Blackness, in of itself, is a weapon whose very existence is deemed to pose a national security threat to sovereignty, as such – the affirmative’s critique of US imperialism cements the violence of chattel slavery’s afterlife by focusing on a mode of violence that operates through transgression – by contrast, Black death requires no breach of social or political norms, because captive flesh is always vulnerable to gratuitous violation – voting negative reveals the indebtedness of their movements to antiblackness

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

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

We can note further that the institution of transatlantic racial slavery — whose political and economic relations constitute, present tense, the social fabric of Western modernity in general, of the Americas in particular, and of the United States most acutely — cannot be explained (away) by the acquisition of fixed capital, the minimization of variable capital, or the maximization of profits, much less by the dictates of gunboat diplomacy, the expansion of strategic overseas military installations, or the idiosyncrasies of the White House. It may seem so at times, but only insofar as contemporary observers, or our historical counterparts, fundamentally misrecognize the nature of racial slavery: as a brutal regime of labor exploitation; as the atrocious adjunct to land conquest and the extermination, containment, and/or forced assimilation of indigenous peoples; or as an endeavor functional to, rather than in excess of and at times at odds with, the advent and maturation of Eurocentric capitalism.

Of course, all of these procedures have been important to the history of racial slavery (and vice versa), but none is essential to its origins, its development and, above all, its pernicious afterlife.1 Rather, enslavement — the inaugural enterprise for the age of Europe, the precondition for the American century and its coveted sequel — is enabled by and dependent on the most basic of operations: symbolic and material immobilization, the absolute divestment of sovereignty at the site of the black body: its freedom of movement, its conditions of labor, its physical and emotional sustenance, its social and sexual reproduction, its political and cultural representation. Beyond its economic utility, this rendering of the black as the object of dispossession par excellence — object of accumulation, prototypical commodity, captive flesh — structures indelibly the historical proliferation of modern conceptions of sovereignty that now dominate political and legal discourse globally and provide the crucial frames of intelligibility for both imperialism and anti-imperialism, empire and its discontents. With blacks barred by definition from the very notion of the sovereign (whatever their nominal legal status, wherever their tentative place of residence), those not marked by the material and symbolic stigma of slavery have the exclusive and positive capacity to debate about sovereignty: to trivialize its importance and rationalize its violation or to struggle in its defense, to name and lament its loss, and wage war for its recovery.