am developing, industrialization and related transformations like wage-labor, urbanization, motorized transport, and mass communications are fundamental shifts. While the slave trade and the displacement of Indigenous peoples were essential to enriching Europe for global hegemony, it is manufacturing with its intrinsic relation to proletarianization and slums, accelerating technological innovation, and an irrepressible invitation to consume which spread around the planet, which meant that extermination and coerced labor became slower and more covert processes. Doubtless there are work and mobility conditions approaching chattel slavery in all continents, and there is plenty of biopolitical domination approaching genocide even during alleged peace times. But it is difficult to see how multinational corporations, megacities, and mass migration could have obtained were it not for industrial capitalism overcoming the severe limitations built into the mercantile, plantation, colonial, and eliminationist models. (12-13)