"Policing while Black" on Social Etymologies Blog

Here's a link to Lisa Arrastía's article on the shooting of NYPD officer Omar Edwards. It includes some discussion of the 2008 shooting of NYPD officer Christopher Ridley and the entire text of the NY Times article on the shooting.

in the interval, i wait for myself...

Hortense Spillers
1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) …reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’; 4) as a category of ‘otherness’, the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping…slides into a more general ‘powerlessness,’ resonating through various centers of human and social meaning

Amy Goodman
And here in New York, an off-duty African American police officer has been killed by a fellow officer who mistook him for a criminal. The slain officer, twenty-five-year-old Omar Edwards, had come across a man breaking into his vehicle. He chased the man with his gun drawn when three police officers came upon him and opened fire. Edwards was recently married and the father of two children.

NYTimes.com
If history is a guide, a grand jury will consider possible charges against Officer Dunton. There will be calls for reform of procedures to better protect minority officers, who have most often paid the price for such cases of mistaken identity.

Orlando Patterson
The condition of slavery did not absolve or erase the prospect of death. Slavery was not a pardon; it was, peculiarly, a conditional commutation. The execution was suspended only as long as the slave acquiesced in his powerlessness. The master was essentially a ransomer. What he bought or acquired was the slave’s life, and restraints on the master’s capacity wantonly to destroy his life did not undermine his claim on that life. Because the slave had no socially recognized existence outside of his master, he became a social nonperson....The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this is true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. Paul Rycaut’s classic description of the Janissaries as men whom their master, the sultan, “can raise without Envy and destroy without Danger” holds true for all slaves in all times.

Does anybody know what the hell this shit is?

oops. I should say, "Please pardon the utter absence of scholarly decor in the posing of that question..." although I actually don't really give a damn if you pardon it or not.

Just write something. Please.

Consider this a kind of CFP (call for postings) on this blog with the prompt being, 'the hell is this shit:

The Red House Furniture Store in High Point, North Carolina





In particular, how are black bodies being used? How are nonblack bodies being used? In what sense is the fact that this store is selling accoutrements of domesticity significant?

What are the bodies being used for? Whose fantasies are being served by this... umm, "???commercial???" Indeed, can it be properly called a commercial at all? Or is it, oh say... a couple of Masters having fun with the Masters-subaltern and the Slaves (even though this is apparently a real store http://redhousefurniture.com/)?

What would Kant/Hegel/Adorno/Foucault/Fanon/etc. say is going on here?

Please add to the list of questions with which we ought to be interrogating shit like this.

Or pose a set of answers to questions already posed.

Some curious things about "afropessimism"...

A continuation of some thoughts
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What is afropessimism? What does an afropessimist look like?

A cousin of mine laughed when she first heard me refer to some of the authors I’m reading as “afropessimists.” For her it seemed to evoke thoughts of chain-smoking, sad-eyed black women with short 'fros or black men with goaties (like Orlando Patterson and Joy James, seen ABOVE), dressed all in black, sipping coffee in a French café with the same admixture of aplomb and ennui as the image of Jean-Paul Sartre. (Existentialism, of course, is often a profoundly hopeful philosophy.)

First, the name afropessimist is, I think, derived from a critique. In a review of Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (NY: Oxford, 1997) in African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4 (Winter 1999), Anita Patterson said that Hartman's central thesis is "profoundly pessimistic" (683). She was referring to Hartman's move of reading what Patterson would call the "bad use"-- hence, discriminatory practices-- to which African Americans were subjected as signs that blacks have not constituted free subjects in any meaningful sense. (Patterson’s critique, of course, ignores the fact that much of Hartman’s book is not concerned with “bad use” but, rather, with the discourse of civil rights for blacks in the antebellum and postbellum eras. In other words, Hartman is taking on “friends of the negro” as much as those who overtly and violently assailed the notion of black humanity.) Hartman later adopts the term as her own in an interview Frank Wilderson conducts with her, referring to "Achille Mbembe and the other so-called 'Afro-Pessimists'" ("The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman conducted by Frank B. Wilderson, III," Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2003, p. 197).

This distinction-- between "blacks are human subjects who are sometimes treated badly" versus "blacks' repeated bad treatment shows that they are not human subjects"-- is not quite the crux of an afropessimist argument, but it is an important component of one. The "pessimism" in afropessimism comes back, for me, to something my parents used to tell me-- something pretty much all black parents I know have to tell their children, regardless of age: "No matter where you go, no matter who you're with, always remember where you are and who you are." This is not solely or even essentially a reminder to be proud of one's heritage and carry the strivings of one’s ancestors wherever one goes. Rather, it constitutes a reminder that we are not agents, and that any number of things can and will happen to us at any time without our parents being able to protect us in any way. As Lewis Gordon says in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, with the black, it is a matter of "when," not "whether." It reflects an awareness that blackness is a position formed by the violence essential to Modernity and that that fact does not change no matter how much society may seem to change, no matter how much the company of friends may change, no matter how much my performance changes, no matter my age. Afropessimism is, at its heart, a fundamental critique of performativity and hybridity because it says that no amount of incremental change can create an ethical order so long as black incarceration, fungibility, and death is the precondition for social stability.

Pessimism. Sounds like a horrible, hopeless way to live doesn't it? In a sense, perhaps it should sound that way. As Saidiya Hartman says in the above-cited interview with Frank, it is "obscene" to take "the narrative of defeat" and "still find a way to feel good about ourselves" (185). We should not shrink from it; Hartman says that her pessimistic account of the violence of nineteenth-century black subject formation should be read as "an allegory of the present" (190). Moreover, as she puts it clearly in Scenes of Subjection,

It is impossible to fully redress this pained condition without the occurrence of an event of epic and revolutionary proportions--the abolition of slavery, the destruction of a racist social order, and the actualization of equality (77)

In that possibility of radical change-- what Fanon would call "the end of the world"-- may lie some hope. Let’s be clear. Afropessimism is not a politics. But it does hold political potential. It is probably better to think of it as a precursor to a politics. It is an attempt—however, as yet, incomplete— to frame a rage, a rage that will not find an articulation or a signification within any politics that takes the modern order as its presumption and premise.

This brings me to the second curious thing about afropessimism. The term "afropessimist" is still largely used as a descriptor-- an adjective more than a noun-- for work that evinces certain symptoms of black rage that cannot be spoken. Indeed, it is correct to say that most of the people whose work is described as afropessimist may not identify themselves as afropessimists or may pay a dear price for the extent to which they consciously avow a pessimistic analysis. Again, it has not (yet) coalesced into a school or philosophy. But that is really only to say that it shows up in bits and pieces, in stolen moments, as if whispered through a hole in a wall or as if spoken unconsciously through the ways in which it manifests in fantasies.

So, to point to the fact that Joy James and Saidiya Hartman, for example, have “made it” within the academy as an indication that there is a space for afropessimist thought would be to obscure the actual lived experience of students whose dissertation work, for example, was derailed by advisors who were politically opposed to the prepolitical seeds of afropessimist thought or sentiment that manifested in their work. Or, even before the dissertation work begins—the extent to which the seminar process serves a regulatory function on forms of thought that evince such a critical perspective on hybridity and performativity as afropessimist thought and other politico-ontological perspectives employ. In other words, just because some professors who identify as afropessimists have their photographs online and have won awards for their work does not in any way mean that afropessimist thought has a place within the academy from which it can inform the efforts of up-and-coming scholars to pose a counterhegemonic challenge to the dominant paradigm.

Moreover, the fact that classic authors of the black literary canon like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison-- as well as established scholars like Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, and Orlando Patterson-- may not self-identify as afropessimists does not prove that their thought isn’t shot through with afropessimistic tendencies. Orlando Patterson, for example, is a political moderate, certainly not a revolutionary, who has consulted heads of state and who often moralizes about black male irresponsibility with the most strident of white neoconservatives. Nonetheless, his excellent central argument in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study clearly authorizes a reading that blacks today-- despite the fact that some of them experience (and theoretically all of them could experience) a great deal of politico-/socio-economic success (which prior groups of elite slaves also experienced; see 299-333)-- may still be understood as slaves if their social position is defined by the three constituent elements of slavery: social death, natal alienation, and general dishonor (1-14). When framed by Patterson’s analysis, black political discussions are free to shift to discussions of the extent to which the United States is a society that has depended and continues to depend on slaves for a variety of forms of labor that preserve its existence as a set of relations, rather than dwelling on questions of whether or not the United States ever actually ceased to be a slave society.

There is still more discussion to be had about the question of what constitutes afropessimist thought. One thing to keep in mind is that the goal of this site is not to make us be more afropessimistic, whatever that might mean. The goal is simply to not let certain things that we know to be true atrophy in obscurity and suffocate, for lack of light and air, by not even being raised to the level of discussion. If afropessimistic thoughts flourish as a result of our having a space in which to pose them, that fact will speak to the need for them to be raised and carried further within the academy as well.

For now, this juncture might be a good place for us to start working out a discussion list. Since it is in some ways the source of current afropessimist thinking, maybe we could start out with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

After that, I’d love to move on to work on the following in no particular order:

Ronald A.T. Judy's (Dis)Forming the American Canon
Frank Wilderson's Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight
Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama
Loic Wacquant’s “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”
Hortense Spillers’ Black, White, and In Color
Frank Wilderson’s “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”
The Wire
George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum
Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection
Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes
Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton’s “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy”
Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
Abdul JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound Subject
Assata Shakur’s Assata

These are just things that I’m interested in checking out and discussing. Please feel free to add.

Dissonant Consonance: Afro-pessimism & the Hope of David W. Noble

For a discussion of contributor Myrrh's statement that "there is no space for the afropessimist in the academy," please go to the blog Social Etymologies. SE provides a discussion that links and contrasts afro-pessimist Frank Wilderson's theories on the transformation of time, space, and civil society with that of American studies scholar, David W. Noble.

Are "Afro-pessimists" Really a Rejected Group & Just Another Theory "Movement"?

So, what's an "afro-pessimist" anyway? Another scholar inducted into another theory movement or wave? Could it be just some thinking or must it be an "ist" or "ism"? I hear echoes here of "post-structuralism," "post-modernism," etc. ( [l] Frank Wilderson, UC Irvine; [r] Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University)

This is a response to the post regarding what this blog might offer and discuss. I'm uncomfortable with positioning (or labeling of a "style" of thought) the "afro-pessimist" (or any scholar) as one who is intellectually rejected by the university because of her thinking. Most of the scholars who might be called "afro-pessimists" (I have yet to find a place where any scholars identified by others as "afro-pessimists" call themselves "afro-pessimists" or believers in "afro-pessimism") are doing quite well in the university, publishing, sharing and arguing with colleagues as folks usually do in the academy.

This is not the '60s where there needs to be a revolt because the "thoughts" of afro-pessimism are dis-allowed in the university. There are far more issues around race, sexuality, gender, and capital to go after in the university: the privatization of public space; the neoliberalization of departments. e.g., audits, separate department budgets for pencils, copying, and the rental of classroom space from the university in which departments reside.

Lastly, how can thoughts not be thought (taken from the quotation below in this blog's first post: "thoughts that cannot be thought.")? Which thoughts can't be thought? Whose thoughts can't be thought? I know that when my daughter mumbles under her breath, she is under the illusion that I can't hear her--that she is in her own private Idaho where she may curse me out into the abyss. She has inferred that she may not think her own thoughts about Mamí and Papí, but obviously she knows this not to be true because her mumbles of defiance speak for themselves . . . she mumbles away anyway calling me a "b-ch" in her own 8-year old language. Or, who knows, quite possibly she's doing so in our adult language.

All of this is to say that I hear here a need for some sort of "rights" movement: the right to think thoughts, for example. I hear here a need for positioning, location, a normative "home" within the university. And, this is just what ethnic studies departments didn't problematize when they initially made the "fight"--they succumbed to the fallacy that the university could provide a home--and it did, a home just like the university's--and they became, in many ways, like the university and its disciplines. Because of the times and because of the ways in which power works, perhaps they desired normativity (and the normative space of the university) more than they desired freedom--freedom also being a constructed notion. So what did they want? See Roderick Ferguson's new work on this, which is forthcoming in his new book The Affirmative Actions of Power.

Afro-pessimists have not been shorn off from the university. They are not a desperate group or cause to be argued for. In fact, I think people like Hartman, James, Spillers et al would want to be known as thinking people not people in need of permission to think and speak. Maybe they want to be known as people who are arguing against the terrain that claims theoretical spaces and names them without naming a historical violence. E.g., the way in which the US claimed British cultural studies and created departments and anthologies around it (see Stuart Hall's "Cultural Studies & Its Theoretical Legacies").

Do the so-called afro-pessimists desire to be a theory-group of their own or would they prefer challenging us all to think different kinds of thoughts and to consider seemingly twisted kinds of societal and cultural problematizations. I thought they were (and there's that label of "they" again, as if they were a group) reacting against traditional cultural theory? And PS, is it even for us to decide?

what might a reading group start?

"Alexander and his pregnant 19-year-old wife, Renee, celebrated their wedding a week ago.

'Hey HUBBY,' Renee Alexander wrote in white chalk on the sidewalk just steps from where he was gunned down. 'Its ur wife … jus wanna say I will always love you & miss you!'"

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This blog is not a meditation on police brutality, or crack cocaine, or US involvement in Haiti, or Katrina, or even "racism," although all of those events can be said to be part of it.

It's a place to meditate on the thought suppressed in the following common interaction among black people:

x: How you doing?

y: Aw, you know. Still black.

Somewhere in that simple, mundane interaction is the seed of a discussion that needs to be had among African people everywhere. On one hand, the notion that one is "still" black, implies that there is still a trial period that needs to be endured, perhaps even seeming to hold out the hope that this period will someday end. On the other hand, the answer "still black" comes in response to a question-- "How you doing?" -- so routine that its pertinence to questions of performativity may go overlooked. No matter the performance-- the "doing"-- y is acknowledging that one thing is not going away.

This blog is worthwhile if it allows a space to meditate on the things we cannot contemplate elsewhere-- to work out the thoughts that cannot be thought. It would not be necessary, but for that fact that there is no space for the afropessimist in the academy. While there is no space for us to work out the thought, there will be no space for us to turn black positionality into a set of poseable questions-- capable of being answered. This blog represents a strategic move toward that end.

The afropessimists are intellectuals of various stripes who work through the idea that the violence that creates the modern world is so powerful that it turns a planet full of people into not only the modern subject, of whom so much has been written, but also the modern object, euphemistically called the black person. In other words, they understand that a black person was not "black"-- as a noun, rather than an adjective-- before all things African became equated with slavery. And not just any kind of slavery, but a particularly brutal kind that uses the mechanisms of modern capitalism's drive toward hyperaccumulation. Modernity, the afropessimists posit, created a human who, somehow, is related to in a way that is qualitatively-- and often quantifiably-- different from the way in which other humans are related to, and that this relation is somehow necessary for the modern world/modern subject to be "itself."

A lot of questions present themselves within and about this perspective. What happens within discourse (psychoanalytic, semiotic, political) when certain subjects are not able to signify as themselves, but must (very conditionally) adopt performative characteristics of those to whom they are defined in opposition? How does afropessimism resonate with a wide variety of discourses in black culture and history? How does afropessimism resonate with a wide variety of discourses in nonblack culture and history? In this intellectual context, what does it mean to be an optimist? What about other modalities of oppression-- such as nonblack racial oppression, ethnic chauvinism, gender oppression, class and caste oppression? Et cetera.

How can a blog help?

Well, for one thing, this blog will work as a location for discussion of readings, films, art works, and other materiel that take the afropessimist viewpoint seriously.

This blog will be most effective if we make it a place where people with different amounts of familiarity with plainspeak can posit and discuss points about anything relevant-- including what is raised for discussion.

Let's work out the rest as we go along, can we?