Baby bonds and reparations are cruel optimism preserving anti-Blackness as the foundation animating the new social structures arising from them

As post-racialism becomes the vehicle for a colorblind agenda, the material consequences of racial exploitation and social violence— including the persistence of educational inequity, the disproportionate racial patterns of criminalization and incarceration, and the deepening patterns of economic stratification—slide further into obscurity.65 More than a century after the Civil War Amendments, 60 years since Brown, 50 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and we are here, with white supremacy and anti-Blackness intact, but now masked, and with slavery (unwilling to die) transformed yet again. Still, the law, unwilling and unable to offer relief, but worse still, at the center of this exclusionary endeavor, from the outset to the present, remains the definer and purveyor of Black social, civil and literal death. PART VI. REMEDIES? Despite centuries of death-defying movements and oft wellintended legislation, the essential story line and structural reality of white supremacy/anti-Blackness remains foundationally intact. While there has been progress for some, enough to reinforce the claims of a post-racial era, the mainstay, the historical sway of a slavery rooted in both racism and profit, lingers, transformed over and again from “the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.” 66 This same phenomena is called by many names. All the powers of the law - Constitutional amendments, Federal Civil Rights legislation, Supreme Court rulings - have failed to stymie this trend, and as we have seen, have often allowed and re-enforced the same. In the Post-Civil Rights era, efforts to resist are complicated by the insidious cover story created by the paradigm of “color-blind” racism and its corresponding entrenchment in now “race-neutral” law. All matter of inequality is masked by claims of legal equality, but nowhere more so than with regard to the extensive and excessive reliance on mass incarceration.67 Criminality has become conflated nearly entirely with Blackness, and the entire machinery of it rests on an unspoken understanding that the property rights of “whiteness” rest now (as always) on the exclusion, the caging, and the execution of Black bodies. The law supports this, still. In light of this, what remedies then remain? The usual calls for still more legal reform, perhaps for reparations, the hope for a more radical future Supreme Court reading of McCleskey seem too distant, too abstract, and perhaps too, destined to fail at addressing the deep roots of the possessive investment in slavery.68 Perhaps the most fruitful approach is evidenced in the prison abolition movement, which explicitly recognizes the contemporary prison industrial complex as an extension of slavery and later, convict lease.69 As such, the call now, as then, must be for abolition. Angela Davis describes the movement as follows: Prison abolition, like the abolition of slavery, is a long-range goal and the handbook argues that an abolitionist approach requires an analysis of “crime” that links it with social structures, as opposed to individual pathology, as well as “anticrime” strategies that focus on the provision of social resources. Of course, there are many versions of prison abolitionism—including those that propose to abolish punishment altogether and replace it with reconciliatory responses to criminal acts. In my opinion, the most powerful relevance of abolitionist theory and practice today resides in the fact that without a radical position vis-a-vis the rapidly expanding prison system, prison architecture, prison surveillance, and prison system corporatization, prison culture, with all its racist and totalitarian implications, will continue not only to claim ever increasing numbers of people of color, but also to shape social relations more generally in our society. Prison needs to be abolished as the dominant mode of addressing social problems that are better solved by other institutions and other means. The call for prison abolition urges us to imagine and strive for a very different social landscape.70 Even here, there is the danger that the prison abolition movement will attend to the dismantling of an essential structure of white supremacy without fully grappling at root with the antiBlackness that serves as corollary. At the time of this writing, the nation is divided again for the most recent in an ongoing spate of “new 21st century version of lynchings”. 71 Police and vigilante killings of unarmed Blacks, now occur at the rate of 1 every 28 hours.72 New research verifies what some have already known with their lives, that Black children are seen, by police and others, as older by far— in fact not seen as children as all.73 New research too suggests that white Americans are more comfortable with punitive and harsh policing and sentencing when they imagine that the people being policed and put in prison are black. This is mediated by fear; the idea of black criminals inspires higher anxiety than that of white criminals, pressing white people to want stronger law enforce enforcement.74 While these sentiments and actions are rooted in the desire to protect the property of “whiteness,’ this is always over and against the perceived intrusion of excluded Blackness. In the final analysis, it is the long shadow of anti-Blackness that must be confronted. All legal, political, and social movement efforts to dismantle white supremacist institutions will fail in lieu of this. These will be half measures until, at last, there is acknowledgement and embrace of the “Black specter waiting in the wings. . . .that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.”