Performance

With all disrespect

I don't really like you white motherfuckers, that's just where I'm at
Screaming "All Lives Matter"
As a protest to their protest, what kind of shit is that?
Even if they weren't picking cotton physically
That don't mean they are not affected by the history
It's hard to elevate when this country's ran by whites
Judging them by their skin color and their blackness
Tryna find a job but ain't nobody call them back yet
Now they gotta sell drugs to put food in their cabinet
You crackers ain't slick, this is all a part of your tactics
Don't talk about no INSERT AFF HERE, when they are out here static
You think you know everything but you don't
Trynna make reforms but the fault is your own
Fuck, I'm exhausted
They can't even drive without the cops tryna start shit
They are tired of the systematic racism bullshit
All you do is false shit, this the shit that I'm force fed
And even though Barack was half as black
You hated president Obama, I know that's a fact
You couldn't wait to get him out and put a cracker back
And then you gave us Donald Trump and now it's payback for that
I'm not racist, I never lied
But this shit we live in is modern day apratied
And all you care about is money and power
And not being black and that's the cracker within you
Hatred all in your brain, it slowly start to convince you
And then you teach it to your children until the cycle continue
Blame it on education, blame it on Donald Trump
Blame it on everything, except for your own race
Blame it on black residents and blame it on black citizens
Aim at the black businesses, I’m saying their innocent
But, they might not be any day now.
 I'm not racist, but I cry a lot
You don't know what it's like to be in a frying pot
You don't know what it's like to mind your business
And get stopped by the cops and not know if you 'bout to die or not
You worry 'bout your life, so you take theirs
I wish we could burn grounds
So we could understand each other but we don’t have the same sounds
It's like we livin' in the same buildin' but splittin' in two sides
I'm not racist
But there's two sides to every story and you will never be able to hear mine.
 1
No slave. No world. The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that
of the Slave and the Savage, the demand for the end of America itself. This cry,
exposes the grammar of the Affirmative’s calls for larger institutional access of
civil society by averting its focus for the reason for its very existence. This
silence of the Affirmative’s assumptive logic renders them unaccountable to the
revolutionary political ontology of Redness and Blackness and thereby sets the
stage for the various dramas of conflictual relationships that are made possible
by the antagonism between the Master and Slave.
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 demands—and, by extension, the grammar of
their suffering—was 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 world’s 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 world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was
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 man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”?
Surely, that doesn’t 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
cinematically—unless 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 clear—if the filmographies of
socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of
Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is 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 how—and,
for some, what—would 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
accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to 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 case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that 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. One could (and many did)
acknowledge America’s 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 question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as
did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from struggle. The question’s 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 estate’s 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 symptoms—it 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 ontology—or 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. Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the grammar of
assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which 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-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the
foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.

What does it mean to be a problem? Education policy focused on redressing

disproportionate inequality doesn’t come to terms with signification of black
incoherence that authorizes psychic and material violence. Social violence must
begin with the anti-human void known as Blackness
Dumas 16 ~Michael J. Dumas, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in
the Graduate School of Education and the Department of African American Studies, "Against the
Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse," Theory Into Practice 55:11–19, 2016,
published by The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University, pg. 13-16
1
Afro-pessimism theorizes that
Antiblackness is the central concern and proposition within an intellectual project known as Afro-pessimism.

Black people exist in a structurally antagonistic relationship with humanity. That is, the very
technologies and imaginations that allow a social recognition of the humanness of others
systematically exclude this possibility for the Black. The Black cannot be human, is not simply
an Other but is other than human. Thus, antiblackness does not signify a mere racial conflict that
might be resolved through organized political struggle and appeals to the state and to the
citizenry for redress. Instead, antiblackness marks an irreconcilability between the Black and any
sense of social or cultural regard. The aim of theorizing antiblackness is not to offer solutions
to racial inequality, but to come to a deeper understanding of the Black condition within a
context of utter contempt for, and acceptance of violence against the Black. Afro-pessimist scholars contend
that the Black is socially and culturally positioned as slave, dispossessed of human agency,

desire, and freedom. This is not meant to suggest that Black people are currently enslaved (by whites or by law), but that
slavery marks the ontological position of Black people. Slavery is how Black existence is
imagined and enacted upon, and how non-Black people—and particularly whites— assert their own right
to freedom, and right to the consumption, destruction, and/or simple dismissal of the Black.
“Through chattel slavery,” Frank Wilderson (2010) argued, 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, forging a symbiosis
between the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (pp. 20–21) This “social death” of
the slave is introduced most explicitly in the work of Orlando Patterson (1982), who detailed how slavery involves a parasitic relationship

between slave owner and slave, such that the freedom of the slave owner is only secured and
understood in relation to power over the slave. For Patterson, slavery is “the permanent, violent
domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (p. 13). Although slavery involves
personal relationships between groups, it also operates as an institutionalized system,
maintained through social processes that make it impossible for the Slave to live, to be
regarded as alive for her- or himself in the social world. This focus on slavery might seem anachronistic in the current historical
moment, some 150 years after the (formal) end of the institution in the United States. However, Wilderson maintained that the relations of

power have not changed. He explained: Nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election
of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and

housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at
the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. (p. 10) This lived experience serves as a
continual reinscribing of the nonhumanness of the Black, a legitimization of the very
antiblackness that has motivated centuries of violence against Black bodies. In this sense,
even as slavery is no longer official state policy and practice, the slave endures in the social
imagination, and also in the everyday suffering experienced by Black people. As Saidiya Hartman (2007)
insisted, Americans are living in what she described as “the afterlife of slavery:” Black lives are still

imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched
centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I,
too, am the afterlife of slavery. (p. 6) Importantly here, the afterlife of slavery is not only an historical moment, but

deeply impressed upon Black flesh, in the embodiment of the Black person as slave. Thus, Hartman
maintained, she is also this afterlife of slavery. Salamishah Tillet (2012) made clear the heaviness of the historical memory, the ever- presence of slavery in Black life:

Because racial exclusion has become part and parcel of African American political identity
since slavery, it cannot simply be willed or wished away. This protracted experience of
disillusionment, mourning, and yearning is in fact the basis of African American civic
estrangement. Its lingering is not just a haunting of the past but is also a reminder of the
present-day racial inequities that keep African American citizens in an indeterminate,
unassimilable state as a racialized ‘Other.’ While the affect of racial melancholia was bred in
the dyad of slavery and democracy, it persists because of the paradox of legal citizenship and
civic estrangement. (p. 9) To the extent that there is ample evidence of the civic estrangement of
Black people—their exclusion from the public sphere—one can theorize that the Black is still
socially positioned as the slave, as difficult as it may be to use this frame to understand contemporary “race relations.” Here, “race relations” is
necessarily in quotations because there is really no relation to be had between master and slave in the way

one might conceptualize human relationships. For Afro-pessimists, the Black is not only misrecognized,
but unrecognizable as human, and therefore there is no social or political relationship to be
fostered or restored. As Wilderson argued, Our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil
society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who
argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? (p. 11) And this is the broader challenge posed by a theory of

There is no clear historical moment in which there was a break between slavery and
antiblackness:

acknowledgement of Black citizenship and Human-ness; nor is there any indication of a clear
disruption of the technol- ogies of violence—that is, the institutional structures and social
processes—that maintain Black subjugation. Thus, Afro-pessimists suggest that one must
consider the Black as (still) incapable of asking for (civil or human) rights. This does not deny
the long legacy of Black racial struggle, but it positions this struggle as an impossibility,
because the Black is (still) imagined outside of the citizenship that allows claims for redress to
be regarded as legitimate, or even logical. Part of the challenge in theorizing blackness in contemporary race discourse is that Americans are
living in an officially antiracist society, in which, as Jodi Melamed has documented, post- World War II racial liberalisms and neoliberal- isms make some space for the
participation of multicultural subjects (Melamed, 2011). That is, even as race continues to structure capitalism, which in turn facilitates white accumulation, the official stance of
the state is against racism; blatantly racist laws and government practices have been declared illegal, and the market embraces outreach to a wide multicultural range of

consumers. In this context, there is a rush to celebrate the social and economic advancement of select
Black individuals and, perhaps more significantly, the success of other groups of people of
color. In fact, it is the social and cultural inclusion of non-Black people of color that is often
offered as evidence of the end of racial animus and racial barriers in the society. There- fore, the failure of
large swaths of the Black population is purported to be a result of cultural deficits within the Black. The slave, always suspected of being

lazy and shiftless, now must bear primary responsibility for not making it in a society, which—
officially, anyway—thrives on multiracial harmony and civic participation. Jared Sexton (2008, 2010) contended
that in this era, multiracialism thrives largely at the expense of, and firmly against, blackness. His

argument rests on the premise that the color line is more fluid during periods in which Black
freedom is thought to be most contained. Thus, during slavery in the United States, multiracial
communities could serve as “buffer classes between whites and blacks” which often “corro-
borated and collaborated with antiblackness” (Sexton, 2008, p. 12). The current period is marked by similar dynamics, with little
organized Black political movement, resegregation of neighborhoods and schools, and, in fact, an easy deterritorialization and gentrification of historic Black urban homeplaces.
The current Black Lives Matter movement (Garza, 2014), which has emerged in the wake of so many cases of anti- Black violence, may yet shift Americans into a period of
heightened anxiety about Black bodies, but Sexton’s description of the current period is valid: There is little fear of Black bodies and, arguably, an emboldened antipathy to the
Black overall. This, in Sexton’s theorizing, opens up new spaces for multiracial inclusion. In this moment, the Black – white divide is seen as less consequential and not as much

Sexton maintained, the more significant boundary is the one

the result of white attitudes and behaviors. In these moments,

constructed “between blackness and everything else” (2008, p. 13). And this is a boundary seemingly
constructed and maintained by recalcitrant Black people against multiracial- ism, and more to
the point, multiracial progress. Multiracialism, in Sexton’s view, “premises its contribution to knowledge, culture and politics upon an evacuation of
the historical richness, intellectual intensity, cultural expansiveness, and political complexity of Black experience, includ- ing, perhaps especially, its indelible terrors” (2008, p.

Transcending the Black-white binary, multiracialism ostensibly moves people past the
15).

narrowness and anachronism of black- ness and toward a more profitable global economy and
more sophisticated cultural milieu. Embracing non-Black bodies of color thus facilitates, and is
facilitated by, antiblackness, and can be justified as antiracist precisely because it is inclusive
of more than white. “The [B]lack body,” Lewis Gordon con- tended, “is confronted by the situation of its
absence” (1997, p. 73). This absence—this social death or afterlife of/as the slave—positions Black
people as the embodiment of problem, a thing rather than a people suffering from problems
created by antiblackness. Part of the aim of Afro- pessimist scholarship is to insist on the humanity of Black people. “Those of us who seek to understand
[B]lack people,” Gordon concluded, need to “bear in mind that [B]lack people are human beings” (p. 78). In an anti-Black world, this is easier said than done. In the end, there
may be, as Wilderson suggested, no “roadmap to freedom so extensive it would free us from the epistemic air we breathe” (2010, p. 338). Even so, like Gordon, Wilderson

theorizing antiblackness is important simply as an existential and political recognition

suggested that

of Black humanity, as a means “to say we must be free of air, while admitting to knowing no
other source of breath” (p. 338; italics in original).

The Affirmative is an example of cruel optimism – Believing that something can

or will get better is a trick of time that allows for even more insidious violence
because we believe that things will get better, just not now.
Warren 15 (Calvin L Warren is Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington
University: Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, CR:
The New Centenial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, published by Michigan State
University Press, p. 220-223)
This brilliant analysis compels us to rethink political rationality and the value in “means”—as a structuring agent by itself. What I would like to think
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 outcome—without an “end,” if we think of “end” and “object” as synonyms—I 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 proximity—we 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 exist—one’s 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 politics of hope, then, constitutes
what Lauren Berlant would call “cruel optimism” for blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about

redress, equality, freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that always lies beyond
reach. The objective of the Political is to keep blacks in a relation to this political object—in an
unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is detrimental because it strengthens the very anti-black
system that would pulverize black being. The pursuit of the object certainly has an “irrational” aspect to it, as Farred details, but
it is not mere means without expectation; instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In other words, the

pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the continued widening of
the gap between historical reality and fantastical ideal. Black nihilism is a “demythifying” practice, in the Nietzschean
vein, that uncovers the subjugating strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its fantastical object. Once we denude political hope of its axiological
and ethical veneer, we see that it operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2)
shielding this alternative from rigorous historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an unknown future, 3) delimiting the field of action to include
only activity recognized and legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different philosophical perspectives. The
politics of
hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of “happiness” and “life.” It terrifies with the
dread of “no alternative.” “Life” itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this
logic, life becomes untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternative—a
discursive and political organization beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The
construction of the binary “alternative/no-alternative” ensures the hegemony and dominance of
political hope within the ontoexistential horizon. The terror of the “no alternative”—the ultimate space of decay, suffering, and death—
depends on two additional binaries: “problem/ solution” and “action/inaction.” According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and hope
provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of “the problem”; the solution, in fact,
transcends the problem and realizes Hegel’s aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the “problem” with the pristine being of the
solution. No problem is outside the reach of hope’s solution— every problem is connected to the kernel of its own eradication. The politics
of
hope must actively refuse the possibility that the “solution” is, in fact, another problem in
disguised form; the idea of a “solution” is nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies
on what we might call the “trick of time” to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary.
Because the temporality of hope is a time “not-yet-realized,” a future tense unmoored from present-tense
justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its “solutions” from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence
that these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not subject to
history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the “past” or “present.” Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the
proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreating to a “not-yet” and “could-be” temporality. This “trick” of
time offers a promise of possibility that can only be realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be
redeemed, only imagined. In this sense, thepolitics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of
desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of possibility, never to satiate or bring
fulfillment. This politics secures its hegemony through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing) any
other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant (re)production and proliferation
of problems to justify its existence. Solutions
cannot really exist within the politics of hope, just the illusion of
a different order in a future tense. The “trick” of time and political solution converge on the site of “action.” In critiquing
the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. “But we can’t just
do nothing! We have to do something.” The field of permissible action is delimited and an
unrelenting binary between action/inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These
exclusionary operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest.
Legitimate action takes place in the political—the political not only claims futurity but also action as its property. To “do something” means that this
doing must translate into recognizable political activity; “something” is a stand-in for the word “politics”—one must “do politics” to address any
problem. A refusal to “do politics” is equivalent to “doing nothing”—this nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life, possibility, time, ethics, and
morality (a “zero-state” as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). Black
nihilism rejects this “trick of time” and the lure of
emancipatory solutions. To refuse to “do politics” and to reject the fantastical object of politics
is the only “hope” for blackness in an antiblack world.

The education system is part and parcel with the ideals of freedom and
democracy that rely on the fungibility of blackness to cohere themselves – this
means that only a focus on the structural nature of violence can ever lead to
genuine liberation
Pierce 17 (Clayton. "WEB Du Bois and Caste Education: Racial Capitalist Schooling From
Reconstruction to Jim Crow." American Educational Research Journal 54.1_suppl (2017): 39S-
43S)
As a chief neoliberal governing strategy, charter/choice reform models have been critiqued by Marxist, neo-Marxist, and race/class theorists (Buras, 2014; Dumas, 2013;
Fabricant & Fine, 2012; Lipman, 2011; Saltman, 2005; Stovall, 2013). Missing from this research, as Stern and Hussain (2015) argue, is a genealogical analysis of the

charter/choice debate grounded in the epistemic tradition of Black radical thought. A strength
of Du Bois’s caste analysis when applied to the neoliberal reform context is how it repositions
the charter/choice debate within a historical framework that understands ‘‘a priori to
neoliberalism, this has all happened before in a multiplicity of ways, means, and locales’’ (Stern & Hussain, 2015, p. 66). Caste provides a
corrective to the lack of an audible or theoretical link . . . to understand gentrification, urban
renewal, and charters as symptomatic of a longer colonial and inter- national history whereby
brown and black populations have been the locus and alibi for capital accumulation and
education an alibi to control knowledge and populations. (Stern & Hussain, 2015, p. 66) Du Bois’s caste analytic applied to
charter/choice governance models takes up Stern and Hussain as well as others’ call to theorize current (and long- standing) racial and class inequities reproduced through
schooling from the Black intellectual tradition (Gordon, 1995; Grant et al., 2016; Watkins, 2005b). Applying Du Bois’s caste analytic to the choice/charter debate under- scores
two main differences between a caste research approach and existing liberal and neo-Marxist critiques. It also provides a robust bridge between race and blended race/class

such free market reform

analyses of inequality and schooling. Many scholars who have studied the charter/choice governance model have pointed out how

policies continue legacies of population fragmentation and containment within urban cities
along racial, class, and language lines (Buras, 2014; Lipman, 2011; Parker & Margonis, 1996; Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002). In her incisive study of
the Chicago pub- lic school system, Lipman (2011) situates neoliberal economic policy and educational/urban

reform within the historical projects of wealth accumula- tion and White supremacy. While Lipman
gestures toward the ‘‘pivotal’’ 400- year legacy of White supremacy in the U.S. nation state, her analysis of the charter/choice debate is largely concerned with how to

What
rehabilitate the pro- ject of public education from the damaging forms of enclosures brought on through neoliberal governance models (cf. Stern & Hussain, 2015).

is missing from the critical literature on charter/choice policies is an accounting of how even
Marxist critiques retain modern European notions of equity, citizenship, and rights built on the
dehumanization of Blacks and the ‘‘dark world.’’ Alternatively, a caste analysis would ask whether existing
critiques of charter/choice policies assume a democratic potential in the public school system
that was never a design feature. If schools are democratic institutions only insofar as they can support and aug- ment White supremacy and
accumulation, what would an adequate response to neoliberal caste strategies such as charter/choice governance be? One contribution a caste analysis makes to

the existing research litera- ture on race/class and educational inequality is that it sheds a pessimistic light on the prospect of the

public education system in the United States as a recuperable institution. Such a pessimistic assessment
stems from the fact that a caste analytic is rooted in a genealogical understanding of U.S.
schooling as a population management tool of the racial capitalist state. The founding of the
public school in the United States, Du Bois (1935/1998, 1999) argued, was not born out of the application of
Enlightenment ideals of democracy and equality but rather from a moment of crisis in the co-
articulating projects of White supremacy and capital accumulation during the colonial-
plantation period and aftermath of the Civil War. As such, liberal reform and Marxist strategies
for dealing with economic and racial inequal- ities through schooling are untenable because
even in these models, democracy and equity have not adequately been washed of their White
supremacist and accumulatory origins. From Pessimism to Abolitionary Democracy The second contribution Du Bois’s caste analytic provides to
existing lit- erature on choice/charter reform is a call to develop practical expressions of ‘‘abolition democracy’’ (Davis, 2005; Du Bois, 1935/1998; Lipsitz, 2004; Olson, 2004).

, an
Different from liberal education reforms based on the assump- tion that equal political and social standing has been established in the post– Civil Rights era

abolitionary democratic position starts from the premise that democracy has been thwarted
from the onset by the racial capitalist state after its brief period of existence following the Civil
War (Du Bois, 1934/ 1998). As Angela Davis (2005) puts it, Du Bois argued that the abolition of slavery was accomplished only in the negative sense. In order to achieve the
comprehensive abolition of slavery—after the institution was rendered illegal and black people were released from their chains—new institutions should have been created to

the reconstruction of the public

incorporate black people into the social order. (p. 95) From an abolitionary democratic standpoint, then,

education system in the United States needs to start from Du Bois’s insight that ‘‘by betraying
the Negro . . . white Americans betrayed them- selves as well, because they destroyed the most
democratic and egalitarian force in their national politics, while strengthening the power of the
most elite, plutocratic and undemocratic elements in their country’’ (Lipsitz, 2004, p. 277). A caste analysis of U.S.
schooling logically points to abolition- ary responses to (neo)liberal educational reform. Charter/choice strategies are seen for what they

are: the continuation of a historical betrayal that empowers an elite White oligarchy (the 1%)
while denigrating all Whites (despite their very real material privileges) through the continued
dehuman- ization of the dark world. A caste analysis call for a second abolitionary education movement pushes beyond existing critiques of
charter/choice strategies in another important way by forefronting a fundamental claim in work that has come to be known as Afro-pessimism. As Dumas (2015a) points out,

one of the most salient insights from Afro-pessimist thinkers such as Frank Wilderson (2010) is that through 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,
forging a symbiosis between political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (Dumas,
2015a, p. 20) Du Bois’s caste analytic and Wilderson’s claim that the European humanistic tradition is based on the fungibility of Black bodies converge around a cen- tral thesis:

Schools in racial capitalist society are biopolitical to their core, a constituent part of the life and
death processes associated with White supremacy and anti-Blackness upon which caste control
is built.6 Caste schooling carries with it a material politics of humanity (and therefore
democracy) whereby Black bodies and populations are necessarily rooted in an ontological
condition of less than human that supports Whiteness as a fully human condition (Wilderson, 2010). In the
context of the charter/choice debate, caste and fungibility work together as complementary concepts. When school districts in New Orleans or
Philadelphia are handed over to charter management companies, caste populations are being (re)produced. However, they are also working within the historical circuits of Black
fungibility because charter/choice pol- icies are framed as an ‘‘innovative’’ approach to rescuing impoverished peo- ple of color from a failed public school system. Just as the
formerly enslaved and free African American were used to avert a crisis in production and White supremacy after the Civil War by propping up and extending the racial hate and

the Black figure (and other students of color) is needed today to

privileges of poor Whites in work and educational spaces,

sustain govern- ing strategies aimed at ‘‘fixing’’ problems such as the achievement gap stu- dent
and ‘‘turn around’’ school. As replaceable parts in racial capitalist society, the Black fungible
body and populations form a base for neoliberal caste reconstruction because choice/charter
policies help provide Whites access to greater assets for thriving through wages of Whiteness
generated from the currency of Black social death. One reason high-performing elite charter
schools exist is because failing ‘‘urban’’ schools that capture surplus populations of
underperforming and ‘‘at-risk’’ students call for innovative market solutions. The fungible
popula-tions and bodies of the dark world are part of the measurement and thus the valuation
of social life as it is either enhanced (invested in through accumu- latory benefits that elite charters provide) or left to whither (in
disinvested, underfunded schools). It is through the historical reservoir of anti- Blackness that caste

reconstruction operates through the charter/choice governance model today. A rejection of

charter/choice policies and other neoliberal governing strategies must include a problematized
understanding of how the fungibility of Black bodies and populations undergird the humanist
(liberal, Marxist, and neo-Marxist) ideal of a democratic education system and the type of
human and less than human it can produce. Lacking such a critique, we risk falling back into a
romantic notion of democratic education that fails to see how it is based on the ontological
‘‘grammar of suffering’’ of Black bodies and populations (Dumas, 2014; Wilderson, 2010). Du Bois’s caste analysis of
education therefore situates the U.S. public education system as part of the ongoing project of
caste control in that schools in the neoliberal era help produce the political and ontological con-
ditions of social death and social life. Social life produced through neoliberal education governance strategies foregrounds a historical
materialism where charter/choice policies should be read as part of a specific emergence of freedom—as economic value, political category, legal right, cultural practice, lived
experience—from the modern trans- formation of slavery into what Robin Blackburn terms the ‘‘Great Captivity’’ of the New World: the convergence of the private property
regime and the invention of racial blackness. (Sexton, 2011, p. 19) There is more at stake in the school choice movement and ‘‘innovative’’ charter governance approach than

What is at stake, and what Du Bois’s caste analytic shows, is that the
the loss of a potentially democratic and egalitarian institution of the public school.

very definitions of freedom, equality, and justice are based on the social death of Black bodies
and populations.

The alternative is to engage in unwavering paradigmatic analysis through

rejection of [Team Here] as an act of burning down the civil society that
produces violence against the slave.
-- Our alternative is to enter a constant interrogation of the black positionality and the representation of
the 1AC to render civil society incoherent. We create a disruptive political cognizance endorsed by every
negative ballot that spreads the word to break down civil white society
-- occurs on the link debate when we analyze the anti-black aspects of the affirmative

Wilderson 10 (Frank B. III, “Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms, pg. ix-x) **we reject author’s use of ableist language
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-

essential an unflinching
ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how

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 question—and 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.

Justice needs no grounds within empirical reality. We need to mobilize praxis

within this space to create change. Thus the Role of the Judge is to be an actor
of liberation and endorses the debater that methodologically breaks down anti-
blackness.
Wilderson 14 (Frank B. Wilderson III; Professor of Drama and African American studies at the University of California; Irvine
RR Conference—Discussion with Frank B. Wilderson; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMfL35rQsA)//ghs-VA

The master's projection of unbridle sex onto Patsy and his simultaneous engagement with his
wife over an assemble of questions which cluster around sexuality is homologous with debate's
coaches phallic projections onto black intellectual insurgency the coach reserves his
interlocutory exchange for someone else, someone who is not black. The second speaker
projection of death and mutilation onto black intellectual activity is a little more complex than
the Negrophilic move I just spoke of. I don't have time do more than a superficial reading of it so let me outline the
means of approach, the path that a I might take if I were writing an article Black intellectual insurgency catalyzes the imagery of anti-
Jewish pogroms for this member of debate community it's as if though by speaking their truths in the policy wonk world of debate
black shave declared war on him. The legacy of victimization enhanced by the imagery of war is problematic for several reasons one
the pogroms against Jews or for that matter or for that matter the War on terror against Muslims is predicated on a struggle
between competing conceptual frameworks. ie the threat of a Jewish economic domination for example or a world without
Christianity saturated with Islam. The libidinal placement of Black intellectual interventions anti-Jewish pogroms does nothing to
explain how black intellectual activity is a threat to this student's conceptual frame of reference its simply apprehends the fungibility
of black flesh and press that flesh into the service of more expanded and intense reflections on the Jewish/gentil divide. It doesn't
deal with Afro- Pessimism on the terms elaborated by Afro-Pessimism. Let me put it another way, the conflict between Jews an
already has conceptual coherence. In other words, this struggle is an intersubjective struggle between two entities whose temporal
and spatial capacities are mutual recognized. As Franz Fanon explained in Black, White Masks the idea of the Jew is what accounts
for her or his genocide. But it
is the appearance of the Black which magnetizes bullets. Blackness is so
fungible that it can be lifted out of the context it is speaking and mobilized by the unconscious
in such a way to make more vivid and give greater clarity to the intersubjective struggle
between non-blacks. The intersubjective dynamics of war are eviscerated as a speaker that analogizes black interventions as
anti-Semitic pogroms because black energy and black embodiment have been displaced onto a struggle between competing
conceptual frameworks while the same time conceptual framework of the black intellectual labor has been left behind. Abraham
Lincoln wanted the slaves to remain slaves or second prize would be sending them off to Liberia. He wasn't a foaming at the mouth
racist, he was a benevolent liberal and an honest man. In his most honest moments, he said he could simply not imagine civil society
and black people together. In other words black ontology was unimaginable. The same is true today in the
world of debate a world where theoretically imagining the unimaginable should be welcomed
with open arms, the labor of debating is heavily skewed towards reflection on those elements
which constitute the political economy. Not libidinal economy. The policy wonk origins of debate are largely
responsible for this orientation but institutional capacity runs along two axes: political economy and libidinal economy underwriting
the coherency and stability of both economies is structural violence. It is only by being positioned on the contingent side of
structural violence that one can live life as an exalted human being, the heteronormative white a couple or as a degraded human
being, white person's junior partners in civil society. The Slave the Black is positioned on the gratuitous side of violence black people
cannot mobilize their fantasies of aggression against whites or the fantasies of white sexual licentious in any meaningful way
because blacks are already objects of gratuitous violence and never subjects of it. The Negrophilic fantasy "Black debaters give me a
hard on" and the Negrophobic fantasy black debaters are agents of genocide are coordinated with institutional power which is a
polite way of saying: they have violence on their side. The
kind of institutional power that cannot only let them
leave the game when they don't like whose winning or how it's being played but leave the game
and start a brand new league while simultaneously floating the idea of destroying the league
where black people compete. As Sexton said, "You better understand white people's fantasies because tomorrow those
fantasies will be legislation.” Thank You

Anti-Blackness structurally underpins all violence

-- while racialized violence is still a daily reality for people caught in the position of the slave, the rhetoric
of “oppression” or “exploitation” alone asks only how we might redeem this failed American experiment.
There is no analogy for the structural suffering of the slave, meaning authentic engagement with social
violence must begin with the anti-human void known as Blackness

Pak ’12 {Yumi; philosophy prof ; "Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the
Literary Lineage of Afro-Pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature.”;
Accessed 7/13/15}AvP
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 Fanon’s splitting of “the hair[s] between

Others
social oppression and structural suffering”; in other words, Wilderson refutes the possibility of analogizing blackness with any other positionality in the world.

may be oppressed, indeed, may suffer experientially, but only the black, the paradigmatic slave, suffers
structurally. 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 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” To theorize blackness is to begin with the

slave ship, in a space that is in actuality no place. 7 In discussing the transportation of human cargo across the Middle Passage, 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 motive will, its active desire” (Spillers 67). She contends here that 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). Black
flesh, which arrives in the United States to be manipulated and utilized as slave bodies, is “a primary narrative” with its “seared,
divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s 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

“Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks” (Red,
of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes,

White & Black 38). In other words, 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

what defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated

line with Afro-pessimists, does not align slavery with labor. The slave can – and did – work, but

object, the master’s whims for him/her to work, or not work, can be carried out without ramifications. Rather, the slave’s
powerlessness is heightened to the greatest possible capacity, wherein s/he is marked by social death and the “permanent, violent domination” 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, black suffering forms the
ethical backbone of civil society. He writes, [c]hattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created

the Human out of cultural disparate identities from Europe to the East… Put another way, through 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, 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 the structural suffering

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

Afro-pessimism as “a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the
succinct definition of

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” (“Gramsci’s Black Marx” 1). While it is undeniable, of course, that black bodies and labor were

what defines enslavement is accumulation

used to aid in the economic growth of the United States, we return again to the point that

and fungibility, alongside natal alienation, general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous
violence; the slave, then, is not constituted as part of the class struggle. 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, 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” in opposition to “rubric of conflict” to clarify the
positionality of blacks outside relationality. The former is “an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the

obliteration of one of the positions,” 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

In contrast to imagining the

“antiHuman, against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity” (11).

black other in opposition to whiteness, Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists theorize blackness as being absent in the dialectic, as
“anti-Human.”

No Perms. Engagement with the state can never succeed because they fail to
first explain how the slave relates to the world – this is an aprior question to
the plan because they assume “just one more policy” will actually make a
difference which retrenches gratuitous violence
Wilderson, 10 (Frank B. Wilderson, American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic, 2010,
“Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,” Pearson)

Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state
by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film
studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of
Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the United States
as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these
questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on
the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police
brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical
rates of hIv infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute
the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the
wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather
than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts, ” the “historical record, ”
and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with
more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history,
and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the
grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby
subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power
and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled
this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and
why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of
“work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the
state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate
the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air.
The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way,
No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an
ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-
Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence,
its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored,
perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no
relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be
approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil
society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The
onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is
a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur?
The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
Case