Black Feminist Hauntology can locate a language to speak about the ways in which racial capitalism and colonialism sustain antiblack and racialized violence and the ways in which this sustains present superstructures

20 Black Feminist Hauntology is an anti-colonial analysis of time that captures the expanding and repetitive nature of structural violence, a process whereby we begin to locate a language to speak about the actual, not just symbolic or theorized violence that is racial colonialism. The ghosted nature of this work brings forth or calls upon the silent yet visible and enduring realities of colonialism: …a ‘sociological ghost,’ the form by which something is lost, barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition… the forces in our lives that we usually try to ignore or forget, but never totally leave us alone. If we deliberately investigate these ghosts, though, we can learn to take control over troubling memories; we may turn destructive haunting into something more enabling (Jacobs, 2007, 7). 21Here, the term ‘ghost’ neither confirms nor denies the metaphysical. It simply invokes a framework in which terror and unpredictability, grief and unrest, guilt and injustice, ancestors and demons can be called upon to empower and liberate us, not from the fact that we have been violated or even that violation continues, but from a condition of inability to locate the heart and soul of the problem. 22As we learn to see in Beloved, slavery shapes (present tense) the lives of the people (across its racializing spectrums) it consumes. Through Sethe, Toni Morrison brings forth the undeniable reality of the problem at hand: that the ensuing legacies of centuries engulfed in chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide are real, that at this time, we continue to live through its bloodshed and that no amount of silence, distortion or terror can erase it. In her presentation of Sethe’s rememory Morrison disallows, even at the periphery, a view of the world in which chattel slavery and plantation violence is not forever carved into the social, political, cultural, and economic landscape. At the same time, a fatalistic view of colonial slavery assuming we always have and always will be colonizers or colonized is rejected in her vivid articulation of the brutality with which these institutions are built and maintained. So finally, with both of these realities articulated, we are left with a deep recognition for the casualties and survivors of such violence, their descendant’s continued struggles against it and an immediate reverence against it. From this place of both acceptance (that colonialism and slavery happened, are happening, and are significant indicators of how we live our lives today) and rejection (that this violence is reprehensible) we locate an acutely anti-colonial stance desperately needed in abolitionist movements today. 23Through Black Feminist Hauntology, racial colonialism re-appears an implicitly abusive system of power (capitalism) and control (enslaved, reservation-bound, imprisoned and many more varying forms of conquest). A system built upon White supremacist conceptions of humanity and conquest is a system that must appear and re-appear in varying forms to uphold its own lies. It functions like a ponzi-scheme borrowing from one liberation movement’s language and ideologies to the next, co-opting the images of freedom to conceal its racist, morally corrupt bankruptcy. The scheme can only crumble – and quickly – when new lenders stop providing funds. Thus, White supremacy’s fuel has always resided in an implicit anti-Blackness it knows it can bank on, for its political campaigns, its policies of reform, its anti-Black constructions of abolition, its varying punishing and thinking institutions. That ponzi-scheme flourishes when feminism remains dominantly White, when Marxism remains dominantly White, when postmodernism remain dominantly White, when neocolonial and postcolonial studies became dominantly White, and so on. While the ponzi-scheme analogy helps us understand how White supremacy perpetuates itself despite moral bankruptcy, its actual practices are best understood through our knowledge of abusive relationships. 24Race-relations, through colonial conquest, have developed inter-generational, wide-reaching, institutionalized and structurally abusive relationships that mirror cycles of abuse made familiar to us in feminist scholarship. Abusers start by isolating their victims from family and support networks, proceed by entangling their victims in a web of self-doubt and dangerously involuntary dependence, and entrap their victims by building an illusion of change to come or abuse to end. The institutional beatings of a systemic abuser manifests itself behind a million small and large acts of injustice behind the looming figure of a White man, on a horse, with a gun in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. Buried deep within that figure are the qualities that form the modern abusive husband who is born out of the colonial soldier’s massacres, the White feminist who constructs her own womanhood in juxtaposition to her colonized stepdaughter, the one who was born because her husband, a slaveholder, a prison guard, a president of the United States raped that child’s enslaved, imprisoned mother. Racial colonialism binds us up in one place and constructs us through a classically capitalist competition of humanity in which Whiteness, backed by militarized power (penal and otherwise) becomes dependent upon racializing violence to construct itself. 25White hetero-patriarchal violence classically legitimizes racial abuse by othering so it can blame the victim. It occurs in cycles starting with isolation, followed by beatings, then apologies accompanied by gifts in what feminists call the ‘honeymoon’ phase rife with formerly broken promises. Typically as the honeymoon ends tensions begin to build and soon after the abused partner bears the brunt of her abusers ways and inevitably, the cycle continues with beatings once again manifesting themselves in overtly abusive measures of control. Through Black Feminist Hauntology we apply this cycle of violence so well discussed in feminist scholarship (e.g. Snider, 1998; Harris, 2011) to a structural understanding of colonizing race-relations in the United States. These are inter-generational, foundationally abusive: the original acts of isolation began with colonial land-theft (isolating Indigenous peoples from their land, identities and ways of life) and slavery (isolating African peoples from their homelands, families, ways of life and worship, their very identities). The first severe and often lethal beatings were performed by Europeans through chattel slavery and Indigenous genocides. Centuries of abuse were followed by a brief honeymoon phase phase (in the structural Black and White Racial relationship) in the United States named ‘reconstruction’ after the 13th amendment was passed in 1895: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction (United States Constitution, emphasis added). Heavily embedded in this amendment is the abuser’s warning, that slavery could re-emerge if his victim does not follow his rules (i.e. if she is convicted of a crime). This moment in race-relations, the passing of the 13th amendment, is mirrored every time an abuser comes home with flowers or blood diamonds, depending on his inherited or achieved status, to atone for his violence. As we know, these gifts are accompanied by ‘never again’ messages underscored by classic, ‘do not provoke me’ tones of victim blaming. Race-relations through colonial conquest continue to exist within these tensions and the beatings eventually resurface. During Reconstruction Whiteness emerged solidly rooted in the formations of the ku klux klan and their support within White neighborhood associations manifesting in White police enforcement and their politically popular endorsement of lynching (Hale, 1999). Those beatings performed through lynching, and accompanied by varieties of Black resistance, commenced for decades and claimed thousands of lives. This abuse was briefly followed by a honeymoon moment in which the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. Shortly afterward COINTELPRO waged its war on freedom struggles, the war on drugs became institutionalized, privatized prisons were revived, and prison labor entered into the New York Stock exchange to be bought and sold by corporations investing in these most expensive and ‘low risk’ stocks (Browne, 1996). The criminal justice system emerged empowered to carry on the beatings that chattel slavery and jim crow violence had performed before it accompanied by each generation’s resistance, struggles to survive. Today, the public, recorded and endorsed police murders of Black people in the United States are confronted with ghosted words, “Hands up don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe”, uttered from the graves, sustained by protesters shouting back White supremacy’s ultimate unspeakable sentiment: “Black Lives Matter”. Anti-Black police violence today is ghosted by its historic antecedents, was forward-haunted by lynching and the countless deaths inflicted by armed White men on plantations colonizing the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere, overshadowing but unable to fully erase the fact that chattel slavery extends well beyond the Confederate States of the Southern United States and pollutes the Northern regions of the United States, Canada, Western Europe (Cooper, 2007) and vast lands and islands south of the United States. Chattel slavery was the underpinning institution for White modernity and as generations of White Supremacy’s abusive institutional beatings arises, with each comes its own systemic perpetrator’s versions of why the victims of abusive race-relations are ‘responsible’ for that violence. Much like an abused woman must first recognize that she is trapped in an abusive relationship before she can find the language needed to critique it, it is only through an understanding of colonial cycles of abuse that we can transcend these exploitative explanations – of crime, of segregation, of slavery, of the inevitability of Black and Indigenous death mirrored in the progression of White supremacist life – to fully consider an exit from White supremacist hetero-patriarchy altogether. 26Oftentimes, the first step in exiting an abusive relationship alive requires the abused to see, in her abuser, his potential to kill, coupled by her desire to remain alive. She must recognize his intentions to continue abusing her, his obsessive need to control her. It is not that he cannot or will not change, it is that he does not want to or does not have to change. Margaret Garner knew that, which is why she left Sweet Home Plantation. That was why she killed her daughter, because she had to kill her: If I had not killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her (Morrison, 1987, 200). 27Orlando Patterson’s definition of slavery as parasitic helps us better define the abusive nature of White racializing colonialism: parasitism emphasizes the asymmetry of all such unequal relations: the degree to which the parasite [Whiteness] depends on the host [Blackness] is not necessarily a direct measure of the extent to which the host is exploited in supporting the parasite. A parasite may be only partially dependent on its host, but this partial dependence may entail the destruction of the host (Patterson, 1982, 335). To view slavery through these lenses requires we see racial dependency and race relations as inherently exploitative: for slavery produced a parasitic Whiteness dependent on degraded conceptions of Black personhood through which forced Black labor is imagined legitimate, legal and ethical. Whiteness, as such, relies on and literally feeds off anti-Blackness, without which it could not uphold the White power structures upon which European colonialism then and now is dependent.