Anti-blackness wages a war of colonial proportions that alienates Black people from their bodies, labor. Conceptualizing war as an “overseas occurrences” or “foreign acts” reentrenches a public/private divide and crowds out grammar of intimate, everyday violence.

In his recent sweeping and skillful Toni Morrison lectures, "Mike Brown’s Body: Meditations on War, Race and Democracy," Robin Kelley (2015) draws an extraordinary conclusion. Kelley asserts that Michael Brown should be understood as “collateral damage in a perpetual war whose colonial roots are still alive.” He situates the police murder of the eighteen year old Black man in the suburban municipality of Ferguson in a much larger and longer history of imperial violence. In contrast to claims emerging out of security studies that locate unending warfare in the period post-2001, Kelley (2015) argues that the entire history of American racial oppression is a story of perpetual war. Kelley explicitly asserts that “coloniality and capitalism are inseparable,” and that the U.S. racial state must be understood historically and geographically as transnational imperial violence, simultaneously reliant on indigenous dispossession and enslaved labor. His approach to the problem of anti-black violence in America locates it firmly within settler colonialism, both mirroring and amplifying the exciting engagements underway between critical race theory and indigenous studies, feminist and queer theory (Jackson, 2014; King, 2014; Lawrence and Dua, 2005; Morgensen, 2012; Snelgrove et al, 2014; Tuck et al, 2014). “War,” he argues, “begins at the point of settlement with the shipment of kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic, the enslavement of indigenous people, with rape and pillage, forced removals, not to mention religious conversion and compulsory assimilation.” Kelley’s arguments question the distinction between "internal" and "external" organized violence, and so too the supposedly foundational separation underpinning the modern state system between police and military force. In its place, Kelley offers a profoundly important rethinking of space. The "domestic situation" becomes one site in a wider cartography of imperial violence that transformed, rather than expired with, emancipation.