Traditional ethics fail to recognize the problem of anti-Blackness, as it roots in a

philosophy that originates in a view from nowhere. The lack of embodied

experience in discussions of ethics and philosophy allows the white body to
assume the status of normativity by bracketing all others into their universal
ethics. The role of the ballot is to endorse the debater with the best liberation
strategy for the oppressed.

Yancy 05[1]
I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure.

In

philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power.
The embodied self is bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It
is best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to speak
for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin
Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak
(apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also
pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials.

To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the body as the radix for
interpreting racial experience" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a
lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of
(1998, 6)

the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and
theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These
instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black people. These acts of selfconstruction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white]
elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the bodyin this case, the Black bodyis capable of undergoing a
sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis--vis white embodiment. The body's meaningwhether phenotypically white or blackits ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its

The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth,"
is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "The body" is positioned by historical
practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are
sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded
comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation.

within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social
semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed
and material truth" that preexists "its relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through symbolic repetition
and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social spaces.
"In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something [End Page 216] fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular

it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness, but the white
body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm ,
social groups" (301). On this score,

the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility.

[1] [George Yancy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Speaker Series, Whiteness and the Return of the
Black Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Muse]

The only means by which we can rectify the violent order imposed by civil society
is through its entire destruction. As every contour of social relations is marked by
anti-blackness, every aspect of society must be destroyed, dismantled and
reconfigured.

Farley 05[1]
What is to be done? Two hundred years ago,

when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity, burned

everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we
cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.48 The slaves burned everything because everything was
against them. Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were
positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything.49 Leave nothing white behind
you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-over- black.50 God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.51 The slaves burned

unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti.52 Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the
history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century.53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The
colorline belts the world.54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline.55 The problem, now, at
the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline
continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now
threatens an entire world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of
yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if
they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. Education is the call. We are called
to be and then we become something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only callingit alone contains
all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our lives. We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made.
everything, yes, but,

The slave must be trained to be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to

death,
then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.
pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black,

[1] Anthony Paul, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Perfecting Slaveryhttp://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1028&context=lsfp

Debate is based on resolving conflicting truth claims through dialogue. Such resolution is
impossible without first endorsing a stand against structural oppressionthe exclusion of certain
perspectives makes any truth claims epistemically illegitimate. Clifford and Burke [1] write:
Our view of the nature of ethics admits the possibility of giving reasons, drawing on both knowledge about the social world, and on the feelings that are common (and uncommon) to human experience, but without assuming that rationality, empirical evidence or human feelings can either

Too much is known about the variability of human values and the
limitations of human rationality
There are many inequalities
leading to
structural divisions. The social context o
demands
recognition of the need to act in a way that minimizes
the
effects of
oppression, rather than
neglect
What
matters is the possibility of dialogue
the attempt to act in an anti-oppressive way
is itself an endless search for ethical values in which we continually
learn from each
other
Finally, issues of structural exclusion come first under any frameworksuch inequality excludes
certain individuals from the moral sphere, meaning its impossible to create a coherent moral
code without resolving issues of structural violence. Winter and Leighton [2]
by themselves or even together provide an absolute basis for ethics.

to make such an assumption complacently.

cultural and

social

of wealth, status and power, both reflecting and

f the professional working with vulnerable individuals and groups

or overcomes some of

adding to them through collusion,

complex

discrimination and

or lack of self-awareness. Even worse, obviously, would be intentionally adding to existing oppression and exploitation.

between individuals and groups

negotiate with and

and especially from the other, in the sense of one who is socially and culturally different.

Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be
so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual/cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice

we draw
conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall
outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that
we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing
that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so

, but

Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of

structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its

operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects
diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that

. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers

encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence.

[1]

Anti-Oppressive Ethics and Values in Social Work, Derek Clifford, and Beverley Burke. Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/1403905568.pdf
[2] WINTER AND LEIGHTON. STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE SECTION INTRODUCTION.http://danaleighton.net/writing/downloads_files/SVintro.pdf

Thus, the plan text: The civil society of the USFG should be deconstructed as a radical
approach for limiting qualified immunity for police officers.
Part 2 is the Problem

The police force is anti-black--Baltimore proves.

Washington Post 2016:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-systemic-racism-in-baltimores-policeforce/2016/08/10/86ce448a-5f3f-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html?utm_term=.69c956df86a6
IN THE Justice Departments damning, astonishing report on the ingrained, systemic racism in Baltimores police
department, one tidbit captures the larger picture. It describes an email by a city police supervisor containing a template
for officers making trespassing arrests, with blanks to be filled in for date, location, suspects name and address yet,
oddly, no prompt for race or gender. Instead, the words black male were automatically included. That must have been

a convenience for Baltimore patrol officers, who, as the report

details, have routinely used minor charges to harass, detain and arrest African
Americans for the offenses of walking down the sidewalk,
gathering on a corner and speaking to police the wrong way. If
that assertion prompts a raised eyebrow, consider this: In the five-year period ending last summer, blacks who
comprise 63 percent of Baltimores population accounted for roughly 90 percent of suspects charged with trespassing,
failing to obey an officers orders or impeding an officer. Eighty-four percent of those charged with disorderly conduct
were black. And in a disproportionate number of those relatively trivial cases, where the arrests depended on an officers
discretion, the charges were ultimately dropped.What is clear in the report is that as a matter of culture and practice,

Baltimore has long had two enforcement regimes: one for

African Americans, which is often unlawful and
unconstitutional, and another for everyone else. This explains why Freddie
Gray was arrested in April 2015, and why he ran when a patrol car came into view In a news conference unveiling the
report Wednesday, Vanita Gupta, who leads the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie
Rawlings-Blake (D) and Police Commissioner Kevin Davis spoke about the cooperation they have undertaken and expect
as they negotiate a court-enforceable decree imposing sweeping reforms on Baltimores police. At the same time, they

noted that the reforms will be slow and difficult an epic understatement.

The problem is not a few bad

apples, as Mr. Davis suggested in saying the abuses were carried out by a relatively small number of police officers. To

the contrary: The problems are

cultural, institutional and legal. Real change

will encounter massive resistance, especially from the union

representing police, which beat back legislation in Annapolis this year that would have required
disciplinary trial boards in cases of serious police misconduct to include civilians, not just officers. Instead, lawmakers,
quailing at the unions opposition,decided only that civilians may be included on the boards which, in practice, is
unlikely to happen.

Current status quo qualified immunity laws allow police officers to get away with
unjust killings that include a disproportionate amount of Black/Brown bodies.

Qualified immunity harms the groups and communities most victimized

by police wrongdoing.

Kade Crockford, "Militarization of Police and Racial Justice Gone Wrong: The
Eurie Stamps Tragedy", ACLU, Speak Freely, 09/29/2015

Duncan invokes

the qualified immunity doctrine, which holds that police officers cannot be sued for

conduct that doesnt clearly violate the law, conduct which at the time appeared reasonable. By that theory, while the
actions that preceded the shooting taking the gun off safety, pointing it at Stamps were clearly unconstitutional, as
soon as Duncan (accidentally) pulled the trigger, he became immune from liability for his conduct. As my colleagues write
in a friend-of-the-court brief, the defendants argument is dangerous and bizarre. It would, if accepted,

produce[s]

a legal doctrine that provides incentive for police officers to injure or kill
people they have subjected to unconstitutional police practices. It inoculates
officers if, but only if, their unreasonable actions cause injury . As applied to the facts of this case, this rule means that an
officer who unreasonably aims a firearm at a civilians head would incur liability if the civilian is not shot, but not if the
firearm discharges and the civilian is killed.Other possibilities abound. For example, if an officer seeks to extract a
confession by dangling a suspect over the ledge of a high-rise, the officer will be liable under if he later pulls the suspect
back to safety. Yet, under the defendants rule, the officer will acquire immunity if his grip should fail and he accidentally
but as a consequence of his prior, intentional, and unreasonable conduct drops the suspect to this death.

A ruling

accepting this argument would be terrible and absurd under any

circumstances, but particularly given the climate of militarized policing
in the United States today a burden borne disproportionately by
Americans with darker skin. Across the nation, police departments armed with military weapons and
flash-bang grenade bombs barge into peoples homes in the early morning, simply to serve search warrants or arrest
suspects. More often than not, these raids are conducted to look for drugs or someone suspected of selling them. An ACLU
survey of departments throughout the nation found that 71 percent of the targets of these militarized raids are people of
color. Moreover, as my colleagues argue in their brief, Black

and Latino people are subjected to

more police stops than whites, even when controlling for crime and
other factors. Studies show that race can influence the probability that
the police will erroneously harm an innocent person during an
encounter. Other studies have extensively documented unconscious
negative associations about people of color, including an association
between Blacks and crime. Americans are more likely to think Black
people holding innocuous objects are holding guns, and to erroneously
shoot those Black[s] [are]
and police stops, and

people when given the opportunity. Subjected to more dangerous SWAT raids

the targets of racist tropes about criminality and Blackness,

people with darker skin are much more likely than whites to suffer the
repercussions of unconstitutional policing. Therefore, a legal doctrine establishing that
officers cannot be held liable for the final, accidental twitch in a string of unconstitutional actions would further endanger
individuals and communities already bearing the brunt of disparate, aggressive policing . Its our hope that the court will
clearly rebuke the defenses dangerous argument, sending an unmistakable message to police officers throughout the
northeast: You will be held liable for your mistakes when the likelihood of making them is compounded by prior illegal
actions. You cannot turn the safety off your gun and then illegally point it at someone, only to claim that the final act of
shooting them was accidental and so absolves your prior conduct.

The world at large is rooted in anti-blackness because it structured itself at the exclusion
of the black body, which created modern civil society and continues to sustain its
existence through the perpetual suffering of the black body and its ontological destruction

Pak 12

(Yumi Pak 2012, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary Lineage of Afro-pessimism in 20th
and 21st Century African American Literature, Dissertation through Proquest)

Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in autobiographical narratives, this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by queer theory and
performance studies, as the structural organization and methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being inter in between... intergenric [sic], interdisciplinary, intercultural and therefore inherently unstable (What is
Performance Studies Anyway? 360). My abstract ideation of the dissertation was one which conceptualized the unloosening of the authors respective texts from the ways in which they have been read in particular genres. Yet the investigative
progression of my research redirected me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes, Baldwin and Jones novels, a despondency and sorrow that seemed to reach beyond the individual and collective purportedly represented in
these works. What does it mean, they seem to speculate, to suffer beyond the individual, beyond the collective, and into the far reaches of paradigmatic structure? What does it mean to exist beyond social oppression and veer instead into what
Frank B. Wilderson, III calls structural suffering (Red, White & Black 36)? Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls Frantz Fanons splitting of the hair[s] between social oppression and structural suffering; in other words, Wilderson refutes

the possibility of analogizing blackness with

any other positionality in the world

. Others

may be oppressed

only the black, the paradigmatic slave, suffers structurally.

, indeed, may suffer experientially,

but

Afro-pessimism, the theoretical means by which I attempt to answer this query,

provides the integral term and parameters with which I bind together queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography studies in order to propose a re-examination of these authors and their texts. The structural suffering of blackness seeps

into all elements of American history, culture, and life, and thus I begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense Spillers concept of an American grammar in Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book.

theorize blackness is to begin with the slave ship ,

of human cargo across

the Middle Passage,

motive will, its active desire (Spillers 67). She contends here that

To

in a space that is in actuality no place.7 In discussing the transportation

Spillers writes that this physical theft of bodies was a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its

in this mass gathering and transportation

, what becomes illuminated is

not only the complete and total deracination of native from soil, but rather the evisceration of subjectivity from blackness, the evacuation of will and desire from the body; in other words, we see that even before the black body there is flesh, that

zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography (67).

nited

Black flesh,

S to be manipulated and utilized as slave bodies ,

tates

which

arrives in the

is a primary narrative with its seared, divided, ripped-

apartness, riveted to the ships hole, fallen, or escaped overboard (67). These markings lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh are indicative of the sheer scale of the
structural violence amassed against blackness, and from this beginning Spillers culls an American grammar that grounds itself in the rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation, a grammar that is the fabric of blackness in

the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes,

White & Black 38). In other words,

Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks

(Red,

in the same moment they are (re)born as blacks, they are

doomed to death as slaves

. This rupture, I argue, is evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal

alienation, general dishonor and openness to gratuitous violence. The captive body, which is constructed with torn flesh, is laid bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists, does not align slavery

with labor. The slave can and did work, but what defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated object, the masters whims for him/her to work, or not work, can be carried out without ramifications. Rather,

the

slaves powerlessness is

heightened to the greatest possible capacity, wherein s/he is

permanent, violent domination

marked by social death and

the

of their selves (Patterson 13). Spillers radically different kind of cultural continuation finds an articulation of the object status of blackness in the United

States, one which impugns the separation of slave and black. As Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland inquire, [h]ow might it feel to be... a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the final analysis, does it mean to

suffer? (Sexton and Copeland 53). Blackness functions as a scandal to ontology because, as Wilderson states,

backbone of civil society.

Human out of

cultural

He writes, [c]hattel

black suffering forms the ethical

slavery

did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also

created the

disparate identities from Europe to the East

chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent, and with these joys and struggles, the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black

... Put another way, through

forging

a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and the social

death of Blacks

. (Red, White & Black 20 21) Again, the African is made black, and in this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence. It is not my intention (nor of other Afro-

pessimists) to argue that violence has only ever been committed against black individuals and communities in the United States, or in the world, but rather that

that defines blackness,

indeed

, provides the

logical

the structural suffering

the violence enacted against blackness to maintain its positioning outside of civil society, that demarcates the black as slave, has no horizontal equivalent and,

ethos of existence for all othered subjectivities

; by this I mean that all

other subjects (and I use this word quite intentionally) retain a body and not the zero degree of flesh. As Sexton writes, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not lose your mother (Hartman 2007) (The
Curtain of the Sky 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers the succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way (The Social Life of Social Death 23).
Furthermore, Afro-pessimists contest the idea that the modern world is one wherein the price of labor determines the price of being equally for all people. In this capitalistic reading of the world, we summon blacks back into civil society by
utilizing Marxism to assume a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy (Gramscis Black Marx 1). While it is undeniable, of course, that black bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the United States, we

return again to the point that what defines enslavement is accumulation and fungibility, alongside natal alienation, general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous violence;

part of the class struggle

the slave

, then,

is not

constituted as

.8 While it is true that labor power is exploited and that the worker is alienated in it, it is also true that workers labor on the commodity, they are not the

commodity itself is, their labor power is (Red, White & Black 50). The slave is, then, invisible within this matrix, and, to a more detrimental effect, invisible within the ontology of lived subjects entirely. The slave cannot be defined as loss as
can the postcolonial subject, the woman, or the immigrant but can only be configured as lack, as there is no potential for synthesis within a rubric of antagonism. Wilderson sets up the phrase rubric of

antagonism
struggle

in opposition to rubric of conflict to clarify the positionality of blacks outside relationality. The former

between entities, or positions,

the resolution of which

of one of the positions,

is not dialectical but

is an irreconcilable

entails the obliteration

whereas the latter is a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, [i]f a Black is the very antithesis of a

Human subject... then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (9). Integrating Hegel and Marx, and returning to Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the
slave is not a laborer but what he calls anti- Human, against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity (11).

Thus, the advocacy

The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itselfthe
aff refuses to challenge the foundational antagonism that produces the
violence against the black body. Wilderson 10:
[2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and
the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]

Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the

structure, that is to say the

rebar, or better still the grammar of their demandsand, by extension, the

grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their
grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity
writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used

and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that
underwrites the modern worlds capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and

temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other
violent and consensual dramas could be enacted.

Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy

enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world
itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was
not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she
was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her
sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on
the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity,
what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a
being for the captor (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus
value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale);
and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body,

fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She
gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity
nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the worldand not its myriad discriminatory
practices, but the world itselfwas unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without

the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her
crazy. And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans
insanity? Hes crazy if he thinks hes getting any money out of us? Surely, that
doesnt make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a
big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid

enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why
are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematicallyunless they are
posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the Savage. Repair

the demolished

subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the
structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An ethical
modernity would no longer sound like an oxymoron . From there we could busy ourselves
with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class
struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences,

one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political,
questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations,
political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a
child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is
also clearif the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive

of progressive scholars,

and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis that what can so easily
be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on)
so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only

render their speaker crazy but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be
forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the
unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the

questions asked by radical politics and scholarship

were not Should the U.S. be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but
rather when and howand, for some, whatwould come in its wake. Those steadfast in

their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ
large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing
of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were
their rhetorical machinations, to

accountable, in

the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American

Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could
deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics
and the possibility of success, but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because
they could not make a convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an
ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and

progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential

candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the
presence of Blacks.[i] One could (and many did) acknowledge Americas strength
and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but
rather remained an assessment of the so-called balance of forces. The political
discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force
of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently,

the

power of Blackness and Redness to pose the questionand the power to pose the
question is the greatest power of allretreated as did White radicals and progressives
who retired from struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young Black
Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so
many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and

at the gates of the academy where the crazies shout at passers-by. Gone are not only
the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but
also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became
authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a

revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still

possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave
estates[ii] destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream
is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in
the academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse
in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but yes in the sense that in

even the

most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering
breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both
cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think
cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980
to the present, Blackness

and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual

(political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the
cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the
script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict
(that

is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to

the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities,

the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the
positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems
that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of family values), the
non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of
Red and Black political ontologyor non-ontology. The

grammar of antagonism breaks in on the

mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our
grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.[iii] Likewise, the

grammar of

political ethicsthe grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich

underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical
action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the
present) is

also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an

ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory,
political discourse, and cinema assume crowds

out other structures of suffering, regardless of the

sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in
question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic,
rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be
aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-ofstep claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that
follows.

[i]

After the Watts Rebellion, RFK observed: There is no point in telling

Negroes to observe the lawIt has almost always been used against themAll
these placesHarlem, Watts, South Side [of Chicago]are riots wating to
happen. Quote in: Clark, Kenneth B. The Wonder is There Have Been So Few
Riots. New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1965.

[ii]

[iii]

Slave estate is a term borrowed from Hortense Spillers.

See Emile Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans.

Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971.

Aff solves- state action through the lense of abstraction will only allow the
problem to continue, as it urges the black body to wait for a better tomorrow.

Black bodies are systematically condemned to gratuitous violence;

politics of hope coax oppressed into waiting for a better tomorrow,
allowing systems of domination to continue. Warren 2

Warren, Calvin L. "Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope." CR: The New
Centennial Review 15.1 (2015): 215-48. Web.

We continue to struggle and work as black youth are slaughtered daily, black

bodies are

incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant mortality rates are

soaring, and hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and spirits of
desperate black youth. In short, these conditions are deep metaphysical problemsthe sadistic pleasure
of metaphysical domination and work

and struggle avoid the terrifying fact

that the world depends on black death to sustain itself. Black nihilism
attempts to break this driveto stop it in its tracks, as it wereand to end the cycle
of insanity that political hope perpetuates. This brilliant analysis compels us to rethink
political rationality and the value in meansas a structuring agent by itself. What I would like to think 220 Black
Nihilism and the Politics of Hope through, however, is the distinction between hope and despair and expectations
and object. Whereas Farred understands political participation as an act without a political object, or recognizable
outcomewithout an end, if we think of end and object as synonymsI would suggest that

the Politics of

Hope reconfigures despair and expectation so that black political

action pursues an impossible object. We can describe this contradictory object as the lure of
metaphysical political activity: every

act brings one closer to a not-yet-social

order. What one achieves, then, and expects is closer. The political
object that black participation encircles endlessly, like the Lacanian drive and its object, is the idea of
linear proximitywe can call this progress,

betterment, or more perfect. This

idea of achieving the impossible allows one to disregard the

historicity of anti-blackness and its continued legacy and conceive of

political engagement as bringing one incrementally closer to that
which does not existones impossible object. In this way, the Politics
of hope recasts despair as possibility, struggle as triumph, and lack as
propinquity. This impossible object is not tethered to real history, so it is unassailable and irrefutable because it
is the object of political fantasy.

The act of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis allows us to deny

intellectual legitimacy to the compromises that radical elements have made
because of an unwillingness to hold moderates feet to the fire predicated on
an unflinching paradigmatic analysis
Wilderson, 10

[2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D.

from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]

STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa.

During the last years of

apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground

capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period,

I began

to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated

to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that
the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements
were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates'
feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic
analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be
displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the
power to pose the questionand the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all.
Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and

Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many
political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic
moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For
their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda
Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg,
Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile
Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.