The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering 151790093X, 9781517900939

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The Denial of Antiblackness

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The Denial of Antiblackness Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering

João H. Costa Vargas

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “Gendered Antiblackness and the Impossible Brazilian Project: Emerging Critical Black Brazilian Studies,” Cultural Dynamics 24, no. 1 (2012): 3–­11. doi.org/10.1177/0921374012452808. Portions of chapter 5 were previously published as “Black Disidentification: The 2013 Protests, Rolezinhos, and Racial Antagonism in Post-­Lula Brazil,” Critical Sociology, December 24, 2014, 1–­15. doi.org/10.1177/0896920514551208. The following publications are reprinted by permission of Red Salmon Arts. “Does Heaven Have a Ghetto?” “Prayer,” “Dear Lord, I’m in residential,” “It’s Not Too Late,” “Hell ain’t shit compared to life—­Protect me God it’s rough,” and “I’m trying to get out” from Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? copyright 2009 Red Salmon Press. “Praying for Freedom,” “Despite Hard Times,” “In My Hands,” “Dear Mama!” “Let It Slide By (A Whole Lot of Struggle),” “Where I Come From,” “New Beginning,” “Always Together,” “Trapped Inside,” “Hands in Diamond Shape,” “LSI (Low Self-­Image),” and “All I Need” from I Come from a Teardrop copyright 2010 Red Salmon Press. Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0092-2 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0093-9 (pb) A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer.

UMP BmB 2018

Contents Preface: The Challenges of Black Autonomy

vii

Introduction. Our Lives Are Our Deaths: Antiblackness and Oblique Identification

1

Part I. Austin, U.S.A.: The Dynamics of Youth Incarceration 1. Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? Growing Up in Prisons

51

2. Stanzas of Oppression and Hope: Voices of Incarcerated Black and Latino Boys

81

3. Negotiating Quotidian Violence and Uncertain Futures: Narratives from Black and Latina Girls

113

Part II. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Empire-­State Terror and Apartheid 4. Reclaiming Public Space: Rolezinhos as Protest

151

5. The Pacifying Police: Security through Brutality

181

Part III. The Denial of Antiblackness 6. Michael Zinzun: The Fall and Rise of the Black Cyborg

211

7. Black Suffering as Catalyst: Multiracial Blocs in Diaspora

239

Conclusion: The Slave against the Cyborg

259

Acknowledgments 273 Notes 275 Bibliography 305 Index 325

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Preface

The Challenges of Black Autonomy

This book is about challenges of Black autonomous analysis and political organizing. It examines how research and progressive multiracial efforts that address Black suffering are often unable to engage foundational, structural, multigenerational, and ubiquitous forms of antiblackness. Such efforts also crowd out the possibility of Black self-­determination. This work not only calls into question a progressive canon of multiracial analysis and mobilization, but also argues for Black self-­determination as a necessary condition for the effective identification, challenge, and overcoming of antiblackness. To do so, however, it must backtrack. In Parts I and II, it looks at what constitutes antiblackness in multiracial contexts of the diaspora: in formations of residential segregation, punitive schooling, juvenile imprisonment, policing practices, and political mobilization. In typical critical analyses and progressive multiracial mobilization addressing these formations, Black suffering is acknowledged while antiblackness is negated. As Part III shows, the negation of antiblackness often occurs due to the need for establishing common grounds of oppression among Blacks and nonblacks, the basic principle underlying canonical critical social analyses as well as the progressive multiracial bloc. Over time and across countries, the permanence of antiblackness, however, signifies the imperative of Black self-­determination as a collective organizing principle and mode of critical and transformative analysis. The case for self-­determination is indicated in the fact that, in the United States and in Brazil, we are, once again, on the cusp of a shift in Black people’s engagement with politics, so-­called civil society, and the empire-­state. Whether and how this shift is going to fully actualize itself is impossible to say. In public events when Black people, especially the youth, talk about what is going on in their communities—­continued brutalization and assassinations of women, children, and men by the police, enduring poverty, disease, isolation, and stigmatization—­one of the most vii

viii · PREFACE

often used expressions is that “we can’t take it anymore,” “não aguentamos mais.” Although terror has always defined Black existence as the condition of modernity—­and Black people’s perception that their lives are worthless in supposedly multiracial democratic polities is hardly a novelty—­there is an emerging agreement that traditional forms of political mobilization, which engage agents of the empire-­state and civil society, and require a specific Black political subject, need to be radically remodeled, maybe even altogether dismissed. This emerging agreement does not surface purely, without attachment to more traditional modes of protest. For example, the charges of structural police misconduct, and even that of genocide, are often leveled against the empire-­state apparatus (the occasional recourse to international courts notwithstanding). This approach requires that the political bloc engaging the official bureaucracy employ a specific vocabulary, demeanor, and ultimate belief in the redemptive capacity of the process. Such requirement produces a specific type of legible Black political subject: the researcher, academic, NGO operative, community organizer, and social movement militant who are able both to dialogue with Black people and to engage representatives of the empire-­state and civil society. Yet, rage at the systematic actualizations of antiblackness, as it did in the past, intermittently but significantly, is turning into a negation of the empire-­state and its protocols, including the legible Black political subject who, in the multiracial political bloc, uses Black suffering as a bargaining tool. So-­called violent and irresponsible street manifestations—­ which in the United States and in Brazil lead to the intervention of “special” militarized force against protestors—­the refusal to negotiate with officials, the disillusionment with the electoral process, and indeed the increasing emphasis on Black self-­determination, are all evidence of this shift. Again, the shift is still incipient, seemingly uncoordinated with similar initiatives, and its manifestations are not yet completely divorced from normative Black politics and its commonly supportive multiracial blocs. Here is a report on a case of “unrest” following the all-­too-­common police use of lethal force against Black people, published in the New York Times on August 15, 2016, as i was finishing this preface: The burning buildings, smashed police cars and scuffles between police officers and angry protesters on Milwaukee’s north side over the weekend might have seemed like a spontaneous eruption.

PREFACE · ix

But for many in the city’s marginalized black community, it was an explosive release decades in the making. Milwaukee is one of the United States’ most segregated cities, where black men are incarcerated or unemployed at some of the highest rates in the country, and where the difference in poverty between black and white residents is about one and a half times the national average. There are barren lots and worn-­down homes all over the predominantly black north side, while mostly white crowds traffic through the restaurants and boutiques downtown, or inhabit the glossy lakefront high rises. Add to that the disrespect that many black people say the police show them, and many of Milwaukee’s African-­American residents are unsurprised by the volatile response after a police officer fatally shot a black man on Saturday—­even though, as it turns out, the officer was also black. “This isn’t just, ‘Oh, my gosh, all of a sudden this happened,’ ” said Sharlen Moore, 39, who lives in Sherman Park, the mostly African-­American neighborhood where the shooting and unrest occurred. “It’s a series of things that has happened over a period of time. And right now you shake a soda bottle and you open the top and it explodes, and this is what it is.”1 This “unrest” is a manifestation of collective revolt against long-­term patterns of antiblackness. Such patterns far exceed the period of mobilization in the United States that followed the February 26, 2012, assassination of Trayvon Martin. They define the Black experience in the diaspora. Just as defining is the cyclical social awareness that the empire-­state and its institutions are irremediably antiblack. When this awareness emerges, so do collective actions, such as “unrest,” “riots,” and “uprisings” that reject institutional mechanisms of redressing grievances. For example, after the March 4, 1991, KTLA broadcast of the videotaped brutalization of Black motorist Rodney King by four police officers that had taken place the previous day, Blacks and their allies in Los Angeles patiently waited over a year, until May 29, 1992, in the hopes of obtaining a legal victory against law enforcement. It was only after the not-­guilty verdicts were announced in the Simi Valley court that the streets of South Central Los Angeles, the city’s historically Black area, became the stage on which to voice multigenerational grievances and rage against the antiblack society. The

x · PREFACE

Los Angeles rebellions, therefore, resulted from a rational choice to wait for the court verdict; they also materialized from a subsequent evaluation that the justice system, and indeed the larger social structure, did not work for Blacks. These were not “riots,” whose naming by the media monopoly suggests irrationality and criminality. Rather, the rebellions represented a shift, from a belief (or a suspension of disbelief) in the justice system and its attending political institutions and modes of operation, that included peaceful public multiracial demonstration, to a realization that only collective revolt was able to express long-­term exclusion and perhaps bring about change. Today, similar shifts occurring in the diaspora are compounded by the collective frustration at two ineffective two-­term presidencies, one headed by a Black man and former community organizer in the United States, and the other by a leftist labor unionist in Brazil. From a purely pragmatic Black standpoint, these federal administrations proved themselves futile in addressing, let alone combating, a litany of structural social vulnerabilities that define the majority Black experience. To be sure, the Lula presidency diminished poverty and opened access to consumer credit and first-­time homeownership to the economically poor in unprecedented proportions; it aggressively implemented affirmative action policies in public universities and a number of public sector occupations; the rising tide lifted many boats of the impoverished Black population. There were programmatic changes, albeit short-­lived, and they are already being reversed (see Part II). The two Obama terms, however, were unable to produce even a modicum of programmatic improvement for the Black majority. According to Census Bureau figures, while in this period the national unemployment rate dropped to 7 percent, the jobless rate for Blacks hardly declined, from 12.7 percent in 2009 to 12.5 percent in 2014. In this time frame, poverty for Blacks sharply increased, from 12 percent to 16.1 percent. Moreover, although median income diminished by 3.6 percent for White households, to $58,000, it decreased 10.9 percent, to $33,500, for Black households. The differences in Black and nonblack wealth, which provide a more accurate measure of transgenerational disadvantages, are staggering.2 And while the U.S. homicide rate showed signs of improvement, the homicide rate of Black people remained far greater than the country’s average. In Brazil, the homicide rate for Blacks actually spiked while the country’s average declined. There is no better proof of structural, long-­term antiblackness than continued vulnerability to disease and premature death

PREFACE · xi

by preventable causes, which includes homicide by the police but goes far beyond. The litany of disproportional incidence of cardiovascular ailments; AIDS/HIV infection; various diseases caused by environmental exposure to toxic chemicals as well as insects and pests; malnutrition; deficient and unavailable health care; and cancer, is evidence of how Black lives don’t matter. Protests against the use of deadly police force on Black people galvanize unaddressed grievances against the vast inventory of antiblack processes. This context explains why multiple groups of young Black people have begun to explore autonomous strategies of self-­defense and collective support. In impoverished Black communities, in prisons, artistic venues, independent study groups and publications, Black youth are pushing back at their structural stigmatization while repudiating traditional progressive analyses, strategies, and mobilization. Of course, most of the reports the world receives of this new wave of protest suggest a multiracial front. It is not accidental that the photograph accompanying the article quoted at length above focuses on a Black man beside a White man. But what the framing of these protests reveals is precisely the canonical multiracial imperative, which crowds out Black autonomy. What is presented as a solution—­multiracial solidarity, or multiraciality more broadly—­becomes part of the problem, for it reveals deep fears of Black autonomy. Still, the logic of the continued multifaceted and transgenerational oppression of Black people has nothing to do with either the Lula or Obama administrations. This book points to the elementary contradictions of a social formation that on the one hand purports to abide by principles of multiracial democracy, and on the other is spectacularly structured against Black people in methods at once foundational, essential, ever changing, and ubiquitous. One of the current contradictions is that, while there appears to exist a greater social awareness of Black suffering, there is a generalized incapacity to locate, particularly revealing in progressive circles, the antiblack logic at the very core of these empire-­state formations. It is this logic that, unexamined, continues to systematically generate Black suffering. There prevails a belief, even among the progressive-­minded, that multiracial formations can bring about full equality and inclusion of the oppressed and the Black. This belief is carried out by collective efforts that, since at least the 1960s, have relied on, produced, and reproduced the figure of the Black cyborg: the super-­, extra-­human being, of infinite wisdom, boundless knowledge, unassailable strength, and universal love. The

xii · PREFACE

Black cyborg and his/her multiracial bloc believes in, and thus legitimates, the empire-­state project of integration (chapter 6). When Blacks begin to shift their political practice away from the cyborg, the principles and totality of the empire-­state are also called into question. To grapple with the Black cyborg’s dilemmas is to engage the empire-­state’s project of multiracial integration. Yet the social order that requires and sustains the cyborg’s multiracial progressive bloc is not about to go away. Multiraciality, and the invested belief in the empire-­state’s redemption, is still strong and normative, which means that the social willingness to address antiblackness is embryonic. Nevertheless, incubated in a newfound awareness of structural antiblackness, insurgent imaginaries are relearning accumulated lessons of the past. Such is the Black imperative of transcendence. The figure of the slave, and her social practice and imagination, incarnate this imperative.

Introduction

Our Lives Are Our Deaths Antiblackness and Oblique Identification

The Denial of Antiblackness focuses on an intriguing social phenomenon, one that manifests itself across two of the largest countries of the African diaspora, Brazil and the United States: while there seems to be an increasing social awareness of Blacks’ experiences of discrimination, there is a denial of antiblackness as a foundational and structural fact. There is multiracial mobilization, outrage even, against the recent police killings of unarmed Black women and men, but there is not a comparable public willingness, or capacity, to debate structural and historical forms of antiblackness as explanations for these recurring events. Antiblackness is seldom, if ever, considered a possible foundational reason for the ways these allegedly multiracial democracies function. In these two main countries of the Black diaspora, there exists the simultaneous acknowledgment of Black suffering and the denial of foundational and structural antiblackness. What makes the denial of the structural, historical, and enduring facts of gendered antiblackness all the more intriguing is that it is happening when antiblack forces are now affecting nonblacks in unprecedented ways, at the levels of perception and experience. Blackness is always and already gendered, as subsequent chapters will show. Antiblackness is fundamentally gendered not only because gender modulates how blackness is perceived and experienced (e.g., violence against Black males is related to but quantitatively and symbolically quite distinct from violence against Black females) but also because blackness shapes the ways in which gender is perceived and experienced, which means that normative (i.e., nonblack) assumptions about femaleness (e.g., as equated to subordination) and maleness (e.g., as equated to domination) hardly, if ever, apply unproblematically to Blacks.1 As i explain below, even though Blacks are still, by far, the most 1

2 · INTRODUCTION

disproportionately affected by such processes, police brutality and mass incarceration are now increasingly affecting nonblacks in the United States and in Brazil as well.2 Nonblacks are now directly impacted by antiblack forces and/or are seemingly more aware of them. So why does the denial of antiblackness persist (especially but not exclusively) among nonblacks? How does this negation take place? What political horizons does the negation of antiblackness engender? By stressing that much of our current mechanism of social containment and repression is due to antiblackness, i am making a case that is as simple as it is controversial: take Blacks out of the picture, and such dynamics of containment and repression, and their corresponding institutions and socially shared values, make little, if any, sense. The diasporic war on drugs, stringent criminal law, and massive incarceration of vulnerable communities: without Blacks, those scenarios lose most of their social meanings—­that is, their collectively sanctioned symbolism, organizing principle, legal underpinnings, historical roots, and indeed their sheer intensity and brutality. Hypersurveillance, dispossession, and death of Blacks constitute the central logic and are the expected result of ever-­ expanding panoptical police empire-­states.3 This does not exclude other logics that are at play (e.g., the logic of capital and its funneling of surplus to the unprecedented construction of prisons in California in the 1970s and 1980s),4 nor the specific ways in which nonblack groups experience such processes. Rather, my point is to suggest that antiblackness is a central, but certainly not exclusive, overarching principle that combines with the empire-­state’s desire to police and contain its so-­called dangerous classes, among whom—­or, as we shall see, in contradistinction to whom—­ Blacks occupy a unique position.5 Antiblackness merges with, appropriates, intensifies, and indeed defines the inherent impulses of the Western penal system. In the process, it renders the Black subject its paradigmatic object, which is to say, it renders the Black subject a nonsubject.6 According to Michel Foucault, the penal system’s panoptical logic reproduces its own desire to know, catalog, and capture, in minute detail, figuratively and practically, as many subjects as possible. “The ideal point of penalty today,” Foucault affirms with relation to the drive of criminal justice, “would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty

INTRODUCTION · 3

that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.”7 If there is a simple truth about the U.S. criminal justice system’s operation since the dawn of the so-­called war on drugs, it is its rapid expansion. In the early 1970s, activists and researchers were perplexed at the two hundred thousand people the United States incarcerated domestically.8 With about seven million people under some kind of correctional supervision, including 2.5 million currently behind bars, it is evident the U.S. carceral machine operates under the imperative of a “file that was never closed,” a permanently expansive drive whose very existence depends on its capacity to capture as many individuals as possible, as well as their corresponding data universes. Students of the carceral regime have showed the very specific ways in which the employment of ever-­morphing surveillance and policing technologies, in a transhistorical climate of barely dissimulated social hostility toward Blacks, produces its own demand for more data, which in turn drives additional and improved technology, staff, and public and private support for expansive and efficient forms of social management, including policing.9 It is only fitting that, after the legal condemnation of New York Police Department’s stop-­ and-­frisk policy, the new approach, endorsed by progressive mayor Bill de Blasio, is called Omnipresence.10 The persistent disproportional targeting of Black women and men by these policing practices, and the corresponding disproportionality of Blacks under the supervision of the criminal justice system, as we will see throughout this book, indicate the antiblack logic of such ever-­expanding enterprises of social control. One could argue that, because Latin@s, Asians, Indians, and vulnerable Whites are also affected by massive criminalization and imprisonment, the underlying logic of such processes of massive surveillance and warehousing is not antiblack; or, that when such processes affect nonblacks they acquire a distinct logic and thus are, or become, something other than a product of antiblackness.11 As i show in chapters 1, 2, and 3, young Latin@s’ experiences with incarceration do indeed suggest a logic distinct from that of young Blacks under the same conditions. While in confinement, Latin@s are not as severely punished as Blacks; and once “in the free,” Latin@s can expect relatively better outcomes in employment, education, and future contact with the criminal justice institutions, including the foster care system. Chapters 4 and 5 show the ways in which,

4 · INTRODUCTION

like Blacks, nonblacks in Brazil find themselves in spaces of social vulnerability and experience the police through violence. However, based on recent demographic studies, in contrast to Blacks, vulnerable nonblacks may encounter police brutality often, but not structurally; the same is true for residential segregation, and deficient medical and educational institutions.12 So in Brazil, like in the United States, there seem to be distinct logics according to which Black and nonblack persons experience suffering. Nevertheless, in both empire-­state contexts, antiblackness becomes a compelling overarching explanatory category when we consider the very disproportionality of Blacks within institutions of confinement, impoverished segregated urban spaces, and indeed their unique experiences of punishment in schools—­which often lead to their first encounter with the empire-­state’s punitive institutions. These factors, in turn, explain and are reinforced by the unmatched historical levels of Black unemployment, underemployment, and vulnerability to early death by preventable causes. When nonblacks experience such geographies of punishment, isolation, and dispossession, they experience the collateral effects of a transhistorical, society-­sanctioned, institutionalized logic of antiblackness. Thus nonblacks do not experience antiblackness in the same way Blacks experience antiblackness. Nonblacks’ experience of antiblackness is distinct from Blacks’ experience of antiblackness insofar as nonblacks are not the paradigmatic objects of antiblackness; as such, nonblacks do not experience social death and early physical death by preventable causes as omnipresent, permanent, structural, and defining features of social life. Nonblacks do indeed experience aspects of preventable physical and social death, but such experience is of a different nature than what Blacks encounter: as the various chapters show, it is not as transhistorically and structurally persistent as it is for Blacks. Hence the distinct logics that operate for Blacks and nonblacks affected by antiblackness. Antiblackness, as an overarching social principle, affects Blacks and nonblacks in related but distinct ways. This differentiated impact makes antiblackness mostly incommunicable to nonblacks. It is thus unsurprising that while currently there is nonblack acknowledgment of Black suffering and oppression, there is a seeming incapacity, or unwillingness, on the part of nonblacks to grapple with the transhistorical structural aspects of antiblackness. “You are playing oppression Olympics!”—­the predictable accusation against the focus on the logic of antiblackness and its effects—­not only serves to disqualify the analytical effort on, and pivot the

INTRODUCTION · 5

conversation away from Black experiences, but also reveals the canonical people-­of-­color framework this study analyzes in chapter 7. To examine these related yet distinct experiences, this work investigates evidence of continued antiblack institutional and everyday practices in Brazil and the United States. It focuses on the excesses such practices have generated. What types of demographic outcomes, social awareness, and collective mobilization emerge when antiblack technologies of surveillance, isolation, and containment increasingly affect nonblack social groups at the corporeal and/or perception levels? Because antiblack forces are currently impacting nonblacks in ways legible to researchers, policy makers, popular culture producers, and broader publics, they are creating conditions for, and indeed incipient traces of, what i call oblique identification. Oblique identification is the central concept i utilize to make sense of these curious social processes through which are manifested, on the one hand, a seeming empathy toward Blacks’ victimization by the empire-­ state, and on the other, a refusal to engage with the foundational and structural aspects of antiblackness. Oblique identification between nonblacks and Blacks takes place when nonblacks recognize as worthy of their concern, and/or are victimized by, processes that, historically and contemporarily, have disproportionally affected Blacks—­processes, therefore, whose ideological core, institutional memory, and everyday manifestations are antiblack. Among these paradigmatic Black social phenomena that now increasingly figure in nonblacks’ collective awareness and/or experience are police misconduct, court bias, and mass incarceration. I call oblique identification this mode of relating to eminently Black processes. Oblique identification means that such Black processes are recognized only partially, belatedly, indirectly, reluctantly, or even unknowingly. Though imperfectly, oblique identification engenders various and varying forms of nonblack–­Black recognition. To make matters more interesting, oblique identification emerges in a political climate marked by narratives of and collective efforts aimed at empire-­state redemption that seek to redress current injustices perpetrated against Black and nonblack persons, and actualize inclusive, democratic, and multiracial ideals. The Denial of Antiblackness starts by establishing the social facts of antiblackness. It employs multiple disciplinary studies, as well as ethnography, drawn from geographically and historically varied social sites, to examine current events such as residential segregation, school discipline

6 · INTRODUCTION

policy, juvenile and adult incarceration, the continued and predictable brutalization and killing of Black people by empire-­state agents, multiracial and Black public protests, and the national and international debates about public security and democratic multiracial societal redemption. Taken together, the chapters show the continued and compounded effects of transgenerational cycles of dispossession subjugating already marginalized communities in the United States and in Brazil. While these empire-­ states are differentiated by their specific formations of social stratification and corresponding collective representations, as part of the Black diaspora they actualize analogous patterns of marginalization that are greatly dependent on intersecting dynamics of race, particularly blackness, and gender.13 A relational analysis, rather than a comparative approach, establishes a diasporic continuum whose fundamental logic, informing cognition, sociality, and the management of life and death technologies, is antiblackness.14 In both empire-­states, social and economic indicators suggest that, local inflections notwithstanding, experiences in the spheres of work, housing, criminal justice, and health are correlated to one’s racial positionality: the closer one is to blackness—­a measure that is always affected by social class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, among many other factors—­the more intensely one meets social disadvantages and the more likely one is to die prematurely.15 In Brazil and the United States, greater social disparities exist between Blacks and nonblacks than exist within discrete racial groups, yet another pattern indicative of a diasporic antiblack gendered logic of social antagonism.16 Once we center on antiblackness, we are able to suspend the comparative impulse, thus opening up Black analytical and political orientations. Sexton argues for the connection between the relational method and its impact on the resulting political field of possibilities: If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the United States seems conditional to the historic instances and functions at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-­lived or that the latter is exhausting and unchanging). If pursued with some consistency, the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of our

INTRODUCTION · 7

political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task.17 Antiblackness, as an underlying and mostly unaddressed logic (a structure of positionality, as i discuss later in this chapter), generates oppression in units of and across the Black diaspora: this is the broader analytical framework with which i make sense of the selected empirical data, forms of sociality, and political imagination. By moving from Austin to Rio de Janeiro to Los Angeles, the chapters in The Denial of Antiblackness suggest persistent antiblack dispositions. In these two empire-­states, neighborhoods continue to be defined by antiblackness in such a way that the greater the concentration of Blacks, the more impoverished, the more vulnerable to unemployment, and the more likely to produce early death by preventable causes a residential area will be. Black areas concentrate higher levels of imprisonment and homicide committed by agents of the empire-­state. As occupied zones of dispossession, Black residential areas across the diaspora also tend to have the worst schools, health-­care facilities, urban infrastructure, and overall living conditions, including disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards.18 Zones of dispossession are zones of social and physical death by preventable, manageable causes. The chapters show the ways in which contemporary intersecting antiblack social forces—­and most crucially, an overdetermining antiblack logic—­ are a critical, albeit often denied, aspect of how democratic and multiracial empire-­nations are imagined and managed. All of which is to say that, while this book is devoted primarily to the study of pragmatic social facts through quantitative, historical, and ethnographic data, these social facts are merely a partial consequence—­a deficient translation, and at times a complete negation—­of the antiblack logic that produces them. The logic of antiblackness far exceeds, and can indeed be disavowed by, its practical social manifestations. (On the disavowal of the logic of antiblackness by recourse to practical social facts, it is easy to imagine someone saying “But we just had a Black president,” or “Things have come a long way since the days of slavery and Jim Crow, and now there are laws that prohibit discrimination,” or even “Criminal justice reform recognizes mistakes of the recent past and attempts to restore the country’s inclusive [multiracial] democratic principles.”) So the analytical challenge is to access the logic of structural antiblackness through an

8 · INTRODUCTION

imperfect medium, that of pragmatic antiblack social processes. Imperfect as it may be, this investigative angle has a strategic advantage: that of engaging the seemingly more robust and widespread recognition of Black suffering since at least the death of Trayvon Martin in the United States and the campaigns against the genocide of Black people in Brazil since at least the late 1970s, thus offering possibilities of a critical dialogue about the logical and structural mechanics of antiblackness. Still, The Denial of Antiblackness moves beyond the analysis of intersecting pragmatic antiblack processes. It also examines what happens when these processes reach a saturation point and affect nonblacks physically and/or at the level of perception. Examples of antiblack saturation and its consequences on nonblacks abound. In the United States, home of the world’s greatest prison population and highest incarceration rate, in 2009, following long-­term patterns traceable to Richard Nixon’s declaration of the war on drugs, Black men were incarcerated in state and federal prisons at 6.4 times the rate of Whites, and Latino males at 2.4 times the rate of Whites. Recent findings on imprisonment between 2000 and 2009, however, point to new trends. These trends are indications of the saturation point. While rates of incarceration declined for Black men and women, incarceration rates for White men and women rose. For Latin@s, the men’s rate declined slightly, while the women’s rate rose 23.3 percent. The shifts in racial disparities among women have been particularly intense. Although Black women’s incarceration rate remains almost three times that of White women, and 1.5 times that of Latin@ women, there have been new, forceful, and curious developments. For example, while the incarceration rate for Black women in this period diminished 30.7 percent, for White women it increased 47.1 percent, and it increased 23.3 percent for Latina women.19 Although Black adults and juveniles continue to be the most disproportionately incarcerated compared to other groups, incarceration rates increased for White men as well as for White and Latina women. Expressing the increasing proportion of White men and women along with Latina women among the incarcerated, such trends reveal two processes: one, the saturation of institutions of confinement with Black persons relative to the overall Black population, which explains part of the “1.5 million missing Black men [and yet to be calculated number of Black women and children]” reported by the New York Times on April 20, 2015;20 and two, the renewed and increased presence of the repressive apparatus in nonblack

INTRODUCTION · 9

social spaces. Although we are indeed witnessing new and surprising trends, the underlying antiblack logic that structures and produces industrial incarceration remains unchanged. Not only do Blacks continue to be, by far, and consistently, the group most disproportionately represented in institutions of confinement; but also, more fundamentally, the social logic, the collective agreement, that must devalue Blacks in order for these facts to be true remains sovereign. In Brazil, police repression featured prominently in the grievances of the more than one million protesters who, in 2013, took to the streets of the country’s main cities. The protesters, themselves victimized by acts of police brutality, were mostly nonblack youths. What’s perhaps most astounding about the timing of the massive public protests in Brazil is that they happened when, nationally, homicide rates, including homicides committed by agents of the state, although diminishing for nonblacks, were increasing for Blacks. More specifically, between 2002 and 2010, Brazil’s homicide rate for Whites fell 25.5 percent; for Blacks, homicides increased by 29.8 percent. Over the same time period, the relation between rates of Black homicide and rates of White homicide—­what is called the National Index of Black Victimization—­has shown a steady increase: in 2002 it was 65.4 percent (i.e., proportionally 65.4 percent more Blacks died than did Whites), 90.8 in 2006, and 132.3 in 2010.21 While these trends suggest, on the one hand, a disconnect between nonblack protestors’ episodic (and declining) experiences of violence and Blacks’ foundational (and increasing) experiences of violence, they also point to, on the other hand, the phenomenon of oblique identification. Oblique identification takes place in the context of antiblack saturation. In the Brazilian case, antiblack saturation is indicated in the continued and intensifying rates of homicide of Black persons. Even though such rates represent an idiosyncratic Black phenomenon, what undergirds those rates—­institutionalized antiblackness—­spills over, so to speak, to affect nonblacks. This impact happens at the levels of perception and/or experience. The practical effects of antiblackness at times become so concentrated and expansive, so saturated, that they affect nonblack social worlds. Multiracial mobilization against police brutality affecting primarily Black people, as chapters 4 and 5 show, was part of the 2013 countrywide wave of protests. This mobilization, however, while unwilling or unable to address structural forms of antiblackness, generated enough of a critical understanding and organizing momentum that, following the

10 · INTRODUCTION

well-­publicized police torture and death of Amarildo de Souza in Rio’s largest historically Black area, it morphed into a wave of support for Black victims of police brutality, as chapter 5 shows. While this wave of support did not engage structural and foundational antiblackness, it generated the potential for nonblack relative conscientization of Black experiences. Oblique identification thus engendered the simultaneous temporary collective awareness of Black suffering and the denial of structural and foundational antiblackness. An emerging social climate across empire-­state borders appears to be related to the recognition of the excesses of antiblack oppression. Traces of this climate, in the United States, include the determination of federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin that New York’s stop-­and-­frisk practices evidenced unconstitutional racial profiling against Latin@ and Black youth;22 widespread reform in drug law and mandatory sentences at the state level;23 and former attorney general Eric Holder Jr.’s announcement of a new Justice Department policy according to which federal prosecutors would no longer apply harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses.24 The attempts at reforming drug laws and mandatory sentences, which cannot be dissociated from the ever growing criminalization and incarceration of nonblacks, and especially Whites,25 are also rooted in an expanding, albeit oblique, awareness of the evidence that such laws and sentencing guidelines disproportionately affect impoverished persons, particularly Latin@s and, paradigmatically, as it will be shown, Blacks. In the wake of the violent deaths of Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Jones, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Yvette Smith, Tarika Wilson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, and David Joseph, and many other anonymous victims of quotidian antiblack state or state-­ sanctioned terror, there have been widespread protests, often markedly multiracial, against police brutality and the criminal justice system. Based on a Department of Justice report about the Ferguson police force, which found systematic discrimination of Blacks, Holder affirmed he was prepared to dismantle the offending institution.26 The result of thorough and independent research, the national organization Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) recently published a report showing that in 2012 an agent of the state, or someone supported by the state, killed a Black person every twenty-­eight hours. Based on this report, MXGM, following the 1951 Civil Rights Congress headed by William Patterson, is campaigning to charge the United States with genocide against its Black population.27

INTRODUCTION · 11

Meanwhile in Brazil, the Worker’s Party federal administration adopted some of the analysis found in the Black movement’s similar condemnation of genocide, and began a multi-­ministerial campaign, symptomatically without the acknowledgment of antiblack genocide (preferring instead to affirm “institutional racism” as the culprit), to avert alarming homicide rates of Black youth;28 as seen above, the 2013 mass protests demanded the end of corruption in all levels of the public administration machine, including the police;29 and a new public security paradigm in the state of Rio de Janeiro promised to extinguish the drug commerce–­related perennial violence in historical Black areas and bring about greater law enforcement accountability.30

Oblique Identification: Engaging Black Suffering, Denying Antiblackness The Denial of Antiblackness explores the hypothesis that such an emerging social climate is creating conditions for nonblack oblique identification with Black people and historically Black social phenomena. As nonblack subjects identify with and support legislation redressing social problems that disproportionately affect Black persons, they gesture toward a political formation that despite its internal contradictions is able to produce graspable results, such as seemingly pro-­Black legal victories and institutional reform, that some people find satisfactory. Yet it is a fraught political formation because (most of, but not exclusively) its nonblack members seem unable to grasp the underlying antiblack transhistorical logic that produces Black oppression and suffering. For a brief illustration of the argument, let us reflect on the Black–­ nonblack political formation that in the 1940s and 1950s opposed residential segregation, a quintessential antiblack social phenomenon—­and one whose current incarnations we’ll revisit in chapters 1, 4, and 5 as they take place in Austin and Rio de Janeiro.31 The writings of civil rights lawyer and scholar Derrick Bell are instructive on the limited conditions under which Whites support pro-­Black legislation, as in the events leading up to the 1954 Supreme Court’s decision Brown v. Board of Education. Bell states, “The decision in Brown to break with the Court’s long-­held position on these issues cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to Whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those Whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad

12 · INTRODUCTION

that would follow abandonment of segregation.”32 If and when it happens, nonblack support of pro-­Black policies suggests a considerable dosage of self-­interest, rather than, or together with, moral indignation at antiblack phenomena. This conditional support (in this case conditional to White self-­interest) makes nonblack support of Black causes, and thus nonblack recognition of Black experiences (including Black articulated political desires), oblique. To expand on this illustration, a host of reasons other than or conjugated with self-­interest can be added to explain nonblack oblique acknowledgment of Black experiences. The adoption of the people-­of-­color analytical framework is key among the reasons explaining oblique identification. According to the more progressive version of this framework, due to the effects of capitalist cisheteropatriarchal White supremacy, the Black experience is analogous to, or commensurable with, that of the nonblack (including the impoverished White), LGBTQ people, the immigrant, and the refugee. In this people-­of-­color framework, such groups, including Blacks, in various forms and degrees suffer due to the aggregate causes and effects of alienation and exploitation, and therefore should struggle together against their common source of oppression—­the supporters, practices, and institutions of White supremacy. Yet, alienation and exploitation are not categories that capture the Black condition satisfactorily. Following Hartman’s reasoning, fungibility provides a more precise measure of contemporary Black experiences rooted in transhistorically imposed abjection through terror.33 Black subjugation is not explainable as solely a product of capitalist pragmatic logic; Black subjugation is as much about a libidinal economy—­a regime of desires and abjections—­shaping the ways in which the enslaved were at once dehumanized, transformed into discardable and interchangeable machines, and made into a medium for the expression of the subjectivity of the nonblack. Of course this scheme functions paradigmatically for the White, but not exclusively. In our proposed Black–­nonblack dyad, the nonwhite also elaborates her subjectivity in opposition to the Black’s subjectivity, made absent by cultural agreement.34 Specifically: The relation between pleasure and the possession of the slave property, in both the literal and figurative senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave—­that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to

INTRODUCTION · 13

the commodity—­and by the extensive capacities of property—­that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.35 Later in this introduction i argue for a perspective on slavery that has less to do with its historical specificities and more with its logic: slavery is a socially enforced theory of human relations, a theory that resists the passage of time. Fungibility suggests the thingification and replaceability of the Black, rendering her a necessary yet disposable entity. As a process and as part of an underlying theory of the social, fungibility targets, requires, and annuls Blacks qua autonomous and valuable humans; it produces unique Black experiences. That is not to say, however, that Black experiences are reducible to such process and logic, but that Black experiences cannot be understood without them. Yet the progressive version of the people-­of-­ color framework presents the experiences of blackness commensurable with nonblack experiences. It thus relinquishes the necessary appreciation of the uniqueness of blackness—­a uniqueness that is revealing of the ways in which our social worlds are structured by the accepted, amply reaffirmed in our quotidian, yet hardly centered, fungibility of the Black body. Abdicating this resolute engagement with antiblackness, the people-­ of-­color analytical framework is unable to imagine what an anti-­antiblack world would look like. Adopters of this framework, as chapter 7 shows, are incapable and/or unwilling to grasp that to embrace anti-­antiblackness is to imagine nothing short of a complete overhaul of our social cognition, modes or relating, institutions, and of course principles for distributing resources—­that to engage antiblackness is to imagine freedom at its fullest.36 In spite of—­or perhaps precisely due to—­its peculiar limitations, this type of oblique identification, that stresses common denominators between Black and nonblack experiences rather than the specific, structural, and defining aspects of blackness, has already proven that it is effective in bringing to public attention, even if partially and/or indirectly, the ways

14 · INTRODUCTION

in which the empire-­state apparatus carries out, and social actors tacitly support, antiblack policies of control and punishment. Oblique identification, specifically as chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 show, indeed enables the articulation of multiracial alliances. By bringing together racially diverse subjects, oblique identification incites a common set of political demands toward which Black and nonblack constituencies converge. The resulting multiracial bloc coheres around specific political objectives and broader democratic principles. Specific political objectives, formulated by social justice researchers and civil rights activists, include the analysis and reform (if not abolition) of the prison–­industrial complex and its attending criminal justice institutions and practices. Broader democratic principles, seemingly resonant in multiple social locations—­ from policy makers to street protesters to cultural producers—­embrace the empire-­ state’s multiracial constituency and affirm its allegedly inclusive and solidary vocation. However, while the multiracial constituency appears indignant about what seem like episodic excesses of the empire-­state machine, it nevertheless appears unwilling or unable to consider the full dimensions of the foundational, structural, recurring, yet simple fact of gendered antiblackness. When the multiracial bloc’s racial analysis emerges, it is one that, even though it originates in pleas against phenomena that are fundamentally antiblack, such as police use of lethal force, often metamorphoses into a multiracial problem, one that affects Blacks, Latin@s, and other oppressed groups, if not equally, then at least in comparable ways. This study shows that Black experiences, while related to those of nonblacks, are unique; such uniqueness is a manifestation of the antiblack logic that informs much of pragmatic social facts. To stress common denominators between Blacks and nonblacks is to bypass such uniqueness; it is to ignore a fundamental, ubiquitous, and structural feature of this social world. It is this expected, canonical practice, particularly but not exclusively in progressive camps, that needs to be interrupted: i want to pause the swift political move that goes from a recognition of Black oppression to the assertion of multiracial analogy. The focus on antiblackness allows for a critical perspective on the ways in which even progressive political formations obviate a coming to terms with the antiblack foundation of modern multiracial political and cultural formations. The Denial of Antiblackness thus interrogates, rather than takes as a given, the inclusive and solidary vocation of the empire-­state. Multiracial political efforts that affirm this

INTRODUCTION · 15

vocation are thus also scrutinized. At stake is not whether contemporary democracies are essentially antiblack, but how. The peculiar ideological construct that references yet elides the specificity of Black experiences so as to emphasize multiracial common denominators cannot be attributed to lack of evidence of eminently antiblack institutional practices. For example, the 2015 Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice report on its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (FDP), in the wake of the police assassination of Michael Brown, was unambiguous in its findings about the FDP’s antiblack orientation. In no uncertain terms, the Department of Justice stated the following: Ferguson’s law enforcement practices overwhelmingly impact African Americans. Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 show that African Americas account for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67% of Ferguson’s population. African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non–­race based variables such as reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers, suggesting officers are impermissibly considering race as a factor when determining whether to search.37 Based on the awareness of such unambiguous antiblack institutional and everyday phenomena, organizations in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere in the diaspora push for unapologetic Black perspectives and collective practices. Many of them, such as Black Lives Matter and Reaja ou Será Morta! / Reaja ou Será Morto! also address the deep complicity between heteropatriarchy and antiblackness.38 Despite such unequivocal evidence of antiblack institutional practices, and the no less assertive recent emergence of collective mobilizations that stress Black standpoints, at the many recent multiracial public events against police brutality across the Americas antiblackness is diluted and often crowded out of collective impulses that privilege common denominators across race, social class, sexual orientation, and nationality. For example, in the United States, following the death of yet another Black person by the police, a common refrain used by public protestors of all races was that “police brutality impacts all

16 · INTRODUCTION

of us.” Nonblack LGBTQs, Latin@s, Muslims, and Asians often claimed that they, too, were negatively affected by state repression, and thus empathized with Black suffering. While the show of empathy had the obvious effect of constituting and numerically strengthening the multiracial bloc, by suggesting an analogy between nonblack and Black victimization it also negated the specificity of police homicide of Black people. This ubiquitous refrain and its underlying logic were in evidence during the February 11, 2016, debate between Democratic Party presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at the University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee. In preparation for the primaries in Nevada and South Carolina, where Latin@ and Black voters are a substantial part of the electorate, Sanders and Clinton were trying to show engagement with the many Black Lives Matter protests across the United States against police misconduct and, as Clinton put it, the expanding consensus to “end the era of mass incarceration.” Both candidates addressed Blacks’ disproportionate victimization by the criminal justice system, staggering rates of incarceration, and incomparable figures of unemployment among the youth which, according to Sanders, hovered around 51 percent. Clinton remembered Dontre Hamilton, a young Black man killed in 2014 by the police in Milwaukee. Let me say that i’ve been teaching courses on the criminal justice system for the last fifteen years; i frankly could not have anticipated the day when targeted mass incarceration, this defining antiblack social phenomenon of our times, would become a part of a presidential campaign debate. Alas, while the candidates uttered strong statements about Black disproportionate victimization, the undeniable antiblack logic of criminal justice was crowded out. The focus on Black experiences was not sustainable. Both candidates quickly pivoted to affirm the criminal justice system’s impact on Latin@s and Whites. Tellingly, one of the moderators, Gwen Ifill, after saying that “when we talk about race in this country we always talk about African Americans, people of color,” asked a pointed question about White people: “Don’t they have a reason to be resentful?” Ifill explained how working-­class Whites, “underemployed in many cases,” already outnumbered in the public school system, will be a numeric minority by mid-­century, and are living shorter lives than their parents did. The question led to the candidates’ discussion about vulnerable White people’s oppression, including mounting rates of drug dependency and incarceration.39

INTRODUCTION · 17

In Brazil, despite well-­known cases of police assassinations involving unmistakably Black persons—­Amarildo Dias de Souza and Cláudia Silva Ferreira, among many other victims of state-­sanctioned genocidal practices—­multiracial protesters often articulated that police brutality affected “the poor, the Black, and the residents of the periphery.” To be sure, the inclusive refrain can be interpreted as a good-­faith attempt to morally sensitize and politically mobilize nonblacks (and Blacks who resist acknowledging antiblackness), thus making Black experiences of discrimination matters that concern the entire society, not just aware Blacks. The search for and assertion of transracial and cross-­class common denominators is, after all, precisely the sine qua non of multiracial political efforts. Along similar lines, one could affirm that, as it challenges police brutality and the disparities in the criminal justice system as a multiracial, cross-­ class injustice, the multiracial bloc demonstrates the effectiveness of its initial plea for a collective protest against antiblack oppression. Yet these inclusive refrains that reverberate across the diaspora, and the cognitive device they represent, if on the one hand generate an imagined sense of familiarity with Black suffering, on the other have the effect of pivoting away from, thus attenuating, thus misrepresenting, the foundational antiblackness that animates the criminal justice system in particular and the normative principles of sociability more generally. Morally indignant, the multiracial bloc, tethered to a people-­of-­color logic, is not analytically able or willing to consistently explore the hypothesis that the empire-­state, its institutions, and its supported modes of sociality are immanently antiblack. Imagined familiarity with Black oppression and suffering equates with a refusal to consider antiblackness as foundational. Transnationally, despite overwhelming evidence of antiblackness, the progressive public consensus is unwilling and unable to push for a debate agenda that asks deep and unrelenting questions about antiblackness as a structuring principle. This alternative agenda means stepping away from the people-­of-­color analytical framework that consistently denies antiblackness as fundamental, ubiquitous, and transhistorical. It means suspending the belief in the empire-­state’s interest in and capacity to bring about multiracial integration that is not dependent on Black abjection; interrupting the demands of reform (e.g., criminal justice reform, policing reform, political reform); taking very seriously the hypothesis that antiblackness inflects our basic parameters of living collectively under the empire-­state’s umbrella, thus

18 · INTRODUCTION

engaging our elementary principles of sociability; and imagining analytical and political strategies able to identify and challenge the core institutional aspects of antiblackness. If antiblackness is foundational, then nothing short of detecting and destroying our structuring codes of what it means to be human in society will get rid of it. • • • The Denial of Antiblackness shows that, as antiblack processes reach a saturation point and increasingly affect the nonblack physically and/or by way of acquired awareness and even relative empathy, they create possibilities for oblique identification between nonblacks and Blacks. The central questions structuring this work are as follows: What are the conditions in which oblique identification emerges? And what are the manifestations and consequences of oblique identification and its denial of antiblackness? While there are quite apparent, vivid, and seemingly positive outcomes of this curious form of identification—­renewed public awareness of institutional excesses and the victimization of Blacks—­there are other, not so obvious consequences. Oblique identification manufactures silences, gaps, erasures, and avoidances. That is to say, while oblique identification enables the relative (re)cognition of Black suffering, it also denies the analysis of structural and foundational antiblackness that informs Black and nonblack experiences. Could it be that the very condition of possibility of nonblack relative empathy toward Blacks is precisely the elision of antiblackness? In the United States and Brazil, the popular Netflix series Orange Is the New Black is an example of the complexity of oblique identification and its disavowal of antiblackness: as it suggests a greater public awareness of and willingness to engage targeted mass incarceration (in particular its impact on nonviolent women drug users), it also forecloses a serious and sustained engagement with forms of antiblackness that structure the emergence and maintenance of targeted mass incarceration.40 Currently, the sincere multiracial efforts at empire-­state redemption across the Black diaspora take place in this curious and contradictory political atmosphere. What does the denial of structural and foundational antiblackness say about these projects of empire-­state redemption? This book draws on one short-­lived and three long-­term ethnographic experiences in Brazil and the United States. Between 1996 and 2006, i collaborated with activists at the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) in Los Angeles, coordinated by Black Panther Michael Zinzun. Founded in

INTRODUCTION · 19

1975, CAPA was primarily focused on the quotidian police brutality that marked the South Central Los Angeles ghetto. It provided legal advice and logistical and moral support to victims of police abuse. CAPA’s primary activist intervention was to transform cases of police brutality into community mobilization in which the repressive presence of the state was denounced as one of many aspects of Black people’s subjugation. Unemployment, substandard education, food insecurity, exposure to environmental hazards (including toxic chemicals and disease-­carrying pests such as cockroaches and rodents), and general susceptibility to early death by preventable causes (including domestic violence): these were some of the problems affecting Black people that CAPA was able to engage as it battled the everyday militarized police presence. Over the years, CAPA developed a series of programs targeting local youths, such as computer literacy, photography and video production, silk screening, and public speaking. As chapter 6 shows, Zinzun used his personal funds to support these initiatives, at great cost to him and his family. Following a Black Power orientation, Zinzun made concerted efforts to connect local and diasporic organized struggles. He traveled to Europe, Africa, and South America frequently, and in his journeys made it a point to bring young people—­impoverished, formerly incarcerated, members and victims of gangs—­with him. For example, in 1983 he traveled to Brazil for the first time, taking with him fellow organizers from various U.S. cities. He arrived in Rio de Janeiro shortly after the infamous Candelaria massacre, when the police killed eight young Black people while they were sleeping on the steps of the homonymous downtown church. There he interacted with local activists, such as members of the Research Institute of Black Cultures (Instituto de Pesquisa das Culturas Negras, IPCN), and organizers in Black communities. Zinzun maintained these contacts until he passed in 2006. When i first met Zinzun, in 1995, he had recently come back from an international trip that included Rio and Salvador, in Brazil. At the time i had just moved to Los Angeles and was determined to live in South Central and work at CAPA. My youthful enthusiasm and analysis indicated that, if the Black-­majority area had rebelled in 1992, it would again soon enough. At the very least, i would learn the rebellions’ conditions of possibility. It was my hypothetical understanding that such scale of mobilization that became inaccurately known as the “L.A. riots,” as if it was a product of irrational spontaneity, could not have happened without sustained

20 · INTRODUCTION

and informed local mobilization. It did not take long for me to learn that, in fact, CAPA had an important role in the uprising. Zinzun, a survivor of police brutality, as chapter 6 shows, was a central activist in the organized struggle against militarized police presence in Black and nonblack areas, but he was also instrumental in bringing about the 1992 gang truce between Crips and Bloods. It is an often-­forgotten fact that the truce happened before that year’s rebellion, and that much of the concerted actions of resistance against armed and ready to shoot-­to-­kill private property owners and agents of the empire-­state were the result of meticulous coordination between the now united gangs. More important, i soon discovered through working at CAPA daily between 1995 and 1998, and interacting with allied organizations and individuals, that the so-­called rebellions’ “hot spots”—­where the greatest concentrations of people, fire, and resistance against antiblack armed individuals and agents of the state happened—­were precisely the areas where local organizations were the most dynamic, and established. South Central activists and residents had been ready for the rebellion.41 All of which is to say that, when in 2000 Zinzun told me about an organization in Rio de Janeiro that required my urgent attention, i knew that he had already seen in it a very specific type of potential. At the time i was employed in Austin, and i hadn’t been back in Brazil since 1994. So it was through Zinzun and CAPA that i contacted Rumba Gabriel, one of the main organizers of the Favela Popular Movement (Movimento Popular de Favelas, MPF), and effectively reconnected with my country of origin. In 2001, by participating in the planning and the implementation of weekly meetings in various of Rio’s participating favelas, i became involved in the MPF and Jacarezinho community, where Rumba was the resident association’s president.42 To this day, MPF is seen as a unique political experiment; contemporary activists cite the short-­lived MPF as a model of collective intervention. MPF brought together more than sixty of Rio’s favelas, and elaborated autonomous favela-­based demands about infrastructure, education, and the police. MPF activists consciously employed strategies and discourses aimed at denouncing racial injustice while, often intentionally, raising nonblack anxiety: with Black children and adolescents, they occupied shopping malls; in various marches they protested the systematic use of lethal police force against Black youth; they encouraged the burning of buses to call attention to deficient public transportation and urban infrastructure; and they constructed walls and installed cameras around

INTRODUCTION · 21

some of the historical Black communities as a way to incite public debate about safety and policing in impoverished areas.43 Synthesizing hopes of a more just society while inciting deep nonblack fears of the allegedly unruly Blacks, the MPF activists, and Rumba in particular, often repeated the threat that, if their demands were not met, the “favelas will come down to the asphalt and claim what is ours.” Intimidation, brutal repression, Rumba’s incarceration and subsequent disappearance—­and yes, the state’s incorporation of some of the activists into its bureaucratic machine—­led to MPF’s disbanding in 2002. Shortly thereafter, in great measure due to my evaluation that one of MPF’s shortcomings was its lack of a gendered antiblack critique, i began conversations with Criola activists in Rio. Founded in 1992 by Black women who grappled with various feminist collectives’ incapacity to reflect on race and the traditional Black movement’s refusal to engage gender, Criola emerged shortly after São Paulo’s Geledés; today, Criola and Geledés are the preeminent autonomous Black women’s organizations in Brazil. One of Criola’s coordinators, medical doctor Jurema Werneck, often stresses that they are not a feminist collective, but an organization that is rooted in the ancestrality, experiences, and thoughts of Black women. This, in part, is to distinguish what Werneck finds to be mostly a European– Anglophone and U.S. academic practice, feminism—­which according to her tends to rely on a curious mixture of victimization, unchecked privilege, and individualism—­from a much broader set of imaginaries and collective strategies embodied by Black women in Brazil and the diaspora.44 Part of local, state, national, and international networks of Black women, Criola focuses on combating various forms of racism and sexism. Criola activists and their allies, many of whom are rooted in, supportive of, and inspired by communitarian practices developed in the Black spaces of Candomblé, a Brazilian religious practice derived from African symbolic matrices, have engaged in a number of awareness and organizing campaigns. Examples of awareness campaigns include those focusing on domestic violence against women, lesbophobia, and sexual and reproductive health. In 2016, for example, Criola spearheaded a national campaign titled “Virtual Racism, Real Consequences.” Criola collected racist comments posted on social media like Facebook and, after locating the geographical origin of the comments, placed those comments on billboards near those locations. The objective was both to denounce the persistence of antiblack racism and to create a national conversation about it.45

22 · INTRODUCTION

Criola members considered “Virtual Racism, Real Consequences” a successful awareness campaign. It received widespread attention in activist, media, academic, and various civil society circles. This campaign emerged in the wake of a much larger effort, undertaken in 2015, to bring about the “Black Women’s March.” Organized nationally with the objective to convene Black women from all over the country to the capital, Brasília, the march sought to call attention to Black women’s struggles against “violence, discrimination, and racism.” Several months of national preparation, in which Criola played a prominent role, culminated with the congregation of more than fifty thousand people in Brazil’s capital, in the streets and in study and discussion groups.46 My collaboration with Criola, built around an annual course on the Black diaspora, is ongoing. In 2016 we completed the tenth edition of the course, originally intended as a workshop for the formation of Black movement cadres. Over the years, the course has served as a forum where more than two hundred Black women and men of various social, political, and sexual orientations discuss and strategize approaches against the ongoing genocide defining the Black diaspora. As chapter 4 and 5 show, much of what i learned working and dialoguing with Criola members Lúcia Xavier, Jurema Werneck, José Marmo, Sonia Santos, Luciane Rocha, Maria Aparecida Patroclo, and Luceni Ferreira informs my analysis of diasporic forms of Black suffering, including the resistance, even by progressive Black fronts, to come to terms with the specificity of gendered antiblackness. Even though the chapters on Brazil focus on specific events—­the 2013 street protests, planned youth gatherings called rolezinhos, police pacification policies, and the torture and death of a Black worker in an impoverished neighborhood in Rio—­they reveal the ways in which transhistorical and structural antiblackness continually manifests itself. Much like CAPA, Criola centers the experience of blackness. Unlike CAPA, Criola stresses the gendered aspects of blackness and their institutional and everyday manifestations. CAPA, MPF, and Criola make demands to the state and act in so-­called civil society. A number of former ministers of racial equality, and Black public functionaries at the local, state, and federal levels, frequently seek counsel with Criola, whose members participate in state-­sponsored events and engage in state-­generated initiatives and forums. Rumba was eventually employed by the state of Rio’s public security secretariat. Zinzun ran for an elected position similar to that of a city councilperson in Pasadena. This means that, as critical of

INTRODUCTION · 23

Black exclusion as these organizations and people are, they engage established forms of power and spaces of political articulation as necessary and perhaps the only available arenas of struggle. The antiblack empire-­state, its apparatus, rituals, and representatives, are thus rendered legitimate, even if reluctantly. A similar assessment can be made of my involvement with Save Our Youth (SOY). Between 2008 and 2012, in an Austin juvenile detention facility, with Czarina Thelen and Rene Valdez, i participated in a twice-­ a-­week writing workshop with incarcerated young people, mostly Black and Latin@. SOY was an initiative of poet and activist xicaníndio Raúl Salinas, also known as raúlsalinas, developed in previous decades and implemented in schools and juvenile justice institutions throughout Texas.47 Significantly for me, Salinas knew Zinzun. They had collaborated in California, and probably were incarcerated at the same time and place. Salinas and Zinzun reconnected in Austin in 2004, when Zinzun delivered a series of talks at the University of Texas. Employing poetry and music as means to facilitate debate, the SOY workshop was designed to encourage critical thinking, foster confidence, and cultivate social and historical awareness among the mostly Latin@ and Black children. At the Austin juvenile facility, the workshop’s continuation depended on our renewed ability to make the case to the prison’s administrators that we, the facilitators, aided both the institution and the kids. As i show in chapters 2 and 3, we had to constantly negotiate with the facility’s administrators the terms of our interventions: the content of our sessions, the vocabulary that we employed and allowed the young people to use, and the format and substance of the publications that resulted from the workshops. We were instructed to discourage the kids to produce any and every expression that “glorified gangs, gang symbols, gang activities, and gang territory.” We even had to police the language used in the workshops. Because Spanish was prohibited, we often found ourselves telling the kids to revert to English. Of course not all rules were followed, and of course, over the years, we found ways to circumvent many of them. For example, at some point we pleaded with the prison administrators that, because some of the kids incarcerated were not English speakers, and given the fact that both Valdez and Thelen were fluent speakers of Spanish, it made no sense not to translate the workshops for those kids. The administrators agreed, and thus relaxed the no-­Spanish rule during our sessions. Some of the kids interpreted the concession as an invitation to

24 · INTRODUCTION

use Spanish in their writing and reading of their poetry. But the fact remains that, even though we worked to empower the incarcerated kids, we also, even if unwillingly, contributed to the management of their confinement. And, as i show in Part I, if the logic of confinement—­which is to say, the logic of social management that far exceeds the prison—­is deeply antiblack, then a considerable part of our actions, as facilitators, furthered this perverse antiblack logic. The five-­year work in the juvenile prison with young Black and Latin@ women and men was challenging. Full of life and imagination, the youths were confronted with the daily and long-­term reminders that their confinement was not restricted to the juvenile facility, but included their schools, their neighborhoods, and their options in the formal economy. Although Black and Latin@ young women and men often shared neighborhoods, schools, and experiences of exclusion, they rarely interacted across racial lines as easily as they did within their racial groups. Black and Latin@ kids recognized and spoke of their distinct social worlds; they experienced social death in related but quite distinct ways. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 argue that, relative to Latin@ kids, Black kids remain disproportionately represented in institutions of confinement; they are more severely punished while in the juvenile criminal system and in their schools; their social networks are significantly more negatively affected by technologies of surveillance and punishment; and their prospects of adult incarceration and unemployment are more likely. For these reasons, which in turn speak of a pervasive antiblackness that affects the Black and the nonblack, Latin@ recognition of Black experiences, even in spaces of confinement where physical closeness was imposed, remained ephemeral and partial at best. Such an evanescent type of recognition is an example of oblique identification. The activist partnerships introduced above provide ethnographic insight into the everyday, local, institutional, and political dynamics analyzed in each chapter. Because they reveal and produce continuities across borders of time and geographical space, because they transcend their local and finite actualizations, these dynamics suggest a transhistorical and diasporic logic. In other words, the specificities of Black suffering reveal a fundamental structural linkage between social realities contending with the enduring problem of the Black presence. Therefore, each chapter, as it grapples with manifestations of Black dispossession (including dispossession of one’s self) and hypersurveillance (including auto-­surveillance), is but an expression of the foundational, structuring, and geographically

INTRODUCTION · 25

widespread logic of antiblackness. The dynamics of antiblackness translate the logic of antiblackness, but neither do they accurately translate it, nor do they exhaust it. The analytical challenge, then, is to present convincing linkages between the manifestations of antiblackness and the principles of antiblackness. Rendering matters more complex, the dynamics of antiblackness also disclose ways in which social actors struggle with antiblackness, even by denying it. Progressive activists, incarcerated young people, protestors, police officers, journalists, bureaucrats, and elected officials at times recognize aspects of foundational and structural antiblackness but often fail to sustain analyses and actions that address it fully. The recorded occurrence of multiple forms of Black exclusion in the diasporic recent past, and their predictable repetition in the near future, impels the search for innovative analytical, social, and political alternatives. On the one hand, such alternatives must be able to contend with, in a sustained manner, the transhistorical, ubiquitous, and structuring fact of antiblackness. On the other, they must be able to detect, or even prefigure, oppositional glimpses that refract from, rather than bypass, the prism of antiblackness. This latter requirement is presented here to tell the reader that a focus on antiblackness is not pessimistic, if by such term one means the absence of possibilities beyond the inescapability of antiblackness. The focus on antiblackness, rather, is the paramount translation of transcendental possibilities. Such possibilities, however, must suspend all accepted wisdom that sees, hopes, or authorizes possibilities of redemption in our current formations of empire-­state, including “radical” theorization and modes of collective organizing that accept and enforce multiracial solidarity as a self-­evident positive given. Don’t get me wrong. To engage antiblackness is not to preemptively negate analyses and modes of collective organizing that focus on multiracial constituencies. Rather, it is to focus, first, and comprehensively, on antiblackness, and only thereafter move on to nonblack experiences and multiracial possibilities. It will become apparent that the specific activist partnerships from which i draw, immersed in and defined by their multiple transnational commonalities, are themselves also evidence of our current difficulty, or utter failure, to confront antiblackness. This work is in pursuance of the transcendental, the visionary. • • • Below i introduce a number of concepts that will inform my analysis, concepts that attempt to approximate the dimensions of antiblackness as

26 · INTRODUCTION

indeces of a transnational, foundational, and transhistorical logic. This brief account is meant to establish points of departure, not fixed references: heuristic propositions that will be tested against social processes, and possibly modified. I offer these in an attempt to train our gaze and direct our efforts in ways that address antiblackness rather than avoid it. To provide theoretical references against which the concept of oblique identification gains specificity, i focus on the notions of antiblackness and social death. I start with an analysis of antiblack racism as a subset of antiblackness. I propose to linger on antiblackness not as an exercise of nihilism. Quite the opposite. To confront antiblackness is to revive a utopian perspective that seeks to destroy socially shared assumptions that naturalize Black suffering. To model the embracing of antiblackness i am proposing, i draw a self-­critique of my previous works that uncritically engaged in a people-­of-­color framework and in the process foreclosed a more comprehensive analysis of antiblackness. The effort is to find ways to bypass, or at least challenge, not only our normative methodologies but, as importantly, and inextricably, the implicit structuring tropes of antiblackness we all employ and sanction by simply being part of our global culture. For example, if recent social psychology experiments are correct, we all harbor subliminally the Black–­ape association, Black abjection at its most elementary. To do away with our complicity in Black dehumanization, we thus need to undo our fluency in normative social grammars that impact, and are inflected by, modes of thinking, methods of inquiry, and political imagination. The insurgent pro-­Black proposition, then, is to negate coherence, which means to negate accepted wisdom. In particular, we must interrogate progressive research and organizing agendas, including academic programs, whose oblique identification is manifested in their timid efforts at engaging antiblackness as foundational, structural, transhistorical, and ubiquitous. I conclude by arguing for a Black–­nonblack dyad, meant to correct and replace the canonical White–­nonwhite framework.

The Obstinate Vivacity of Antiblackness: Structural Antagonism and Social Death Antiblack racism is a constitutive aspect of the social world in the Black diaspora. Antiblack racism, according to Lewis Gordon, is a form of bad faith, which he defines as “the effort to hide from human reality, the effort to hide from ourselves. From the standpoint of bad faith, racism is the ossification of human reality into a monadic entity identical with any

INTRODUCTION · 27

other aspect of its assumed duality. The racist is a figure who hides from himself by taking false or evasive attitudes toward people of other races. The antiblack racist is a person who holds these attitudes toward black people.”48 Expanding these insights to the social, antiblack racism can be conceptualized as a shared set of attitudes, and their assumptions, that translate into everyday practice and measurable results. This shared antiblack symbolic universe and its corresponding social protocols engender and justify a hierarchy of worth according to which human beings are classified. Although the resulting scheme allows for certain disadvantages to the otherwise privileged (e.g., White women are disadvantaged in a number of material and symbolic ways vis-­à-­vis White men; transgender White men are disadvantaged relative to cisgender White men), it consists of structured advantages for the nonblack and structured disadvantages for the Black.49 A fundamental consequence of this hierarchy is that antiblack racism determines how and thus for how long members of racialized groups live. Since it negates the very humanity of those who are less valued, for nonblacks antiblack racism guarantees the transgenerational accumulation of relative advantages. For Blacks, antiblack racism is synonymous with transgenerational accumulation of disadvantages, which consistently diminishes life expectancy. The Black, in this symbolic universe—­our world—­is abject. To such an extent that, as will be argued at greater length below, the Black is not included in the hierarchy of human worth. The Black makes possible that hierarchy but is not of it. The Black is not human. It matters little that she objects the abjection by resisting, performing, finding joy, organizing.50 Although it leaves its odious marks on the realm of the lived experience, the social-­pragmatic world—­who gets what, when, why, and how—­antiblack racism functions primarily, more effectively because seldom detected, and transhistorically, at the structural level. Antiblack racism structures not only social outcomes, including well-­being,51 but fundamentally how we culturally think about and relate in and to the social world. It is a form of structural bad faith because it renders human difference essential, static, predictable, and classifies those differences according to a hierarchy of value; it renders humanity unattainable for the Black. Shaping social cognition whose fundamental principles reside in the unconscious, or subliminal, antiblack racism establishes the assumptions informing and inflected by the field of sociability. There exists a feedback loop between shared subliminal assumptions and social practice, between

28 · INTRODUCTION

structure (the structuring of social practice) and agency (the realization of the structure via practice).52 Yet, antiblack structuring principles have been impervious to the considerable pro-­Black gains in political and social rights since the mid-­twentieth century. Antiblack racism—­and more broadly, aversion to all that is related to and suggests blackness, antiblackness—­is thus structuring and inescapable unless and until the very structures of our cognition and sociability are deeply transfigured, removed, destroyed. To get to this desired and necessary transformative moment, however, we need first to figure out what exactly needs to be replaced. The exercise of identifying and analytically staying with, instead of pivoting away from, antiblackness, in its painfully present, transhistorical, ubiquitous yet elusive underlying nature, is as urgent as it is incipient. Such is the imperative of freedom. Targeting the logic of antiblackness, my effort is to revive—­ not abdicate—­ the utopian expectation, and corresponding political-­ intellectual projects, based on the assumption that insurgent social practice can identify and destroy socially shared structuring principles. I am not defending a Black-­only focus that precludes attention to nonblack, negatively impacted social groups. As i show in every chapter, the structural positionality of the nonblack is necessarily connected to and indeed dependent on the structural positionality of the Black. This doesn’t mean such experiences are analogous, or commensurate; it means, more precisely, that insofar as Black and nonblack structural positionalities are necessarily linked, albeit fundamentally distinct, their related experiences acquire more detail when juxtaposed to each other. Because antiblackness is ubiquitous and foundational, it links Black and nonblack experiences; because antiblackness is experienced differently by Blacks and nonblacks, it suggests categorically distinctive logics informing these differentiated yet linked experiences. To focus on Black experiences and on antiblackness, therefore, is to gauge a social force field that affects everyone. James Baldwin, aware of the structural centrality of blackness in the formation of modern subjectivities, and the earth-­shattering effect that a change in such arrangement would produce, put it this way: “The black [wo/]man has functioned in the white [wo/]man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as [s/]he moves out of [her/]his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.”53 I am pressing for a slower, comprehensive analysis—­one that lingers on antiblackness, grapples with its minutia, understands its nature, depth,

INTRODUCTION · 29

and reach. A self-­critique contributes to centering antiblackness. My two previous books, Catching Hell in the City of Angels and Never Meant to Survive, reflecting the canonical expectations of diasporic Black studies and politics, are examples of a standard analytical prism: after examining a litany of antiblack phenomena, and how Black folks survive and succumb to them, i proceeded to emphasize methodological and political angles enabling broader (i.e., beyond blackness) analyses and multiracial alliances. Despite the attention they directed to Black experiences, those books were structured by an underlying multiracial focus, itself related to the people-­of-­color analytical framework with which i’ll grapple further in chapter 7. I now suspend those canonical moves, take a step back, and ask how these very same analytical procedures are themselves reflections of and substantial contributors to the ongoing, everyday, and seemingly as-­ graspable-­as-­ever antiblack phenomena. In other words, the multiracial analysis is made part of the problem as it often interrupts, decenters, and dilutes a focus on antiblackness. To suspend canonical tropes of analysis is to recognize, as the realist perspective for which Derrick Bell and others passionately argued, the obstinate yet often made elusive vivacity of structural antiblackness. As Bell characteristically reminded us: In spite of dramatic civil rights movements and periodic victories in the legislatures, Black Americans by no means are equal to whites. Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal. By constantly aiming for a status that is unobtainable in a perilously racist America, Black Americans face frustration and despair. . . . While implementing Racial Realism we must simultaneously acknowledge that our actions are not likely to lead to transcendent change and, despite our best efforts, may be of more help to the system we despise than to the victims of that system we are trying to help.54 The canonical avoidance of antiblackness at minimum prevents a detailed exploration of Black lifeworld specificity. As troubling, it preempts an appreciation of possible investigative and political alternatives incubated in the midst of Black experiences. It is disconcerting to realize how powerful is this canonical imperative, and the missed opportunities it produces. Had i lingered at greater length with what residents of South Central Los Angeles in the 1990s were doing and saying, before i began searching for commonalities between their experiences and that of nonblacks, what

30 · INTRODUCTION

would i have found? What would i have found had i stayed longer with the political imagination Black activists in Rio de Janeiro were putting into practice in the early 2000s? In both contexts, the imperative of multiracial analysis and alliances disavowed a more detailed exploration of these questions. The fact that i have no satisfactory answer to these questions reveals not only missed opportunities, but also an underlying normative cognitive force that ascertains the sustained focus on antiblackness as suspicious, incomplete, inviable. To avoid antiblackness is to sidestep blackness, and vice versa. Against the grain of this paradigm, this book zeroes in on antiblackness; it is particularly attentive to the normative conventions that prevent the stability of antiblackness as a legitimate analytical and political focus. This book proposes that, instead of complying with the canonical requirement of adding nonblack foci to the study of antiblackness, this addition becomes a possibility. This countermove, from requirement to possibility, equals the suspension of the people-­of-­color analytical framework.55 To center the obstinate vivacity of antiblackness, then, is to find ways to bypass canonical methods, which means to bypass normative expectations. And normative expectations are often, although of course not exclusively nor more effectively, reinforced through the socially shared unconscious mind, or the culturally implicit. Here i am suggesting that our methodological limitations are related to cultural bias, which operates often undisturbed at the subliminal, unconscious level. Our conscious minds can and often do obviate these cultural biases. Recent social psychology experiments, designed to bypass the conscious mind and access unconscious cultural codes, show how implicit—­subliminal—­bias consistently associates Blacks to apes, and apes to Blacks. This Black–­ape association, then, has nothing to do with, and indeed happens quite independently of, what people say, think, and suggest about their views on racial difference.56 At the level of the culturally shared, beyond the threshold of consciousness, our current multiracial moment does not show signs that it is much different than what it was before the civil rights era and its legal and conscious cultural achievements. By conscious cultural achievements—­the recently transformed empire-­state collective superego57—­i mean the relatively established ethical consensus and the institutional apparatus signaling that racial discrimination is unacceptable. Yet, U.S. White, Asian, and Black college students, when primed to engage their subliminal cognition (and thus unaware of their subliminal reactions), not only consistently

INTRODUCTION · 31

employed the Black–­ape association, but did so at approximately the same frequency. This association—­proof, if you will, of the socially established and structural fact of Black abjection—­is manifested subliminally, and thus takes place in spite of, or together with, one’s conscious reaffirmation of egalitarian principles. Because it is manifested subliminally, the Black–­ ape association is present even when one is consciously resisting, performing, finding joy, organizing. Or put another way, to be a member of our culture is to be fluent in our social grammars. To be fluent in our social grammars is to have internalized—­rendered unconscious, subliminal—­ cultural biases. To be fluent in our social grammars, then, is to be fluent in, albeit not necessarily aware of, antiblackness. Evidence of an empire-­state superego that is tolerant and even accepting of nonwhite racial differences as ethically, aesthetically, and juridically valuable does little to affect the grammar of antiblackness. Indeed, as quantitative and qualitative analyses of the marked increase in antiblack racism during Barack Obama’s presidency suggest, the tolerant collective superego coexists happily with contemporary forms of Black degradation.58 Such is the quandary of the Black diaspora: as it affirms its attention to, and even the embracing of, blackness, it is fundamentally structured by the naturalization of antiblackness. The culturally sanctioned avoidance of coming to terms with antiblackness, which the people-­of-­color framework, and multiraciality more generally, perform exemplarily, is tantamount to the authorization of antiblackness. To engage antiblackness, then, requires moving beyond the force field of the culturally acceptable. Frantz Fanon is a reader of dominant culture who locates in it the preeminent symbolic and structuring force of antiblackness. His writings offer an analytical toolkit useful to contend with the inescapability, centrality, and urgency of antiblackness. “Ontology,” he explains, “does not permit us to understand the being of the black [wo/]man. For not only must the black [wo/]man be black; [s/]he must be black in relation to the white man.”59 The being of the white man, however, is not dependent on the black because “the black [wo/]man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” A peculiar semantic field, one whose meanings and experiences depend on structured positionalities, is thus configured.60 Structured positionalities refer to the preordained relation between each and every subject. Although the existential aspects of antiblackness are certainly relevant—­how they manifest on one’s body, mind, and soul—­in this proposed scheme they are best understood as consequences of structured social relations. Such structured

32 · INTRODUCTION

relations precede and frame the ways in which actual interactions between social actors are comprehended and performed. Positionalities are the principle by which one’s understanding of oneself is produced. These positionalities form a nonsymmetrical diagram of simultaneous articulations. It is a nonsymmetrical diagram because the differently gendered and racialized positions—­as indicated, for example, by Fanon and Gordon, and further examined in this book—­don’t influence each other in the same intensity and quality. Importantly, the Black subject, in an antiblack world, is both irrelevant and critical to the formation of the nonblack (including the White) sense of being. The Black is a nonsubject against whose positionality all nonblack subjectivities define themselves. One is because one is not Black. The Black nonsubject is the central reference; but because the Black is not a subject, she is also a nonreference. Thus the Black nonsubject is the fundamental absent presence (or present absence). It is the Black nonsubject’s absent presence that structures the world’s range of nonblack positionalities. And even though the Black is symbolically required in her absent presence, her unqualified presence, or absolute absence, is impossible for it would cause irreparable damage to this “precarious balance of reality.”61 As a generative proposition, as a proposition to be tested in this study, however, the grammar of antiblackness and its asymmetric field of structured positionalities is normative, ubiquitous, transhistorical, subliminal, and thus effectively shielded from contestation. This grammar establishes Black absence as self-­evident. The fact that Blacks share and draw from the exact same antiblack symbolic universe only exhibits the degree to which this field of positionalities is naturalized and omnipresent. For blackness “is regarded, even by the black, as the antithesis of fulfillment in an antiblack world.”62 In this world, in this symbolic and cognitive structural setting, an eminently Black, avowedly pro-­Black perspective, is impossible. A Black perspective, a consciousness that is not tethered to the ubiquitous grammar of antiblackness, is only possible when antiblackness and the cognitive and social world it establishes—­the social world that emerges from the grammar and the facts of antiblackness—­is destroyed.63 Frank Wilderson suggests that the worldwide semantic field gains coherence through antiblackness.64 Even though this formulation may appear to calibrate theories on global White supremacy by adding to them the perspective of the Black,65 it is rather a considerable theoretical shift, one that reflects on global modes of relational identity by centering the

INTRODUCTION · 33

Black structural positionality. Instead of conceptualizing all nonwhite racialized groups as affected by a common source of White supremacist oppressive forces, which differentiates these groups in hierarchies of social worth, thus making their conditions fundamentally commensurable, Wilderson takes up Fanon’s model and from it draws a map of structural antagonisms. In this conceptual map, the antiblack social world’s semantic field establishes Black positionality as the embodiment of the afterlife of slavery. According to Saidiya Hartman, the afterlife of slavery is a cause and product of the foundational and continued subjection and abjection of Blacks regardless of the progressive expansion of rights and formal citizenship. Hartman argues for the transhistoricity of Black abasement by stating that, following emancipation, “while the inferiority of blacks was no longer the legal standard, the various strategies of state racism produced a subjugated and subordinated class within the body politic, albeit in a neutral or egalitarian guise. Notwithstanding the negatory power of the Thirteenth Amendment, racial slavery was transformed rather than annulled.”66 In the world’s semantic field—­in which empire-­states are necessarily immersed—­Blacks occupy a unique and incommunicable position because the afterlife of slavery means that they continuously experience violence as structural and gratuitous. To a Black person, violence is structural because, as per Fanon’s scheme, s/he is positioned outside the realms of humanity and civil society. Civil society, then, is a permanent state of war, a landscape where Black bodies magnetize rape and bullets.67 On the normatization of rape against Black women, Hartman states the following: “The rape of black women existed as an unspoken but normative condition fully within the purview of everyday sexual practices, whether within the implied arrangements of the slave enclave or within the plantation household. . . . In this case [that is, the omission of the crime of rape against the enslaved in slave laws], the normativity of sexual violence establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and sexual subjection. As well, the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially tolerable and necessary violence sets the stage for the indiscriminate use of the body for pleasure, profit, and punishment.”68 Hartman thus presents a libidinal economy that accumulates, interchanges, abuses, and discards Black bodies according to a logic that far exceeds and thus differs from the profit motive. Blacks experience gendered violence not because of what they do, but because of who, structurally, they are—­or rather, who

34 · INTRODUCTION

they are not. Gratuitous violence constitutes a state of terror that coexists with liberal laws, rights, and citizenship. Gratuitous violence is terror because it is unpredictable in its predictability, or predictable in its unpredictability. For a Black person, it is not a matter of whether she is going to be randomly brutalized; it is a matter of when. Gendered antiblack violence is gratuitous because, contrary to what the nonblack experiences, it is not contingent on transgressing the hegemony of civil society.69 As unsavory as this theory is experienced when one resists coming to terms with antiblackness, plenty of mundane events remind us of its simple truth. In 2015, my son Toussaint, then eleven, as he followed the news barrage about yet another unarmed Black person shot dead by the police, asked me for a bulletproof vest. Antiblack gratuitous violence, then, is a constitutive, not incidental, element of our social world. Orlando Patterson equates this type of violence with “the necessity or the threat of naked force as the basis of the master-­slave relationship.” The field of asymmetrical structured positionalities, reproduced by slavery’s symbolic mandate, is exemplified in the following remarks: “When we say that the slave was natally alienated and ceased to belong independently to any formally recognized community, this does not mean that he or she did not experience or share informal social relations. . . . The important point . . . is that these relationships were never recognized as legitimate or binding.” Consequently, the slave “could not have honor because he had no power and no independent social existence, hence no public worth.” Slavery, then, is “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” Slavery is not defined by the fact that slaves are property objects—­many nonslaves can be and are types of property. Think of professional athletes bought and sold by individual impresarios, teams, and corporations.70 Moreover, slavery is not exclusively, nor centrally, about labor. Slaves are not slaves because they are involuntary workers. Involuntary workers are not necessarily slaves.71 Rather, slaves are slaves because they have been rendered socially dead. In Patterson’s formulation, ever present violence, actual or potential, together with natal alienation and dishonor, are three defining traits of social death. And social death, in Patterson’s work, which relies on an expansive analysis of sixty-­six social formations across time and geographical space, demarcates slavery.72 A central aspect of the slave’s existence is her social symbolic function. Just as the Black, in Fanon’s scheme, allows for nonblack subjectivity (the

INTRODUCTION · 35

Black is seen by the nonblack, which affirms who sees, but the Black’s gaze is irrelevant to the nonblack, thus evidencing the Black’s ontological invisibility), the slave’s degradation reveals, by contrast, who belongs, who has honor, who can trace genealogies, and who is not subjected to gratuitous violence. One is of the social world, one is human, in varying degrees, because one is not a slave. For our purposes, the concept of the afterlife of slavery defines the experience of contemporary blackness as coterminous with that of the slave. Slavery, as Joy James insists, is an ongoing fact, present tense.73 Slavery, more specifically, is the underlying algorithm of antiblackness.74 If that is the case, then social death, as a condition that is defined by vulnerability to permanent symbolic and raw violence, the disintegration of social and genealogical bonds (natal alienation), and lack of honor, defines paradigmatically the representation and experience of blackness. Fanon, James, Gordon, Hartman, Patterson, and Sexton are some of the authors Wilderson identifies as theorists of Black positionality from the perspective that the entire world’s ensemble of social meaning relies on and reproduces antiblackness.75 Antiblackness equates abjection to blackness, and establishes that the Black, qua object of terror and absent reference against which the human is constituted, is the quintessential, transhistorical slave. Social death defines Black social life. It is quite predictable that, in a diasporic moment marked by the denial of antiblackness, a conceptual scheme that insists on focusing on antiblackness as the fundamental matrix of the world’s symbolic universe will be met with all kinds of resistance and refusal. At a moment in the United States, especially in a number of progressive formations, including research institutions and academic departments, when a considerable amount of energy, resources, and reputation is funneled to the study and celebration of blackness through art, performance, and multiracial social mobilization, these theorists’ insistence on social death compels us to approach an analytical field that the denial of antiblackness prohibits.76 In public events when such concepts are mentioned, rather than an informed engagement, what i continue to witness is an avalanche of the expected preemptive rebuttals that begins with variations of “But Black people have been resisting since . . .” The problem here is not the focus on Black resistance, beauty, love, sexuality, or spirituality. It is, rather, with the unwillingness to momentarily shift our analytical minds, affective attention, and political horizons so that the performativity of the social can

36 · INTRODUCTION

be comprehended in conjunction with, and not in opposition to, the proposed structure of antiblack relational positionalities. Adding to the difficulty in the dialogue between theorists of social death and skeptics, the first tend to be perceived by the latter as conveying a certain disdain for the empirical while questionably overemphasizing structures. This perception dismisses how theorists of social death and the afterlife of slavery constantly pivot between the structural aspects of antiblackness and the facts of the social—­what actually happens in the messy negotiations of the everyday. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection is replete with exegeses of everyday acts of the enslaved’s resistance; Wilderson’s memoir, Incognegro, is a good example of a close analysis of personal and social facts as they happen within, interact with, and inflect structures of power in South Africa and the United States.77 Still, it is correct to point out that, in these analyses of slavery and its afterlife, social facts are presented as indices of how the antiblack structure of positionality remains untouched in spite of individual agency and social upheaval. In South Africa as in the United States, past and present—­and in the Black diaspora, as i am arguing here—­there remains a social cipher, a structuring logic that, except for fleeting moments of truly revolutionary insight—­which means moments when this world’s antiblack premises are made contingent rather than necessary—­presents the Black as a sentient being without presence, a being defined by its non-­being-­ness, by social death.78 But that is the point. Unless these moments of revolutionary insight are analyzed with relation to the antiblack structure of positionality, they remain just that, fleeting and unable to address the social cryptograph that kills the Black before she is physically dead. Theorists of the afterlife of slavery propose a theoretical move that forcefully asks us to conceptualize the realms of performance and outcomes of the social in necessary relationship to the antiblack structure of positionality. This relationship is overdetermined when social because, save for the unusual transfigurative moments—­ imagination and collective action are able to project the end of this antiblack world—­the social structures of Black abjection remain active even in the presence of resistance and of apparent social gains. This analytical move reconfigures the social as an arena that is necessarily a function of, even though obviously not always limited to, the global, foundational, transhistorical, and ubiquitous force field of antiblackness. Anti-­imperial research connects defining aspects of the Black diasporic

INTRODUCTION · 37

experience—­hypersegregation, unemployment, punitive education, police brutality, incarceration, exposure to environmental toxins, disease, and early death by preventable causes—­to the empire-­state’s management, and therefore reproduction, of structural antiblackness. The absence of sustained work along those lines in the U.S. and Brazilian research and academic environments suggests an authoritative consensus that disallows potentially transformative agendas. As an employed professor in a public institution in the United States, i am inescapably part of an imperial caste. One of Sylvia Wynter’s generative insights supports this proposition. Commenting on Fanon’s distrust of the colonial, and thus antiblack social symbology with which he nevertheless subjectively experiences himself, Wynter imagines to hear him say, “I am now fief to an order of consciousness whose powerfully induced reflex responses of desire/aversion impel and induce me not only to desire against myself but also to work against the emancipatory interest of the world-­systemic subordinated and inferiorized Negro population to which I belong! For these reflex responses of desire/aversion are not my own!”79 In contrast to contemporary dominant formations of progressive research, pedagogies, and collective organizing, the conceptual ensemble that insists on the structural underpinnings of the afterlife of slavery scrutinizes the specificity of Black positionality and the normative denial of antiblackness that interdicts an appraisal of what exists within and beyond social death.80 Paraphrasing Fred Moten, in the last decade or so, Afro-­ pessimism, a subset of this conceptual equipment, has offered one of “the most exciting and generative advance[s] in black critical theory, which is to say critical theory.” This agenda of inquiry, Moten continues, “refreshes lines of rigorously antidisciplinary in(ter)vention, effecting intellectual renewal against academic sterility. . . . Wilderson and Sexton keep on pushing over the edge of refusal, driven by a visionary impetus their work requires and allows us to try to see and hear and feel.”81 Visionary is the broader conceptual ensemble that stresses slavery not as a fact, but as a structuring and contemporary social agreement. Such impetus, while mostly unrealized in progressive collectives and institutions, including academic jurisdictions, is graspable in realms where Black transformative imagination is exercised. For example, creative writers Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward, both from Mississippi, have produced works describing the very graspable experiences of Black life immersed

38 · INTRODUCTION

in social death. Here is Ward, in a memoir that recounts how the death of young Black men, including her own brother, marked her coming of age in Mississippi in the early 2000s: The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so that the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow the playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths. Instinctually C. J. [one of Ward’s cousins] knew this. I have no words.82 Premature death of Black young people is normative, expected, uninterrupted. Laymon’s narrative is equally trained on the imminence and ubiquity of early physical death as well as on the structuring and ubiquitous aspects of social death. Like Ward, he stresses both the defining structural positionality of blackness—­that which makes Black experiences of oppression fundamentally incommensurable to those of nonblacks—­and one of the logical consequences of that positionality, self-­annihilation: I know that as I got deeper into my late twenties, and then my thirties, I managed to continue killing myself and other folks who loved me in spite of me. I know that I’ve been slowly killed by folks who were feverishly in need of life and death as I am. The really confusing part is that a few of those folks who have nudged me closer to slow death have also helped me say yes to life when I most needed it. Usually, I didn’t accept it. Lots of times, we’ve taken turns killing ourselves slowly, before trying to bring each other back to life.83 The challenge is not to bring joy, resistance, and organizing to this picture as if joy, resistance, and organizing are incompatible with social death. As the vital and myriad expressions of blackness attest, they of course are not. The challenge, rather, is to engage with blackness as part of a unique and extreme social universe—­one that is constantly at its limit, which means that it is at the limit of this current human world. The vanishing

INTRODUCTION · 39

and therefore always urgent world of blackness, while encoded by the premise of its own destruction, suggests a sensibility that is necessarily transcendental. A transcendental sensibility simply means that, because of its familiarity with death—­social death, bodily death, ubiquitous death—­ blackness is necessarily a pathway for imagining beyond the logic and results of the antiblack structuring principles, that is, the here and now. “Pathway” can mean a theoretical effort, an organizing principle, an aesthetic drive, a metaphysical musing. This sensibility—­a Black transcendental sensibility—­demands that we imagine a different social configuration. In Never Meant to Survive i called this the imperative of Black genocide. Insofar as the imminence and ubiquity of death render this world impossible, they engender another universe. In the realm of blackness, just as slavery is present tense, so is transcendence. When Cedric Robinson affirms the fantastic, i think he is talking about this transcendence, as an imperative.84 In an event at the Southern California Library in Los Angeles in 2012, when reflecting on the meanings of Oakland, his home city, Robinson said he liked to think of it as the space of the fantastic. This of course is in line with the unabashedly utopian tenor of his transformative book Black Marxism. It should be pointed out that in this monumental effort at reflecting on Black revolt in the diaspora (as well as canonical Black male thought), the fantastic—­the enslaved’s emphasis on the ontological totality, collective property, the structures of the mind—­is inextricable from the enslaved’s familiarity with death, both as a social structuring condition and a bodily event. Tellingly, one of the overarching findings in Robinson’s research on Black revolt throughout the diaspora since European colonization of Africa and the Americas was the enslaved’s willingness to participate in suicide missions. While this willingness dumbfounded nonblacks and especially slave owners, it is quite logical as both a political strategy and the expression of a shared imagination that, acutely aware of the pervasiveness of structural antiblackness, insists on transcendence, on the metaphysical, on the ontological totality that is realized beyond bodily death. Transcendence is the anti-­paradigm. Robinson and his admirers would almost certainly disapprove of what comes next. The conjoining of antiblackness, death, and the fantastic suggests that Robinson’s project—­ one that is explicitly about rewriting history from the perspective of Black insurgency—­has more in common with the theories of the afterlife of slavery, including Afro-­pessimism, than their preemptive demonization suggests.85

40 · INTRODUCTION

Sylvia Wynter affirms this imperative of transcendence when she proclaims the urgency to reach the until-­now unreachable. When Wynter points to, in the words of Katherine McKittrick, “the imperative need for a new intellectual praxis, one that enables us to now both consciously and communally re-­create ourselves in ecumenically inter-­altruistically kin-­ recognizing species-­oriented terms,” she is pressing for the need to realize the “unknowable conception of human freedom that is to be now imperatively realized.” Transcendence, the urgency to reach the until-­now unreachable, is thus essential.86 When we avoid a full engagement with structural antiblackness and by default reaffirm normative analyses of Black suffering, we deny coming to terms with this specific, urgent Black transcendental sensibility. We thus miss the chance to appreciate the visionary impetus that the afterlife of slavery in particular, and blackness in general, necessarily conjures. We miss the chance to exercise the imperative of freedom. Wilderson describes this impetus as such: If a social movement is to be neither social-­democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro” has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners [the nonblack worker, the immigrant, the woman], to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today—­even in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition movement—­ invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-­white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death.87 This challenge to our imagination is unambiguously rooted in a commitment to insist on the centrality and uniqueness of Black experiences. To do so is to make antiblackness foundational. Which brings me to the final heuristic proposition that i would like to employ to this study: that a Black–­nonblack dyad reflects with greater accuracy our world’s antiblack structure of positionalities. The uniqueness and irreducibility of the Black experience calls into question canonical analyses of racial oppression. Canonical analyses, derived from and indicative of the people-­of-­ color framework, rely on the assumption that the dyad White–­nonwhite

INTRODUCTION · 41

provides the reference from which to measure and evaluate the effects of White supremacy. According to this assumption, whiteness correlates strongly with privileges while nonwhiteness correlates with disadvantages. A hierarchy of human value informs advantages and disadvantages; in it, Blacks are at the most disadvantaged extreme, which means they are the least valued humans. The formula is flexible enough to account for White relative disadvantage and nonwhite relative advantages. These variations take place both within and across racial groups, and are the product of the interplay between racial identity and a combination of power as it correlates with color, social class, formal education, gender, sexuality, and nationality, among others. Still, the White–­nonwhite dyad is overdeterminant, which means that the paradigmatic social differences are between Whites and nonwhites, making intramural conflict exceptional, or at least derivative. Here is a passage from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States, a significant publication that encapsulates what has become accepted wisdom, at least in progressive camps: Racialized groups are positioned in unequal ways in a racially stratified society. Racial hierarchy pervades the contemporary United States; that hierarchy is preponderantly white supremacist, but it is not always that way. There are some exceptions, specific urban areas where groups of color have achieved local power, for example, in the administration of social services and distribution of economic resources. In cities like Oakland and Miami, this had led to conflict between blacks and Latin@s over educational programs, minority business opportunities, and political power, with dramatically different results depending on which group held relative power. In these cases, some groups of color are promoting racial projects that subordinate other groups of color. While such exceptions do not negate the overarching reality of white supremacy, they do suggest that differences in racial power persist among groups of color. Inter-­group racial conflict is not unidimensional; it is not solely whites vs. people of color, though whiteness still rules, OK?88 In their efforts to bring about a more just world via critical analyses, proponents of the people-­of-­color framework locate White experiences and whiteness as the defining references. The racial force field changes

42 · INTRODUCTION

dramatically when Black experiences and antiblackness are centered. The bodies are the same, but the symbolic–­gravitational pull that each racialized body exerts on the others attains an altogether distinct set of directions, values, and meanings. When blackness and antiblackness are centered, a distinct landscape is configured, which produces a distinct scale of human values. This landscape, i am proposing, reflects with greater precision the state of our worldwide sociality. If we engage the field of relational positionalities as that which constitutes nonblack bodies as human while Blacks are the absent inhuman references, then the dichotomy generative of social difference and self-­understanding becomes Black–­nonblack. According to the White–­nonwhite dyad, to be White (and Western and male and propertied and cisheteropatriarchal) is the paradigmatic embodiment of humanity. In our proposed global landscape of relational positionalities, the Black–­nonblack dyad represents (and allows for grasping) an expanded continuum of nonblack humanity according to which degrees of humanity accrue, not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to their distance from blackness. The range of differentiated humanity would then include Whites and nonblack nonwhites while excluding Blacks. This is quite different from the canonical scale of humanity, which the White–­nonwhite dyad represents. In this canonical scale, Whites and nonwhites, including Blacks, are placed on a continuum. The Black–­nonblack dyad is not only a theoretical attempt to adjust our perspective so that it centers antiblackness. It is also an apprehensible social fact. Drawing from the 1999–­2000 Lilly Survey of American Attitudes and Friendship (LSAF), for which he was a co-­researcher, George Yancey argues that, compared to the largest nonblack racial groups in the United States, Latin@s and Asian Americans, Blacks are uniquely rejected and paradigmatically excluded. The LSAF data derived from telephone interviews with more than 2,500 U.S. persons randomly selected; the findings are thus generalizable. Yancy shows that Latin@s and Asian Americans do face discrimination, and that in certain contexts they can experience more prejudice than do Blacks. His analysis, however, shows that the Black positionality is of a distinct kind, irreducible to that of nonblack groups: My argument is that African Americans generally have a level of alienation that is qualitatively greater than that of these minority groups [Latin@s and Asian Americans] and because of this alienation do not possess the same ability to become incorporated

INTRODUCTION · 43

into the dominant culture as nonblack racial minorities. . . . It is the rejection (alienation) of blacks that serves as the standard by which nonblack racial groups can find acceptance. Because nonblack racial groups can avoid the label of being “black,” they can eventually be given a “white” racial identity. African Americans are in a quasi-­caste system by which they occupy the lowest level of social prestige . . . and it is in the social interest of all nonblack racial groups to keep them at the bottom. Yancey’s findings suggest that “it is rejection of African Americans rather than acceptance of European Americans that shapes this hierarchical structure.” Blacks show willingness to live in integrated neighborhoods and marry nonblacks at far greater rates than nonblacks are willing to live next to and marry Blacks. Yet, Whites, Latin@s, and Asian Americans show rejection toward Blacks that is significantly higher than the rejection they show toward every other racial group.89 Nonblacks’ preference for proximity to Whites cannot be the fundamental explanatory concept; rather, it is hostility against Blacks that drives their choices of neighborhoods and lasting intimate partnerships. This explanation supports the adoption of the Black–­nonblack dyad. It also suggests a correspondence between our theoretical incursions into the world of structural antiblackness and actual social facts.

Back to the Black Diasporic Relational Perspective The examples focusing on African American experiences should be taken in their broader sense. From a transnational Black diasporic relational perspective, “African American” refers to Black experiences in and beyond the United States. As will be made apparent in this book, even though formations of empire-­state such as Brazil and the United States employ their specific technologies of social management and reveal unique sociabilities, they are originally dependent on, and continually reproduce, antiblackness in ever-­changing configurations. For now, it suffices to point out that in Brazil levels of residential segregation, unemployment, police abuse, incarceration, medical negligence, and death by preventable causes, including treatable disease, are consistently more pronounced for Blacks (that include “pretos” and “pardos,” Blacks and Browns, or Blacks and mixed, according to the official Brazilian bureau of statistics, IBGE) than

44 · INTRODUCTION

for nonblacks.90 To be sure, there are at least two features of the Brazilian social formation that require attention in our relational perspective. First, the nonblack category, given the relatively small number of Asians and Indians, who together constitute just over 1.52 percent of the population according to the 2010 census, is less expansive than in the United States, and thus self-­declared Whites, who constitute 47.73 percent of the population, are distinctively dominant among the nonblacks. And second, as in the United States, there are variations in social outcomes for Blacks by skin color, according to which, often but not always, lighter skin tones correlate with relative privilege. Nevertheless, the significant, paradigmatic differences in accumulated and transgenerational disadvantages manifest between Blacks and nonblacks.91 Recently published dot maps, indicating where individuals identified by race reside, plotted from the most recent Brazilian census data, show Rio de Janeiro’s stark pattern of residential segregation.92 Contrary to what the proponents of the Brazilian racial democracy thesis and its variations continue to advocate, the maps reveal a persisting Brazilian apartheid. The areas where Blacks are mostly absent, the so-­called Zona Sul (south zone), are also where there is documented higher income, better schools, better urban infrastructure, better access to health care, and higher life expectancy, including lower vulnerability to homicide and police lethality. Black areas are characterized by just the opposite patterns, all of which translate into greater social vulnerability, including greater chance of police homicide and considerably lower life expectancy.93 Compare the dot map of Rio to those of Brazilian cities such as São Paulo, Brasília, and Salvador. Antiblack residential segregation structures the distribution of racialized bodies on social geographies. Salvador, the eminently Black Brazilian metropolis, not surprisingly, shows its antiblack logic more intensely, and is therefore the most segregated. There, as organizations such as Reaja ou Será Morta! / Reaja ou Será Morto! insist, the police are notoriously genocidal.94 Racial democracy—­the concept, its proponents and revisionists, and the institutional and corporate apparatuses that sustain it—­is nothing but the denial of antiblackness masqueraded as an elegy to the country’s fictional inclusive multiraciality. The 2010 United States Census–­based maps of metropolitan areas show similar patterns. All major cities display geographies of antiblackness, but those are particularly salient in places like Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., where there are sizable Black populations and hence a greater societal

INTRODUCTION · 45

disposition for containment.95 Across the Black diaspora, just as the absence of blackness guarantees relative privileges, antiblackness equates to geographies of death.

Overview The book is divided in three parts. Part I presents analyses of surveillance, dispossession, and social death in the United States via a case study on urban space and juvenile criminal justice system in Austin, Texas. Latin@ and Black kids’ experiences prior to, during, and after their incarceration are examined as lenses through which to reflect on what i call asymptotic recognition, a form of oblique identification that arises from the simultaneous sharing of social conditions and divergent life trajectories. Chapter 1 provides the demographic, education, and criminal justice institutional background that informs the routines in the juvenile justice facility in Austin where i conducted a writing workshop with inmates (analyzed in more detail in chapters 2 and 3). A Latin@ numeric majority, an overrepresentation of Blacks, and an underrepresentation of Whites mark juvenile probation referrals. The deeper Black kids move into the punitive system—­from referral, to adjudication, to increasingly more severe forms of punishment, which sometimes culminate with being legally considered an adult—­the greater their levels of overrepresentation. For White kids, the inverse process is at play: the deeper they move into the juvenile system, the lesser their proportions become. Throughout the various stages of the juvenile system, the proportion of Latin@ kids remains close to their proportion of the overall population. Latin@ youth thus occupy an intermediary position between Blacks and Whites. As Latin@s move through punitive schools, juvenile detention, and the adult criminal justice system, they experience patterns of surveillance and dispossession that are quite familiar to Blacks. However, in each of the above institutions, Latin@s tend not to be punished as severely as Blacks. Still, because of the shared experiences of marginalization, there remain possibilities of identification between Latin@s and Blacks, even if oblique. Examining (a) the routines of the juvenile detention facility, (b) the writings the incarcerated youth produced during writing workshops, and (c) the assumptions, expectations, and methodologies the facilitators, the young people, and the staff shared, negotiated, and fought over, chapters 2 and 3 zero in on the tensions as well as the forms of relative identification

46 · INTRODUCTION

between Black and Latin@ incarcerated youth. Chapter 2 is devoted to the analysis of young men’s experiences, while chapter 3 engages those of young women. Through the critical examination of the 2013 mass protests, most recent public security policies applied to historically Black areas in Rio de Janeiro, and multiracial demonstrations that followed a well-­publicized death of a favela resident, Part II focuses on types of recognition and misrecognition that antiblack social control generates between the nonblack and the Black. Chapter 4 shows how Black assertive and autonomous presence is antagonistic to hegemonic sociality, the empire-­state machine (especially, but not only, the police), and more broadly, the Brazilian multiracial project of development. Because it destabilized the structure of Brazilian social organization, Black presence as temporarily displayed in the early 2010s—­relatively empowered economically, formally backed by a host of pro-­Black sweeping federal affirmative action policies, and often embraced by sectors of Brazilian Black movements—­had the effect of bringing to the surface elementary principles of social interaction that excluded Blacks from realms of conviviality, capitalistic transactions, and politics. In other words, the Black relative economic improvement made more evident principles and practices of antiblackness. At the same time, however, these events generated moments when nonblacks identified, even if ephemerally, with Blacks who were absent from the protests but were a majority during rolezinhos. When focusing on police lethality, imposed social isolation, and poverty, protestors often addressed, even if indirectly, experiences that characterize the Black condition in Brazil. Chapter 5 maintains this focus on the ways in which nonblacks often address Black experiences only obliquely and thus leave structural antiblackness unaddressed. The 2013 police murder of Amarildo de Souza, a Black construction worker resident of Rocinha, the largest historically Black area in the city of Rio de Janeiro, is contextualized by ethnographic observations and news media reports collected over the last fourteen years, a critical appraisal of the new statewide public security paradigm implemented in 2008, and recent studies on violence trends in Rio and Brazil more generally. Reflecting on the multiracial protests against police lethality that followed Amarildo’s death, the chapter closes by considering the ways in which the excess of empire-­state violence in impoverished communities is creating new, but limited, forms of nonblack awareness and identification with Black Brazilians. Importantly, if

INTRODUCTION · 47

and when traces of the denial of antiblackness emerge in these multiracial protests, what do they reveal about the project of social change these protests support? Bringing the previous chapters together, Part III reflects on oblique identification from a diasporic perspective. In dialogue with James Baldwin’s political philosophy, including his cogitations on the ideal Black political subject, in chapter 6 i argue that Michael Zinzun was a Black cyborg: a modified, improved human whose expansive ethical, physical, intellectual, and spiritual capabilities generated unusual wisdom, strength, knowledge, and boundless love. Zinzun was a Black Panther Party member and longtime coordinator of the Coalition Against Police Abuse in Los Angeles, from the mid-­1970s until his death in 2006. I collaborated with him between 1996 and 2006. A person of great charisma and energy, Zinzun was successful at disrupting the normalized workings of the police in Los Angeles. Despite constant harassment from agents of the state, which in 1986 culminated with an act of police brutality that left him blind in one eye, Zinzun engaged his activism with unfailing vigor. He embraced the assumption that he, like other committed Blacks, had the uncommon yet indispensable ethical and historical responsibility to restore the country, and indeed other nations of the Black diaspora, according to their multiracial, inclusive, and democratic ideals. However, to his multiracial collaborators Zinzun was legible only insofar as he performed his political persona based on ethical and experiential common denominators that were assimilable and immediately recognized. Excluded from this political universe were the claims of Black phenomenological uniqueness vis-­à-­ vis racialized nonwhite groups, and antiblackness as a structural, foundational, and overdetermining fact. Immersed in the people-­of-­color ethos, and identifying with blackness only obliquely, the Black cyborg’s multiracial political bloc could not address antiblackness methodically, and thus left untouched the foundations of the antiblack empire-­state. Reviewing the principal findings of each chapter, chapter 7 unfolds the proposition that the political possibilities of oblique identification are contingent on and actualize an incongruous relationship with the Black subject. Prototypically represented in the figure of the Black cyborg, the Black subject of democratic integration enables the progressive multiracial bloc, yet this same bloc denies the antiblack structural conditions that generate continuous Black suffering. The multiracial bloc’s assumed familiarity with Black oppression and suffering is integral to the people-­of-­color

48 · INTRODUCTION

concept and practice. I argue the people-­of-­color framework is part of a diasporic paradigm shift that claimed to replace the perceived undue emphasis on the Black-­White binary. To come to terms with some of the foundational traits of our diasporic multiracial political moment—­one that is squarely intent on redeeming the project of the integrated multiracial empire-­state—­is to understand the simultaneous acknowledgment of Black suffering and the denial of the foundational, structural, historic, and continued aspects of antiblackness. Oblique identification informs a type of multiracial political ethos in which Blacks are at once central and, by virtue of the denial of antiblackness, not recognized as social beings paradigmatically engaged in structures of foundational dehumanization. To stress the foundational aspect of antiblackness is to call attention to the ways in which the supposedly democratic and multiracial polis of the Black diaspora still grapples with the problem of the Black presence. To analyze the Black subject’s embattled presence is to evaluate the conditions of possibility, the promises, and the shortcomings of our contemporary progressive multiracial political projects. From the Black subject’s perspective, the current empire-­state multiracial political projects are fundamentally antiblack. To engage anti-­antiblackness, then, is to begin to imagine a world not structured by a type of sociability that demands Black abjection. The Conclusion briefly introduces the figure of the slave as the cyborg’s alternative. The slave renders transcendental imagination imperative; she is the visionary.

Part I

Austin, U.S.A. The Dynamics of Youth Incarceration

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1

Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? Growing Up in Prisons

While the dynamics of gendered antiblackness emerge in specific modalities in Austin, they resonate with analogous processes that mark Black social life in Brazil, as explored in the chapters of Part II. Patterns of residential segregation, school punishment, and youth imprisonment in Texas and Rio de Janeiro are linked by fundamentally similar logics. This debatable claim requires that we evaluate each of these social realities’ manifestations and structuring principles. What are some of the main features of Black exclusion? How is Black social death produced and reproduced by the quotidian operation of institutions such as schools, the police, and prisons? What structuring logics account for these social dynamics? An exploration of the mechanics of youth institutionalization in Texas, this chapter engages these questions by focusing on the various stages leading to a child’s passage into the juvenile criminal justice system: from offense to referral, to adjudication, to prosecution, and to imprisonment. It analyzes racial disparities at each of those stages and shows how youth institutionalization is part of a recurring cycle, one that continually expands its reach over individuals, communities, and urban spaces defined by precise social characteristics. To contextualize the expanding criminalization of Black and Latin@ youth, this chapter provides an analysis of the relationship between residential segregation and the public school and juvenile justice systems. It shows the ways in which patterns of blocked social mobility, which intensely affect Black and Latin@ areas, are strongly correlated to Austin’s mechanics of economic and racial segregation. Due to the powerful interplay between race, affluence, urban space, and education, Black and Latin@ children remain excluded from quality school campuses. These are the children who, due to their greater chance of finding themselves in the worst-­performing schools and receiving harsher punitive measures, are the ones more likely to be referred to out-­of-­campus 51

52 ·  DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO?

educational alternatives and thus to enter the juvenile criminal justice system. While these patterns of punishment affect Black and Latin@ kids, antiblackness—­the overarching logic organizing punishment and related processes—­makes it so that Blacks are quantitatively more intensely and qualitatively distinctly penalized. Black students, in a process that mirrors patterns in the juvenile justice system, are appreciably overrepresented in school discretionary disciplinary referrals; Latin@ students are also overrepresented in disciplinary referrals, but to a lesser extent than Blacks. Importantly, Black overrepresentation in disciplinary referrals reveals patterns of punishment that are unique in their nature, duration, and long-­ term effects. Despite the city’s progressive reputation, the Austin Independent School District refers Black children to disciplinary programs at rates that are consistently more than double their representation in the student body. Travis County, where Austin is located, has one of the highest referral rates to juvenile probation in Texas. Combined, these two patterns, which are in turn deeply related to urban space and affluence, produce and intensify social dispossession among Blacks. Antiblackness is the all-­ encompassing principle that links residential segregation, school discipline, and incarceration. That nonblacks are also affected only reinforces the thesis that antiblackness may have reached a saturation point and is expansive. Nonblacks, however, are not impacted in the same way as Blacks. Antiblackness, as a structuring fact, differentiates social positionalities and thus produces varied collective results for distinctly positioned subjects. Antiblackness, itself a structuring logic, produces (and interacts with) different logics as they apply to distinguishable racialized social groups. Rather than adopting the canonical people-­of-­color framework that tends to lump nonblacks at the receiving end of the negative impact of White-­supremacist oppression—­and thus crowds out the specific and foundational Black experience from the resulting analysis—­this chapter zeroes in on the differentiated results of antiblackness on Blacks and Latin@s. It is precisely in these fine distinctions that emerge the nature of antiblackness and its constitutive social death. The Denial of Antiblackness enters a dialogue with a people-­of-­color-­oriented literature and political perspective that argue for the applicability of the social death thesis to nonblacks. This argument, however, tends to address Black experiences as

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  53

paradigmatic examples of social death while almost always assuming that such experiences are analogous to those of nonblacks.1 A cyclical and expansive carceral logic of dispossession is at play: one that operates on segregated social environments and, over time, affects multiple generations as they transit from schools, to juvenile and adult prisons, and back to the segregated areas. This chapter suggests that Latin@s’ collective experiences, vis-­à-­vis those of Blacks, describe similar yet distinct insertions in the cyclical logic of dispossession. While often inhabiting the same residential areas, going to the same schools, and finding themselves in the same punitive institutions, Latin@s are collectively less vulnerable to the harsher forms of punishment and isolation that mark such environments and affect Blacks disproportionately. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how these common yet importantly distinct experiences impact Black and Brown mutual recognition.

Mechanics of Institutionalization In the Texas Juvenile Justice System, a juvenile is a child between the ages of ten and seventeen at the time of committing an act defined as “delinquent conduct” or “conduct in need of supervision.” “Delinquent conduct” is one that, if committed by an adult, could lead to incarceration; “conduct in need of supervision” (CINS), on the other hand, is more frequently associated with conduct specific to juveniles, and would therefore not be a violation if committed by an adult.2 A juvenile cited or apprehended engaging in delinquent conduct or CINS can be referred to juvenile court, or her case can be disposed by probation departments or prosecutors. In 2010, probation departments dealt with 40 percent of all juvenile cases, prosecutors resolved 18 percent of them, and juvenile courts disposed with the remaining 42 percent.3 That calendar year, police agencies accounted for nearly 77 percent of the 86,548 formal referrals to juvenile probation departments.4 Schools, juvenile probation departments, the Texas Youth Commission (abolished in 2011, together with the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, TJPC), and other agencies accounted for the remainder of the referrals. It must be stressed that, as much as police presence is qualitatively and quantitatively more intense in Black and Latin@ areas,5 plays a critical role in the maintenance of ubiquitous surveillance (as the recent legal controversies over

A child engages in delinquent conduct or commits a CINS violation

Police officer, teacher, or principal refers child to probation officer Case is dismissed and/or juvenile found not guilty

Juvenile referred to Texas Juvenile Probation Commission; prosecutor reviews case

Supervisory caution or deferred prosecution (voluntary probation: usually reserved for first-time offenders)

Charges filed in court by county with delinquent conduct Probation; child must be discharged by the age of eighteen Court proceedings: child is adjudicated for delinquent conduct

Determinate sentencing, up to forty years (only most severe offenses) Youth certified as an adult, leaves juvenile system, and is transferred into the adult criminal justice

Figure 1. Navigating the Texas Juvenile Justice System.

Placement in a suitable home or foster home Placement in a suitable public or private institution or agency (except the TJJD)

TJJD commitment, indeterminate sentence (only for felony offenses) must be discharged by the age of nineteen

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  55

the New York Police Department’s stop-­and-­frisk practices reveal), and indeed constitutes an entry into the vast institutional network of targeted mass incarceration in the United States, it is just as effective in dragging children into the maze of criminal justice. When a juvenile is referred to court, various outcomes are possible. The juvenile can be dealt with informally and returned home. However, if the county decides to charge the youth with delinquent conduct, two other possibilities open up. One possibility is that the juvenile is certified as an adult, in which case the youth is considered an adult for criminal purposes and is transferred to the adult criminal justice system. The other possibility is that the juvenile is adjudicated for delinquent conduct, in which case three outcomes can occur: (1) the juvenile is placed on probation; (2) if a felony offense is found, the juvenile is sent to the TJJD with an indeterminate sentence; (3) the juvenile is sent to TJJD with a determinate sentence. If the court places the juvenile on probation instead of sending her to TJJD, the juvenile must be discharged by the time she turns eighteen. If the juvenile is sent to TJJD with an indeterminate sentence, she must be discharged at nineteen. However, if the juvenile is sent to TJJD with a determinate sentence, depending on her “behavior and progress” in TJJD programs, she can be transferred to an adult prison. TJJD facilities are therefore reserved for youth who have committed the most serious offenses: “About 95 percent of youths committed to TJJD have already failed at a county-­level intervention. The remainder of TJJD’s youth committed serious offenses such as capital murder, armed robbery, or aggravated sexual assault and were sent directly to the agency’s care.”6 Managed by the county, the “intensive supervision unit” where we conducted our writing workshops housed youths who had been tried in court, found guilty, and placed on probation.7 Many of them returnees, they were aware that each probation incarceration stint put them a step closer to TJJD and therefore the adult criminal system. Even though TJJD’s procedural structure is organized by increasing levels of legal penalties—­ the “progressive sanctions and interventions model” (Figure 1)—­allegedly meant to keep children away from the juvenile and adult justice systems, ethnographic and demographic analyses show that its actual operation, coupled with social processes such as residential segregation, policing, and school disciplinary measures, among others, produces transgenerational patterns of institutionalization.8

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When Kids Become Institutionalized: Blacks, Latin@s, and Whites Referral is the first step in a child and her family’s passage into the juvenile criminal justice system. In 2010, approximately 80 percent of the 86,548 children formally referred to juvenile probation in Texas attended regular school or were homeschooled. The other 20 percent “attended alternative educational programs, had been suspended or expelled, or had dropped out of school.” While the average age of the children referred in 2010 was fifteen, sixteen-­year-­olds were the most frequently referred. Of those referred, 73 percent were males.9 The racial breakdown of youths referred to juvenile probation is of particular significance for, as it happens in the adult criminal justice system, it reveals marked patterns disproportionately affecting Black individuals negatively. In 2010, Whites made up 39 percent the youth population in the state, yet they accounted for 25 percent of the referrals to juvenile probation. The largest racial youth group in the state, categorized by the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission as Hispanics,10 accounted for 45 percent of the youth population, and 49 percent of probation referrals. Black youth were 13 percent of the total state youth population but 25 percent of those referred to juvenile probation. (Other racial groups, including American Indians and Asians, constituted 1 percent of referrals.)11 Racial disparities suggest a gamut of institutional practices that, while reproducing and intensifying social structures of privilege and dispossession,12 create unique dynamics before, during, and after confinement.13 The majority in both the state youth population and the youth institutionalized population, Latin@ kids are slightly overrepresented, by 8.8 percent, among those referred to probation. White youths, on the other hand, are underrepresented by 35.8 percent in the juvenile probation system. Most telling, however, Black youth were overrepresented in juvenile probation by 92.3 percent of their proportion in the total state youth population. Like the facility in Austin where we conducted our writing workshops, a Latin@ numeric majority, an overrepresentation of Blacks, and an underrepresentation of Whites mark spaces of youth detention in Texas. Even though overrepresentation of Latin@ and Black youth suggests the racialized aspect of carceral institutional practices, the unique overrepresentation of Black youth invites us to engage in more detailed punishment mechanisms and grapple with antiblackness and its overarching yet differentiating logic.

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  57

Youth institutionalization is a node in a dynamic and recurring process—­one that builds on its own energy to continually expand its reach over individuals, communities, and urban spaces defined by precise social characteristics. Youth institutionalization also expands through time. Successive generations are caught in it: as we will see through their written words, children detained mention parents, relatives, and friends who were, who are, or who will likely be imprisoned. There is a shared consciousness of incarceration as a ubiquitous and expanding total social fact. The expansion happens on urban space, social networks, and genealogical time. For each additional individual institutionalized, the process of incarceration gains momentum. Children who are referred once are likely to be institutionalized again. In a given year, over half of the youths who enter the juvenile justice system had a previous referral. In 2010, 52 percent of juveniles referred to probation had at least one prior referral; among those, 66 percent had two or more prior referrals, 33 percent had four or more prior referrals. Among those with a prior referral, 45 percent had a felony as the most severe prior offense, 46 percent had a misdemeanor offense, including probation violation, and 9 percent had a CINS as the most serious prior offense.14 The mechanics of overrepresentation of Blacks and underrepresentation of Whites become more graspable when we consider the following related facts. On the one hand, in 2010, compared to Black and Latin@ kids, in the breakdown of the offenses for which they were referred, White youths had the highest proportion of the more serious felony offenses (20.4 percent) vis-­à-­vis misdemeanors (55.9 percent), violation of probation (VOP) (11.6 percent), and CINS (12.1 percent). For Blacks, these numbers stood at 19.1 percent, 52.2 percent, 14.5 percent, and 14.2 percent; for Latin@ youths, they were 18.9 percent, 53.8 percent, 13.0 percent, and 14.3 percent.15 On the other hand, however, Black juveniles were disposed to probation and to TJJD—­the outcomes, within the “progressive sanctions and interventions model,” deemed appropriate for children who committed the most serious offenses—­at greater proportions than Latin@ and White youths. The conundrum of Black kids’ unique experience in the juvenile justice system, which combines lower frequency of serious offenses and higher commitment to probation and TJJD vis-­à-­vis White and Latin@ children, is further illustrated in the following data. In 2010, 29.4 percent of Black juveniles adjudicated were sent to probation; for Whites

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that proportion stood at 23.2, and for Latin@s, 26.8 percent. In that year, following a trend that has remained constant since at least 2008, Black kids were also sent to TJJD more often than were Whites and Latin@s: 1.8 percent versus 1.1 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively. That is, Black kids were committed to TJJD at a rate 70 percent higher than Whites, while Latin@ youth cases were committed to TJJD at a proportion 9 percent higher than Whites.16 On the other hand, Black youths were less likely to be disposed to supervisory caution and have their adjudication deferred than were their White and Latin@ counterparts. For example, in 2010, while Black kids had 22.7 percent of their cases categorized as deferred adjudication, Whites had 30.6 percent, and Hispanics 25.4 percent. The percentages of dismissed charges may be interpreted to show the one area in which Black and Latin@ kids seem to fare better than White kids. In 2010, 23.8 percent of Black kids’ cases were dismissed; White kids had a rate of 19 percent, and Latin@s 23.4 percent of dismissals. However, given the role that aggressive policing in Black and Latin@ neighborhoods plays in referring kids to the justice system, higher rates of dismissals are symptomatic, less of the court’s lenient tendencies toward nonwhites, but rather of the greater frequency with which spurious detentions and charges are made against Black and Latin@ youths when compared to White youths. Dropped cases reveal a national and historic pattern by which police departments produce an excess of unjustified arrests.17 They suggest stop-­and-­frisk type tactics that are not based on deviant behavior but rather on aggressive policing in negatively racialized geographic areas. Based on the mandate of affirming ubiquitous police presence and the assumption of wrongdoing by those under greater scrutiny, this form of occupation policing depends, financially and politically, on ever-­increasing data that prove the very necessity and efficiency of police departments. Immersed in highly competitive funding environments at the local, state, and federal levels, police departments (and criminal justice divisions more generally) are compelled to produce constantly renewed, expanded, and extraordinary activity data.18 The imperative of data collection only adds to the long-­term patterns of intense social vigilance over negatively racialized groups and territories. Similar proportions of dismissed cases for Black and Latin@ youths indicate comparable experiences of urban space defined by hypersurveillance

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  59

and disproportionate police stops. Black and Latin@ areas are occupied zones of dispossession where repressive police presence is routine. Black and Brown kids share the experience of being the object of discriminatory panoptical policing practices. However, that’s not the only experience they share. Texas Juvenile Probation Commission data indicate salient tendencies in the juvenile justice system negatively affecting Black and Latin@ kids in ways not commensurate to the experiences of White kids. Despite Black and Latin@ kids’ lower proportions of felony dispositions than Whites, Blacks and Latin@s were committed to TJJD at greater percentages than were Whites; they received harsher legal treatment (probation rather than deferred adjudication, for example); and they were less likely to be given supervisory caution.19 Yet, in the spectrum of experienced juridical outcomes, Latin@ youths’ trajectories are not always comparable to those of Blacks. A more accurate description of this phenomenon is that whereas Latin@ kids’ cumulative experiences in the juvenile system put them in an intermediate position between that of Whites and Blacks, the Black positionality consistently correlates with more intense levels of containment and punishment. Consider adjudication to supervisory caution, a disposition normally reserved for less serious offenses according to which the probation department provides counseling for the child and may refer the child and her family to social services. It is a legal outcome whose frequency reveals Brown kids’ intermediate position between Black and White youths. In 2010, while Black kids received supervisory caution in 21.8 percent of their cases, the rates for Latin@ youth were 23 percent and White youths 25.9 percent. These numbers suggest moments in which Latin@ youths are not as harshly treated as Black kids, but are nevertheless not treated as sympathetically as White kids. Probation dispositions, which are of considerable consequence since they mark a child’s institutionalization, show similar patterns: in 2010, 29.4 percent of Black kids’ referrals were disposed to probation; that number was 23.2 percent for White kids, and 26.8 percent for Latin@ kids.20 Other times, however, legal outcomes for Latin@ youths are closer to those of Whites than Blacks. Indeed, the harsher the dispositions are, the more distant become the institutional experiences of Blacks on the one hand and Whites and Latin@s on the other. Commitment to TJJD, far greater for Blacks, as analyzed above, is a case in point. And so is a child’s certification as an adult, which automatically transfers the child’s case to the

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adult criminal justice system. In 2010, 0.4 percent of all Black kids were certified as adults (0.3 percent in 2009); for White kids, that proportion was 0.2 percent, and the same 0.2 for Latin@ kids. For White and Latin@ youths, between 2009 and 2010 there was no increase in the percentage of juveniles committed to the adult system. It bears emphasizing that the proportion of Black kids certified as adults is 100 percent greater than the proportion of White and Latin@ kids certified as adults.21 Over time, such disproportionality has the effect of constantly increasing Black children’s disproportional representation in the adult punitive system. In sum, Black kids are disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system. Even though felonies are smaller proportions of their offenses than they are for Whites, and only slightly higher than they are for Latin@s, Black children are committed to TJJD at a rate 70 percent higher than Whites, and 58 percent higher than Latin@s. Black children are less likely to be referred to counseling, and they are more likely to be sent to the adult criminal system. When committing less serious offenses, Latin@ kids’ experiences in the juvenile system more closely resemble those of Black kids. However, for Black children, in a process that is not so linear for Latin@ children, and certainly not the case for White children, the movement through the juvenile criminal system is accompanied by accumulated disadvantages.22 This process of accumulated disadvantages, which partly translates into an increasing overrepresentation in the institutionalized population most harshly treated, is similar to what happens in the adult criminal system.23 Consider that while only 13 percent of the general population, Black juveniles constituted 26.8 percent referred to probation, 32.8 percent disposed to TJJD, and 40.7 percent of those certified as adults (see Table 1). For Black kids, the deeper they move into the punitive system, the greater their levels of overrepresentation. For White kids, the inverse process is at play: the deeper they move into the juvenile system, the lesser their proportions become. Throughout the various stages of the juvenile system, the proportion of Latin@ kids remains close to that of their overall population, with a slight increase in the initial referral stage, followed by a slight decrease as the children are placed deeper into the punitive bureaucracy. Table 1 suggests that the positionality of the Black youth is not commensurate to that of Latin@ and Anglo youths. The juvenile justice system apparatus works according to an unmistakable antiblack dynamic that targets, punishes, and confines Black youth in unique degrees of reach and

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  61

TABLE 1

Anglo, African American, and Latin@ youth in the juvenile justice system ANGLO (%)

AFRICAN AMERICAN (%)

LATIN@ (%)

TEXAS JUVENILE POPULATION

39.0

13.0

45.0

REFERRED TO TJPC

25.0

25.0

49.0

PROBATION

21.9

26.8

50.2

TJJD

21.3

32.8

44.9

CERTIFIED AS ADULT

16.2

40.7

42.6

Source: Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, State of Juvenile Probation, 12, 17. Percentages do not add up to 100 because “other” racial categories were not considered.

intensity. That Black kids are increasingly overrepresented the deeper they move into the machine of juvenile punishment only reveals the fundamental overlap between technologies of punishment and the institutional logic that derives from and reaffirms the abjection of the Black body.

From Where Do Locked Up Kids Come, and to Where Do They Return? Residential Segregation and Disparities in Income and Education In a recent study appearing in the Austin American Statesman, its authors stated what many of the youths under the supervision of the juvenile criminal justice system already know: “Austin is one of the most economically segregated metro areas in the country, with rich and poor residents increasingly separating into low-­and high-­ income neighborhoods, and a smaller and smaller share of residents living in mixed-­income communities.”24 CC, a youth who participated in the SOY workshop in 2008, recorded his impressions of residential segregation in this way: . . . how is it you ask that Those with it all Look as happy as On the other side of the Wall

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Clean people Clean houses   Clean Cars Clean roads But in our ’hoods the garbage Is in loads. Austin’s map of income segregation, as analyzed by Zehr and Villalpando, shows I-­35 dividing the city along a south–­north axis. To the west are wealthier areas where real estate values are higher, schools are better, recorded crime is lower, and police presence is not as pronounced. To the east are impoverished areas where home values are lower (although increasing in the last two decades, due to gentrification), schools consistently produce worse academic results (including test scores and graduation rates), crime is recorded in higher numbers, and police presence, as discussed above, is aggressive.25 Austin’s economic trends have intensified segregation rather than attenuated it. Even areas that in the early 2000s presented a relative mixture of income are becoming either more homogeneously impoverished or more homogeneously privileged. This process increases segregation as it diminishes the possibility of contact between families of dissimilar social backgrounds. Austin’s patterns are not in any way unique. The long-­ term significance of such levels of segregation is readily graspable when we consider that “lower-­income children tend to climb higher up in the economic ladder if they were born in areas of greater income integration.” Children born in Austin in the lowest fifth quintile of national income had a 6.9 percent chance of making their way to the top quintile by age thirty—­a chance “notably lower than other tech-­savvy cities and lower than all but four Texas cities.” These patterns of blocked social mobility are strongly correlated with Austin’s dynamic of economic segregation. The city’s separation between affluent and disadvantaged neighborhoods is a product of two interrelated processes. On the one hand, although the share of families living in rich areas has fluctuated since the 1970s, it has steadily increased since 2000, reaching about 19 percent of all families. On the other hand, despite a slight decrease in the 1990s, there has been a marked increase in the proportion of the city’s families living in impoverished areas. Indeed, based on the 2010 United States Census, “the share

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  63

of Austin families living in poor neighborhoods has grown from 16.3 percent in 1990 to 19.2 percent in 2009.”26 Economic segregation in the Texan capital, thus, stems from a combination of intense, opposite, and related processes. Recrudescent levels of poverty and affluence shape the ways in which urban space is occupied, providing resources and opportunities for the better-­off, and limiting life chances for the already disadvantaged. Yet, it is not just income and educational levels that attain expression in urban space. Urban space is itself a medium of and metaphor for racial dynamics: a stage where representations and practices of race gain temporary expression; a stage that is itself the expression of gendered and racialized conflicts.27 Because income and educational attainment are influenced by and express spatial configurations, and since spatial configurations forcefully shape and are influenced by narratives and performances of race and its gendered inflections, income and educational attainment are necessarily expressions of gendered racial dynamics. The gendered aspects of racial dynamics become readily apparent when we engage variations of employment rates, salary, frequency of encounters with criminal justice systems, and victimization by domestic and sexual violence within and across race-­specific groups.28 The dot map of Austin’s racial landscape shows Interstate 35 separating neighborhoods that have substantial Black and Latin@ families from areas that are predominantly White.29 Juxtaposing this dot map to the previous map we discussed, which represents levels of segregation by income and educational levels, we immediately notice that the areas where there is greater concentration of low income and lower educational levels are also the areas where Whites live in smaller numbers. Relatedly, the location just east of Interstate 35 and north of the Colorado River comprises zip code areas where Blacks are concentrated in greater numbers than in other Austin coordinates. Characterized by the relative absence of Whites, these geographies of dispossession are predominantly Black and Brown. Having established the transgenerational and spatial dimensions of affluence and poverty, it is not surprising to find that most schools rated “exemplary” are located west of I-­35, in precisely the areas marked by an absence of economically disadvantaged students. In a context where the number of unacceptable schools in Central Texas increased from three in 2007 to twenty-­seven in 2011,30 the greater presence of better schools in already economically privileged areas suggests a troubling cyclical dynamic

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whereby social privileges are concentrated and expanded, both in space (in Austin’s case, more people who are getting richer are living closer to one another, crowding out the less affluent) and in time (one’s family material and social resources, and access to quality neighborhood schools, improves future life chances). Indeed, “of all the factors that predict financial success, none are more tightly linked than education.”31 By the same logic, social dispossession is concentrated and expanded. Due to the powerful interplay between affluence, education, space, and race—­one that produces social facts grounded in social geography that are carried through time—­Black and Latin@ students thus “remain significantly less likely to attend an Exemplary campus.”32 These kids are shut off from the best public schools, and they remain trapped in campuses where low graduation and high dropout rates affect them disproportionately. In Central Texas, Black and Latin@ kids graduate at lower rates compared to the rest of the campus, and indeed, in a trend that has intensified since 2005, “drop out at almost double the rate of the campus as a whole.”33 The spatial dimensions of racialized intergenerational privilege and dispossession produce and reflect a host of other social phenomena. Likelihood of entering in contact with the criminal justice system is one of them. When heeding patterns of what has been called “the school-­to-­ prison pipeline,” it is apparent that the children most likely to be disciplined and referred to out-­of-­school Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs (DAEPs) and Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Programs (JJAEPs) come from, precisely, the already economically challenged areas—­areas whose schools are disproportionately Black and Latin@, and whose graduation rates and standardized test results are consistently worse than campuses located in whiter neighborhoods west of I-­35. This phenomenon’s nuances are worth focusing on; they tell us an important part of the collective and intergenerational story that leads youths into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.

The School-­to-­Prison Cyclical Pipeline: Accumulated Dispossession and Early Social Death At the time of the nonprofit justice center Texas Appleseed’s 2007 publication of Texas’ School-­to-­Prison Pipeline, “one in three juveniles sent to a locked-­down facility operated by the Texas Youth Commission [replaced

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  65

by TJJD in 2011] has already dropped out of school—­and more than 80 percent of Texas adult prison inmates are school dropouts.”34 Following the 1994 passage of the federal Gun-­Free School Act, and Texas governor George W. Bush’s 1995 State of the State remarks focusing on the need to adopt policy targeting “those who terrorize teachers or disrupt classrooms—­zero tolerance,” there was substantial change in Texas school discipline legislation. Specifically, the 1995 75th Texas Legislature rewrote the Texas Education Code and crafted Chapter 37, which created DAEPs and JJAEPs. Mandatory referrals to these programs were linked to a specific list of serious offenses. School districts, however, were given ample discretion to refer students for other code of conduct violations including talking back to a teacher, using profanity, and disrupting class. Starting in the mid-­1990s, a dramatic increase in student disciplinary referrals resulted from these policy changes. According to the 1995 State Board of Education’s Long-­Range Plan for Public Education, the objective was to “promote zero-­tolerance guidelines for behaviors and actions that threaten school safety.”35 Focusing on disciplinary referrals for the period 2001–­6, Texas Appleseed examined in-­school suspension (ISS), out-­of-­school suspension (OSS), and DAEPs for all Texas school districts. Because Appleseed’s analysis disaggregated data by seriousness of offense (and thus differentiated mandatory and discretionary referrals), race, ethnicity, participation in special education, and grade level, we can relate it to (a) our previous examination of disparities in the juvenile justice system, (b) economic and educational levels, and the ways in which (a) and (b) connect with and gain expression in urban space. Appleseed identified school districts disproportionately referring Black and Latin@ young people for misconduct, and paid special attention to the role that discretion had in producing the data. It found that discretionary referrals constitute, by far, the largest share of the total referrals produced in a given year. In 2005–­6, for example, Texas public schools produced 62,981 discretionary referrals to DAEPs, whereas mandatory referrals for serious offenses numbered 27,093. Moreover, contrary to expectations, discretionary DAEP referrals were given for violations less serious than fighting by a proportion of six to one.36 By engaging school discipline, we are able to gain insight into the microphysics of youth institutionalization in racialized spaces marked by accumulated dispossession.

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Even though most Texas schools have not formally adopted zero-­ tolerance guidelines, they nevertheless utilize the broad latitude given to them in the Texas Education Code, a product of the zero-­tolerance Bush-­ era political climate, to enforce severe disciplinary measures that are often not commensurate to the offense. Once in the realm of discretion, the subjectivity of schoolteachers, staff, and administrators gain added importance in how children of different backgrounds are treated. Collectively-­ shared representations, many of which operate at a subliminal frequency unlikely to be detected as explicit bias,37 lead to subjective disciplinary decisions that, over time, have the accumulated effect of reinforcing preexisting negative stereotypes about Latin@ and, more intensely, Black young people. African American students, in a process that mirrors patterns in the juvenile justice system, are appreciably overrepresented in the discretionary disciplinary referrals (see Figure 2). Latin@ students are also overrepresented in disciplinary referrals, but to a lesser extent. Indeed, not surprisingly, the greater predictor of the likelihood that a child receives a disciplinary referral is the school district she attends.38 By shutting down already economically impoverished kids from formal educational tools that

Figure 2. Overrepresentation of Black, Latin@, and White students in discretionary disciplinary referrals, 2001–6. Figures do not add up to 100 percent because racial groups other than Black, Latin@, and White were not considered. Source: Texas Appleseed, Texas’ School-­to-­Prison Pipeline, 9.

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  67

would in theory give them a competitive labor market profile, excessive discretionary disciplinary measures increasingly render indistinguishable the difference between educational and criminal bureaucracies. Over time, discretion in school discipline adds to the arsenal of social mechanisms reproducing exclusion. Specifically, between 2001 and 2006, for one or more years, 211 Texas school districts referred Black students to DAEPs at rates exceeding their proportional representation in the school: “In 2006–­2007 alone, 15 school districts referred African American students at more than twice their representation in the student population, with discretionary referral rates ranging from 21 to 65 percent” (see Table 2). Considering that there are 1,037 public school districts in the state, it is astounding that 503 of them overrepresented Black kids in discretionary out-of-school suspensions, while 347 districts overrepresented them in discretionary referrals to in-­school suspensions.39 Latin@ kids are also overrepresented in disciplinary referrals, but not in rates as glaring as Black kids. Forty school districts overrepresented Latin@ kids in discretionary DAEP referrals; 224 disproportionally referred them to OSS; and 92 overrepresented them in ISS.40 Comparing these numbers to those of the paragraph above, one is confronted with troubling patterns of antiblack discrimination which, compared to the patterns of discrimination against Latin@ and White students, suggests a unique scale of range and intensity—­an intensity that is without analog in other social groups.41 Overrepresentation of Black students in disciplinary referrals becomes even more aberrant when we consider their specific predicament regarding dropout rates. Black male kids are more likely to drop out of high school due to disciplinary referrals than any other gendered and racial group. This is partially because DAEPs have five times the dropout rates of other disciplinary programs. Still, DAEP dropout rates are not the end of the story. Upon reentering a regular campus from a DAEP, students who find themselves lagging tend to drop out simply because they are unable to make up for the lost ground. Most schools, unsurprisingly, lack transitional programs. Texas has one of the country’s highest dropout rates—­ only 74 percent of students graduate on time. Yet for Black and Brown kids, high school graduation rates are even worse, standing at 68 and 65 percent, respectively.42 As argued by the American Psychological Association’s Zero Tolerance

68 ·  DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO?

TABLE 2

Overrepresentation of African American students, at more than twice their proportion in the student population, in DAEPs, 2006–­7 SCHOOL DISTRICT

BLACK PERCENTAGE IN STUDENT BODY

BLACK PERCENTAGE IN DAEP DISCRETIONARY REFERRALS

Amarillo ISD

11

24

Austin ISD

14

37

Bryan ISD

25

56

Carthage ISD

27

63

Corsicana ISD

23

50

Greenville ISD

25

56

Humble ISD

15

38

Huntsville ISD

28

63

Klein ISD

15

40

Lubbock ISD

15

39

Midland ISD

10

21

North East ISD

10

23

Temple ISD

29

65

Waxahachie ISD

14

35

Wichita Falls ISD

18

43

Source: Texas Appleseed, Texas’ School-­to-­Prison Pipeline, 38.

Task Force report, the heightened use of discretionary disciplinary measures does not enhance discipline, student performance, or campus climate: The evidence strongly suggests, however, that zero tolerance has not increased the consistency of school discipline. Rather, rates of suspension and expulsion vary widely across schools and school districts. Moreover, this variation appears to be due as much to characteristics of schools and school personnel as to behavior or attitudes of students. . . . A key assumption of zero tolerance policy is that the removal of disruptive students will result in a safer climate for others. Although the assumption is strongly intuitive, data

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  69

on a number of indicators of school climate have shown the opposite effect, that is, that schools with higher rates of school suspension and expulsion appear to have less satisfactory ratings of school climate, to have less satisfactory school governance structure, and to spend a disproportionate amount of time on disciplinary matters. Perhaps more importantly, recent research indicates a negative relationship between use of school suspension and expulsion and school-­wide academic achievement, even when controlling for demographics such as socioeconomic status. Disciplinary referrals, as punitive measures that do little to enhance school climate and safety, seem to increase the probability of future disruptive behavior. In an atmosphere that is increasingly dominated by surveillance and punishment, school campuses where disciplinary discretion is utilized frequently and widely offer little in the way of overall safety, intellectual nourishment, and support. Students who are suspended are more likely to be suspended again: “In the long term, school suspension and expulsion are moderately associated with a higher likelihood of school dropout and failure to graduate on time.”43 Black and Latin@ kids who find themselves in punitive campuses and have a history of disciplinary referrals are not only at a greater risk of dropping out; they are also one step closer to being absorbed by the juvenile justice system. One could argue that Black kids are consistently overrepresented in suspension and expulsion due to their relatively lower economic status, which would intuitively correlate with higher challenges at home, which would, in turn, produce a higher likelihood of disruptive behavior and lower academic achievement. Yet, according to careful research, such disciplinary overrepresentation of Black students is reducible neither to economic disadvantage nor to alleged higher rates of disruption or violence committed by Black kids. “Rather,” this research finds, “African American students may be disciplined more severely for less serious or more subjective reasons.”44 Subjective reasons, then, may be an overdetermining factor explaining disproportionate discretionary disciplinary referrals for Black youths. Subjective reasons, which in turn inform and reflect an antiblack structure of positionalities as suggested in the Introduction, are likely to be that which connects the school and the juvenile justice systems. When we recognize that the single most important predictor for referral to the

70 ·  DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO?

juvenile justice system is a history of disciplinary referrals at school, we are able to grasp the cyclical dynamic linking schools and the justice system. This cyclical dynamic is energized, in great part, by the subjective underpinnings of discretionary disciplinary actions. A 2005 study on “minority over-­representation in the Texas Juvenile Justice System,” conducted by the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, showed that involvement in one or more disciplinary incidents increased by 23.4 percent a child’s likelihood of being referred to the juvenile justice system compared to children with no school disciplinary referrals.45 • • • The cyclical dynamic linking schools and prisons is not restricted to schools and prisons. It is a cyclical dynamic because the logic that sustains it—­the gendered antiblack logic of surveillance and dispossession—­is effective far beyond the confines of institutional protocols. When a child is referred to a DAEP, she is already placed in coordinates of time and space that engender her social inviability. She lives in an urban area where racial hypersegregation intensifies the effects of concentrated poverty,46 the failing and overtly disciplinary school, and the panoptical presence of the criminal justice system. It should come as no surprise that, (a) just as where a student attends school overdetermines the likelihood that she will be referred to a discipline program, so too (b) the student’s geographical location affects her chances of entering the criminal justice system. The overlap between (a) and (b) is an example of the cyclical dynamic of surveillance and dispossession. But it is also an instance when and where institutions synchronize—­they trade captive bodies, as well as data, technologies, and common understandings about those who enter their realms, and thus apply their mandated discretion accordingly. Institutions are able to synchronize—­and indeed need to synchronize—­because they are part of the same, constantly retrofitted complex of surveillance and dispossession. They communicate because of their common grammar that enforces and depends on repressive patterns of space occupation and management. Bureaucracies of education, punishment, and incarceration draw their shared clientele from predictable and easily identifiable social geographies. Even though it may appear that the school-­to-­prison pipeline operates only in one direction—­from schools to prisons—­over time it becomes evident that those who are sent to schools are the biological/ social products of previous and ongoing transgenerational dispossession.

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  71

prison

school

Black spheres

Figure 3. The transgenerational cycle of surveillance and dispossession.

Because of their gendered racialization, the current generation’s predecessors were already dispossessed, and whether they entered, currently reside, or left a prison institution is a mere detail in the long duration patterns. Paradigmatically in Black spaces, the racial dynamics of segregation are such that vulnerable communities experience heightened confinement, vigilance, and material destitution as indistinguishable from, and indeed defining, the very residential coordinates they inhabit. A carceral logic is at play here, one that “conceptually encompasses the stratecraft and expansive institutionality of state-­proctored human captivity, which inscribes a multiply scaled political geography of social and bodily immobilization.”47 It is this “multiply scaled political geography” that propagates transgenerational surveillance and dispossession while restricting movement beyond its domain. We are in fact observing a constellation of institutional protocols, socially shared expectations, and cognitive patterns that, as they interlock, produce a continuous feed of new bodies to be confined, disciplined (educated, as it were), and disposed, not necessarily in this order. It is thus not surprising to find structural similarities between Austin Independent School District’s use of discretionary referrals against Black children and Travis County’s rate of referrals of Black kids to juvenile probation, which is of course a result of the county’s exercise of its discretionary powers. In Texas, AISD and Travis County have the distinction of ranking among the highest in their use of discretionary referrals. AISD sends Black children

72 ·  DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO?

to DAEP and OSS under discretionary referrals at a rate of 37 and 32 percent, respectively—­more than double the 14 percent of Blacks in the student body (see Table 2). Travis County, which contains Austin, has one of the highest referral rates to juvenile probation in the state, at fifty-­four per thousand children (Table 3). While the available numbers of referrals are not broken down by race, we saw previously in this chapter that not only will Black children be overrepresented among those referred, but their overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system will increase the deeper the child moves into its bureaucracy of punishment (Table 1). By juxtaposing Tables 2 and 3, my intent is to suggest not a perfect correspondence between the workings of admittedly distinct institutions, but rather the simultaneous and amplification effect that each has on the other, and how both, in turn, are immersed in and reflect antiblack gendered racial dynamics of social representation, dispossession, and immobilization that far exceed their provinces of intervention. As specific as these institutions are, they combine powerfully to produce and reproduce a Black body whose individual and collective inviability suggests an incommunicable positionality in contrast to which the nonblack understand and perform themselves. The nonblack is able to experience viability precisely because the Black is inviable. At times and in certain spaces, nonblacks actually go through similar experiences of profound dispossession and immobilization. Yet those moments are not commensurate to the ones Blacks experience as normative. The unsaid but essential fulcrum is the Black body: the ideological, organic, sentient, yet invisible entity that is made to circulate through the maze of (in)human geographies and articulated institutions that constantly replenish the meanings of citizenship, social worth, and personhood—­social life—­by producing and reproducing Black social death. Social death can be thought of as precondition to, embodiment, and consequence of imprisonment: once released back to the “free,” the formerly incarcerated carries with her an invisible yet formidable scarlet letter that obstructs or impedes access to subsidized housing, health care, work, and the ballot box.48 The scarlet letter that the Black carries is an instruction manual for the constant assembly and reassembly of social death. Here, then, social death attains more accurate descriptive power when we think of the processes it describes as part of a cyclical and intergenerational trajectory rather than a linear, one-­time sequence of events. So instead of conceptualizing incarceration as the beginning of one’s social

TABLE 3

Juvenile probation referral activity by county, January 1, 2010, through December 31, 2010

COUNTY

2010 JUVENILE POPULATION

ALLEGED DELINQUENT AND VOP

ALLEGED CINS

VIOLENT FELONY

STATUS

Bexar

154,281

367

OTHER FELONY

918

OTHER DELINQUENT/ VOP

OTHER

TOTAL REFERRALS

5,897

274

1,076

8,532

REFERRAL RATE PER 1,000

CHILDREN REFERRED

55

5,554

Dallas

257,908

486

901

4,631

748

267

7,033

27

5,585

El Paso

80,346

247

399

2,034

0

2

2,682

33

2,071

Galveston

24,986

66

188

1,002

51

21

1,328

53

696

394,464

840

1,607

9,311

1,030

1,799

14,587

37

10,364

1,803

6

22

26

1

8

63

35

38

Lubbock

23,317

120

169

795

60

1

1,145

49

819

Travis

81,559

192

437

2,964

307

506

4,406

54

2,519

Harris Houston

Source: Compiled from a report of the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, November 2011, 71–­81.

74 ·  DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO?

death, we can think of it as a station in a constellation of synchronized institutions, experiences, and beliefs that effectively produce collective Black social death while guaranteeing gradations of attainable life, property, and the pursuit of happiness for nonblacks. More to the point: prior to being incarcerated, the now-­released person was probably referred to a disciplinary program at school; she was born and raised in a hypersegregated and impoverished area where schools were frequently worse than those offered in zones where there was a lower concentration of Black people; her parents had troubled encounters with school administrators, juvenile probation personnel, and police officers; and aggressive police presence marked her coming into consciousness as a member of a particular community demarcated by clear spatial and racial boundaries. All of which doesn’t even begin to address the secondary forms of marginalization,49 those engendered within and by the very communities most affected by forces of social death: the just-­as-­deadly discrimination and employment of violence, symbolic and actual, based on the isolated and variously combined modalities of gender, sexuality, color, religion, age, and nationality, just to name a few. One choosing to dismiss these manifestations of social death as specifically and fundamentally antiblack phenomena should consider the spatial dimensions of potentially deadly diseases. In 2008, the Austin American Statesman published an article about maps divided by zip codes showing where people were more likely to die of illnesses. “When we look at the enormous impact on our health system of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma and childhood obesity,” affirmed Dr. Melissa Smith, a family practice physician, director of the Seton Community Health Centers, “you see that poor and minority communities are heavily affected.”50 The same areas in the map of economic disparities that concentrate lower incomes, lower educational levels, most punitive schools, and greater juvenile probation referrals are also the areas where people die more frequently of disease. Deaths caused by diabetes and cancer, for example, “are more heavily clustered in the ZIP codes in the inner city and east of Interstate 35. Overall mortality from all diseases tends to be higher in those ZIP codes.”51 Black and vulnerable nonblack persons in those areas are thus more likely to die of such ailments. Yet, when we add to this reflection the finding that residential segregation affects Blacks paradigmatically—­that Latin@s, for example, never experience the concentration, intensity, multifaceted nature, and duration of hypersegregation that defines the Black experience—­then

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  75

we are forced to come to terms with the fact that Blacks are more likely to be affected by such chronic and deadly diseases.52 Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? By JS . . . God Forgive me for my sins. I wonder if Heaven has a Ghetto And will they let me in? Tomorrow is not promised 2 us. Today is hard enough.53 JS’s question intimates social awareness of the synchronized, ever present, ubiquitous, and expansive racialized forces of dispossession and surveillance. The ghetto, as the spatial formation that produces gendered/racialized experiences of containment and dispossession, offers few alternatives within and beyond its borders—­or palliatives that would make it bearable. Such is the evaluation that emerges out of BG’s poem: I’m [here] for aggravated robbery. So instead of hitting the lottery I committed an aggravated robbery. I needed the cash So now I’m locked up. I’ve done about 7 to 8 months—­ I got 1 more month to get back To the North-­east, my streets Ridgemont Drive 78723.54 Short of becoming economically viable in an instant through a winning lottery ticket, there are reduced chances of participation in the legal monetized markets of commodities, jobs, health, relationships, and happiness, as constantly bombarded by a variety of mass propaganda media. The prospects of leaving the ghetto—­in the words of Clyde Woods, a “social-­ spatial enclosure”55—­are quite dim. Fluid, expanding, yet ever present and forceful enclosures, ghettos replenish rituals of dispossession—­ghettos are institutionalized, transgenerational rituals of dispossession. One leaves a ghetto for another

76 ·  DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO?

ghetto—­and may even encounter a ghetto in the afterlife. Ghettos are evocative descriptions of hypersegregated racialized neighborhoods.56 Yet, because of the antiblack logic structuring underprivileged and hypersurveilled neighborhoods, schools, juvenile prisons, and adult prisons can also be categorized as ghettos—­spaces organized by a common logic of gendered/racialized surveillance and dispossession. In Ruth Gilmore’s formulation, prisons are “partial geographic solutions to political economic crises.”57 Such crises are the permanent political, economic, and cultural experiences of already dehumanized Black lifeworlds. Zones populated by devalued bodies, ghettos (like prisons) are socio-­spatial enclosures: geographic solutions to the social management questions posed by fundamental social inequality. What to do with the not-­yet-­dead but already excluded, socially dead? How to contain imagined, feared, and actual forms of resistance, rebellion, and other “antisocial,” including “criminal,” behavior? Prisons are partial solutions; ghettos, understood as networks of surveillance and dispossession, are expanded solutions, operating in tandem with, containing, and extrapolating prisons. Prisons and ghettos are articulating dimensions of the same carceral system of gendered and racialized dispossession. Given the ghetto’s ubiquity and capacity for constant reconfiguration, it does not escape the imprisoned youth that the difference between the “free” and the “unfree” is one of degree, not quality. The “free” and the “unfree” are in a continuum of oppression; there is no clear line separating one condition from the other. When speaking from spaces of institutional confinement such as the juvenile facility where we conducted our writing workshops, the “free,” the space of the Black and Latin@ ghettos, is itself a primordial locus from which is drawn, intergenerationally, raw material for the cyclical pipeline of surveillance, punishment, and dispossession. The raw material is the negatively gendered and racialized body. The “free,” therefore, is itself experienced, partially at least, as a condition and process of social death. There would be no need to ask about a ghetto in heaven, the quintessential timeless and placeless realm of unqualified freedom, if the ghetto were not all encompassing, ever present, the stage and embodiment of unfreedom. The ghetto also configures, or serves as index for, a singular type of being in the world, an ontology. To be dispossessed, to be suspended (from school, from home, from sociality), to be criminalized, to be a nonbeing: these states of being actualize themselves, and gain time and spatial dimensions in, with, through, and by the social spaces of the ghetto. When

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  77

JS, a young Latino man, asks if there is a ghetto in heaven, he states his familiarity with spaces of social death, which are paradigmatically Black. His familiarity is an ontological trait, one that suggests that his condition is commensurate to that of other people familiar with, determined by, and resisting the ghetto, which makes his condition commensurate to that of other Latin@s. JS’s narratives also suggest that his experiences are commensurate to that of Blacks. JS’s narrative puts into question the thesis of the incommensurability of the Black condition, which was advanced in this book’s introduction. JS’s irredeemable attachment to, and his very existential fusion with, the ghetto seems to bridge Black and Brown ontological markers. If not even death redeems those born in and defined by the ghetto—­or, if even heaven has a ghetto, where, therefore, presumably some form of disadvantage will persist—­what will redeem them? JS’s sense of inevitable degradation renders his perspective one that seems to be converging with that of Blacks, the paradigmatic subjects of social death. Yet, because JS’s profound question is, after all, a question, it suggests a pregnant silence, an interruption, hope. It suggests a desire that what seems like an ontological condition and a structural positioning, confirmed in but ultimately independent of a variety of degrading social forces (as proponents of social death theses would have it), is in fact not an ontology at all, but rather temporary conditions that can be changed. In this vein, JS’s familiarity with the ghetto, rather than perpetually constitutive of his experience, would be momentary, not foundational, and therefore neither ontological nor structural. JS’s question becomes a supplication for an alternative, for a confirmation that what he experiences is not evidence of a permanent condition but a process that offers a way out, offers redemption. As we have seen, Latin@s’ collective experiences in death-­prone segregated areas, schools, and prisons waver between being at times closer to those of Blacks and at other times closer to Whites. The question about heaven’s ghetto, therefore, may be a consequence of this pendular motion: while the proximity to Black patterns of dispossession is quite evident as Latin@s move through the bowels of punitive schools, juvenile institutions, and the adult criminal justice system, it is also a measurable social fact that Latin@s tend not to be as seriously punished as Blacks. To make JS’s question all the more evocative, it is important to grasp the relevance of the sheer numeric majority of Latin@s in the juvenile system. Even though Blacks are, by far, the most overrepresented racial group,

78 ·  DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO?

Latin@s numerically dominate the scenes formed by interlocking systems of confinement. So, while this shared experience, as shown, is not indicative of a shared structural position, it nevertheless opens up the otherwise improbable recognition between Blacks and Latin@s. Such recognition has been documented in the enclosures of large U.S. cities such as Houston and Chicago.58 In Austin, common carceral experiences may be establishing shared grounds from which to forge common vocabularies of affect, analysis, and imagined futures. These shared grounds do not automatically mean shared ontologies, but they do point to forms of identification between Browns and Blacks, even if oblique. In this case, the obliqueness of the identification means that Blacks, antiblackness, and Black experiences are seldom directly mentioned in narratives such as JS’s. To appreciate the singularity and potential of such forms of oblique recognition, it is important to suspend the default urge to consider and preemptively celebrate (even potential) recognition. Recognition in what sense? For what? For whom? What does recognition assume and require? Against the grain of the people-­of-­color canon, let us consider that oblique recognition, while potentially generating cognitive means by which nonblacks can gain some grasp of paradigmatically Black experiences, also circumvents, and thus contributes to the maintenance of, antiblackness. I find these Black–­ Latin@ forms of recognition to be urgently needed, positive, affirming alternatives to the shared experiences of social and bodily death. They may be the beginning of Latin@ acceptance of the dance of death to which Blacks have been inviting nonblacks for centuries. Still, given the nature and process of the persisting and overriding patterns of containment and dispossession that mark spaces of social death—­spaces into which Latin@s get forced often, but not with the same intensity—­these forms of recognition remain tenuous. They remain, mostly, possibilities that, if at times actualized in forms of practical collaboration, nevertheless face a fundamental challenge: that of the unmistakable antiblack logic organizing social cognition and the various technologies of containment. For the nonblack—­not to mention Blacks themselves—­given the force of normative analytical and affective frameworks, the difficulties in grasping antiblackness are enormous. Moreover, what are the incentives for undertaking such a task? Even in the improbable scenario when one comes to terms with antiblackness, why would anyone willingly associate with the permanently nonliving, or embrace the dance of death into which Blacks have invited nonblacks time and again?

DOES HEAVEN HAVE A GHETTO? ·  79

For all its potential transformative political outcomes, the earnest but not always precise analogizing that almost inevitably occurs when documenting and reflecting on Black and nonblack experiences runs into another common shortcoming: that of diluting, and thus negating, the foundational antiblack nature of social management’s structuring logic. To avoid this shortcoming, and to establish more solid conditions for the possibility of Black/nonblack (re)cognition, the very antiblack foundations of the ghetto have to be fully grasped and rendered central. Spaces of the fundamentally Black ghetto do indeed forcefully bring differently racialized people to the same geographies and institutions of containment and dispossession. But as we have seen, technologies of repression, degradation, and surveillance don’t work the same way for everyone in the ghetto. Reflecting the multifaceted and ultimately effective nature of antiblack technologies of containment and dispossession, in Austin the Black population has shown a steady decline despite the city’s overall population increase. While this population decline may qualify the city as an outlier,59 in the U.S. and Black diasporic context it illustrates the social impact of intersecting antiblack forces—­transhistorical and ubiquitous antiblack forces—­some of which we analyzed in this chapter. In this regard, Austin is not in any way unique. • • • The next two chapters take us to the inside of a juvenile prison in Austin. They examine the everyday routines to which young people are subjected, and which they often try to resist. By analyzing the writings the kids produced during the workshop of which i was a part for five years, what follows is an analysis of structural antiblackness as it is manifested in institutional protocols and social interactions among the kids themselves, and among the kids and the prison’s staff. It must be stressed that, while the microphysics of everyday life in confinement is a critical site where structural and transgenerational modalities of social degradation take place, social degradation, as this chapter shows, far exceeds the juvenile facility’s walls and procedures. Part II argues that antiblack structuring patterns of dehumanization also characterize the management of the Black presence in Brazil. Dynamics of hypersurveillance and transgenerational dispossession are therefore the principal mark of the Black diaspora. The ordinary features of social death in Austin, undoubtedly specific in their manifestations, are windows into the structural, transnational, and transhistorical fact of antiblackness.

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2

Stanzas of Oppression and Hope Voices of Incarcerated Black and Latino Boys

Focusing on the interactions and routines of a youth detention facility in Austin, Texas, this chapter builds from and specifies our previous analyses of the gendered antiblack dynamics of surveillance and dispossession. It draws from ethnographic insight accumulated during a writing workshop, of which i was a facilitator with two other colleagues, Czarina Thelen and Rene Valdez, between 2008 and 2012. A node in the constellation of circular and transgenerational factors producing social death, the youth detention facility serves as a two-­way passage between what the young incarcerated people call the “free,” the “outside” world, and the “inside,” the unfree. It will become evident that, due to the ever replenished and articulating technologies of social death, the difference between the free and the unfree is of degree, not nature. The youths transit between detention and neighborhood life only to be reminded of their always subjugated, dispossessed, and vulnerable lives. Yet, as chapter 1 suggested, youths differently situated by gender, race, sexuality, and nationality experience vulnerability differently. How are such differences manifested in the juvenile detention facility? Are there moments of identification, even if oblique, between Latin@s and Blacks? If so, what precisely are such manifestations of oblique identification, how do they occur, and what are their meanings to Blacks and Latin@s? More broadly, how is the logic of antiblackness manifested in social interactions of captivity? To analyze institutionalized dynamics of social death, this chapter and the next, which continues the examination of the juvenile detention facility, develop around the following axes. First, the everyday social dynamics of the juvenile prison: How does the prison function, what are its protocols, how are the protocols translated into staff and youth comportment, and how do the young people navigate the institution? In short, what are the routines and the social climate inside the facility? Here i will be 81

82 ·  STANZAS OF OPPRESSION AND HOPE

attentive to the relationships among the kids themselves; among the kids and the staff; and among the staff members themselves. Second, the writings the youths produced in the workshop, some of which were selected and published in two chapbooks, Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? (2009) and I Come from a Teardrop (2010): the first one contains writings by young men, the second, mostly by young women; they reflect two gender-­segregated units within the detention facility where the workshops were conducted. What are the main themes emerging out of the writings? How do they relate to the cyclical and transgenerational patterns of surveillance and dispossession analyzed above? Do they suggest evidence of oblique identification between Latin@s and Blacks, and if so, what are the specificities such forms of identification acquire, and what are their meanings in terms of interpersonal relations? Third, the assumptions, expectations, and methodologies the facilitators, the young people, and the staff shared, negotiated, and fought over: Even if not always consciously or apparent, the assumptions, expectations, and methodologies at play during the writing workshops provide a window into the challenges youth institutionalization, and the carceral logic more broadly, pose to individual desires and organized projects of freedom. This embattled field deserves close attention as it reveals (a) the not always recognized nature and extent of the convergence and difference between the institution’s narratives, the young people’s perspectives, and those we used in the workshop, and (b) the experiential commonalities and contrasts of kids differently situated by race, gender, nationality, and sexuality, as they engaged the institution, interacted with one another, and made plans for when they were released back in the “free.” The workshops were conceived as political acts insofar as they drew from raúlsalinas’s oppositional writing programs that challenged forms of dehumanization, principally among the imprisoned youths; they were instruments of relative empowerment in environments defined by radical disempowerment. To restrict the workshops to their “political” qualities, however, empties them of perhaps their most effective outcomes. Such outcomes were not always political, if by political we understand modes of action engaging and pushing back against forms of power.1 At times, the workshops provided unencumbered, amorphous imaginative possibilities beyond carceral confines—­not just the confines of the facility itself, but also the confines of the always embattled and diminished existence in the social spaces the young people came from and to which they looked

STANZAS OF OPPRESSION AND HOPE ·  83

forward to returning. When discussions, readings, sounds, and imaginative flights departed from the already known to the yet to be, to the there and then, they became the most devastatingly innovative, they became the most difficult to contain, and they therefore became the less obviously “political.”2 At other times, the workshop orientations were difficult to distinguish from ever present discourses of respectability and redemption, including the prison’s protocols. Although we opposed the prison’s very existence, constantly criticized its practices and its dehumanizing effects on the young people it supposedly assisted, we the facilitators were not free of contradictions. Like many of the staff, we operated under the desire that, if only our workshops could generate part of the impact we wanted, the young people so needlessly brutalized (in their communities and their imprisonment) would come out with added awareness, critique, self-­ possession. We wanted to be part of a dialogical process that would, in time, repossess, reconstitute, and re-­member the young men and women whom confinement, and indeed the social world writ large, had dispossessed, broken down, scattered, and dis-­membered. In our desire resided a hope of an undefined yet urgent, insurgent renovation that in many ways, paradoxically, merged with institutional orientations to which we were fiercely opposed. Of course, the institution’s redemptive orientation did not include the aspiration to help its clients become politically transformative or even progressive subjects imbibed in an ethics of social justice and freedom. Yet, the prison staff, like us, wanted to send the youths back to the “free” with added and improved skills that would enhance the kids’ navigation in/of the social world. The three facilitators—­idealistic as we were—­and the institution operated from a general assumption that the youths we worked with could be reoriented, competitively equipped, and even substantially modified. This assumption required another, less examined, and nevertheless complex premise: that the youths and their actions, once outside the institution, could be legible in ways that did not preemptively diminish, dispossess, or recriminalize them. So not only could the youths benefit from their time locked up; once adequately reformed, our youth would impress on social actors and institutions their legitimate, productive, and much needed social membership. We, the facilitators, were cognizant of the various difficulties and challenges the impoverished Black and Brown young people would certainly face—­challenges only compounded by their institutionalization. Yet we had confidence in

84 ·  STANZAS OF OPPRESSION AND HOPE

progressive visions that would provide invaluable intellectual and spiritual tools with which the young people would somehow thrive. We didn’t expect to make an immediate impact, but we did hope our efforts would eventually add up to small openings and incremental changes. All of which is to say that, although aware of the theory and multiple experiences of Black social death as an ontological given, i often operated as if antiblack social structures could be somehow, if not modified, then at least managed. Part utopia and part willful ignorance, this orientation provided a type of activist sustenance whose practice contradicted the sociological evidence presented in chapter 1, the antiblack underpinnings of the lifeworld of social death presented in the Introduction, and as we will see in this chapter, the insights the youths shared in writing and action. Weaving its way around these three axes (social dynamics within the facility, the writing in the chapbooks, and the ideological terrain), this chapter grapples with the narratives of redemption the youth, the institution, and we the facilitators utilized, negotiated, and often revised. How do these narratives of redemption emerge? What purpose do they serve? If and when they produce counter-­narratives, what do they suggest? Although narratives of redemption operate from diverging political perspectives, most have in common the assumption that the incarcerated youth can be reintegrated into society as legitimate, autonomous, productive, and mindful individuals. In a state of confinement where Latin@ kids are the numeric majority but Black kids are by far the most intensely overrepresented, paying attention to how narratives and counter-­narratives of redemption resonate in and between these two groups will highlight some of the effects of shared warehousing. What do Black and Brown kids’ similar and/or divergent responses to narratives of redemption indicate about their collective experiences and prospects? What are the points of recognition and disidentification between Latin@ and Black kids emerging out of the forced shared experience of incarceration? How are such interpersonal dynamics indicative of structuring antiblackness? • • • The writing workshop conducted in the juvenile facility was part of Save Our Youth (SOY), an initiative the poet and activist xicaníndio raúlsalinas developed in previous decades and implemented in schools and juvenile justice institutions throughout Texas.3 Engaging poetry and music

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as means to facilitate debate, the workshop was designed to encourage critical thinking, foster confidence, and cultivate awareness. Officially, the workshop aimed at building “self-­esteem and develop verbal/written communication and conflict resolution skills.”4 Depending on the semester, the workshop lasted eight to ten weeks. Each week, we conducted two ninety-­minute sessions at the detention facility, where youths between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, arranged in gender-­segregated units, served sentences averaging about twelve months. Sequentially organized according to a syllabus, each workshop followed a similar structure: short stories and poems were read; a discussion about them ensued, wherein main themes were identified and debated; individually and in groups, the youths wrote about one of the emerging themes; the writings were shared among the young people and the facilitators; and performative readings of the day’s work concluded the session. My role was to play bass during the sessions and at times facilitate discussions based on a theme, an author, or a poem. For example, on March 5, 2010, when discussing the ways in which the personal connects to the collective, Rene Valdez and Czarina Thelen selected the lyrics of “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Rene, Czarina, and the youths then proceeded to take turns reading the poem while i presented them with different melodic lines and rhythms. The reading became a musical, collective, and coordinated event. A discussion on the process of writing ensued, which was then followed by an analysis of the social conditions described in the lyrics. We asked how the social problems Grandmaster Flash addressed in the late 1970s related to issues the young people today encountered in their communities. Based on recurring themes the youths brought up—­unemployment, poverty, teenage pregnancy, violence, and imprisonment—­we asked how they, the youth, could positively affect their communities. The young people were then instructed to write about these themes. They could relate the themes to personal experience; they could create related fictional stories; in short, they were free to go wherever they wanted, as long as they engaged the collective discussion. Most chose to write about the problems rather than the solutions, an interesting trend given the overall optimistic approach not only we, the facilitators, employed, but also the staff, who, as we will see, at times joined in the activities and discussions. Many of the youths who participated in our workshops were later transferred to a halfway house, the last stage before release. The mural

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that youths in the halfway house collectively painted with the assistance of community organizers (Figure 4) provides a visual representation of many themes discussed in the workshops: schools as prisons, prisons as schools, and their ubiquitous presence in their neighborhoods; AIDS and HIV, gambling, gangs, and the allure of money; the belief in education (i.e., that the closed fist that holds a diploma is able to break the chain, and supposedly end the cycle of poverty and imprisonment); the valuing of family, Christian religious iconography, and indigenous traditions; popular mobilization (“Sí, se puede” and a mural of Cesar Chavez attract one’s gaze to the back of the mural); as well as free time, contact with nature, and utopian representations of physical and imaginative projects. The heart, limbs, roots, and branches that fuse together in the mural’s center connect the different scenes and temporalities (tradition, confinement, spirituality, and the yet to be) and affirm struggle as a condition and as a process—­“En Lucha.” Multilayered, the space of the barrio is wretchedness as it is redemption; it is confinement as it is transcendence; it is a space whose temporalities suggest both unfreedom and freedom;

Figure 4. SOY mural, 2013, Resistencia Bookstore, Austin. Photograph by Rene Valdez. Reprinted by permission.

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dispossession and repossession; the space of the barrio is embattled, confined, yet triumphant. The ghetto represented in the mural, enclosed in barbed wire and a brick wall, is a Latin@ ghetto, a barrio. Whether the Latin@ barrio and the Black ghetto, via the forced passage of young people into institutions of confinement, become comparable, and perhaps conversant—­this is an overarching question organizing the chapter. This question builds on the analysis of the mechanics of incarceration presented in chapter 1, and specifically focuses on the dynamics and effects of Black and Brown forced coexistence in spaces of confinement defined by unique demographic traits. Among those traits is a Latin@ numeric majority coexisting with a Black overrepresentation. What, if any, lines of communication, and social and ontological recognition, occur between Black and Brown people in a juvenile facility that feeds from and spits out young people? To what extent, if any, are Latin@ lifeworld tropes, as represented in the mural, an indication of communicability with Black experiences? Is the mural an indication of a foundational Blackness shared and embodied by Latin@s who see themselves, transgenerationally, occupying structural positions analogous to those of Blacks?5 Or, as was intimated at the end of chapter 1, is the mural, and especially its attention to redemption, an illustration of Brown oblique identification toward Blacks? Does the mural confirm a fundamentally distinct, noncommensurable Black positionality vis-­à-­vis that of nonblacks, including Latin@s? Or can we speak of both oblique identification and incommensurability? The metaphor of an asymptotic relationship may be useful for reflecting on how Black and Brown experiences relate to each other. According to a geometry formulation, an asymptote of a curve is a line whose distance to the curve tends toward zero as both the asymptote and the line tend toward infinity. In Figure 5, the x and y axes are the asymptotes of the curve. The curve is graphed based on the equation y = 1/x, where x is other than zero. My intent is not to reduce social interaction to mathematical entities. Rather, it is to use the graph as a rudimentary conceptual analogy to show how the collective trajectory of Latin@s, which we can approximate as the curve, may become increasingly closer to the collective trajectory of Blacks, which we can approximate as the asymptotes. The asymptote metaphor may help us grasp some of the dimension of oblique identification. Consider the curve. As the values of x augment, the y values become

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Figure 5. A curve and its asymptotes.

increasingly infinitesimal, suggesting a point at which the curve will almost touch the x and y axes. If we imagine the increasing proximity between the asymptote and the curve as representing a possible process in time, then we can further extrapolate from the graph and suggest the following: given enough time—­given enough opportunities for the expansive antiblack cycles of surveillance and dispossession to actualize themselves and affect nonblack constituencies; given enough forced interaction between social groups distinctively positioned in the structure of U.S. antagonisms,6 which in turn would affect the very structure of positionalities—­ Latin@s and Blacks begin to share an increasing number of experiences. Over time, according to this model, Latin@ and Black experiences will become close enough to be commensurate. Hypothetically—­and this is a working proposition i will test when analyzing the experiences of incarcerated Black and Brown kids—­identification, even if oblique, takes place. It is the passage of time in close proximity to, and indeed within, Black ghettos that allow students of Latin@ social dynamics to take a step beyond recognition and affirm that, in certain places such as Houston, the common experience of subjection leads to a “fusion of Black and Latino subjectivities.” A “trans-­individual subjectification,” this fusion is able to “overrun the grasp of . . . biopower and should be understood, in Michael Hardt’s . . . terms, as a form of ‘biopolitical militancy.’ ”7

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The possibility of common experiences between Black and Latin@ youth is not equal to the possibility of a change in the structure of antiblack positionality. As discussed in the Introduction, the structure of positionality shapes experience and its representation. In this structure, vis-­à-­ vis the nonblack, the Black is the absent presence, abject yet fundamental in the establishment of all nonblack positionalities. The demographic and ethnographic data examined here suggest that, despite common experiences of segregation and punishment, the stark and subtle differences in Black and Latin@ trajectories indicate distinct logics informing their experiences. When and if there is experiential convergence between Blacks and nonblacks, rather than an ontological “fusion,” this convergence indicates a temporary approximation. This temporary convergence is not so much an indication of an inflection in the antiblack structure of positionality as it is evidence of how this structure produces distinct logics. Thus, it is not the suggestion of a smooth progression toward an eventual encounter that is useful in the graph. Rather, the graph as an allegory is interesting because, just as the idea of a line and a curve becoming joined in the infinite requires abstraction, so is the idea of Blacks and Latin@s becoming connected by a common subjectivity. Indeed, neither the actual “touching” of the asymptotes and the curves can be represented graphically, nor the merging of Latin@ identities into a “foundational Black” identity can be assumed, much less demonstrated. It does not escape me that, in fact, the asymptote analogy works more effectively for the argument about the ultimate incommensurability of the structural Black positionality, itself a product and example of the afterlife of slavery:8 as the lines and curves don’t touch, so the Black and nonblack positionalities never intersect, and neither do the nonblack acknowledge, let alone recognize, the Black subject. Nothing seems more distant from this configuration than the idea of a nonblack–­Black subjective fusion. Still, for the sake of an analysis that proceeds without guarantees, and so that the structural argument is not made impermeable to and overdeterminant of social processes, i want to leave open the possibility that, over time, the accumulation of actual lived experiences affects the map of structural positionalities. This possibility, as discussed in this book’s introduction, is dismissed on the theoretical and experimental grounds that (a) social processes have shown to have no bearing on the structural map of relationalities, fixed as the tableau on which modern subjectivities emerged and continue to operate (think of the enduring socially shared,

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transracial, subliminal Black–­ape association); (b) the Black position and the accompanying antiblack violence are foundational to all other positions, and that all other positions, therefore, depend on the Black subject’s absent presence; and finally (c) the Black position is irreducible to other positions and ontologies.9 By allowing for input into this otherwise structure-­centered theory of relational positionalities organized by and dependent on antiblackness, we are potentially able to further reflect on the theoretical significance and applicability of social death theses,10 and grapple with ongoing social processes of forced proximity and their impact on what it means to be Black, non-­Black, anti-­Black, and ante-­Black. Let us move into the juvenile prison. • • • To pass through the doors and checkpoints of the youth facility is to experience increasing layers of surveillance and dispossession. These mark thresholds of intensified isolation, from the “free,” as the young people call the world outside the facility, to the residential units, where individual bedrooms, the shared bathrooms and shower, the time-­out solitary cell, and the permanent flickering of fluorescent lights demarcate confinement spaces. Linking the free and the unfree, corridors, multiple doors, combination codes, surveillance stations, and closed-­circuit cameras and monitors make apparent each increasing level of separation from the outside world. To reach the unit is to be reminded of the many layers of isolation and dispossession defining the experience of incarceration. The reverse trajectory, from the lockup unit to the “free,” should, in theory, have the opposite effect—­that of peeling off layers of sedimented surveillance and punishment on the captive bodies. Yet it does not: the walk back to the “free” brings with it an added awareness of the unfreedoms in/of the inside, the unfree, as well as the unfreedoms in/of the outside, the supposedly free. This impression was shared not only among us, the facilitators, but also, more important, was relayed by many of the formerly detained young people. TK, one of the youths we kept in touch with after his release, often remarked on how behavior protocols, instilled in him while inside the facility, emerged in unexpected ways in his routine after incarceration: the brisk, early morning waking up, followed by the mechanical tidying up of his bed and room; the robotic search for a line to join; the urge to assign himself a number he’d be prepared to utter out loud; the anxious expectation of reprimand shouted by a staff member; the avoidance of

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eye contact with authority figures; and hands going automatically to his back while thumbs and index fingers formed a diamond shape. Leave the prison you may, but the prison hardly leaves you. Over time, beyond the facility, the protocols of subjection experienced while incarcerated gain dimensions that far exceed the period one spends confined. It’s not just muscle memory, reflex behavior, and anxiety that remain. These residue conditionings dilute into, and become expanded by, a myriad of similar protocols kids are likely to experience at school, in the streets, and in their homes. The free, after all, is already populated by forms of degradation that render prison rituals mere satellites in a vast constellation of related forces of control and punishment (see Figure 3). Even though a juvenile’s record is sealed and in theory is immaterial to a person’s adulthood, the experience of early institutionalization makes it that she will be three times more likely to enter the adult prison system than a juvenile without that experience.11 Despite the trauma it causes, early imprisonment is not a drastic inflection point in the child’s life. Rather, early imprisonment is part of a cyclical continuum in which the prison’s rituals are sequel to and preparation for the brutality that the child is likely to experience before incarceration and once thrown back in the “free.” Already saturated with the logic and practices of confinement, the free, including schools, is itself the blueprint for imprisonment. And imprisonment invariably affects one’s future experience in the “free.”12 In what follows, i approach Rene Valdez’s “Praying for Freedom,” published in I Come from a Teardrop, together with the writings of kids who participated in our writing sessions, as an ethnographic account of the workshops. Valdez’s descriptions catalog frictions, small victories, and the larger dreams informing and emerging out of the time spent with the youths: Sliding past first line of personnel, We are led down a hall. Us—­a ragtag army carrying bent pens, torn paper, & an upright bass . . . Thick steel doors with small rectangular windows Separate us from locked-­up Black and Brown youth. With a single turn of their skeleton key,

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We enter a chamber Where they do their time.13 Our passage through the facility’s entrance, to the various internal checkpoints, and finally to the unit, was usually hurried and clumsy. It was not only the large objects we carried that made the walk awkward. Depending on the unit we were going to visit, after the obligatory pat down, we’d get in the elevator, wait for clearance, go up a few floors, wait in a chamber, face the closed-­circuit cameras and security control room, and wait again for another clearance. To coordinate our escort, staff spoke with one another on walkie-­talkies: “Poetry group, three people coming in.” “All clear.” We were then led through long corridors, cream colored, shiny floors, no windows, and a few heavy, large metal doors, each an entrance to a unit. We’d catch glimpses of scenes revealing the uninterrupted flow of incarceration producing abundant raw material, the prisoners themselves: young people whose presence in those spaces at first seemed deeply incongruous. Scene 1: three men staff escort a very young-­looking Latino kid, who could not have been older than thirteen, much shorter than the staff, shackled at his ankles, waist, and wrists. He avoids our gaze; we meet again in the unit. Scene 2: the visiting room. Young men in their green or khaki jumpsuits, white socks, and cream plastic slippers talk to people whose physical resemblance suggest they are relatives: mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, grandparents. Most are Latin@; a few Black families; every now and then a White family. Their gazes are low, their voices hushed. An unarmed guard monitors them, but there is no need for warnings. Some of the young people cry and are consoled by their elders. The rituals seem well-­known. The uneasy yet fluid choreography suggests familiarity with the scenes. As we, the facilitators, experience our apprehensive and hurried ritual of passage unfold, we don’t immediately process the brutal, transgenerational, and widespread reach of the juvenile system so forcefully illustrated in those fleeting scenes. Instructed to stop in front of our unit, we watch the staff member take out his skeleton key, and we enter: . . . Scratching symbols on paper praying for freedom—­ freedom from this madness, letting go of this sadness.

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we tell them who we are and why we are here—­ to learn how to be human again . . . are we not human? One youth asks if they thought you was human would you really be here?—­is what I want to tell him but “staff ” sits there—­ Just watching. Watching every move, listening to every word & note.14 Once in the units, we the visitors conducted our workshops under the ever present gaze of staff workers, cameras, and the youth, who practiced their own form of sousveillance.15 The units were divided by gender and type of offense. Our session usually began with a few youths helping the facilitators arrange metal tables together to produce a larger table around which we all sat. Meanwhile, one of the staff would summon the other kids to come out of their rooms, which, together with the staff ’s offices, bathrooms, and the solitary cell, were arranged around the common area. “Drop out of your rooms! Drop out of your rooms!” the staff yelled. The kids would then appear, reluctant, dragging their feet. Besides their reluctance to follow the staff ’s orders, the young people had in common what seemed like a permanent somnolence. Over the years, it became evident that most kids were heavily medicated. The nurse’s visits to the unit and the administration of medication soon became part of the workshops’ routine. Some of the conversations between the youths and the nurse, even with the music and chatter, were perfectly audible, so it was often collectively known who was being treated for what condition. Bruises, cuts, acne, fungus, colds, headaches, stomachaches, lice, and other minor conditions were closely monitored and treated. It was not difficult to gather that many of the kids were also being treated for psychological problems, including anxiety and depression. Those conditions were not discussed as openly. But occasionally, concerned about a child’s gloomy mood, staff would ask in front of other children whether he had been taking his medication regularly, and whether the child noticed

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any improvement in his mood. “Keep taking your medication, things will get better,” i heard staff say a few times to dejected-­looking young people. To introduce ourselves and convey to the kids that we were trying to create a safe space, one where they’d be able to enter candid dialogue with their peers and with us the facilitators, we explained how Save Our Youth came about. We talked about raúlsalinas, his origins in San Antonio, and his youth in East Austin, which we emphasized knowing most of the kids came from that area. We discussed raúlsalinas’s experience in the U.S. prison system following a few arrests for drug possession. Drawing parallels between his life path and that of other activists who had spent time incarcerated like Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Ramona Africa, and Safiya Bukhari, we suggested that one’s confinement provided evidence from which to reflect on the social world, and formulate both a critique and a plan of action. The idea was to empower the youths via critical thinking, making them less vulnerable to what often seemed like inevitable outcomes in their lives: school suspension and expulsion, unemployment, police harassment, and incarceration. Reflecting on the lives of raúlsalinas and other activists, the discussions provided the youths with examples of study they could initiate while inside and action they could take once back in their communities. We pressed the point that incarceration, as indeed life marked by imposed marginalization (punishing, uncaring schools; underserved, polluted, violent neighborhoods), was part of a continuum of institutionalized dehumanization. As we stressed severance from social netthe dispossession effects of confinement—­ works, exclusion from formal employment, added social stigma, higher likelihood of future incarceration—­we also tried to provide the kids with a perspective of their personal trajectory that was intimately linked to the trajectories of other people in their communities. Interconnectedness was graspable: the young women and men were quick to recall family members and friends who had experienced incarceration. Many of those young people had kids of their own, or were expecting children. Some of the young women were pregnant; others struggled with the separation from their infants. To reconnect, to remember, and to be able to articulate a critical perspective on their condition: these forms of conscious agency, we suggested to the young people, were as much about reclaiming their forcibly suspended humanity as they were about making more attainable their survival, in and out of the facility. At first, the young people seemed apathetic; their rare smiles were shy,

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tentative; when they happened to shake off what seemed like a perpetual lethargy, they’d soon become exhausted again. Yet, when successful in reaching them, even if temporarily, we the facilitators noticed how much the young people craved attention, recognition, acceptance. When they finished a piece of writing and asked one of us to read it, or they read it aloud, their hopeful, momentarily excited yet hesitant gaze, their crisp yet uncertain movements, their enthusiastic yet fearful eyes betrayed intense experiences of bodily abuse, including sexual and psychological brutality. In their manner and in their writings emerged frequent experiences of neglect and violence, symbolic and physical, perpetrated on them by teachers, school administrators, police officers, counselors, peers, and family members. The young people were eager to be recognized, accepted, embraced, to have their truths acknowledged. Their enthusiasm—­precious yet fragile enthusiasm—­was a commentary on and an emergent critique of their experiences at school, in their communities, in the detention facility: experiences that were often defined by, precisely, nonrecognition, isolation, cruelty, imposed disposability. To witness these evanescent moments of self and mutual re-­cognition and re-­membering was daunting. Transparent joy materialized out of the simple yet rare moments when the kids felt cared for, guided, engaged. But transience was the best we could hope for—­the workshop would soon be over, and who knows what would happen next. Besides, the writing and dialogue sessions had a potentially perverse side effect: providing a channel through which the young people examined their own lives, described painful moments, recognized personal shortcomings, and formulated social analyses, the sessions also rendered them more vulnerable. Because they read their writings out loud, some of their fears, weaknesses, and longings became collective knowledge and, as it happened a few times, were used by other kids as means of ridicule and contempt. Their budding articulation of social critique made them more sensitive to, and often more assertive against, the workings of the youth prison. So, on the one hand, the kids became increasingly eager to share their newfound insights, wanting to communicate with other kids and, occasionally, with the friendlier staff. On the other hand, because they seemed more curious, assertive, and aware, our kids became more susceptible to institutional retaliation. As they vocalized against the wrongs they perceived in the detention facility, they were promptly reminded of where they were: a place that was extremely hierarchical and structured against, precisely, the kids’

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expressions of autonomous agency, including critiques of the detention facility. The performance of some of the sentences they carefully crafted over a few weeks—­sentences full of personal and collective truths and critique—­occasionally led them to insubordination and to solitary confinement, which ended up adding time to their incarceration sentences. Still, we pressed forward. Our calculation and hope was that, first, the critical insights and self-­confidence gained in those precious moments outweighed the potential side effects, and second, those gains would generate other insights, would affect other people, and would remain with them. And to provide a bridge between our sessions and the time when the kids were released, from day one we emphasized our commitment to reconnect with each one of them in the “free.” In many sessions, we mentioned Resistencia Bookstore in Austin, gave them contact information, and encouraged them to show up. We offered internships, social networks, and support, explaining how those could aid in the young people’s quest for work, and to expand their social circles: . . . Just watching. Watching every move, listening to every word & note. That’s my rhythm—­a young Mexica says enraptured, Smiling as fingers thump a sick Coltrane bass line: A Love Supreme. A Love Supreme. breaks thru this thick smoke of violence & abuse of yes-­Sir’s and no-­Sir’s and can-­I-­get-­up-­to-­get-­my-­notebook-­Sir and can-­I-­get-­up-­to-­go-­to-­the-­john-­Sir and do what i say as soon as i say or go straight to solitary. raw bass sounds disturb this physical and spiritual brutality awakening consciousness—­ shakin’ em up outta bondage.

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Time is suspended getting at the cut of eternity. Rhythms—­wordsnotes—­chants—­prayers, for a moment, Breathe . . . We Shape-­shift into spiritual vessels: Spitting their slang about surviving the streets, Hustling for a quick dime Busting into homes on the run. In there they don’t get to feel the sun on their skin. Our circle is broken by random searches—­ rummaging through their personal belongings, looking between mattresses, pulling up the sheets, even thumbing through notebooks and underwear We tell them to focus on words and rhythm. They can’t corrupt our circle of strength—­I tell them. They find nothing—­no weapons, no drugs, no contraband. Just family photos and letters folded in books. One of the Chicanitos reflects—­for some strange reason, the music “goes” with the searches like in a movie . . .

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keep goin’ and the cipher continues like Black improvisational music what is it? A Coltrane solo as a form of freestylin’. Uninterrupted laughter A young brother tells us the music calms him.16 It bears repeating that the sessions took place under conditions of acute surveillance. We were under the constant, attentive watch of staff: male staff in the boys’ units, female staff in the girls’ units. The staff members were White, Black, and Brown women and men whose age varied from their mid-­twenties to their sixties. Each session started with the staff asking that one of the kids say a pledge, which another kid would then repeat. Those pledges were variations around a general pattern: “I pledge to respect my peers and staff, speak in turn, pay attention to the facilitators, avoid the glorification of crime and gangs, and avoid inappropriate language.” At least two staff oversaw our sessions. In the young women’s units, one of the staff looked over the entire group, usually on a chair removed from the circle we formed; the other staff sat next to young women in greater need of assistance due to medical conditions and/or reading and writing challenges. For example, a Latina young woman, fourteen years old, was having a difficult time adapting to the facility’s routine and being away from home. She seemed extremely detached and depressed during the writing sessions’ first few weeks, cried constantly, and barely participated. A staff member—­a White woman in her late forties—­sat near her, patiently tried to help, and calmly accompanied the young woman to her room or the bathroom, and mediated the conversation with the nurse. Such moments of seeming genuine concern, especially between women staff and young women, were not rare. They reflected institutional guidelines according to which “the juvenile correctional system places an emphasis on rehabilitation. Even when it is necessary to incarcerate youth, the setting is not punitive but rather is protective and designed to educate youth about discipline, values, and work ethics thus guiding them toward becoming productive citizens.”17 Staff behavior seemed to reflect the assumption that, even in confinement, the youths still possess that which

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defines their ontology: their theoretically extended and plastic, malleable personalities. They can be educated, guided, taught to be responsible—­in other words, they can be rehabilitated, reinserted in society as productive, law-­abiding subjects. A better future is theirs to be conquered. No limits exist to their accomplishments. Or so it seemed. It is quite telling that only once, over the years we conducted the writing sessions, did i hear a staff member explicitly demonstrate frustration about a youth that was allegedly beyond rehabilitation. In the staff ’s word, the young Black man, who constantly challenged his overseers, was “a criminal and not a child.” Still, this exceptional moment of staff unselfconscious frustration brought home the norm. Insofar as the codes by which staff are supposedly governed stress potentialities yet to be actualized, they reveal surprisingly idealistic traits. Engineered to structure the very dystopian spaces of confinement where they are practiced, such idealistic traits, however, reflect a complicated orientation, which, after all, is coterminous with the social protocols and physical boundaries that constitute the circles of surveillance and dispossession with which the youths are so familiarized. Yet, as this orientation stresses and indeed generates practices that point to a yet-­to-­be-­realized future, it suggests an approach hardly distinguishable from those of progressive camps whose politics (like those of the facilitators) are, in theory, diametrically opposed to that of the juvenile prison. After all, we, too, stressed potentialities, becoming, a future re-­membered, re-­constituted, autonomous. It is hardly surprising that a repressive institution employs concepts that negate, or at the very least render compassionate, its practices of dispossession and confinement. The naturalization of imprisonment, and in particular that of young people, depends on this and other similar ideological processes by which the time and spatial experiences in confinement are represented as ultimately beneficial to both the incarcerated and to those who are not. Still, there is a puzzling symbiosis between official clichés of juvenile confinement and that which the incarcerated youth, as well as those of us who work with them, believe in and want to implement. If only accidental, temporary, or strategic, the symbiosis is a vexing problem for it forces us to confront the political nature of our interventions in less forgiving ways. Indeed, it compels us to interrogate the very nature and definition of politics. What happens when we, supposedly oppositional people and organizations, as well as those incarcerated, share with the carceral

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institution concepts such as personal responsibility, community accountability, taking charge of the future, and hope?18 The question becomes more complex when we recognize that, by cultural default, by force of hegemonic consensus, the range of interpretations open to political actors in this particular field—­staff, prisoners, program facilitators (us)—­is limited, and therefore, even if originating from distinct political camps, the traffic between and fusion of meanings is intense. If the intended meanings are different, even oppositional to start with, they become jumbled up in the commonsensical ideological melting pot. For example, we, the organizers, wanted to help the kids get jobs when they were released. And so did staff: they provided educational and job-­training programs intended precisely to help released youth be absorbed in the ranks of formal labor. Even though we the facilitators had critical analyses of the gendered and racial inequalities of the job market, we made efforts to provide kids with social networks, mostly around the bookstore, that would give them a chance of finding employment outside not only the minimum-­wage tracks (knowing full well that even low-­paying jobs were scarce) but also the informal and so-­called illegal economy. We reasoned that personal connections with lawyers, teachers, professors, artists, and independent entrepreneurs, like the bookstore caretakers, would improve the kids’ chances of staying out of the reach of the carceral system. That the juvenile facility staff was perfectly fine with our post-­confinement arrangement—­and indeed encouraged it—­indicated that, after all, we shared with them similar views on how to break the cycle of incarceration. In our twice-­a-­week meetings, there were many examples of the ways our own meanings and purposes fused with those of the staff. On Saturday, November 13, 2010, as we talked with a group of young women about community involvement, intervention, and change, the staff member in charge, a middle-­aged White woman who had overseen our work since 2008, and who, in this period of time, went from begrudgingly tolerating us to trying to help us, decided to take part in the discussion circle. The staff member openly supported the idea of community involvement, and enthusiastically suggested that young women join or start local discussion groups and political organizations. Making herself the fourth facilitator, the staff member earnestly engaged the ensuing discussion about the problems in the communities from where the youths came. She supported the youths’ desire for improved, more nurturing schools, free of violence. Especially interesting was the staff ’s apparent support of our effort to

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denounce the repressive aspects of zero-­tolerance educational policies and the ways they contributed to those young people’s incarceration. How do we begin to understand and break up this ideological symbiosis? Are we to believe, after all, that caring staff members reflect a humanitarian institutional architecture? Or is there something more complicated and nefarious going on? Let us remember that as part of a cycle of transgenerational dispossession, juvenile confinement is anything but humanitarian, much less progressive—­it is indeed a node in a web of constantly self-­replenished, biased institutional practices that are rendered naturalized, acceptable (at least to the broader public), and redemptive. These practices and their ideological justification, which produce the concrete effect of moving bodies between already confined spaces of dispossession (the ghetto, the school, the prison) until they are finally deposited in cemeteries after comparatively shorter lives of disproportionate suffering, are quite dystopian. The point is this: independently of what is stated in TJJD’s bylaws, regardless of the caring staff (and keep in mind that not all staff are caring—­far from it), the data we analyzed unambiguously show that juvenile incarceration produces consistent discriminatory patterns, and indeed requires and feeds a cycle of antiblack, gendered, racialized disadvantages closely tied to where one is born, lives, and goes to school. Rather than the stated intentions that appear in the institution’s self-­descriptions, and individual staff behaviors, which are at times indeed compassionate, what is relevant when reflecting on the juvenile prison’s orientation are its accumulated and recurring effects over time. How do we begin to critically understand the workings of a perverse institution that routinely employs and encourages redemption tropes—­an institution that often sounds and looks like its precise opposite, an institution that functions through the work of seemingly well-­meaning and caring people? An entry point for analysis—­where this façade begins to crack—­is the revealing fact that the staff seldom paid much attention to what we the facilitators said to the kids. Their attention was squarely on what the youths were doing and saying, or not doing and not saying. Gang signs, fidgety behavior, inappropriate looks, and a host of other demeanors, including speaking Spanish, were the object of swift and routine reprehension. When, in 2009, we proudly showed the staff and their supervisor, a Black woman very much supportive of our program, the first chapbook, Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? featuring the young people’s writings done in our workshop series the year before, we were deluged with a series of

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questions and accusations. Caught by surprise, at first we thought the objections were against the introduction, where Czarina Thelen unapologetically linked the young people’s incarceration to patterns of U.S. structural racism. We were wrong. The administrator and staff ’s vehement frustration had to do with the many allusions to gangs they saw in the chapbook. From the cover, to many of the drawings depicting gang clothing, deportment, and slang, and to the actual naming of gangs and gang territories in the poetry, the chapbook was deemed inappropriate. We the facilitators thought the incident would be the end of our sessions. But since we strategically apologized, and we were one of the few among the many groups that worked at the facility that did not charge a fee,19 we were allowed to continue our workshops provided that we were more vigilant about preempting any kind of “gang glorification,” as the institutional jargon put it. It is this intolerant disposition toward the youths that allows us to zero in on the dystopian nature of youth incarceration, despite its apparent, mostly discursive friendliness to notions of education, reform, and redemption. To focus on these types of quotidian staff interventions allows a finer appreciation of profoundly authoritarian practices. When thought of as part of the same universe of control protocols, repressive interventions and progressive tropes render each other that much more appealing and effective. Control protocols, and indeed authoritarian demands, when framed as part of the effort to reform and educate, gain a veneer of compassion; and tropes of reform and redemption, when coexisting or applied with repressive measures, suggest a pragmatic, rational, we-­do-­ this-­for-­your-­benefit type of approach. So the genuine concern, and even occasional affection, between the staff and the youth, need not be considered exceptional behaviors in an otherwise brutal institution. To the contrary, the juvenile institution’s brutality—­the brutality that it assumes and generates—­and the greater collectively sanctioned and historically inflicted cycle of brutality of which it is a part, are so effective and pervasive precisely because they are able to weave into their operational machines very recognizable, often authentic, expressions of care. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the most palpable aspect of the juvenile facility, as we shall see below, is death. As staff carefully watches the youths, death is as present as the brutal dystopia the juvenile facility embodies. • • •

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Bass lines created a sonic membrane around our workshop participants. Not only a rhythmic and melodic accompaniment to the reading and writing, this sonic membrane was also meant as a barrier to shield the youths and us from noise coming from the staff. Telephone and walkie-­talkie rings and conversations; the constant clatter, near and far, of heavy doors opened and closed; the movement of personnel and chained inmates circulating in and out of our room, including the nurse’s seemingly caring yet imperative administration of drugs during which she demanded that the youths raise their tongues and keep their mouths open to make sure the drug was ingested—­all such noises were constant, predictable events around us.20 They were part of the everyday mechanics of the detention center. Even the moments that seemed, at first, examples of crisis—­fights among the young people, or between them and the staff, often leading to solitary confinement; and the occasional unannounced searches, when all rooms and personal belongings were combed—­even those became routine. There was also a more vaporous noise that came from staff walking behind the young people to check on what they were writing, staff gazes and gesticulations that indicated inappropriate behavior or imminent reprimand, and signs and looks of all sorts (friendly, flirting, menacing, defiant, jocular) traded among the young people that interfered with the workshop. Over time, the facilitators and i came to rely on recognizable bass lines that would bring back the youths to the tasks at hand, and isolate us from the staff ’s controlling impulses. One of those bass lines, from John Coltrane’s “Acknowledgment,” the opening movement of the A Love Supreme suite, became one of the young people’s favorites. We discussed Coltrane’s recorded performance as an example of collective collaboration and improvisation, rhythmic variation and precision, and political and spiritual work. We stressed his uncommon practice routine that often involved twelve to sixteen hours of daily dedication. At the end of a day’s writing session, when the kids were asked to read what they had come up with, I’d be asked to play the line. We experimented by having a few of the young people snapping their fingers on the second and fourth beats of a 4/4, mid-­tempo song, while others marked the quarter notes, and yet others were free to sprinkle the rhythms with random accents. However, these moments of focus, collaboration, and creativity were not shielded from the facility’s routine forms of control. As much as our writing groups managed to create and inhabit temporary spaces

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of sounds, words, and imagination in which, in Valdez’s words, “time is suspended,” reminders of where we were—­reminders that the kids were immersed in time of a much different quality—­often came crashing in as rude awakenings. • • • In a 2008 session in a boys’ unit, most of whom were there for drug offenses, the facilitators and i were still trying to find an optimal workshop design to engage the youths. We were at the beginning of our twelve-­week program. It was a large group: fourteen young men, eleven Latinos (including two born in Mexico), one White, and two Black. The staff unit leader, a White man in his mid-­forties, repeated a few times that they were “good kids, they get out of hand sometimes, and we do what we have to do, but most of them are smart, bright kids.” We quickly found out that the unit was quite embattled. When not overtaken by drowsiness or frustration, the kids were sharp. They were in constant disputes among themselves and with the staff. At first, they were unwilling to focus on the texts we brought and the activities we had planned, and instead used the sessions to test how far they could push the boundaries imposed by their overseers. (When we started our sessions, the kids saw us as yet another set of overseers.) They took turns asking to get water, to go to bathroom, to fetch belongings in their rooms—­anything to disrupt the session and get the staff ’s attention. If their intent was to get the staff to lose their cool, they eventually succeeded. At some point during our second session, when they were supposed to be writing about their communities, the kids managed to overwhelm the two staff members in charge that day. As one of the young Latinos left his chair to get water, another one made his way to the bathroom. The staff unit leader told the kid going to the bathroom, who at that point had taken a few steps away from our group, that he needed to go back, sit down, and put his hands on the table. Looking frustrated, the kid told the staff that he, the staff member, had given him permission, to which the staff member snapped and yelled, “Do as I say right now or go straight to solitary!” The Latino kid hesitated, looked at the staff member with contempt, and scanned the other kids for hints on what to do. He stopped walking but did not go back to his chair either. At that point, the staff unit leader, and the other staff member who until then had remained aloof writing notes on a desk nearby, stood up and ordered the kid into solitary. The unit leader warned that if the kid resisted he’d

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sound off the alert and call reinforcements. “Just go in and don’t make this worse for yourself,” the staff member said. A small, brightly lit cubicle with a concrete bed on top of which lay a thin mattress, the solitary cell was separated from the rest of the unit by a heavy door with a small window; it was located in the center of the unit. JG, the youth sent to solitary that day, did not resist the orders and entered the solitary cell calmly. As we continued our workshop, he stretched and tiptoed to peer through the door window. His grimaced gaze suggested helplessness and the onset of a deep sadness. Gone was the playful verve he and his peers displayed earlier. Gone was any kind of positive energy we the facilitators and the young men could muster for the remainder of the writing session. The last half hour was a strange concoction of silence in the group; JG’s ever present, contorted, and increasingly desperate gaze piercing through the small glass window; and now-­meaningless bass sounds interspersed with the sequential recitation of half-­baked lines of writing the young men had put together based on that day’s earlier discussion. Over the next few weeks, the facilitators and i slowly built some trust with the young men. Rene and Czarina brought in short, suggestive, good-­ sounding poetry; our sessions became more dynamic, participatory; a community activist, a formerly imprisoned Latino poet in his fifties, accepted our invitation to speak with and read for the kids, to talk about his time locked up, and share how writing poetry kept him sane, focused, and determined. We had decided that instead of playing the bass only during the reading parts of the workshops, I’d do so during most of the sessions. It became apparent that the music enhanced the sense of collective participation and protection. Even though not physically isolated from the unit and its staff, we nevertheless enjoyed a modicum of separation created by the sonic waves. Bass lines for mid-­tempo, twelve-­bar blues, in half time, usually started us off. I’d walk the half notes and occasionally have the kids snap their fingers in rhythm. Even those who did not make a sound would, invariably, immerse themselves in the communal cadence by either moving parts of their body or by simply relaxing. As the conversation got going, and the young men became absorbed in the exchanges, I’d double up and walk the quarter notes. Most of the time unnoticed, a melody and an improvised solo would follow. When the sessions switched gears—­from reading a poem to discussing it; from discussing to writing; or from writing to reciting—­there would be a corresponding change in

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the music. It happened frequently that kids would memorize certain tunes and ask for them when they were writing or when time came to deliver their words to the group. Sometimes they’d ask for specific beat patterns, by singing them or using their fingers, hands, and feet, which I’d try to follow while maintaining the chord and melodic structure of the songs i knew. Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology” and “Au Privave,” Miles Davis’s “All Blues” and “So What,” Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints,” “JuJu,” “Pinocchio,” “Fall,” and “Adam’s Apple,” Joe Henderson’s “Jinrikisha,” and John Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.” and “Equinox,” among many others, became part of the young people’s repertoire. Even when they did not remember the names of songs and composers, they’d ask for them by humming excerpts. I’d happily oblige. What happened next is registered in Valdez’s poem. The stanza that starts with “Our circle is broken by random searches” describes an unannounced search staff conducted without providing any justification. While the writing session was taking place—­and it happened to be one in which the young men and us the facilitators were absorbed in creative discussions about the ways in which schools and prisons interact—­three staff briskly entered our unit and proceeded to rummage each of the young men’s rooms. They lifted mattresses, separating them from sheets, squeezed pillows, opened books, and closely examined the kids’ few belongings. The young men and the facilitators momentarily stopped our activities, only to be told by the staff in charge to continue with our business and keep our eyes away from the rooms. The kids gave one another looks that seemed surprised at first, but then quickly became resigned; one of them noted, as i resumed playing a mid-­tempo funk groove, how the music gave the raid a perfect soundtrack: “For some strange reason, the music goes with the searches, like in a movie.” I interpret the search as both a reaction to our somewhat successful attempt at establishing a zone of dialogue with the young men, and a demonstration, by the facility’s staff, of their indisputable, unpredictable, and invasive powers. There would be no moment of respite; even though staff and service providers (us) seemed friendly and supportive, the kids were to be assured that they were dispossessed of time, space, and agency. The resulting immobility that many of the young men and women constantly talked about is addressed in the writing below, done by HP, a fifteen-­year-­ old Latino:

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Prayer I’m locked up ’cause there’s No movement in my space. I can’t see my family or friends. And it’s a disgrace. I can’t see the sunlight or Smell the fresh air I’m in a green suit and can’t Go nowhere. Except my gym, to exercise, But it’s a negative feeling and Vibe.21 Ubiquitous, the “negative feeling and vibe” defines confinement. The recourse to prayer, to a metaphysical realm, in this context is intimately tied to the realistic assessment that, once institutionalized, one is completely overwhelmed, overpowered, immobilized. Like other Latino and Black kids in his unit, HP often despaired at being confined: Dear Lord, I’m in residential. I shouldn’t be here ’cause I have too much potential.22 Although the narratives of redemption he heard in the facility supported his self-­assessment that he had “too much potential,” he found his forced immobilization unjust and often unbearable. In 2008 HP was a small child—­he was the one of whom we caught a glimpse when escorted through the corridors by two brutish guards. As on many similar occasions we witnessed inside the unit, the shackles around his ankles, waist, and wrists seemed utterly out of place not only because of his size, but also because of how much younger he seemed than the other fifteen-­year-­olds. His comparative youth, in turn, only rendered even more absurd those kids’ confinement—­they were, after all, just kids. And even without the

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incongruous chains, the kids were constantly restrained and punished by being forced in isolation either in their rooms or in the solitary cell. The fragile membranes of sounds and recognition we built during the writing sessions allowed for momentary breaks from the place’s overarching brutality. Yet the membrane was too easily breached. JZ, also fifteen in 2008, a Latino resident of the same boy’s unit, shared HP’s claustrophobic powerlessness. Like HP, he was able to both acknowledge and write about a painful past and yet muster hope for a life outside the cycles of dispossession that landed him in confinement. “Addicted to money,” as he wrote in one of his pieces, JZ wanted to find new directions: Growing up around crack houses, Dope fiends, and thieves, Look at me now: Stealing and smoking weed, . . . It’s still not too late. I’m only fifteen. I can still change my life And hope to succeed.23 There were two Black kids in this unit. They were quieter and did not interact much with the other youths. They did engage with the assignments, yet were transferred out of our unit before we could work with them on editing and preparing their writings for the chapbook. For this reason, their writings did not appear in Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? One of the Black youths, AJ, often acknowledged enthusiastically the poetry and music. After the search raid i described above, he noted, to the group’s silent agreement, that the music calmed him down. He was glad that while he was vulnerable to the staff ’s capricious decisions, in that particular episode he countered his anxiety with the soothing effect the music had on him. AJ’s demeanor and his writing, as i remember it, was not as boisterous as other kids’. Compared to those of the Latino kids, AJ’s poems had similar descriptions of drugs, violence, and a child he fathered and about whom he often wondered. Like many of the Latino kids, he, too, came from the 78723 zip code area. AJ’s reserved demeanor was partly due to his introspective nature. It was also a result of the Latino majority. Even though there were two,

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occasionally three, cliques that would, at different times, coalesce around charismatic young men, AJ, the other Black kid, and the one White kid, were outliers. AJ seemed confident in his capacity to engage abstract ideas and convey his own perspective in writing, as well as in his ability to navigate the facility’s environment and be part of a numeric racial minority. There were several Black staff members, most of them older than the unit leaders, and this Black presence may have created a sense of assurance for the Black kids. AJ, like the other Black youths, seemed more mature than most Latino kids. Still, besides his temperament, the demographics of the unit, and the considerable presence of Black staff, i suspect AJ’s marginal and more reserved position was also related to how he evaluated his own prospects after incarceration. While Latinos were able to both (a) express (and often brag about) their outlaw and morally questionable conduct, and (b) still genuinely believe in—­or at least write enthusiastically about—­ the hopes and tropes of redemption and personal transformation, such was not the case for Black kids. This difference between the ways in which Latino and Black youths related to narratives of redemption was subtle but important, as it correlated with the differentiated patterns of punishment in the juvenile system examined in chapter 1—­which in turn are part of a broader cycle of dispossession and surveillance that includes urban space, schools, and prisons. These differentiated patterns of punishment consistently disadvantage Blacks in ways measurably more intense and consistent than for Latin@s. Antiblackness is the fundamental principle informing and being reinforced by these patterns of punishment. AJ’s aloofness was an oblique commentary on how narratives of redemption work differently for differently situated youths: in the midst of the various forms of dispossession and vulnerability that emerged out of their writings, Latino youths seemed to have (or at least expected to have) the support of social networks—­mostly parents and relatives—­in ways that were not as evident for young Black men. In a pattern that will become more apparent when we engage the young women’s writings in the next chapter, the social damage caused by intergenerational dispossession was far greater, indeed of a distinct nature, for Black youth. Reflecting a historically persistent trend, incarcerated Black kids came from single-­parent families in far greater frequencies than did Latin@ kids; Black families were under greater institutional oversight than were Latin@ families; Black families were the most negatively affected by economic downturns; and Black kids had a

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far greater probability of finding themselves under state custody than did Latin@ kids.24 It is not only the criminal justice system, articulated with punitive schools as well as violent and underserved neighborhoods, that disproportionately affects Black people. As part of a cycle of dispossession and surveillance that includes a constellation of institutions, the foster care system provides yet another angle through which to analyze the specificity of the Black social condition. Over a decade ago Dorothy Roberts noted, “42 percent of children in foster care nationwide are Black, even though Black children constitute only 17 percent of the nation’s youth.” She continued, “Black families are the most likely of any group to be disrupted by child protection authorities. Black children even stand out from other minorities. Latino and Asian children are underrepresented in the national foster care population. Latino children make up only 15 percent children in foster care although Latino children now outnumber Blacks in the general population.”25 Young Black men’s comparative nihilism is thus grounded in an awareness and experience of social facts whose intensity and duration are without analogy. How does one start over in the same conditions of dispossession and expect to produce different outcomes? Latino youths did express skepticism and moments of utter rejection of hope, redemption, and their attending narratives, as JG did when he consciously chose to resist orders, obtaining with his insurrection a fleeting victory (he stood up against authority), which nevertheless amounted to a painful stay in solitary. CM, a Latino young man, wrote: Hell ain’t shit compared to life—­Protect me God it’s rough. If I should die b4 I wake, tell the world I came and went, my last wordz here was “Fuck the world”—­ Be strong and represent.26 CM’s familiarity with death, and the rejection of the social world that flippantly discards lives, would be an apt description of Black social life as social death.27 Recognized as social death, Latino social life, in the young Latino’s nihilistic perspective, becomes apparently commensurate to Black social life—­a point of contact in the asymptotic relationship between Latinos and Blacks. These moments of utter negation suggest possibilities of Latino recognition of the Black position. Do they, or can they, reveal

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structural convergence? In other words, while AJ’s aloofness can be read as a diagnosis of a collective and historic condition (even though AJ’s perspective is also built from his own specific experiences), can the same be said of CM’s revolt? Are CM’s revolt and his rejection of assimilation into normative sociality indications of a possible confluence between his lived experience and the structural characteristics that define social blackness? Are the forms of social death defining the juvenile facility grounds on which Latin@ and Black experiences, otherwise separated by distinct patterns of surveillance, punishment, and dispossession, become mutually recognizable? Is CM’s awareness of his social worthlessness an indication of oblique identification of Black social death? Most of the Latino young men we interacted with considered the door into lawful social integration not completely shut. Like HP, they believed in their potential, their future. Black male kids, despite their more obvious reticence about their prospects, also nurtured varied forms of guarded optimism beyond their time in confinement. Latino optimism surfaced in line with Latinos’ relative advantages vis-­à-­vis Blacks (social networks, the prospect of work and marriage, etc.); Black optimism surfaced despite Black foundational disadvantages. CM’s rebellion marks a point of potential articulation between his personal prognosis in the normative social world and the structural constraints defining Black social life of social death. CM’s experiences suggest oblique identification with imminently Black experiences. It is an oblique form of identification because it does not occur with the explicit mention or awareness of Black life; there are no attempts at drawing parallels between CM’s experience and that of Blacks. Yet CM’s narrative defines social death, the paradigmatic Black social condition. Whether this type of oblique identification can become actualized in effective recognition is difficult to establish. There were certainly moments of friendship between Black and Latino young men in confinement, yet most of the time the two groups remained distant from each other. Whether the common subjection Blacks and Latin@s experience translates into sustained and intentional articulation beyond the walls of confinement is also difficult to ascertain. The machine of confinement far exceeds the institutions of captivity. And although the machine indeed affects Blacks and Latin@s (and increasingly Whites), it does so in different ways for differently positioned bodies—­even when these bodies are removed from (and are returned to) the same zip codes. Zones of dispossession are not homogeneous and do not inevitably produce bridges

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of articulation. In trying to evaluate realistic possibilities of recognition, we must be attentive to the foundational social–­cognitive role the Black gendered body has in producing all other, nonblack positionalities, as discussed in the Introduction. A Latino recognition of the Black would necessitate a grasp of both Black experiences and their antiblack structural underpinnings. A Latino recognition of the Black would require an acknowledgment that, if and when Latino experiences converge with those of the Black, they remain distinct, informed by a logic that is related to antiblackness yet different than the logic that undergirds Black social death. The articulation of social death that at times emerges out of Latino experiences is a form of oblique identification with the Black because, while it engages experiential aspects that are defining of the Black condition, it is not able or willing to grapple with the structural aspects of antiblackness. Because oblique identification does not recognize the structural aspects of antiblackness, it is not able to distinguish between temporary experiential convergence and structural incommensurability. The analytical and political challenge is to be able to distinguish between oblique forms of Brown–­Black recognition and forms of recognition based on the actual acknowledgment, or even inhabitation, of the structural positionality defining blackness. Moreover, the challenge is to ask what are the analytical and political consequences of oblique identification in the context of ever expanding antiblack technologies of surveillance, confinement, and transgenerational dispossession. The next chapter, focusing on young Black and Latina women’s experiences while incarcerated, continues the exploration of oblique identification. Specifically, it asks how Latina and Black young women make sense of their experiences leading to, during, and after incarceration. What, if any, are the points of experiential commonality between Latina and Black detained girls? It must be remembered that, as interested as i am in the specific mechanics of youth incarceration in Austin, i also want to establish possible points of resonance between the United States and Brazil. Patterns of antiblackness drawn from the everyday dynamics of youth imprisonment in Austin will serve as references from which to investigate related patterns as they materialize in Rio de Janeiro. To focus on antiblackness is to inquire about its transhistorical, diasporic, and structural manifestations.

3

Negotiating Quotidian Violence and Uncertain Futures Narratives from Black and Latina Girls

Juvenile incarceration reveals a logic of gendered antiblackness; it is a product and precursor of social dynamics of cumulative and transgenerational exclusion. While chapter 2 showed the impact of such dynamics on Black and Latino boys—­and the ways in which their performance of racialized gender reveals embattled, related, yet differentiated relationships to the social world—­this chapter focuses on the gendered and racialized experiences of Black and Latina girls. Specifically, it analyzes the young women’s representations of their own experiences as indications of divergent and shared fates as they occur in social geographies (including state institutions) of hypersurveillance and dispossession. In a landscape characterized by social death—­ubiquitous violence, imposed dishonor, and genealogical and social isolation—­how do young women make sense of their condition? How do they explain their incarceration, what do they make of the institution of confinement, and what do they expect when thrown back in the “free”? Furthermore, what are the points of experiential contrast and contact between Black and Latina young women? When and if there is oblique identification between them, what are the terms, what is the process, and what are the meanings of such forms of (re)cognition? I ask again the question i raised about Black and Latino young men: Is the asymptote analogy useful when reflecting on these forms of oblique identification between Black and Latina young women? It is also important to keep in mind that young women’s quotidian of incarceration in Austin is, until proven otherwise, indicative of structuring antiblackness and its corresponding social dynamics. Structural and dynamic aspects of antiblackness far exceed the time and place of the Austin juvenile prison. Indeed, they will serve as points of reference with relation to which, in Part II, related events will be investigated in Brazil.

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Despite Hard Times By DF I come from the ghetto. I come From how do I put it . . . Struggles Hard work, Loyalty, Money. I was Never a child. I was Never dumb. I was Always in trouble, Always gone. I stayed in school: Education is important. I come from LBJ. Making the wrong decision: Mama on the run, Daddy in jail. I had no choice. Gone for 6 months to a Place that I hate So I stole just to Be happy & Keep lil’ bro home safe. But if I could do it again I would change nothing at all, b/c through my downfalls I overcome it all It’s messed up I know, But if I keep my head and Just stay strong,

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I’ll make it through this world Independent and strong. Ima always take care of mine Despite hard times.1 “Despite Hard Times” points to a young Black woman’s experience of a transgenerational cycle of dispossession. Written during our 2009 workshop in an all-­girls detention unit, the poem locates the ghetto as the point of origin and the stage on which her life unfolds. An acute awareness of surrounding challenges, and a confidence in her own resilience, organizes her narrative. There emerges in DF’s words a complicated relationship with, on the one hand, the official tropes of redemption, and on the other, the critical identification of social death, which together configure the juvenile prison as an embattled zone. A belief in education seems in line with the ways the detention facility provided venues through which young women kept up with their studies and pursued specialized activities such as sewing, drawing, and painting. Rehabilitation, as voiced by staff, was closely connected to educating oneself—­to finishing school and pursuing gainful employment and even college. The Save Our Youth workshop, furthermore, incited reading, writing, and public speaking, which we presented as a tool of literacy, critique, and professional development. DF accepted educational activities as a means of personal redemption and assimilation back into the free. Yet DF’s refusal to repent for stealing to provide for herself (make her “happy”) and her younger brother suggests a set of convictions that clash with the very objectives of the carceral institution where she was detained. DF rooted her decision to practice illegal activities in a pragmatic assessment of her surroundings and needs. Even though she was aware of how her actions posed a moral dilemma, she not only justified her decisions by emphasizing the desired ends, but also reinforced that, if presented with the same circumstances, she would not hesitate to follow the same course of action. Her calculation was rooted in a careful assessment of her condition, involved an evaluation of her options and possible outcomes, and was therefore rational. Without her parents—­her father incarcerated and her mother missing, presumably trying to avoid being incarcerated,

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too—­there was no one else on whom to rely; there were no available material and social resources. Immersed in a pragmatic dilemma of survival that extended beyond her own generation—­that in fact left her isolated, without support from her elders—­DF and her younger brother’s needs were pressing, and constituted the justification for her decision. Means did not matter as much as the urgent ends. DF’s account of her decision to steal is common to the Black and Latin@ incarcerated youths, male and female. WR, a Latino young man, for example, wrote in a similar vein: I’m trying to get out And do good by going to school. Leaning science, math, and stuff like that. But I don’t think it’s gonna help me fast. I like breaking into people’s houses and cars. But at the same time I wanna stop.2 Yet there are social conditions that young Black women like DF encounter that are specific to their gender and race. DF experienced the ghetto as a predatory social wasteland, one where, together with material deprivation and social isolation, physical and sexual abuse was common. Networks of support were either absent or not effective in providing a modicum of emotional and physical well-­being, let alone deterring violence. Unlike what transpired in most of the Latin@ youths’ accounts, DF’s testimony shows she could not rely on family members for any kind of assistance. Quite the contrary: even as a child, she saw herself as the sole and therefore necessary provider, the one who had to manufacture support and sustenance by any means necessary. This struggle for basic survival clashed with normative moral standards and, more directly, with the state and its institutions of repression. The ghetto was defined by and thus revealed the ubiquitous presence of the criminal justice system. Not only were her parents caught by (or running away from) agents of the state, but DF had been incarcerated in a juvenile facility prior to her confinement in 2009. And even though Latin@ young people also mentioned family members, lovers, and friends incarcerated or on the run,3 there was, in young Latin@s’ accounts, an enduring reference to family and kin networks as reliable sources of material and affective support. The social spaces Latin@

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kids referenced were indeed predatory, but they were also geographies of reassuring social relationships. As VV, and young Latina woman, wrote: I come from the South of Austin, Texas Living on South First Street, Having family that cares for me. Having struggles in my life. Having the light turned off From time to time. . . . Got hurt, Heartbroken. People that don’t care about me. Sometimes I’ve let people Take that power. But now I realize I have the power in my hands And I want to get my education. . . . Having my nephew in my life Motivates me. Having my Mom, Dad, and brother Always there for me . . .4 Compared to incarcerated young Latinas, Black young women experienced a more pronounced sense of social disintegration. Among the more than fifty Black girls we interacted with over the years of the writing sessions, all of them had, at best, one parent that was present in their lives—­usually their mother. And even then, the relationship with their mothers was fraught, uncertain, and often interrupted by institutionalization. Díaz-­Cotto documents similar patterns among incarcerated adult Chicanas in California.5 Yet, in the juvenile prison in Austin, Black young women reported tensions between them and their families that seemed particularly fraught, that seemed to involve a greater sense of social anomie, and that seemed to grapple with the state’s ominous presence as an incontrovertible fact:

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Dear Mama! Never liked your boyfriend. But you did, So I was there. Supported you through everything Even if it wasn’t fair. I even kept the lights on, Illegal and all. I kept you food on the table Even if it’s my downfall Your kids are my kids: That’s what I was taught. Even though it f***’d up my head, I still won’t say you’re my downfall. I love my mommy forever I’ma always be there Even with gray hair & Wheelchair Love always, Your daughter.6 DF is the young woman who expressed her pragmatic decision to engage in illegal activity to sustain herself and her brother. In the verses above, a love letter to her mother, DF shows her frustration with her mother’s romantic choices, but reinforces her determination to stand by her mother no matter what happens. DF is perfectly willing to do what is necessary to provide electricity, food, and child care for her and her mother, even it if means that she will end up punished and arrested—­“even if it’s my downfall.” Committed to maintaining the affective bond with her mother, DF was nevertheless aware of troubling aspects of their connection. As she mentioned her mother’s partner, and expressed her dislike of him, DF suggested that her mother’s intimate relationships were often marked by

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abuse. As with most of the young women in the facility, DF was a witness and a victim of physical and sexual abuse. On sexual abuse, DJ, a young Black woman originally from the Northeast, wrote the following: . . . Running the streets is all I knew. Lights were cut off When my Mama couldn’t afford the money. I started to run the streets even harder than before. I started to sell my body at 15 For money And I knew I wanted more. Hustling with my brother Was my way of getting money I’ve seen my sister molested when I was five, Not knowing What to do So I just let it slide by . . . I used drugs to take away the pain. I thought I was going insane. I am a strong Black woman With a whole lot of struggle . . .7 The streets appear in young Black women’s writings as places of relative autonomy (socializing and work, including sex work), some joy, and many dangers (including abuse by men, some women, and the police). In the young women’s written meditations, the streets’ appeal is proportional to how intensely they experience their vulnerability. The greater their economic and social needs, the greater the demand to hustle, to extract from the streets a means of survival. In DJ’s account, the streets were the spaces where, via sex work, she attempted to make a living in an environment

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where other options of economic sustenance seemed dim or absent.8 The streets were spaces of necessary improvisation where, with her brother, she tries to conjure up the next move, the source of temporary material relief. DJ’s description of her sister’s sexual molestation is an example of a widespread process. Like DJ, most Latina young women imprisoned had been the object of and/or witness to sexual abuse, often by men. Here again, the pattern was similar to that described by analyses of Latina incarceration in other parts of the United States.9 LF, a young Latina, fifteen years old, wrote: I come from the south of Mexico I grew up with both parents. I have wasted half my life Running in the streets Smoking drinking and snorting cocaine. I’ve gone in and out of jail. Raped many different times. Pregnant twice. I’ve been in abusive relationships from time to time.10 One of the few White young women detained in the juvenile prison had been raped by a close relative, and found in writing a way of expressing

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her rage. The Black and Latina young women in the group empathized. Some of them attentively listened to the young White woman’s anguish, and admired her determination to reveal it all to the judge; sometimes, they made playful comments about the way the young White woman talked and performed her poems. In their playfulness, the Black and Latina young women tried to bring the young White woman into the fold while they asserted the young White woman’s unique, unknown, strange even, social origins. But there remained a palpable difficulty in the communication between the young White woman and her incarceration peers—­a difficulty similar to what existed between Latinas and Blacks. It was as if her pain was recognizable yet somehow different, part of a world far away from ghettos and barrios, a world that young Blacks and Latinas could imagine, but of which they had no experience and therefore no way of grasping. The Blacks’ and Latinas’ facial expressions of utter surprise when their first heard the young White woman talk about her rape revealed this social distance. Initially, the young White woman attempted to appear open to the other young women in the unit: she engaged with their writings, made suggestions for revisions, and respectfully quoted some of her colleagues’ phrases in her own poetry. Yet the distance between the young White woman and her colleagues remained, a distance that even the common experience of rape by a family member, and of gendered violence more generally, was not able to bridge. As one of the young Black women said, “I didn’t know white folks went through this, too.” • • • The young women’s experiences of rape and abuse echo national trends in violence against women. According to the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, seven hundred thousand U.S. women are sexually assaulted every year, “the highest rate of sexual assault of any industrialized nation in the world.” Although widespread as an aspect of gendered violence against women, sexual assault is nevertheless racialized in specific ways. Incidence of rape against Black women is higher than for any other racial group. Beth Richie explains these disparities by noting social norms that consistently, and paradigmatically, degrade Black women. In a process that reflects shared assumptions about cisheteronormativity, race, Black women, and especially (but not exclusively) those immersed in vulnerable economic and social environments such as the ones experienced by the incarcerated girls, are preferential objects of aggression.

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Because Black women are the less valued members of a social structure that is fundamentally antiblack and cisheteropatriarchal, aggression against them carries a lesser penalty—­evidence that the social price of inflicting injury is proportional to the distance the aggrieved body is from being Black, female, and queer. As zones of dispossession and social disintegration, Black ghettos such as the ones from which the young women at the juvenile facility are removed, intensify social practices of degradation. “According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,” notes Richie, “Black women have a greater chance of being physically assaulted in their lifetime by people in their neighborhood who are not their intimate partners.”11 The young White woman’s experience of rape, while an aggression common to women in general, is thus not as demographically frequent or as intense as patterns of rape that Latinas, and even more extremely, the Black young women experience as a social group: “Not only is the incidence of rape higher, but a review of the qualitative research on Black women’s experiences of rape suggests Black women are assaulted in more brutal and degrading ways than other women.”12 Converging with our discussion of the world’s structure of positionalities in the Introduction, the young Black women’s surprise at the young White woman’s ordeal can be read as a demographically and symbolically accurate recognition of the higher value White bodies attain in the lifeworld, a recognition that renders nonblack, and especially White, female suffering incongruous, unexpected, scandalous. The young Black women’s impressions were rooted in their own experiences of systematic brutality, which in turn suggest a structure of positionality whose logic is gendered antiblackness. Gendered and racialized dynamics of violence and sexual abuse are correlated to and indeed intensified by incarceration. Especially for women who come from predominantly impoverished and working-­class backgrounds, patriarchal violence, mediated and defined by an antiblack logic, is a significant nexus between the “free” and the “inside.” As we will see below, it is well-­known that incarcerated women report much higher rates of violence and abuse against them prior to being incarcerated than the rates of violence and abuse recorded for the overall population. Women who end up incarcerated are already part of the social group most brutalized. The same is true for use of illegal drugs. Disproportionate use of illegal drugs and experience of violence, then, are strongly correlated to women’s incarceration. Both of these conditions emerge quite compellingly in the young women’s poetry. Unable to access

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or wary of formal mechanisms of grievance redressal, women who are already vulnerable to physical and sexual violence—­which includes violence perpetrated by same-­sex partners—­and are the primary object of controlling images, often find themselves criminalized for the ways they react against their own victimization.13 Rather than understood as victims of violence by their surrounding communities, agents of the state, and indeed the broader public, Black women, and to a lesser degree, disadvantaged Latina women, are often considered lawbreakers in need of restraint and control. From a hegemonic, gendered antiblack perspective, their presence in spaces of confinement confirms this perverse logic of criminalization. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on three nationally representative sample surveys conducted with prisoners between 1995 and 1997, when prisoners were interviewed in hour-­long sessions, reveal patterns of gendered abuse prior to imprisonment. While 57.2 percent of imprisoned females reported experiencing some form of abuse prior to admission to state prisons, 39 percent of females in state prisons reported sexual abuse prior to incarceration, and 46.5 percent reported physical abuse before their imprisonment. For males, these numbers stood at 16.1, 5.8, and 13.4, respectively. Among inmates in state prisons, one in twenty men and one in four women reported sexual abuse before turning the age of eighteen.14 Although these data are not broken down by race, racial dimensions of abuse emerge when we reflect on the report’s findings and link them to our previous discussions on the gendered aspects of antiblack violence: “Prisoners reported higher levels of abuse if they grew up in foster care rather than with parents, if their parents were heavy users of alcohol or drugs, or if a family member had been in jail or prison.”15 As we saw in chapter 2, the foster care system disproportionately removes Black children from their homes and guardians;16 Black juveniles and adults are disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated; and even though Blacks do not use alcohol or drugs in greater proportion than any other racial group,17 the effects of drugs and alcohol on Black people are intensified because, as seen previously, already placed in spaces of social vulnerability and state hypersurveillance, Blacks have less access to health care, and are treated in measurably discriminatory and criminalizing ways by medical and law enforcement workers. Preferential targets of violence and sexual abuse, Black young and adult women are thus positioned in interlocking

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systems of social debasement that constantly replay scripts of gendered antiblack institutional and everyday forms of abjection. Patterns of gendered violence prior to incarceration are constitutive of the transgenerational cycle of dispossession and hypersurveillance defining the experiences of those residing in Black and Brown impoverished areas. It is unsurprising that violence and sexual violence are widespread in institutions of confinement, either as threats or actual occurrences.18 What is perhaps not as graspable is how such violence is indeed a continuum, a ubiquitous presence that links seemingly disparate coordinates of space and time. A logic of extraction and return animates this continuum: bodies are constantly extracted from and eventually returned to the ever-­ deteriorating ghettos and barrios—­gentrification of course being part of the process by which Black and Brown zones are further challenged and redrawn. Punishment and welfare institutions, such as child protection bureaucracies, pull bodies from homes, streets, and schools; those same institutions eventually eject the bodies back into Black and Brown geographies. The process continues when the same bodies, and/or their daughters and sons, now perhaps trapped in the most exploitative and vulnerable labor settings of the formal and informal economies, are reabsorbed in jails and prisons, which will then throw them back into the “free” with added social stigma. Given the many ways in which the cycle sustains itself—­that is, given the many social deficits that characterize ghettos and barrios and their mechanisms of support—­it is thus unremarkable that recidivism rates are consistently high for Black and, to a lesser but significant degree, Latin@ juveniles and adults. Specifically for Black women and girls, as Richie suggests, their involvement in crime is often a response to and/or a consequence of gender entrapment—­a set of social conditions in which women are abused, degraded, and incarcerated. In Richie’s study, “gender entrapment described the most extreme negative consequences when gender inequality, economic marginalization, violence against women, biased criminal practices, and racism intersect. The African American battered women whose lives served as the empirical basis for the development of this theoretical model represent not only the loss of comfort, productive potential, and opportunity for self-­determination, but indeed the loss of life that result from the combination of gender violence, social inequality, and crime.”19 Gender entrapment is not restricted to a discrete time frame

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in which individuals are abused and find themselves committing crimes and therefore incarcerated. Rather, gender entrapment is an uninterrupted process, manifested across generations. Part of a distended time frame, gender entrapment can be grasped in the girls’ account of their relatives and lovers’ incarceration, and in the fact that often the young women in the juvenile facility had kids of their own or were pregnant. Gender entrapment refers paradigmatically to Black women’s experiences; in related but not identical patterns, it is common to incarcerated Latinas’ trajectories.20 As it continuously affects multiple generations and geographies of vulnerability, gender entrapment reveals its dimensions in time and space. • • • Alongside physical and sexual violence, the experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in confinement crossed racial lines. LH, a Latina young woman, in a poem addressed to her child’s father, expressed the following: . . . Daddy, Let me tell you The past is the past: And we have a new beginning Now I’m looking forward Feeling my baby kick. My heart skips a beat. My baby boy makes me think tick tock Time’s almost here. Getting ready for a new beginning! Baby boy, Our change Is like a Butterfly

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Being here makes me sigh Can’t wait to see you Open your eyes May 20 Will be the day.21 LH was trying to be optimistic about the new phase in her life. She was looking forward to her boy’s birth and to reconnecting with the baby’s father. LH was confident about parenting, and frequently mentioned the support her parents and extended family were going to provide. Because LH had helped raise her parents’ younger children, and remembered fondly the assistance she and her parents received from her grandmothers and other family members—­almost always women—­she expected a similar mobilization from her closest relatives once her child was born. Yet for other young women pregnant or with a child (including perhaps LH), the experience of incarceration added a few layers of personal uncertainty and institutional requirements. Some of the women were trained in mothering skills while attending our writing sessions. On one of those occasions, CK, a young Black woman, carried a life-­size newborn doll as part of her parenting training. She had a child whose guardianship she hoped to regain once released. The reconnection, however, hinged on a series of evaluations done at the prison, including her successful completion of a parenting training program. CK had to follow instruction on how to hold the baby, feed it, help it burp, change its diapers, place it in the stroller, and put it to sleep, among other tasks. One particular day, she was holding the doll while paying close attention to the workshop discussion. The staff in charge, a middle-­aged White woman who tried to show support and was at times even affectionate with the girls, sat close to CK. At one point CK dropped the doll. Rather than show disappointment or anger, the staff seemed amused and said, “This is why we’re having you do this.” Under her breath, CK replied, “It’s just a stupid doll,” which the staff chose to ignore. The scene was bizarre on several counts. The doll was pink, contrasting with CK’s brown complexion. CK seemed trapped between taking her assignment seriously and not being too self-­conscious about it, which of course made her even more awkward. She made it a point to show the staff in charge that she was following protocol when gently rocking the “baby,”

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putting it on her lap and turning it on its belly so that it could burp, and when gently putting it back in the stroller. The other girls’ indifference rendered the scene all the more curious. The girls’ unconcern suggested they had become accustomed to these training rituals of motherhood in captivity—­as indeed they seemed to have somehow tuned out much of the prison’s everyday routines. Just as it had become conditioned practice to put one’s hands behind the back and form a diamond shape when walking around the detention facility, it had become mundane to witness girls under different types of distress, training, and supervision. Some girls were treated for acute depression and withdrawal; others were treated for overtly aggressive behavior; others were trained to take care of babies. Yet most disturbing in the motherhood training was how an important life phase—­one that is at the very heart of sociability and cultural performance and transmission—­had been assimilated into and obviously shaped by the institution of containment. Pregnancy and child care were as much a part of the routine experience in confinement as was keeping up with school curriculum. Of course, the most disturbing part of human reproduction in captivity is not its novelty, but its contemporary reach, and the implications of that reach, particularly as it can take away the young women’s agency and render obsolete local forms of social knowledge related to pregnancy and child nurturing. As pregnancy, child birth, and child care become normalized in confinement, so does the expectation that one’s life trajectory—­ and that of future generations—­will be also coded, directed, and restricted by such institutions of control. By normalization i mean both the apparent routinization of the heteronormative life cycle as it intersects with captivity, and the institutionalized understandings and practices that become associated with human reproduction. Like CK, many other young women will be trained in child rearing according to the institution’s understanding; like LH, young women will experience pregnancy in institutionalized confinement; and like CK’s son, future generation of young people connected to geographies of dispossession will grow up with an intimate knowledge of and immersion in the rituals and expectations of imprisonment—­for this new generation, as it is already the case for the young people in confinement, carceral protocols will play increasing roles in their socialization. In contrast to LH’s relative optimism, however, CK’s more apparent nihilism hinted at a process of social disintegration that made evident not only her quickly collapsing networks of support, but

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just as suggestive of the carceral logic’s reach, the ubiquity of institutionalized protocols over birth control, pregnancy, and early socialization. It should be noted that while such protocols reveal a structuring antiblack logic, they are also unmistakably patriarchal and cisheteronormative. No young men were trained in or received instructions about birth control, sexual health, and child care (much less any queer person). While we may be tempted to approximate these carceral processes to forms of neoliberal governmentality and its corresponding biopolitics,22 the fact that they happen as a manifestation of social death perhaps also qualify them as indices of necropolitics.23 JV, a young Black woman and mother of a son, in her writing hinted at how one’s networks of socialization intersected with the networks of confinement. It bears reminding ourselves that she wrote about her incarcerated brother while she was also incarcerated. Her narrative, therefore, illustrated both the synchronic and the diachronic reach of incarceration. The synchronic reach of incarceration implicated people of the same generation—­in this case, JV’s brother, family members, friends, and acquaintances of the same age cohort. The diachronic reach implicated people of successive generations—­older people and, like JV’s son, younger people: . . . It’s a struggle Seeing my Big Brotha In the pen For committing a lot of sin. He told me in his cage His struggle With rage Of going crazy. He told me he ain’t going to be in population For a long time And f*** the nation While he’s sinking.24 One may argue that, rather than imposing unreasonable standards and questionably interfering with autonomy in reproduction, the facility’s

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training actually provided useful skills, without which many young mothers would be unable to take care of their children. The same could be said about medical care, psychological treatment, and educational programs, which would be unavailable for the kids were it not for the juvenile prison’s services and resources. For example, it is well-­known that, for many impoverished Black and Latin@ people struggling with drug dependency, one’s imprisonment represents the only possibility for consistent treatment. Such was the case of a person with whom we occasionally collaborated, a young lesbian Latina, impoverished and struggling with drug and alcohol dependence. She had intentionally pursued imprisonment as a strategy to address her health challenges (and gain refuge from people who abused her). And in CK’s case, perhaps some of the techniques she learned in the facility were in fact useful to her and her child. The problem with the increasing role that carceral institutions play in the lives of the Black and Brown is simple: it happens in times of accumulative dispossession and social disintegration, much of it intensified by precisely such institutions of confinement. It is only when social networks crumble, unemployment is pervasive, homelessness looms, and health care and other social services are unavailable that institutions of punishment become viable alternatives for shelter, food, instruction, and heath care. Such a dystopian scenario, well exemplified in the youth detention facility, is the social terrain on which CK, her child, and indeed CK and her child’s entire generations find themselves. Unremitting yet cyclical, these experiences of incarceration extrapolate discrete units of time, space, and social distance: they constitute persistent, intergenerational, and far-­reaching events. To grasp the expanded time horizon that incarceration depends on and further dilates, consider that, within a given family, the experience of being behind bars is common to individuals belonging to one’s own generation as well as other generations. With a mixture of pride and sorrow, young people mentioned that they had friends, lovers, brothers, sisters, and cousins who were incarcerated. They also spoke of incarcerated parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. It is not just time that is distended through the carceral logic. Such logic also extends its reach over racialized spaces—­geographic spaces (ghettos and barrios) as well as symbolic and imaginative spaces (as the presence of confinement in the mural illustrates). As the antiblack time–­space expansive carceral logic intensifies its control over Black and nonblack bodies, it operates a corresponding dispossession of time and space on those on

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whom it encroaches. Although not exclusive to the confined youth—­those out in the “free,” as we have seen, are also dispossessed of their autonomy in spaces of habitation, leisure, and education—­dispossession among the confined is nevertheless intensified. The confined youth, as with any prisoner, will say she has no control over her time, that being in the prison, despite its rehabilitation orientation, is a waste of time, that her time does not belong to her, that she’s just doing time. Without irony the staff often told the young people that, while locked up, they had time to think about their lives, time to gain new skills, time to plan for when they were released, time to dream. Staff frequently uttered the words “education,” “transformation,” and “hope” by way of encouragement. Some of the youth tried to embrace these suggestions and make the most out of what were presented as unique opportunities: so-­called life-­ management skills (including mothering) as well as school curriculum content. The opportunity to look forward to something, anything, was often eagerly embraced, at least temporarily. Able to glimpse an attractive, yet-­to-­be realized time, the youth willing to go along with the detention facility’s rehabilitative project thus gained time, their own productive time. As dividends paid to their conformity, the kids manufactured for themselves a sense of unbounded futurity, if only during the few moments the facility’s good intentions and its promises of accomplishment seemed credible. Still, the youths sensed the contradictions of a bureaucracy that on the one hand imprisoned them, and on the other offered what seemed like limitless possibilities. Added to the loneliness and isolation felt in the prison, young men and women often expressed, through writing, the institutional ambiguities as well as their own internal conflicts. Indeed, the institutional ambiguities were often experienced as internal conflicts. For example, DJ captured in writing moments of frustration as well as the uncertainties the youths experienced in the facility: . . . It’s kind of weird: I’m afraid to go to bed. I’m tired of being tired, I’m fed up And I wish it was over ’cause I’m tired of going through what I’m going through

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I’m Phase 2 and I don’t do what I’m supposed to do. People are here To help me, not hurt me, So I’m tired and confused. I’m sick of being This person that is trapped inside That I don’t know how to get out.25 “Being trapped inside” suggests an internal conflict arising from competing orientations. On the one hand, DJ accepted that the staff members at the facility were there to help her. On the other hand, however, she detected a contradiction between her refusal to repent for her illegal actions and the emphasis on lawfulness and respectability permeating the prison. The “person trapped inside” may be the respectable and lawful person she and the staff want her to be; or she may be the pragmatic, loyal hustler who will do anything necessary to provide for her immediate family. Either way, she was not able to perform the person that remained repressed, and this made her tired and confused. DJ’s despair emerged as she was in possession of neither her body nor her mind, neither her time nor her space; she wavered between the models of behavior that, in her assessment, and of course in the institution’s orientations, competed against each other. All the youth’s activities—­ exercising, studying, eating, sleeping—­ were controlled for them, in spite of them. The undertakings were carefully matched to specific times and spaces within the facility. Timetables, timesheets, activity graphs pasted on large boards, diaries, flyers, and other reminders of structured activities were ubiquitous in every unit. Time dispossession—­doing time, paying back in time—­was compounded by the lack of control over the immediate spatial surroundings. One had to be in very specific places at very specific times: classes, meals, exercise, medication, visits, and showers were all meticulously charted; one was not free to come and go. (The frequent disputes between the young people and staff over bathroom visits were the rare arena of negotiation, one in which the youths often pushed staff members to their limit, and for that, as we saw in the previous chapter, were often severely reprimanded.) Time and space dispossession, then, compounded and complemented each other, and formed the basis of the imprisonment experience. When focusing more closely on this peculiar time and space

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dispossession, we are able to grasp a dystopia—­one in which, rather than movement, autonomy, and becoming, as the prison staff emphasized, the youths were forced into a cycle of almost unavoidable, permanent, life-­ negating state of confinement. In vital moments of reflection, what became evident to the youths were not only the ever-­controlling narratives and protocols of their confinement, but also their hardly unavoidable future confinement. Young men and women went back and forth between affirming that they didn’t want to ever return to the juvenile prison and recognizing the high likelihood of a repeated incarceration. They described their lives in the “free” as intimately connected to the “inside”: lives where the respectable and unlawful did not neatly separate, where the desire to do good by the rules did not match practical imperatives of enjoyment and very basic, material necessities. It was not accidental that many of the young women mentioned how they had to hustle and steal to simply pay the electricity bills: the social world into which they were due to go back was the same that had compelled them to imprisonment in the first place. Indeed, many of the young women recognized that their current incarceration produced added stigma, and would probably make their experience in the “free,” such as resuming school and looking for employment, even harder to negotiate. An irony did not escape the youths’ attention: in such a state of dispossession, they were reduced to bearers of time, the currency with which they had to pay their social and juridical debt, and the currency with which they paid for transgressions while locked up. Time, whose management was taken away from the young men and women as they were forced to abdicate control of their body movement in the closely monitored space, was the substance of which they found themselves having an abundance. The surplus was disturbing. For young people, the prospect of spending months, maybe even a few years, in confinement was daunting: this time represented a considerable fraction of their life as young adults, just when they were coming into age and experiencing relative degrees of autonomy. It was a disturbing, anxiety-­producing abundance of time: it meant that, following a transgression, one could be forced to produce more time, give more time, and thus spend more time in confinement. Many of the young women were perfectly aware they were constantly at risk of being penalized with more time: “They get you for little stuff,” CP, a young Black woman remarked:

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Doin’ time in a place where you can’t wear your own clothes. When you count through the doors, you got to have your hands in diamond shape. If you see things in my perspective You’ll see it is a joke. They get you for the little stuff and they teach you thangs you already know . . .26 Tiredness and confusion should therefore not be surprising—­what should be the cause of scandal is that anyone, let alone children, be subjected to such anguished, repeated, everyday rituals. To be penalized with added incarceration time, rather than standing out as an exceptional event, was the norm. Kids in confinement were constantly being measured against strict forms of control, and many of them were found transgressing the rules. Each transgression increased their debt, translating into more time in confinement. Many of the children internalized the panoptical surveillance to which they were subjected, which added layers of preoccupation to their already embattled and anxious experience. • • • This cycle of time and space dispossession imposes a logic of social death on the youths. Following Orlando Patterson’s formulation, we could speak of the young incarcerated subjects as genealogical isolates insofar as their physical sequestration means a severance from social resources—­networks of sociability, material support, affect, knowledge.27 Yet, the carceral apparatus does more than sever genealogies. It also reconfigures and scrambles these genealogies. It reaches forward in genealogical time (exemplified by the incarcerated young women and men who have or are about to have children) as much as it reaches back (illustrated by the older relatives and friends who were and are currently locked up). The past, present, and future become connected by dispossession, hypersurveillance, and confinement. Severed by incarceration, the genealogies are nevertheless forcefully sutured together as social and biological lines that converge on and irradiate from spaces of immobilization. The carceral machine thus creates genealogical Frankensteins, revealing in these connective powers the machine’s gendered antiblack mastery over space and time.

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What makes the carceral machinery deceiving is that while it brings about and builds from the social and spiritual death of successive generations, it provides a sense of continuity across communities separated by time and space. By mentioning, being aware of, remembering, and communicating with relatives and friends behind bars, the youths bring these people, spiritually at least, closer to themselves. The carceral system that now mediates and indeed produces a sense of genealogical belonging is a vital part of logic that animates the circuit of dispossession that has so thoroughly uprooted the young people from their social geographies and divested them of the most basic control over time and space. And although the sense of transgenerational communion depends on and is therefore about social death—­uprootedness, isolation, debasement, overwhelming violence, and added dishonor—­it provides virtual comfort, melancholic as it may be. Being with the socially dead, while supposedly alive, is a source of reassurance; this morbid familiarity with the socially dead, and with spaces where social death is produced and enacted, captures well a central aspect of juvenile incarceration. Death is a central aspect, the basic experience, the ultimate goal, of the carceral scheme. • • • The writing sessions at the girls’ unit had been meaningful and troubling. There had been intense yet good-­humored and productive conversations, and some of the girls had fully embraced the writing process. Yet there had been tension among the girls themselves and between the girls and the staff members. During the meeting on Saturday, February 25, 2012, for example, one of the most vocal young women, BL, was forced into solitary confinement. The incident started when the staff member who was overseeing our session asked BL to not stare at another young Black woman, to which BL responded that she was not. A quick argument ensued, at the end of which BL was ordered to go to the solitary cell. BL did not resist, yet she was visibly upset and hid her tears as she made her way out. BL participated in the sessions consistently, even though at first she did not seem enthusiastic. Midway through the program, however, she had favorite bass lines that she asked me to play while she added beats with her hands and vocals. BL began composing verses meant to be read with musical accompaniment, and some of her colleagues quickly picked up on and emulated her stylistic innovations, especially how BL interspersed

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her words with percussive sounds she sang and produced with her cheeks, hands, arms, legs, and feet. On Saturday, March 3, 2012, BL was reading a poem she had just written. Another young Black woman, emboldened by the discussions we recently had about non-­Western art, flatly said that BL’s poem sounded “too European.” BL, who was one of the most charismatic and imposing presences in the unit, became visibly irritated, got up, and went to her room. I was surprised the staff member in charge let her go. Maybe because BL had recently been in solitary and was still visibly shaken, the staff member in charge—­a White woman in her early thirties, someone i hadn’t noticed before—­chose not to intervene. BL said she was going to get her things and take a shower. The staff member said, “Okay, but do this quickly.” It was a strange scene. BL, not the staff member, seemed in charge. The staff member appeared hesitant, perhaps even scared, yet, as her rigid body language indicated, determined to show the kids she was the authority. Meanwhile, BB was becoming increasingly agitated. She was openly bisexual, quick-­witted, and one of the few young Black women who wore her hair a short natural. Like BL, BB had a child, a boy, about whom she spoke often. She consistently participated in the writing sessions. She radiated an energy quite different from most kids. Up to that day, she had conveyed a sense of maturity and optimism: she encouraged the girls who seemed sad or depressed; she spoke openly about relationships and love affairs, queer and straight; and she shared with anyone who wanted to hear that she couldn’t wait to get back to her baby and to the community, saying “I’ve got some partying to catch up with.” BB had been consistently upbeat—­until that day. Because i was listening to one of the young women’s poems and accompanying it on the bass, i missed the beginning of the exchange between BB and the staff member. But i heard well when BB told the staff, “Don’t treat me like I’m your slave!” “Don’t go there,” replied the staff, becoming visibly upset. At that point it became apparent the staff member was intervening in what she thought was a problem between BB and BL. BL had decided against taking a shower and had come back to the table. BB and BL were exchanging unfriendly glances. Like she had done the previous Saturday, the staff asked BL to not look—­i assumed she meant to not look at BB. BL responded, “I’m not looking! I just want to know who’s got an opinion.”

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The situation quickly escalated. BB became furious and proceeded to threaten BL, telling her that she would “beat the shit” out of her. Even though BL seemed lethargic, she suddenly became alert and moved toward BB, bent on not showing any trace of fear. BL was much taller and stronger than BB was, although BB seemed older. Very agitated, the staff member in charge got up from her chair and told BL and BB that if they didn’t go to their rooms immediately she was going to call a code red (when additional security staff are mobilized and they take over the unit). BB and BL ignored the staff member; they began shouting at each other, gesticulating, becoming more and more agitated. The other girls around the table stopped their activities. We the facilitators also stopped, unsure of what was going to happen. Into her radio, while trying to immobilize BB on the floor, the staff member in charge declared a code red. A second staff member, who until then had been in a separate room with three girls, quickly appeared on the scene and successfully immobilized and then energetically forced BL to her room. Less than a minute later, several staff members, three men and two women, arrived at the unit. As BB was shouting, her body pressed against the floor, the male staff member who had just come in quickly controlled and handcuffed her. Still struggling against her restraint, BB shouted to BL, “By my son, I’ll get you, nigger. I’m going to kill you!” BL, who until then had been shouting back but remained in the room in which staff member had placed her, attempted to force the door and charge toward BB. Two staff members immediately pushed her back into the room and held the door shut. Through a small glass window in the door BL was seen gesticulating and directing more verbal insults at BB. Not to be outdone by her opponent, BL promised to kill BB in the free, stressing that BB “wouldn’t last a motherfucking day outside before you’re hit dead.” Once the young women were physically controlled—­even though they continued to shout and hit the doors that isolated them from the unit’s common area—­a senior staff member who appeared after the code red alarm had been sounded, a Black woman in her fifties, realized that the three facilitators had witnessed the entire incident. It then became evident to us that we were supposed to have been removed from the unit as soon as the fight broke out. Slightly embarrassed, she told us we had to leave immediately. We proceeded to pack our things and make our way to the door. An older Latino staff member led us out. We asked him if there was any chance of resuming the session later. He said that day’s session was

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over, adding that “things like this happen all the time, no big deal, the girls will be okay.” The confrontation between two Black girls was revealing of the facility’s climate, exposing what lurks just beneath the surface of everyday routine. Despite uninterrupted surveillance—­and perhaps precisely because of it—­some of the young women were constantly at the threshold of acting out their accumulated frustrations. As much as BB seemed upbeat and optimistic until this incident, she did not hesitate to respond to a provocation from BL, who was visibly shaken by her solitary stint, and possibly sedated. Even though the confrontation was sad because of the physical and verbal violence, the mutual hatred, and the utter helplessness both girls displayed, in retrospect it was not surprising. DJ’s awareness of being “trapped inside” emerged vividly in the fight. Creative, inquisitive, musical, energetic (when not medicated), critical, and supportive of other Black girls, BB and BL were deeply troubled by their confinement. They missed their children; they couldn’t wait to resume their lives in the “free” (though perfectly aware of the challenges that awaited them); they resented the constant oversight; they felt diminished by the protocols (they often made remarks about how ugly and humiliating their jumpsuits were); and often they felt threatened by the same young women toward whom they showed support. That particular unit had an equal number of Latina and Black young women, but there seemed to be minimal interaction between them. Especially troubling in the incident between BB and BL was the hatred they were able to express for each other. In the sudden burst of energy they summoned, in the quickness with which they were willing to do physical harm and be harmed, and in the intensity of their words and gestures, a palpable death wish drove both young women during that confrontation. Unrestrained, it seemed, they would have done anything to carry out their mutual threats. Yet, as focused as they were on their personal dispute, it was revealing that only a few minutes earlier, in that same writing session, BB had confronted the staff member by announcing that she was being treated as a slave. What did BB mean? The staff member was White, had unquestionable power, and controlled BB’s every move; BB was Black, imprisoned, had been separated from her child, had suffered countless acts of violence (physical and symbolic), felt humiliated, and had no control over her time, space, and social networks. BB did not articulate the many facets of her dispossession and powerlessness, but the evocation of slavery

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was a direct, suggestive verbal attack meant to criticize both the staff and the prison. Perhaps empowered by some of the essays by Assata Shakur and other revolutionary thinkers we read, BB resisted her confinement in one of the few ways she could: by pushing the staff out of their comfort zones, and calling attention to the gendered antiblack racial makeup of the facility. In doing so, BB rejected the tropes of redemption that thoroughly permeated the narratives and practices to which she was subjected. As important, she called attention to an antiblack, gendered racial dynamic that unmistakably equated, on the one hand, sovereign power with the woman staff member’s whiteness, and on the other, utter powerlessness with the young woman’s blackness. In this gendered racial dynamic, BB’s Latina peers did not play a prominent role, although they were subjected to the same protocols of dispossession and surveillance. The Latina absence from BB’s field of awareness may be an effect of the social distance between Black and Latina young women; or, relatedly, it may be the consequence of BB’s realization that, despite occupying similar predicaments, Blacks and Latinas inhabit distinct social worlds. BB and BL’s rage spoke literally of death—­they were ready to kill each other, and in the process perhaps get killed. However, BB and BL’s rage also spoke of their social death—­by refusing the ostensibly compassionate and reformist principles governing their imprisonment, BB and BL made it apparent that, ultimately, social reintegration according to normative codes was not for them. Their rage perhaps derived from the realization that despite their best efforts, they would not be able to escape the zones of social death. BB and BL’s rebellion against each other was also a rebellion against their own conditions. It spoke loudly of internalized gendered antiblackness. As much as the young women’s rebellion was directed against their environment, it was additionally the product of internal contradictions. What took place during our workshops, as well as what was written, provide insight into the competing sentiments of self-­assertion and self-­ loathing. SM, a Black young woman, wrote the following, titled “LSI (Low Self-­Image),” about a colleague. It was a statement with strong autobiographical tones: She’s young Pretty And has LSI.

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People put her down—­ That explains why. She has a beautiful heart And a beautiful face. It hurts my heart that she’s in disgrace . . . I pray at night That her faith will grow. It’s a shame to me that she has no hope. Young Black and Pretty With LSI.28 A window into the solidarity that often formed between the young women, the poem conveys hope that the person to whom it is intended becomes more positive and attains faith (in a god, or in a future?). The writing is also a declaration of homoerotic attraction, which was verbalized timidly during one of our sessions. BB’s outspoken bisexuality must have worked as an incentive, yet such queer expressions were still surprising given the blatantly cisheteronormative patriarchal protocols of the facility and indeed the social worlds from which the young women came. SM’s main point about low self-­image (or low self-­esteem) helps underscore some of the factors relevant in the confrontation between BB and BL. From the beginning of the writing workshop, it was apparent that the young Black women wanted to find and articulate a language that rendered their gendered Blackness positive, meaningful, and generative. Their common experiences of physical and sexual abuse often emerged in the stories they shared and in their emotional challenges. The constant surveillance and confinement only added to their challenges, even though, as DJ pointed out in her writing, the staff frequently reminded the girls that they, the staff, were there to help them. SM, like BB, at least as far as their comportment was concerned, were exceptions to the generalized self-­deprecating and morose disposition. Still, even though they were often upbeat and apparently comfortable in their skin, they also had their drawbacks. SM had

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recurring bouts of depression, and BB was easily angered, as the fight with BL showed. What comes next adds to our attempt to understand challenges Black girls experienced—­challenges that were specific to the ways their gender and sexuality intersected with and modulated their racial structural positionality. KT was a light-­skinned, long-­haired, young Black woman, fifteen years old. Although not as frequently upbeat as SM and BB, we the facilitators noticed moments of levity when, while reading some of her writing, she was able to laugh at her own ideas and invited others to do so as well. At other times, however, KT was aloof and did not respond promptly to staff requests. Repeatedly, she had been penalized with extra imprisonment time because of several infractions. But KT’s release date was nearing, which was probably the main reason why she seemed unusually happy. Even though she did socialize more closely with her Black peers, unlike them she also interacted often with the Latinas, who seemed to appreciate her presence as much as the Black girls did. KT’s rapport with the Latina girls made her an exception. During a writing session not long before BB and BL’s confrontation, KT joined the group after taking a shower. (The shower, not part of the usual protocol, was allowed due to a family visit she was about to have.) Before sitting down at the large table, she removed the towel that covered her head and used it to dry her hair. At that point SM mentioned how “beautiful” KT’s hair looked and asked about her background, adding that KT looked Brazilian. KT was pleased with the attention and smiled. She said she was “mixed,” adding “That is where my color and my hair come from.” By then all the girls had turned their gaze to KT. The Latinas smiled at KT’s newfound vivacity, while the Black young women also looked on attentively. The Black girls’ expressions, however, were of a markedly different quality than the ones the Latinas showed—­the Black girls were intensely transfixed by KT’s hair and her movements. Even though i had noticed it before, in that instant a fact became quite evident: other than KT and BB, the other five Black girls in that unit had their hair chemically straightened. I will refrain from engaging in a discussion about self-­esteem and Black hairstyle, much less propose a correlation between straightened hair and the internal contradictions with which the Black girls seemed to be struggling.29 Rather, as i speculate about the significance of the scene, i want to explore the proposition that what seemed revealing in the attention KT was getting from the Black

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girls was precisely its intensity. What did it suggest? Why did it happen? SM’s verses about low self-­esteem offer a clue, but they don’t explain the hypnotizing effect of KT’s hair. In this regard, the following poem, written by VV, a Latina young woman, is suggestive. She is imagining the day when she’s able to rejoin her family and her close friends: All I Need I imagine: Me, my little nephew And my brother Outside Feeling the breeze. . . . Seeing the leaves fall down, Watching my mom and dad going Back and forth On the rocking chair, Laughing at my brother’s jokes. . . . Seeing my boyfriend, Light-­complected Wearing black and white With his gold chain, Smiling with his white teeth . . .30 Like other Latina young women, VV is able to imagine both her nuclear and expanded family. Her parents, as well as her siblings and their children, populate her social universe. What is interesting about VV’s imagination concerning her boyfriend is that, among the positive characteristics she associates with his presence, his light skin features prominently. The valuing of light skin is not an isolated fact. KT commanded intense attention not only because of her hair but also because of her racial “mixedness.” KT’s magnetism was as much about her own body as it was about a silent yet powerful gendered racial code which operated in that space. Shared by both Black and Latina girls, albeit in specific ways by each group, the code assigned different values to facial features, skin tone,

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hair texture, and eye color according to their distance from blackness. As a “mixed-­race” person, KT commanded greater attention from Black young women because she embodied a modality of gendered blackness that was a significant step removed from their own blackness. Black yet light skinned and long haired, KT represented what the Black girls seemed to assume was greater desirability and acceptance. To inhabit KT’s body meant to experience a more forgiving social world, a world the Black girls desperately wanted yet ultimately knew was beyond their reach. For the Latina girls, KT was more legible and acceptable than were the other Black young women, perhaps due to the same reasons KT commanded such fascination from the Black girls: her relative distance from blackness. The Latina girls may not have been as mesmerized by KT as the Black girls because, as much as KT’s skin was lighter than the other Black girls, most Latina girls were still lighter than KT, their hair straighter, their nonblackness more apparent. And even when the Latina girls were darker than KT—­as some of them were in other units we worked with—­from the Latinas’ perspective KT was still Black. A more acceptable type of Black perhaps, but nevertheless Black, and therefore, irrespective of KT’s skin and hair, someone who commanded a lower symbolic and social value—­ someone who inhabited a positionality that at times was positively legible to Latinas, but who ultimately was of a different social location and collective trajectory. There seemed to be two modalities according to which the antiblack gendered racial code operated. On the one hand, Black girls’ valuing of “mixedness” was an apparent devaluing of “unmixed” blackness. By devaluing “unmixed” Blackness, Black girls participated in a collective symbol-­making ritual according to which their own bodies were being devalued. KT’s mixedness, and therefore her relative aesthetic and social acceptance, was premised on KT not being simply Black, not “unmixed.” KT’s markers were beyond reach; KT was what they could never be. On the other hand, the Latina girls’ relative acceptance of KT, while also enabled by KT’s mixedness, was based on a concession: Latinas felt more at ease with KT because KT’s mixedness set her apart from the other Black girls, and, as important, closer to the Latinas. KT’s relative acceptance was a compromise on the part of Latinas because KT’s mixedness, while enabling KT’s relative distance from blackness, did not completely remove KT from blackness. To relatively accept KT, then, was to simultaneously

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make a concession to blackness and affirm antiblackness. Even though KT seemed somewhat embraced, KT still carried what Latinas did not want; KT was still what they devalued and avoided. Despite the distinct modalities according to which the gendered racial logic operated for Black and Latina young women, both modalities drew from a common set of principles. As much as mixedness was valued or tolerated, it spoke to the problem of blackness. Mixedness was valued or tolerated because it somehow diluted, and therefore diminished, blackness. Mixedness was relatively embraced as much as antiblackness was unmistakably confirmed. In that context, as suggested in the Introduction, racial negotiations were not so much about an acceptance and desire of whiteness, but rather a repudiation of blackness. • • • In closing this chapter, i want to provide a sense of the gendered antiblack social climate that, subtly but effectively, permeated the detention facility at the individual, collective, and institutional levels. Despite the large percentage of Black staff, and despite the numerical majority of Latin@ kids in confinement, there were recurring manifestations of antiblack dispositions that suggested powerful mechanics that consistently affected how young people made sense of their subjection, how they related to one another, and how they were treated differently by the institutional apparatus. At the individual level, we have seen how Black young people, especially young women who experienced low self-­esteem and anxiety, were affected by experiences of emotional, sexual, and physical abuse; the vulnerability and collapse of their sociability networks; and the scarcity of narratives that provided alternative, generative, and valued forms of gendered blackness. At the interpersonal level, antiblackness operated on several fronts. In each unit, there were obvious divisions along racial lines according to which Latin@ and Black kids hardly interacted at the same level of closeness and solidarity as they did among themselves. At the same time, there were tensions between Black kids—­tensions that, at their limit, erupted in the fight between BB and BL—­which revealed a profound death wish directed, precisely, at one another. Based on the years working at the facility, i did not witness or hear about any such fight between Latin@ youths, or between Black and non-­Black kids; yet i am unable to say fights such as

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this one were exclusive to Black kids. What i would like to submit, however, is that the deep rage revealed in the confrontation between BB and BL can only emerge out of spaces—­internal spaces and social spaces—­of unique, transgenerational dispossession and desperation. The autoethnographic accounts provided in the young people’s written words reveal that, while there are many similarities between Blacks’ and Latin@s’ experiences, there are also fundamental differences. One of the key differences is that the zones Black kids come from and inhabit are areas whose social desolation and fragmentation are without analog in the Latin@ kids’ writings and, we can assume, their experience. At the institutional level, we saw in earlier chapters that Black kids are increasingly discriminated against the deeper they move into the criminal justice system. Was there evidence that, on a daily basis, Black kids were treated differently than the other nonblack kids in the units? Apparently not. Aside from the one example i provided above of a staff member who pronounced a Black young man beyond rehabilitation, White, Latino and Black staff members seemed consistent in applying their mandate of control, punishment, and care to all kids. BB’s outburst, charging the staff member with treating her like a slave, was rather surprising. Even though that particular staff member seemed more anxious and therefore more in need of asserting her authority than did other staff, she had not demonstrated any type of differentiated treatment based on the young women’s race. BB’s accusation, however, can be interpreted less as a personal indictment, and more as an institutional critique and an undaunted evaluation of her personal path. Even though BB was subjected to the same rules as were the Latinas, she intimated that the same procedures had different effects on her. Her point of departure and her point of return were markedly different than what the Latina girls described: BB was not returning to a family or a social network that, at least in her mind, would provide affective and material support. On her pessimistic days, BB also pointed out that she was uncertain about reuniting with her son, and perhaps correctly calculated that her imprisonment was not going to help make a case for his legal custody. BB’s sense of being a slave was a recognition of being socially vulnerable and expendable, of being part of a social world that offered little in the way of redemption. She did look forward to making up the lost time by partying hard; but she also admitted, like other young people in the facility, that there was a high likelihood she would be

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imprisoned again. In this admission lay a scarier and yet just as likely scenario: that of being incarcerated as an adult, as were many of her friends, lovers, and relatives, including her mother. BB’s sense of being a slave was strongly connected to her sense of utter loneliness, which resulted from, and was ever intensified by, her realization of how her network of sociability was already deteriorated and vulnerable. Her loneliness was the result of social network disintegration brought about by poverty, institutional neglect, and imprisonment. Add to this scenario the violence and degradation BB and her peers experienced prior to, during, and probably after their confinement, and a forceful configuration of social death emerges. Being a slave is to experience social death as a given of social life. The juvenile prison, as part of the circuit of dispossession and surveillance, was thus an obvious enforcer of slavery, making BB’s claim quite accurate. Antiblackness defined the prison’s logic as it defined the Black kids’ social environments and personal horizons. • • • There were, however rare, moments of genuine communion and recognition between Black and Latin@ kids. The familiarity with the panoptical machinery of hypersurveillance and punishment superimposing itself on spaces of social vulnerability; the experiences of gendered violence at the hands of predatory men and women in their neighborhoods; and the sharing of a youth vernacular that included music, clothing, vocabulary, and desires of intimacy and consumption: these common experiences rendered possible bridges of understanding. Yet a cautious distance between Black and Latin@ young people seemed to be the default social protocol. These two seemingly competing orientations, however, gain an explanation when we consider that, for Black kids, the redemptive projects of the juvenile facility and of the workshops were less attainable and seemed less believable: given the widespread intensity and permanence of the social destitution marking their transgenerational experiences, the prospect of reintegrating with society as productive, lawful, and respected members seemed quite dim. For Latin@ kids, on the other hand, there was enough shared evidence that their social geographies, resources, and transgenerational survival were also at risk. Latin@ young people were the undisputed numerical majority in the juvenile prison. Although their webs of sociability seemed to be less affected by the technologies of dispossession and surveillance

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than were the Black lifeworlds (of social death), a sense of hopelessness and of expandability was evident among Latin@ boys and girls. There was a reluctant realization that their institutionalization placed them in a powerful machine that would, in all probability—­like it had done for generations before—­suck them back into spaces of confinement. Latin@ boys and girls, like Black kids, were having their own children while incarcerated; their non-­incarcerated parents and their younger siblings, due to their actual or affective proximity, were experiencing the rituals, effects, and self-­ policing internalization resulting from incarceration. Latin@ young men and women, therefore, experienced forms of social death that defined Black experiences. Understandably, they resisted the realization of social death and attached themselves to evidence of its opposite (family, nonblackness, success). Yet Latin@s were faced with social realities quite similar to those realities Black kids were more willing to accept as defining their field of possibilities. Given these ambiguous but significant Latin@ encounters with social death, it may be appropriate to add to our initial allegory of the asymptote

Figure 6. A curve intersecting an asymptote infinitely many times. Image by Guillaume Jacquenot. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

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in the graph in Figure 6. In it, rather than never quite “touching” the line that defines the social life of Black social death, the Latin@ curve, albeit describing a distinct trajectory, defined by singular parameters, and informed by a unique logic, intersects with the Black asymptote. Each intersection would be a moment of mutual recognition; a moment when the effects of social death would, perhaps reluctantly, produce reciprocal insight between otherwise uniquely structurally positioned social groups. Each moment of recognition would generate instances of oblique identification according to which, even if unwillingly and/or unknowingly, Latin@ kids became aware of, and/or indeed experienced, the utter state of social worthlessness defining the Black condition. This common experience, however, does not imply being subjected to comparable logics. While antiblackness is indeed ubiquitous and affects Blacks and nonblacks, it generates distinct life and death trajectories for differently racialized social groups; such distinct trajectories derive from distinct underlying principles. In this case, as much as Latin@s share experiences of social death with Blacks, it is precisely the fact that such experiential intersections between Latin@s and Blacks are intermittent that render Latin@s nonblacks. The recognition of structural gendered antiblackness that emerges forcefully in BB’s skepticism about her reintegration into society, shared in varying degrees of intensity by other incarcerated Black young women, will reappear in the next chapters, which take us to Brazil. In analyzing the persistent problem of the Black presence in the empire-­state often dubbed the home of racial democracy, Part II provides evidence of a transnational continuum, suggesting that antiblackness determines life and death chances, and structures the field of racialized and gender positionalities, in distinct formations of empire-­state in the Americas. If this is true, then the scenes in the Austin juvenile prison allow for the drawing of continuities and relations with contemporary scenes of fundamental social vulnerability that determine Black collective experience in the diaspora.

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Part II

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Empire-­State Terror and Apartheid

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4

Reclaiming Public Space Rolezinhos as Protest

So a bunch of middle-­class white people have finally woken up and taken to the streets . . . I’m part of the Brazil that never fell asleep. —­Emicida

The June 2013 street protests in Brazil were the largest public gatherings since the 1992 national mobilization to impeach president Fernando Collor de Mello, and the 1984 civil unrest that demanded direct elections for president.1 Based on my own witnessing of these mass events (1984 and 1992 in Campinas and São Paulo; 2013 mostly in Rio de Janeiro), as well as a review of pertinent documentation and analyses, there emerge fascinating similarities between them: the city of São Paulo was the principal geographical area from where the protests irradiated and became national in scope; middle-­class high school and college students, as well as recent graduates, were an important part of their initial constituency and had a disproportionate influence on the mobilizations’ outlook (more so in 2013 and 1992 than in 1984, when leftist and centrist parties, as well as labor unions, were prominent in the re-­democratization campaign’s organization and leadership); and, specifically in the 2013 and 1992 events, an anti-­party or a-­party stance dominated, together with a strategic, often humorous nationalism expressed in the widespread and creative use of the national colors and flag. While the 1992 mobilization had the caras-­ pintadas (“painted faces,” a reference to the protestors’ common playful use of yellow, green, white, and blue) as their main protagonists, in 2013 the green and yellow came back, and many faces were covered by “Anonymous” masks, rags, and anything that would protect against police tear gas and help conceal one’s identity. Because of the use of vinegar soaked in 151

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cloth as an antidote to tear gas, the 2013 protests were often referred to as the “vinegar revolt.” These mass movements had several other common characteristics, chief among them their success in reaching fellow citizens and indeed significantly affecting elected (and nonelected) officials, social managers, and political and social institutions at various levels. Due to the impact of the 1984 mobilization, a civilian, Tancredo Neves, was made president in 1985, and democratic elections for president, after the 1964–­85 military rule hiatus, resumed in 1989; following the caras-­pintadas movement, Collor resigned in 1992 before his impeachment could be voted in the Senate; and President Dilma Rousseff, while welcoming the 2013 protests, was also very attentive to their broad, somewhat unfocused, yet powerful invectives against government corruption at all levels and demands for more effective public services. On June 21, 2013, at 9:00 p.m., Rousseff appeared on national television, expressed her sympathy for the movement, and offered to meet with representatives of the protesters. Although condemning violence, looting, and the disruption of the football Confederations Cup games, the president laid out a sweeping agenda promising oil royalties directed toward education improvement, the import of foreign doctors to alleviate the country’s ailing public health system, and a political reform that would expand popular participation. It would not be an analytical stretch to suggest that Rousseff ’s impeachment in 2016 gained political momentum in these protests. For all their enthusiasm, remarkable capacity for mobilization, social media savvy, global awareness, and potential to affect Brazil’s political landscape, the 2013 protests, like the 1992 Fora Collor and the 1984 Diretas Já movements, shared a characteristic that various dominant news media outlets, the greater public, and the participants themselves hardly noticed (or else took for granted), which of course makes it quite troubling: the underrepresentation of Black people among the protesters. To be sure, Black and Brown faces were present in the crowds. Yet, i contend, when Black people participated, they did so not as Blacks, but as students, workers, and self-­declared citizens. As photographic documentation attests, with the exception perhaps of manifestations in the Northeast, and in particular the state of Bahia, Blacks were not present at these events in numbers that reflected their proportion in the general population. Indeed, those crowds were unmistakably dominated by Whites.2 Black people’s effective absence—­and i will further develop what i

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mean by this as the chapter unfolds—­in these epochal public–­political moments of the Brazilian polis is worth analyzing. Because it forcefully problematizes the degree of Black inclusion in, identification with, and political relationship to the Brazilian empire-­state, this absence suggests lingering effects of structural antiblackness that even supposedly popular and sweeping movements are not willing or able to address, much less redress. Such a pattern of Black disidentification becomes all the more complex when we consider that, particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century, economic improvements disproportionately benefited the most impoverished—­and since among the most impoverished there is a historical overrepresentation of Blacks, such macroeconomic advances disproportionately affected Blacks.3 Income and wealth redistribution as well as access to consumer and home-­buying credit are some of the marked improvements brought about by the last three Workers’ Party (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores) federal administrations—­those of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–­10) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–­16). Still, rather than beginning this analysis by suggesting a closed system of mutual causality between, on the one hand, the forces of antiblack exclusion in state and societal structures and practices, and on the other, Black absence from the allegedly multiracial public square, let me state the problem by engaging its many complexities. Black absence can be attributed, in no small measure, to persistent levels of state-­sanctioned and multigenerational dispossession. For example, one’s economic unfavorable economic condition leads to residence in the outskirts of mega cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, making it difficult to access the centrally located manifestations.4 Bus service is not only expensive and of low quality, but also time-­consuming. Depending on time of the day and transit conditions, it can take over two hours to reach the city’s central areas coming from peripheral neighborhoods.

The Demonstrators’ Social Profile A likely factor explaining Black absence was the demonstrators’ majority social composition. In 2013, the disproportionate number of White and middle-­class protestors became readily apparent after June 13, when dominant television news media channels such as Globo and Record were forced to report on the dissemination of the manifestations in various metropolitan and state capital cities including Fortaleza, Porto Alegre,

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Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Print and televised images, many of them close-­up, provided visual evidence of the majority White presence. Sample polling and academic writing confirmed what transpired through televised, Internet, and print images of the street protests. According to Datafolha, a respected research institute, based on surveying conducted with São Paulo protestors, 77 percent of participants were college graduates (as compared to 24 percent in the total population), 22 percent were students (versus 4 percent of the population), and 53 percent were aged twenty-­five or younger.5 Also interesting was that, according to polling company Ibope, 91 percent of participants heard of the protests via the Internet, 77 percent of whom used Facebook.6 The great majority of young college graduates were not in the job market.7 These numbers, especially the ones concerning formal education and access to the Internet, reveal social advantage; therefore, the overwhelming and disproportionate presence of Whites was unsurprising.8 White presence not only confirmed the historical correlation between nonblackness and privilege, which in this case becomes a correlation between whiteness and privilege, but also marked the protests as sites where this privilege was exercised publicly throughout the country. Disrupting the association between nonblackness and the political occupation of public spaces, Blacks have participated, qua Blacks, in manifestations seizing well-­known urban spaces. For example, the Brazilian Black Movement (MNU, Movimento Negro Unificado) organized the 1995 Marcha Zumbi dos Palmares and the 2005 Marcha Zumbi + 10. Each event gathered thousands of Afro-­Brazilians and their allies in Brasília to affirm their position, as the subtitle of the second march stated, “against racism, for equality and life.”9 More recently, Blacks and their allies have mobilized against the ongoing genocide of Black youth in various Brazilian cities. For example, in São Paulo, on November 20, 2012, during Black Conscience week, led by Mães de Maio, UNEafro (União de Núcleos de Educação Popular para Negra/os e Classe Trabalhadora, Union of Popular Educational Centers for Blacks and the Working Class), and Fórum Hip-­ Hop, among others, thousands marched along the Avenida Paulista under the banner “Yes on Quotas, No on Genocide!” (“Cotas Sim, Genocído Não!”). On November 22, 2012, the Committee against the Genocide of São Paulo’s Black and Peripheral Youth (Comitê Contra o Genocídio da Juventude Negra e Periférica) led a rally in the historic Praça da Sé in downtown São Paulo.10 In Salvador, on August 25, 2015, Reaja ou Será

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Morto / Reja ou Será Morta organized in Salvador an international march against genocide.11 Armed with the widespread experiential knowledge, their own research and campaigns, and data from respected sources, such as the Mapa da Violência,12 the protestors demanded an end to the homicide of Black youth, a phenomenon that was increasing while the country’s overall homicide rates were falling. The state apparatuses have played a central role in these rates of homicide, by commission and omission. In 2011, for instance, officially one out of five homicides in the city of São Paulo was committed by the police; in the state of São Paulo, Blacks experience violent deaths at a rate that is 70 percent higher than for Whites.13 And more recently, as mentioned in the Introduction, on November 18, 2015, over fifty thousand people converged on Brasília during the first Black Women’s March, protesting against racism and gender inequality.

Black Disidentification By not participating in the 2013 protests qua Black subjects, Blacks disidentified from forms of political action that operated under assumptions of multiraciality or its correlate, colorblindness. Aside the obvious critique against the ever present antiblack underpinnings of the racial democracy mythology, disidentification intimates a recognition of three basic facts of gendered antiblackness. First, the public square, as part of a “white spatial formation” where “São Paulo’s white civil society—­the middle class, NGOs, social movements—­come together to exercise the rights of personhood and citizenry,”14 is not inviting or conductive to demands based on the singular, arguably incommensurable experiences of Black people.15 Second, historical and structural Black vulnerability to violence at the hands of the police or those deputized as such16 is not likely to be diminished—­and indeed may be intensified—­in occasions, such as public demonstrations, that are evidently opposed to the state machine and powerful capitalist groups like those controlling news media. The third basic fact of gendered antiblackness informing disidentification is the fundamental realization that the dialectical conflictive relationship that exists between public manifestations and the various layers of state bureaucracies, expectations, and agents is ultimately dependent on the foundational nonpolitical quality of the Black subjects.17 In other words, what renders a subject political—­that is, one that can enter a space where her collective voice becomes meaningful and the basis of a response from established

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representatives of the state and of capital—­is that she is not Black.18 Black disidentification from the 2013 demonstrations is due to Blacks’ acknowledgment that, while the relationship between nonblack protestors and the state bureaucracies and representatives is one of articulated conflict (articulated insofar as negotiation and dialogue are not only possible but, as Rousseff ’s public address demonstrated, likely and doable), the relationship between Blacks and the state and its agents is one of antagonism. As an engaged Black organizer stated shortly after the 2013 protests, “Current demonstrations in São Paulo are illustrative of this double standard: even as the beating of [White] middle-­class students by the police has become a national outrage [and has been credited with changing the dominant news media which, until the broadcast scenes of police brutality, harbored negative view of the protests],19 my own experience as a black activist shows that similar police repression, when practiced against black demonstrations, is hardly condemned.”20 Disidentification is therefore the product of collective analysis and historically accumulated and ongoing experience. Readily recognized is how the state, and particularly its ultimate control over public spaces, equates with antiblack terror. “This is to say,” affirms Wilderson, “violence against Black people is ontological and gratuitous as opposed to ideological and contingent.”21 Terror, as related to but qualitatively different from violence, is precisely this ubiquitous and gratuitous quality of violence. For Blacks, violence is transfigured, expanded, predictable only in its unpredictability, and experienced as terror. Nonblack protestors experience state violence that is contingent on the perception of the threat they pose; violence inflicted on nonblacks is contingent on what they do. Black people, on the other hand, experience state violence-­as-­terror as a fact of life, and thus as independent of their avowed position vis-­à-­vis the multiplicity of established forms of power and public–­political events and spaces. The violence inflicted on Blacks does not depend on what they do; antiblack violence is gratuitous because it is directed at what Blacks are (or are not). Would photographs depicting friendliness between protestors and the police in Belo Horizonte be conceivable if the protestors were Black?22 Does it cause any surprise to learn that the last person held in custody after a protest in the greater Rio metropolitan area was a young Black man?23 Still, as we will see below, this foundational antagonism may be difficult to detect when the PT federal administration has carried out several social policy efforts to address long-­term patterns of inequality, and indeed has

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engaged sectors of organized Black social movements and networks, more forcefully via the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR, Secretaria de Políticas the Promoção da Igualdade Racial). President Lula instituted SEPPIR in 2003, and from the beginning it has had the status of a ministry headed by representatives of Black movements. Matilde Ribeiro, the first SEPPIR minister (2003–­8), and Luiza Bairros (minister between 2011 and 2015) are both Afro-­descended women with significant trajectories in Black organized efforts. Instructively, however, while in office Bairros repeatedly remarked on her ministry’s low budget and executive weakness. More important, when she acknowledged patterns of police lethality and its impact on the Afro-­descended, Bairros did not shy away from linking them to the ongoing genocide against Black youth in Brazil, thus throwing her support behind current organized campaigns that call out the role of state agents and apparatuses in the systematic production of Black death.24 In what follows, i unfold these propositions about Black disidentification with the 2013 protest. Specifically, i explore the ways in which Black disidentification both contrasted and aligned with forms of political gendered blackness that emerge out of a Black women’s nongovernmental organization in its relationship with elected officials and, specifically, the federal government. This section draws from a long-­term collaboration and dialogue with members of Criola. Founded in 1992, Criola is one of the most enduring and visible Black women’s organizations in Brazil, and its members are active in both civil society networks and state-­sponsored spheres focusing on racism, sexism, health, African-­matrix religiosity, and the environment, among others.25 By juxtaposing Black disidentification with Black women’s organized efforts, i offer additional explanations for the challenges Blacks encounter when voicing and occupying traditional public–­political spaces.

A Black Women’s NGOs and the “Special Moment” Together with Jurema Werneck, Lúcia Xavier coordinates Criola. Xavier is a social worker, member of the National Commission for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Conselho Nacional de Promoção da Igualdade Racial) where she represents the Articulation of Black Brazilian Women’s NGOs (AMNB, Articulação de ONGs de Mulheres Negras Brasileiras), of which she is the executive secretary. Among many of her leadership roles,

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Xavier is a vigorous member of the annual Black Diaspora course Criola, in collaboration with U.S. and Brazilian academics and activists, offers in Rio for U.S. and Brazilian students and activists since 2006. In one of her lectures, on July 11, 2011, she analyzed the challenges contemporary social movements encounter in Brazil. Xavier offered a controversial thesis: Although the state is a historical enemy, we, as Black people, are in the midst of a special moment. The special moment is a result of PT’s transformative policies, its impact on the state machine, and its potential permeability to Black policy agendas. I take up Xavier’s thesis because it allows us to engage Black disidentification in particular, and the empire-­state’s antiblackness more broadly.26 Lula’s first administration maintained the core of his predecessor’s macroeconomic, market-­friendly policies: inflation control via manipulation of interest rates, fiscal restraint, and floating exchange rates.27 Austere social security reform was achieved in Congress, and the minimum wage was kept unchanged for two years. Yet, other PT policies had a profound, positive impact on Brazil’s staggering rates of poverty. Chief among those was the implementation of the Family Stipend (Bolsa Família). A cash-­ transfer program targeting the most impoverished, it is today the largest of its kind in the world, benefiting about fifty million people (thirteen million families), roughly a quarter of the country’s population. This transformative initiative effectively diminished poverty by almost 28 percent during Lula’s first term, and 50 percent between 2002 and 2010. Although Brazil is still very socially unequal, an appreciation of how income has changed over the last decade is indicative of PT’s political choices: between 2001 and 2009, among the 10 percent poorest, income increased 69.08 percent, while the 10 percent richest saw their income increase by 12.8 percent. In the same period, income for Blacks and Browns increased 43.1 percent and 48.5 percent, respectively, while Whites saw their income increase 20.1 percent. Blacks’ incomes went from 53 percent of Whites’ incomes in 2001, to 62 percent in 2009.28 Given Brazil’s historical inequality and the political elite’s reluctance to address poverty, the levels of income redistribution PT engendered were nothing short of astounding. These sea-­changing processes were reflected in related transformations in the social composition of both the party’s constituency and the state bureaucratic machine. The 2005 Mensalão vote-­buying scandal was a significant moment in the slow but radical transformation in Lula’s social base.29 At that point,

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several high-­ranking PT officials, including José Dirceu, Lula’s chief of staff, as well as the party’s president, José Genoíno, were indicted on corruption charges. The Supreme Court accepted the charges and in 2012 condemned Dirceu, Genoíno, and others to prison sentences. Although Lula was spared and eventually reelected in 2006 with 60 percent of the votes, his base of support had been drastically reshuffled. Until then, since PT’s inception in 1980, Lula and the party’s supporters had been made up of a majority of trade union members, informal workers, sectors of the leftist bourgeoisie and professionals, high school and college students, artists, teachers, university professors, public sector staff, and Catholic organizations. Regionally, Lula and PT’s support was more concentrated in the richer, more industrialized, and whiter regions in the South and Southeast.30 However, in a process that began manifesting itself since at least 1996,31 segments of the middle classes withdrew their support while the most impoverished electorate progressively shifted to Lula and the PT. Aside from the effects of the obviously pro-­poor policy choices and the corruption scandal, many of the party’s longtime supporters felt alienated by a series of policies that seemed to impinge on their already eroding race and class privileges. The expansion of affirmative action programs to all federal universities; the formalization of sectors of the informal economy that, unregulated, sustained much of the middle classes’ lifestyle, especially underpaid domestic workers, who overwhelmingly were Black women; not to mention the dissatisfaction about the Family Stipend that increasingly began to be associated with undeserved handouts:32 these had the accumulated effect of distancing the relatively more educated, whiter, allegedly overtaxed, and frustrated middle classes from Lula and his party. Adding to the perception of eroding privileges, spaces until then almost exclusively White, such as airports, car dealerships, and shopping malls, became visibly more diverse racially and socially.33 Unprecedented for Lula and his party, support among different economic strata became inversely proportional to their income. Thus, for example, in the 2006 presidential election’s second round, against conservative candidate Geraldo Alckmin, Lula obtained 64 percent of the vote among those who earned up to two minimum salaries per month, and 36 percent of the vote among those who earned ten or more minimum salaries. The opposite trend was recorded for Alckmin, who fared better among higher earners and worse among lower earners.34 Since 1989, when the first presidential election took place after the military dictatorship, the country hadn’t

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witnessed such polarized results. The difference, however, was that in Lula’s failed bid for the presidency in 1989, his opponent, Collor, carried the so-­called subproletariat vote.35 In 2006, PT’s presidential candidate gained the support of those who had rejected him in previous elections. The combination of cash-­transfer programs, a substantial increase of 24.25 percent in the minimum wage during Lula’s first mandate, the expansion of consumer credit for the historically impoverished, and a series of focused initiatives that, for instance, expanded the electrical grid, provided land rights for Maroon communities, and offered dental clinics—­these and other policies had the accumulated effect of a historically unprecedented diminution of poverty.36 With this palpable improvement for the impoverished came the electoral support which, ideological ambiguity notwithstanding,37 marked a clear realignment in Lula’s social base. Dilma Rousseff inherited this base; she carried the majority of ballots in the poorer states of the Northeast, North, and Southeast. As significant as the electoral realignment, but not as well documented, was the social recomposition of the federal state bureaucratic apparatus. By appointing working-­class persons at all levels of government, including five among his new ministries and dozens of trade unionists in other high-­ level posts, the first Lula administration radically transformed the federal machine’s social profile. “For the first time, poor citizens could recognize themselves in the bureaucracy and relate to friends and comrades who had become ‘important’ in Brasília. This change in the social composition greatly increased the legitimacy of the state, as it supported from inside the government its redistributive policy agenda.”38 It is in this context of marked shifts in PT’s electorate, its federal administration’s social composition, and above all the policies targeting the most impoverished that Xavier’s remarks about the special moment make sense. The special moment is one that builds from tectonic social changes since 2002. Specifically for a member of a prominent Black women’s NGO, the questions about how, by whom, and for whom the state machine is managed are critical. As representatives of and collaborators with impoverished Black women, Criola members see themselves in the changing face of the PT federal administration. As representatives of Black impoverished women, however, they are part of a still reduced number of Black political operatives that circulate in the national capital’s corridors of power. In Congress, for example, in 2013, 8.9 percent of its members declared themselves Black or Brown; in the Senate, only Paulo Paim declared himself

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Black.39 Either as participants in one of the many federal commissions on issues related to Afro-­Brazilian health, youth, violence, and culture, or as informal advisers to members of various ministries, particularly SEPPIR, Criola activists are engaged in domesticating and further reshaping the state machine.40 Criola’s participation in the federal sphere is an example of a broader trend. The PT government apparatus has absorbed prominent Black activists. This renewed and substantive presence gives Xavier evidence that the empire-­state can indeed be transformed from within. At the same time that Xavier expresses her belief in the transformative work Black organizations and activists do in Brasília and other official venues, she also detects contradictory collateral effects of this practice. Xavier explains what she calls the “emptying of civil society” (esvaziamento da sociedade civil) as a consequence of the state’s absorption of Black leadership and agendas. Unpacking her diagnosis allows us to further our analysis of Black disidentification from the 2013 manifestations. While her statement provides an added explanation for Blacks’ reticence about public protest against an administration that shows support for Black movements, it forces us to consider in what measure the state’s permeability to Black agendas can indeed lead to structural and long-­lasting pro-­Black change. Here the question is whether the empire-­state’s programmatic initiatives already in place (e.g., the sweeping affirmative action policies) can lead to structural institutional and cultural transformation that effectively combats antiblackness. Xavier’s findings lead us to ask: What kinds of social justice demands are legible by state operatives, including policy makers? And just as critically, are these demands sufficient to bring about society’s structural transfiguration? Without this kind of structural transformation, Black exclusion, suffering, and death will continue to be socially acceptable, institutionally normative, and culturally irrelevant. Xavier intimates that this necessary, deep transformation, while difficult, is possible. The enemy state, then, can be domesticated and rendered pro-­Black. According to Xavier’s perspective, the lack of Black public mobilization and disidentification with the protests would be a symptom of how key sectors of the Black movements have removed themselves from the streets and other informal, counterhegemonic venues of political mobilization, and entered institutionalized spaces of policy debate and elaboration. This movement—­not unlike how Derrick Bell described the institutionalization of the United States civil rights movement when it began to increasingly rely on lawyers, courts, and Black middle-­class agendas of

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integration at the same time that it crowded out working-­class, nationalist, and other more radical perspectives—­creates new types of representatives and agendas while rendering obsolete others.41 The Black, NGO-­trained, traveled, internationally funded, socially ascendant, college-­ educated, middle-­class socialized activist becomes a central, although not the only, reference for current and future generations of advocates. Like Xavier, the Black women at Criola come from impoverished and working-­class social backgrounds; they are often the daughters of domestic workers. Yet the registers of affect, vocabulary, and political spaces according to which they militate is more conducive to, and resonates more directly in, formal settings often (but not exclusively) sponsored by state machines operating at various levels: federal, state, and local commissions and research groups, as well as academic conferences. NGOs, autonomous foundations, and civil society networks also intersect in these settings, and indeed have become integral to them. In Criola’s case, the many networks it mobilizes, and of which it is a part, constitute its primary social base. These networks are built around a series of action programs including the health of Black women and of the Black population at large (including AIDS/HIV prevention among adolescents), job market insertion (via the development of marketable skills, access to credit, and cooperatives), and cultural production (focusing on the autonomy of Black youth involved in hip hop), among others.42 Since at least 2006, PT is closer to representing Brazil’s majority population than it was in the 1990s.43 The social transformation that has occurred in the state machine, in theory, can continue to move it closer to Brazil’s poorer, Black social segments, which are still mostly invisible in the federal bureaucracy, and certainly not as present as are nonblack working-­ class-­originated representatives of organized labor. Key questions immediately emerge. Can the Brazilian state bureaucracy be substantially Black, and if so, can it implement structural pro-­Black changes? Xavier’s analysis brings with it the conviction that the state must and can change. It does not, however, negate our heuristic propositions about Black disidentification with the 2013 protests. Xavier is aware of how structural antiblackness overdetermines public–­political spaces and how the state—­via the police, for example—­operates in openly discriminatory ways. Xavier’s insights reveal a political determination to walk through the state doors PT has opened, and in the process, in conversation with Criola’s and broader networks, begin program-­based societal change from those official spaces.

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In its pragmatism and self-­awareness, Xavier’s practice reveals an interesting commonality with the disidentification processes described above: it is as if the realm of the state machine is the most effective—­perhaps the only one—­from which the otherwise irremediably antiblack society formation can be reconfigured. This evaluation does not negate the state’s antiblack practices; it merely points to what strategy is likely to produce the best results. In the context of unprecedented transformations in both PT and its federal machine, instrumentalizing and making the most out of the “special moment” is perfectly rational, save for one caveat. For the strategy to work, it has to bracket the theory, belief, or analysis that antiblack dispositions, though variant, are ultimately foundational to how the empire-­state operates, recognizes itself, and moves through time. In the PT period, the Brazilian state may very well have been more friendly to the working class than any leftist activist ever dreamed of; and because of targeted state policies, Brazilian society witnessed an unprecedented presence of Black people in spheres of consumption in ways unimaginable only a few decades earlier. Still, whether state bureaucracies and dynamics can be rendered less antiblack, or even pro-­Black, and then move on to systematically identify and extract deeply seated antiblack orientations in formations of sociability, is a question that probes not so much the empire-­state’s political will as the viability of the Black presence. Is the Brazilian polis’s cultural architecture compatible with Black people’s effective assimilation, not as mere (and suspect) new customers, but as de facto full citizens? Or more to the point, is the Brazilian empire-­state, as a product of philosophical modernity, compatible with the Black who is also human? In Lúcia Xavier’s perspective, the strategic appropriation of the state can be interpreted as a consequence of the realization that in society as presently constituted, Criola’s demands, like Black people’s voices, are hardly legible: Black subjects, then, inhabit a position of irremediable antagonism and incommunicability. Xavier and Criola exercise a type of strategic maneuver that, sustained by grassroots networks, targets state apparatuses as bases from which to create minimal mechanisms of protection and survival, and implement structural societal changes. Vis-­à-­vis Black subjects who elected to stay away from the protests and disavow politics, Xavier’s strategy recognizes the same constitutive antiblack terror yet chooses to challenge it from within the state machine that implements it and from above the society that sanctions it.44

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In the next segment, i analyze public events in 2013 and 2014 that, while on the surface not as politically charged as the 2013 manifestation, nevertheless revealed additional dimensions of antagonism and incommunicability that the Black presence engenders, particularly in spaces of social privilege.

Without a Permit: Rolezinhos as Metaphors for Black Integration The noun “rolezinho” is the diminutive of “rolê” (or “rolé,” depending on regional pronunciation), and means a short stroll, drive, or ride by car, motorcycle, or bicycle. It has had a constant cross-­class, cross-­gender, and cross-­racial presence in Brazilian youth slang since at least the 1980s. Yet, in the final days of 2013, as school recess, summer, and the holiday shopping season were beginning in the city of São Paulo, rolezinhos became more specific—­indeed, they became a national fixation. In the 2013 rolezinhos, most participants were Black (negro and pardo) youth residents of the impoverished and sprawling city peripheries, claiming their right to collectively enjoy spaces of leisure and commodity consumption. Usually dressed in recognizable brand-­name caps, flashy clothes, colorful sneakers, sunglasses, and jewelry, these young men and women brought to the air-­conditioned, shiny, squeaky, smooth-­surfaced, and artificially lit spaces their good-­humored boastfulness, cadenced in beats and lyrics of what is called “funk ostentação.” This music, not unlike worldwide rap songs on conspicuous consumption, women’s objectification, crime, and partying, provided some of the riffs the young people sang in chorus while walking, sometimes running, through the malls. In the December 14, 2013, gathering, young people sang, “Eita porra, que cheiro de maconha” (“Dang, I smell pot”), part of the song “Deixa eu ir” by a recently killed rapper MC Daleste.45 The youths wore accessories that not only represented inordinate proportions of their or their family’s income, but also hardly distinguished them from one another. And that was perhaps the point. Collectively, these underprivileged, residentially segregated young people stated their hard-­won insertion into the global consumer market.46 By venturing into physical spaces of privilege, they performed an analogous entry into symbolic domains that, by force of deeply ingrained social representations and expectations, were considered out of their reach. Rolezinhos, then, tested the degree to which Brazilian spaces of relative affluence are able to absorb

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large concentrations of Black people. In this simple yet effective manner, rolezinhos became metaphors for Black integration. They dramatized the gains of PT’s social programs in a social formation that historically and presently normalizes Black exclusion. In the largest Brazilian metropolis, malls are often termed “praia de paulista.” This translates as beaches for those who live in the city that, unlike Rio de Janeiro, for example, is devoid of accessible large public and pedestrian space. On December 8, 2013, at the Shopping Metrô Itaquera, six thousand youths, mobilized via Facebook, gathered to socialize, walk around the mall, flirt, window-­shop, and, most of all, exercise their presence in a space defined by its air-­conditioning, cleanliness, sense of protection, and unsaid, invisible, but effective social barriers. On that occasion, the police were called and three people were arrested.47 Then, on December 14, in Guarulhos, about 2,500 young people came together in the Shopping Internacional. Twenty-­two youths were taken into custody, suspected of being “ ‘about to start’ a mass robbery.” While the “about to start” justification may sound bizarre, it is indeed an antiblack preemptive police practice that is diasporic and recurrent. Historian George Lipsitz remarked on its use by U.S. police forces in their systematic targeting of Black motorists. Lipsitz provided an illustrative incident of a cop who, upon stopping a driver, told the African American man his car registration was “about to expire.”48 In the ensuing press coverage that reached national and international readers, there were hints of moral panic, and mostly resentment, among those not accustomed to the presence of Black youths in spaces where they do not usually circulate as customers. (Blacks of course are familiar with those sites as janitorial, cooking, and sales workers.) Spaces of consumption usually located in the city’s more expensive and central geographical areas, these malls target middle-­and upper-­class consumers who live relatively close by and drive to their facilities. Social markers, immediately recognized by patrons and security guards, give normative entry into these spaces. When youths not commonly associated with normative social belonging entered these protected zones in large numbers, cultural codes of Black exclusion and their beholders were directly challenged. Shopkeepers, mall administrators, and the middle and upper classes were swift and, because of their access to news media, quite vocal in their condemnation of rolezinhos.49 Surveys indicated, however, that they were not the only ones. Normative expectations about gendered dynamics of antiblackness

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and their relationship to physical space, and more generally hierarchies of social belonging, are shared across a broad spectrum of people in São Paulo and indeed all of Brazil. A Datafolha survey of 799 São Paulo residents sixteen and older, conducted on January 21, 2014, showed that, across income levels, age, years of formal education, and gender, while 92 percent had heard about rolezinhos, 73 percent said they go to a mall at least once every month. Suggesting a broad, cross-­class, and age consensus (although there were some interesting variations),50 82 percent of those interviewed were against rolezinhos; 77 percent thought rolezinhos were causing gratuitous mayhem; 72 percent believed malls did not react based on skin color prejudice; 80 percent agreed that malls acted correctly when seeking injunctions against unaccompanied minors; 83 percent who had kids younger than twenty-­five would not allow them to participate in the rolezinhos; and 73 percent affirmed that the Military Police should be proactive in quelling rolezinhos.51 Illustrating these commonly held opinions, Eduardo, writing in the comments section of the New York Times, stated the following: “I am Brazilian,” he began, claiming ethnographic authority by virtue of his citizenship. “I know better what is happening. That is not racist or social matter, this is behavior matter. The shoppings are closing because this young crowd are making a mass [sic; he probably meant ‘mess’], screaming and even stealing things. Only in Brazil, that this kind of thing happens. The troublemakers go to the mall to protest against the lack of access to shopping products, dressed in clothes they bought in the mall themselves. The country’s [sic] of collective stupidity. And now the New York times [sic] is going with it. Come here when a ‘rolezinho’ is happening and see it with your own eyes.”52 Among many telling assumptions—­for example, the predictable negation of antiblack racism—­there is one that seems central to Eduardo and the survey subjects’ reasoning: contrary to what rolezeiros seemingly protest (i.e., blocked consumption), the youth have access to consumer goods—­after all, they are, in Eduardo’s words, “dressed in clothes they bought in the mall themselves.” The problem, then, is not economic inequality, access to consumer goods, or antiblack racism. It is young people’s behavior, incompatible with the spaces where they choose to congregate. The common middle-­class and elite perception (which is probably shared in some degree by members of the impoverished classes) is that an emerging social segment, previously impoverished, due to the

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PT government’s preferential treatment, had gained unprecedented buying power. Yet, according to Eduardo’s reasoning, proper comportment, which suggests cultural capital, lags behind newfound monetary gains. Eduardo’s critical statement about the country of “collective stupidity” is not only an indictment of PT’s policies and administration at various levels—­tellingly, Fernando Haddad, then São Paulo’s mayor, is a PT member. It also reveals nostalgia for a mythical social order based on clear emblems and boundaries of belonging, a social order that functioned as if invisible barriers and permits were enforced at all times. (Barriers and permits, certainly, were for those who, for compelling reasons such as performing essential domestic work, had to temporarily enter zones of privilege, although they were not of those zones). It is not accidental that, to this day, parents of Black impoverished and working-­class youths will plead with them to bring their IDs when going out. A few decades ago, work papers (Carteira de Trabalho) were also needed if, once stopped by a police officer, one were to make a case that he were gainfully employed and therefore not a criminal suspect. It is not difficult to see how contemporary antiblack police practices draw a line to the regime of slavery and its aftermath, when policing Black bodies was imperative for the symbolic, social, and economic orders.53 There is a popular aphorism in Brazil that says a Black person running is a thief, and Black person walking too leisurely is a suspect. The persistent, socially constructed, undeniable fact is that Black people are deemed suspect and often stopped by the police (and those deputized as such) not because of what Blacks do, but because of who they are (or are not). Datafolha survey results about rolezinhos and Eduardo’s comments resonate with much of what i heard from upper-­and middle-­class white-­ identified persons in Rio and São Paulo, who lament social deterioration while recognizing, on the one hand, the erosion of their own privilege, and on the other, the ascension of newly economic empowered social subjects. “This city is not what it used to be when I was young,” a well-­known senior academic told me in 2012 in Rio, where he had made his home for the past several decades. A young Black man asked for change and turned around when the scholar waved him away. “Today,” he continued, “people shit in the streets, the city is a mess, look at this around us!” Eduardo, and those who feel aggrieved by Brazil’s astonishing social changes, will likely continue to insist on denying antiblack racism as a personal and social fact. Yet such denial becomes highly disputable when we recognize that the

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boundaries of sociability Eduardo and his imagined social class so value (and now mourn) are deeply gendered and antiblack. Spatial boundaries are gendered antiblack boundaries. The massive, animated, confident, and in many ways defying presence of Black youths in spaces previously assumed and experienced as spaces of nonblack, mostly White privilege strikes at the foundations of Brazilian apartheid.54 Not unlike what happens in U.S. cities like Austin—­where large concentrations of Black people lead to the closing of commercial establishments, local roads, freeways, and shopping malls, especially during the annual track and field competitions known as the Texas Relays55—­when warned about impending rolezinhos, São Paulo mall administrators began to close early or preemptively shut down altogether. Some establishments, like the Shopping JK Iguatemi, obtained legal injunctions prohibiting the entrance of unaccompanied minors. The unsaid premise, of course, was that “minors” equated with “Black youth.” Police presence became even more pronounced.56 The negative reactions about the rolezinhos seemed to lament that, instead of Brazil becoming more like malls, malls have become more like Brazil.57 The first two rolezinhos initiated a sequence of similar events throughout the greater São Paulo area and other parts of Brazil: For example, on December 22, at the Shopping Interlagos, in São Paulo’s southern area, when ten Military Police divisions were mobilized and four youths were detained; on January 4, this time in the city’s northern zone, the Shopping Tucuruvi, four hundred youths participated, no arrests were registered, but shops closed three hours ahead of schedule; on January 11, again in the Shopping Itaquera, when two youths were detained allegedly for participating in an “arrastão” (explained below); and on January 12 in the mall Bosque Maia, in the Guarulhos region.

Rolezinhos and Arrastões Videos taken during the events reveal dominant shared beliefs about those participating in the rolezinhos. One of the online videos, documenting the December 14, 2013, rolezinho at the Shopping Internacional de Guarulhos, is titled “Arrastão Shopping Internacional Guarulhos.”58 In the images, dozens of people in the food court seem distressed. They get up from their tables and look around, concerned; there is shouting, whistling (of the high-­pitched and brief type Brazilians employ to call someone’s attention, whose tone, depending on the context, is modulated between the

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playful and the serious), and the clatter of tables, chairs, and people moving with uncertainty. Then we see a group of about five police officers and mall security staff with their dogs escorting a young man. Dark skinned, slim, no taller than five feet two, the youth has a barrel-­chested man’s arm around his neck. The youth almost disappears in the swarm of bystanders and other police that converge on the scene and follow the group. Emerging from the crowd of bystanders, many of whom record the events with their phone cameras, we hear “Dá porrada no filho da puta . . . dá porrada nele!” (“Beat up the son of a bitch . . . beat him up!”). “Arrastão,” the title given to this video, reveals suggestive historical, geographical, and ideological connections between rolezinhos and events more commonly associated with cities by the ocean. The term denotes a common fishing technique, translatable as trawling, by which two or more rows of people, standing on a beach, pull ropes attached to a large net previously cast in the ocean. Eventually the net reaches the beach and the fish are collected. But arrastão has other, more creative and metaphorical meanings. In the Brazilian popular culture imaginary since at least the 1980s it describes a mass robbery technique according to which a large number of impoverished youth—­described as “menores,” “pivetes,” “trombadinhas,” and “trombadões,” racialized and gendered as Black men—­walk through a beach (casting a net, as it were) and, in the ensuing chaos their presence generates, steal (or “fish”) whatever beachgoers have on or leave behind. On October 19, 1992, for example, Rio de Janeiro’s main newspaper, O Globo, reported on its first page, “Arrastões levam terror às praias” (Arrastões bring terror to beaches). The article read, in part, “Starting at about 10:00 a.m. between the Arpoador and Leblon beaches, the mayhem created by juveniles [pivetes] and adult thieves went on until the afternoon, when it reached Copacabana beach and the surrounding streets, where buses were stoned, cars damaged, and pedestrians mugged. Thirty-­five detainees were taken to the police station, but the majority was released because no one pressed charges.”59 It is fascinating, and in retrospect quite understandable, that arrastão, a phenomenon tied to the 1980s and 1990s in Rio, emerged in the press and in popular language to describe the rolezinhos in São Paulo decades later. “A new arrastão terrorized the patrons of another shopping mall of the capital,” asserted the Diário de S.Paulo on January 11, 2014, to describe the rolezinho in the Itaquera mall.60 A case could be made that arrastões are more explicitly concerned with robberies than getting together—­arrastões

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would be means to economic ends, whereas rolezinhos, normative mall shoppers and security personnel’s opinions notwithstanding, as social gatherings would be ends in themselves. Yet, in the realm of dominant representations, rolezinhos and arrastões become tied by their presumed common delinquency. Shared antiblackness, as a tacit but powerful social code, renders Black youth agglomerations suspect, and perhaps already criminal. Besides the claim that these concentrations of youths are engineered as a technology of quick, illicit profit, they draw out deep collective fears. In both cases, the young people act synchronized by music and sounds whose vernaculars, to those who feel threatened, are tied to unknown yet looming spaces of blackness, poverty, and danger. As in the rolezinhos of 2013 and 2014, in the 1980s in Rio “funk” riffs, some of which traced genealogies that connected them directly to the soul scenes of Atlanta, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, were often sung as the youth occupied the beaches. Taken by surprise, nonblacks, Whites, and tourists were easy prey for the large invading group, who seemed quite coordinated when swarming over areas of leisure until then considered safe. Fears emerged in proportion to the intensity and scope with which such territories of privilege were occupied by an alleged foreign mob formed by large numbers of individuals considered socially marginal and dangerous. To this day, no expression encapsulates the fear of the Black better than “descer o morro,” to come down the hill. The imagery here, used to instill fear by and of peoples of the favelas—­which in Rio usually occupy geographies above White middle-­class neighborhoods, and thus have the strategic panoptical advantage—­is of course reminiscent of the slave revolt. The litany of cultural terms that exist to describe danger as synonymous with a Black crowd (which can really be as small as one or two people) suggests that modern empire-­states of the Black diaspora carry in their collective imaginary the afterlife of the Haitian revolution. The image and fears of the youth, the “pivetes,” conjure up not only the material threat they pose—­perhaps more vivid is the belief that these young men and children have no regard for life and will not hesitate to injure and kill. The term “trombadinha,” used interchangeably with “pivete” and, more commonly these days, “menor,” to describe the young men in arrastões, is the diminutive of “trombada,” which means either a body bump or a vehicle crash. Bodily threat, therefore, is automatically associated with the arrastão. Transposed to rolezinhos, this threat becomes personified in the young Black men’s collective presence in the shopping

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malls. As in many popular culture representations in and of the Black diaspora, the young, dark-­skinned, cold-­blooded killer Zé Pequeno (played by actors Douglas Silva when a child and Leandro Firmino da Hora as an adult) typifies the pivete in the 2002 movie City of God. Zé Pequeno seems to take pleasure in killing both his rivals and—­more worrisome for the social groups who presently feel disturbed by rolezinhos—­nonblacks and Whites not involved in his immediate drug turf wars. The fears that pivetes, trombadinhas, and menores engender is not only because they suddenly appear in great numbers in spaces public (the beaches) and semipublic (the malls, which are private but open to the public). Fears arise because, first, those spaces are not conceptualized and experienced as fully open—­they are public spaces according to defined expectations about which, when, in what capacity, and in what proportion Black social groups can participate. The beaches in Rio where arrastões became notorious are located in middle-­and upper-­class neighborhoods where most Blacks are either employed as domestic workers (including nannies and babysitters), janitors, or drivers, or are residents of near-­by favelas. As we will see in the next chapter, even after police pacifying operations, favelas, historical Black residential areas, are still regarded as spaces of danger and crime. On the beaches of Leme, Copacabana, Arpoador, Ipanema, and Leblon, for example, Blacks are tolerated as a group in manageable numbers and in defined areas, usually at the margins of each beach. It is not accidental that, on any given day, there will be a noticeable concentration of Black beachgoers in Leme beach near the homonymous rock formation, where young people and families from Chapéu Mangueira and Babilônia communities gather. The same happens at Copacabana near the military fort and the fish market, and at the Arpoador beach, where residents of the nearby Cantagalo and Pavão-­Pavãozinho communities often congregate. To the proponents of the racial harmony thesis and its variations, Black presence in those public spaces is proof of conviviality. And indeed, Black access to the famous beaches in theory has increased considerably since the governorships of leftist Leonel Brizola (1983–­87 and 1991–­94). In the midst of predictable, often hysterical protest by residents of the elite neighborhoods by the ocean, Brizola inaugurated bus lines connecting impoverished, mostly Black, northern and western peripheral neighborhoods to the southern beaches.61 The now begrudgingly accepted million-­ people-­plus New Year’s celebration, as well as various music, sporting, and

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religious events in Copacabana, would be unthinkable in this magnitude before the Brizola era. Yet, the beach’s antiblack racial arrangement remains, and the specter of the arrastão is always looming. Beachgoers are often scanning the beach and sometimes show a sudden change of affect when they perceive unusual activity. They reach for their belongings, get up, look for relatives and friends. In a domino effect, other people immediately begin to follow suit and sometimes move away from the water and toward the street, where they assume the police will protect them. On November 20, 2013, beachgoers reported an arrastão coming from Arpoador. “I was going to get in the water,” a witness said, “when I saw everyone getting up, running, tripping on beach chairs, a lot of people left.”62 The fears remain. In a blistering summer day in 2015, an older White woman, sitting a few feet from me in Leme beach, asked me and other people around her if we had seen pivetes, intimating that the question and her precautions were part of her routine. An experiential and representational universe stressing privilege, difference, and separation is actualized in the fears generated by rolezinhos and arrastões. Fears emerge because Blacks, in spaces of privilege, are always already out of place. (The reverse is not necessarily true. Nonblacks, and especially Whites, are hardly out of place, even when they enter historical Black spaces like favelas. Favela tourism, quite common in Rio, brings this point home.) When and if Blacks and the impoverished enter beaches and malls for economic appropriation by cunning or violence, it is from a correct and quite obvious diagnostic that such spaces of privilege, and nonblackness, are where the wealthy reside. These spaces of privilege, more important, bestow onto their natural members a reaffirmation of their value as individuals—­their humanity—­that is ultimately not accessible to those who are foreign to such spaces. It is this sense of differentiated humanity that helps us understand the fears rolezinhos and arrastões produce. I want to propose that the physical vulnerability experienced in these spaces suddenly occupied by Blacks derives from a shared agreement about scales of humanity in which Black lives, considered less valuable—­or even outside humanity—­and thus having less at stake, represent a formidable threat to those who, by contradistinction, have much more to lose as those who hold the privileges of belonging, property, and personhood. The fear of the Black then becomes the conviction and reaffirmation that Black life is less valuable—­Black life is equated with dispossession. Here we are of course in the realm of social

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symbols and norms and therefore beyond conclusive demonstration. Yet, what explains that even with access to economic resources, spaces of consumption and leisure, and, more broadly, with sweeping government affirmative action policies that target the impoverished and the Black, Blacks are still represented and experienced as foreign to spaces historically associated with privilege? We may want to consider PT’s efforts to redistribute income, improve access to credit, and expand citizenship as attempts at providing Blacks with the material and cultural bases for becoming incorporated, naturalized as it were, into the Brazilian polis. It is conceivable, then, that PT’s practical efforts could, with the corresponding cultural work to replace deep assumptions about Blacks, change the antiblack structure of positionality. When rolezinhos and arrastões are brought together in the dominant imaginary, however, they reveal that Black presence in public (and semipublic) spaces of privilege is suspect at best, and terrifying when in great numbers. Black lives are still and always devalued, and because of that they threaten in ways that the nonblack find unbearable. That Blacks are foreigners in the land of racial democracy is well illustrated in the overwhelming data on Black accumulated and transgenerational material disadvantages as well as death by preventable causes, including police violence. Paixão, Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Waiselfizs, among many others, make the case for Black estrangement from the Brazilian empire-­state quite compelling.63 Black out-­of-­place-­ness gains added evidence when we engage with the everyday manifestations of antiblack dispositions. Arpoador beach, where antiblack battles are ongoing, has been plastered with signs reading “Locals only. Respect it or beat it.”64 As i write, the litany of senseless Black suffering and death continues. In Rio, by far not the most violent among Brazilian large cities, a fifteen-­year-­ old homeless Black kid was stripped naked, tied to a light post by the neck, and beaten repeatedly by a band of about thirty White motorcyclists, one of whom was armed with a gun, who then proceeded to threaten to kill him. “He said he was going towards Copacabana beach,” as reported in O Globo, “ ‘for a rolé,’ when he was approached by the men.”65 A day later, on February 2, 2014, Folha de S.Paulo reported on a video showing another young Black man, twenty-­year-­old Igor Veras de Oliveira Falcão, suspected of stealing, shot dead at point blank while sitting in the middle of a street in Belford Roxo, in the greater Rio metropolitan region.66 This time, however, the shooter was a Black man, allegedly private security, who calmly comes down a motorcycle and, in one continuous motion,

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pulls a gun from his waist and shoots three times at Falcão.67 The cultural construction of Black life’s worthlessness is amply shared. Blacks are out of place in places of privilege, but they also seem to be out of place regardless of place.

“I’ve Always Been Discriminated Against” Organizer of the rolezinho in the Shopping Internacional de Guarulhos mall, twenty-­year-­old Jefferson Luis, also known as MC Jota L, was among the twenty-­three arrested in the ensuing mêlée. His sudden notoriety helped his MC career aspirations, and it has given him news media space to reflect on the rolezinhos as well as his motivations, social background, and projects, both individual and collective. Jefferson is a light-­skinned young man who is deeply aware of his social condition. In the videotaped interview, he is dressed in typical hip hop attire—­a black T-­shirt with a print on it, black cap, jeans, high-­top sneakers. His high-­pitched, tentative voice, braces, and thin physique produce an interesting, attention-­grabbing effect when packaged with his fine-­tuned understanding of social dynamics. The aspiring MC sits on the bottom mattress of a bunk bed. The walls are an off-­blue, through which cement gray is able to come through. We learn that, until ten days before the interview he shared the sixty-­foot square room with eight people: his mother, stepfather, three brothers, sister, and two nephews. (His mother, stepfather, and two brothers have since relocated to a nearby one-­room apartment.) His left hand is mostly covered by a tattooed red flower and green leaves; each of the letters of the word “star” is etched on his fingers, starting on the index moving to the little finger.68 Jefferson started organizing rolês via Facebook around 2011. He lives in Vila Esperança, about a mile from the mall where, he said, he had never been at ease: “The place was not comfortable, there was always that different look from security, because we are poor.  .  .  . I’ve always felt discriminated against.” He went on to say how, these days, some malls are enforcing a policy of selecting who can go in. “If you look like a criminal [cara de bandido] you can’t go in. For me, that’s prejudice [preconceito]. There’s color prejudice, there’s prejudice against certain types of music. . . . If I had invited rich people, there would be no bad reaction. Do you think they’d call the police to expel those rich people? No way. The mall owner would have looked me up and asked me to invite more people, bring them

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in because we’re making a profit, he’d say. But because it’s poor people, and black people, they’re beating us up and kicking us out.”69 It’s not apparent whether Jefferson considers himself Black. Yet he is aware of how the assumption of poverty, which is closely connected to the assumption of blackness, lumps the rolezeiros together as one indistinguishable mass of threatening people. In that awareness rests the recognition that, because during rolezinhos everyone is likely to be discriminated against, abused, and brutalized, everyone becomes the embodiment of the subject on whom, according to social expectations and demographic data, violence is normalized. That subject on whom violence is naturalized is the Black subject, the Black nonsubject. Regardless of one’s skin tone, once categorized as out of place, one becomes an outlaw, one acquires a thug’s face—­“cara de bandido.” The bandido and its associated tropes—­pivete, trombadinha, trombadão, menor, juvenil—­may occasionally not be unambiguously Black, yet s/he will be represented and treated as Black. The instantaneous and highly efficient process of social status ascription that links threats with the Black body, any Black body, also produces a deadly magnetic field. In this field, the Black body magnetizes violence, or, in Wilderson’s formulation, magnetizes bullets.70 It is this magnetization that transforms antiblack violence into terror. Jefferson restates this dominant symbolic equation that links poverty, out-­of-­place-­ness, and blackness when later in the interview he explains what motivated him to organize the rolezinho: “I did the encounter so that I could meet people like me. Otherwise, there would be only rich people. I wouldn’t meet anyone. They’d look at me and say, ‘He’s from a favela.’ ”71 Despite his light skin complexion, Jefferson’s awareness of the hegemonic assumptions, in this case held by “rich people,” that instantaneously categorize him as a favela resident, and therefore not belonging in the mall, make him part of a Black social group. By force of his social condition, Jefferson’s racial ambiguity is immediately translated, via the dominant grammar of belonging, into an unambiguous index of blackness. Indeed, the young man is well aware that what happens in malls is symptomatic of broader societal beliefs and institutional practices. Jefferson made it a point to connect his arrest following the rolezinho to his and his peers’ lives beyond the mall. He recalled, for example, how a close friend was once removed from a mall because he was wearing flip-­flops (while apparently many shoppers were not bothered for wearing the same outfit). Cops once stopped Jefferson because they saw him running in a way they found

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suspicious. The young man was flying a kite in front of his house. Encounters between police (and those deputized as such) and people categorized as suspect are mere examples of the state of terror Blacks continue to experience even in a time otherwise marked by unprecedented economic gains for the impoverished and the Black.72 Rolezinhos, as other concentrations of Black people whose presence does not conform to dominant expectations, disturb and yet confirm the symbolic assumptions structuring the Brazilian version of social apartheid. Brazilian apartheid is disturbed because its boundaries are contested. Brazilian apartheid is confirmed because, while the dominant narrative negates the relevance of antiblackness (by emphasizing poverty and/or culture, for instance, as the motivators of fear or explanations for continued marginalization), Blacks are repressed and excluded, and the boundaries of belonging are reaffirmed. This process of exclusion, as exemplified in Jefferson’s narrative, is one that creates an example of oblique identification. Despite his racial ambiguity, Jefferson has become aware of the experience of blackness due to his social proximity to Black spaces, communities, and individuals. Rolezinhos are thus able to produce forms of profound recognition of antiblackness that neither the juvenile prison in Austin nor the massive protests could engender. Whether the protests and their aftermath can potentially turn collective attention to antiblack processes and structures of social interaction is a question to which i will return in the following chapters.

When Black Protest Resurfaces Though Jefferson tried to distinguish the rolezinhos from organized protest, he did associate them to lived experience: “It’s not protest against oppression, as in funk parties, it’s a response to oppression. You can’t stay locked up in your house.” Oppression has many identifiable facets. For one, there is an acute awareness of the lack of leisure options and educational programs: “We have nothing to do besides soccer, fly kites, and the Internet. The mall is the only option.”73 As an alternative, Jefferson suggested the city administration start supervised writing programs for youth interested in learning to MC in addition to opening more parks and activity centers. He has only been to the movies three times in his entire life. Besides his vulnerability to violence, he experiences his social marginality in his lack of leisure and educational options, as well as in his embattled access to employment. Jefferson, like his peers, works hard to stay

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connected to the Brazilian dream of consumer market assimilation. Employed as a delivery person, he interrupted his studies to help his brother finish school. Jefferson plans to resume school soon. In the meantime, he’ll continue to financially assist his household and to MC at parties. Jefferson’s analysis of the rolezinhos reveals a sense of social injustice that brings to the fore a central contradiction in 2014, the pre-­crisis Brazilian political moment: while the impoverished and Black were indeed more connected to the consumer market via employment and substantial income gains, they remained trapped symbolically in dominant negative assumptions about the undeserving poor, and trapped materially in spaces that lack educational and cultural options. The generalized negative responses to rolezinhos were motivation for Black organized groups to take the public political stage. On January 18, 2014, appalled by what they considered blatant acts of racism against the rolezinhos, members of UNEafro organized a protest in front of one of São Paulo’s most well-­known malls, the JK Iguatemi. Suddenly, the June/ July protestors who had gone somewhat quiet, seemingly reemerged, this time with more focused demands. Rather than voice outright critique of how public funds were syphoned to the realization of the World Cup via networks of corruption involving elected officials and private operators, protestors strategically used the upcoming international event to express their own race-­based perspective: How can a country that aims to be a worldwide example of economic improvement and social harmony tolerate discrimination of Black people? Douglas Belchior, UNEafro member and a history teacher, put it even more specifically: “The city is not there for our well-­being, but for consumption. Our protest is political, against all forms of discrimination, especially against the Black.”74 Belchior and UNEafro thus expand on the point Jefferson intimated: market consumption was in 2014 more accessible, but the city and the country’s models of social management and economic development were still antagonistic to Blacks. In question is whether PT’s transformation of the state bureaucracy and its economic policies, including sweeping affirmative action reforms, are able to change antiblack modes of exclusion and discrimination. If Wilderson’s perspective stressing the constitutive aspect of antiblack terror is applicable to current Brazilian social relations and statecraft, then UNEafro’s protest does little but restate a historical pattern that will, because of its foundational cultural and cognitive quality, inevitably continue to actualize itself. Thus UNEafro’s protest in some

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ways explains Black disidentification during the 2013 manifestations. When it asks for an end of antiblack discrimination, the protest demands what cannot be achieved. Although policies may be put in place to address these and similar denunciations of Black oppression, the constitutive antiblack representational core that animates sociality is impermeable to external pressure. Closed malls, frustrated beachgoers, and infuriated representatives of the challenged middle-­classes attest to it. Ongoing patterns of Black death by the police and other preventable causes, including treatable disease, confirm it. Were Blacks to participate in the 2013 protests as Blacks and link their demands to their specific experiences, they would be automatically confronted with these deeper, fundamental questions. Can society be rendered less antiblack, or even anti-­antiblack? If antiblackness structures positionalities in ways that are hardly affected by policy, does it make sense to connect Black demands to reformist pleas concerning public services, education, and electoral politics? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then why bother participate in these types of political protest? While these questions may seem skeptical, they reveal an informed social diagnosis that refuses to buy into the discourses of multiracial integration and redemption. From the Black perspective, there is little evidence that economic and social gains prepare the symbolic grounds for a greater acceptance of blackness. Such Black diasporic perspective finds resonances in the informed skepticism incarcerated Black youth in Austin felt regarding the narratives of redemption and re-­assimilation into the “free.” What emerges out of both contexts is an awareness of unfreedom. This awareness renders imposed social vulnerability, which includes residential segregation, punitive schools, military policing, and the ever present specter of incarceration and early death, not passing events but evidence of a social structure whose fundamental logic is antiblack. That even a declared pro-­poor, pro-­Black federal administration spanning over thirteen years, is unable to make a dent in this social structure and its everyday manifestations that insist on the maintenance of varied modalities of apartheid shows how deep and wide is the challenge the Black presence poses to empire-­states of the diaspora. • • • The next chapter continues the analysis of contemporary forms of diasporic antiblackness. It examines the police-­caused disappearance and

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probable death of Black construction worker Amarildo de Souza in Rio de Janeiro. Amarildo’s ordeal happened in the midst of the political moment described above, when the country was still witnessing waves of protest against government corruption in several of its main cities. Importantly, the police officers that murdered Amarildo were part of a relatively new pacifying force, the product of a change of the paradigm in the state of Rio’s security policy, one that emphasized communitarian forms of policing and instructed officers, who had to undergo a mandatory crash course on human rights, on strategies to appease rather than repress favela residents.

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5

The Pacifying Police Security through Brutality

Amid the waves of mass protests analyzed in the previous chapter, a case of police brutality against a resident of the largest favela in Rio gained national attention. This chapter examines this case as an example of the challenges that supposedly innovative democratic public security policies encounter when applied to historical Black areas. To do so, it examines the new security paradigm implemented in Rio in 2008, which had in the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs in Portuguese) its main practical innovation and symbol. Here i analyze the UPPs’ location, paying attention to Rio’s racialized geographies; the language, implied meanings, and practices of pacification; and the seeming broad public consensus about the new security paradigm’s effectiveness. Next, i focus on the actual improvements with which the UPPs can be credited. The results are mixed at best. While there has been a recorded decrease in violent deaths, bodily injuries have increased. To make sense of these apparently contradictory trends, drawing on my own ethnography and the specialized literature, i zero in on the social climate within pacified communities and provide explanations for the rise in bodily injury in the context of diminishing instances of recorded lethal violence. This discussion prepares for an examination of the specific ways members of the new police interact with local residents of pacified communities. Instructed to appease rather than to repress, and trained in human rights, how do UPP officers make sense of the new policies? What are their views of the favelas and their inhabitants? How, if at all, have the UPPs changed the historical antagonistic relationship between the police and Black people? Based on recent qualitative studies conducted with UPP personnel and community members, it is evident that low-­ranking cops still harbor negative perceptions of favela dwellers. While police commanders and the civilian secretary of public security affirm the new police’s communitarian, democratic, and human-­rights-­based approach, 181

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the rank and file feels they elicit no respect in the communities they patrol, and view favela residents with suspicion. The chapter proceeds with a discussion on the intractable question of blackness, and how it explains both the shortcomings of the UPPs and Amarildo’s death. And finally, analyzing multiracial forms of protest against the disappearance and assumed death of Amarildo de Souza, this chapter wraps up by interrogating these manifestations of nonblack recognition of Black suffering, their assumptions, meanings, and consequences. This concluding section prepares the synthetic discussion about the people-­of-­color ethos, multiraciality, oblique identification, and the attempts at redeeming empire-­states in the Black diaspora that structures the next two chapters. By focusing on the UPP security paradigm and its effects on historically Black areas, i aim to not only interrogate the ways in which this paradigm furthers (and possibly challenges) Black exclusion; i also want to analyze Black people’s evaluation of public security policy in Rio in light of the informed skepticism Black people conveyed by not participating in the mass protests and by carrying out rolezinhos. As important, i want to explore how such manifestations of informed skepticism resonate with incarcerated Black kids in Austin, who recognized, in their personal and collective trajectories, a structure of exclusion that differentiated their experience from that of nonblack kids. This structure of exclusion, whose manifestations transcend borders of empire-­states, is diasporic antiblackness. As this chapter will show, diasporic Black suffering is at times recognized by nonblacks. Yet this recognition seldom includes the awareness of how fundamental, structural, ubiquitous, and unique antiblackness really is. As antiblackness is diasporic, so is oblique identification. • • • Amarildo de Souza, resident of the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Rocinha, was last seen alive on the night of July 14, 2013. A construction worker, married, and father of six, Amarildo was at a bar (Bar do Júlio) when eight police officers, commanded by officer Douglas Roberto Vital Machado (known as Vital), took him to a police post (Unidade de Policiamento de Proximidade). There, Elizabete Gomes da Silva, Amarildo’s wife, unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the officers from taking Amarildo to the headquarters of the Pacifying Police Unit (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, UPP). Images caught by a security camera placed in front of

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the police post, and broadcast by TV Globo on August 9, 2013, show Amarildo leaving the building escorted by officers and being placed in a police car. Elizabete is seen running toward the police vehicle and pleading with the officers.1 The three-­minute ride up the hill must have been tense for Amarildo. The UPP compound, fashioned out of six converted cargo containers, sits relatively isolated at the top of the community, in an area flanked by thick vegetation and no houses. In that community, as in others where this new model of policing was implemented, it was well-­known that, contrary to the overwhelmingly positive press coverage about UPPs throughout the city of Rio de Janeiro, UPP officers engaged in routine acts of abuse against locals. Hence Elizabete’s desperation. Although there was speculation that the officers suspected Amarildo knew the whereabouts of drugs in the neighborhood, and that the officers were trying to force Amarildo to provide the information, the exact motivation for what followed is not yet known. What is known, through investigative reporting and sworn testimonies, is this: once in the compound, Amarildo was tortured with Taser guns, asphyxiated with a plastic bag, and had his head submerged in a water-­filled bucket. Lieutenant Medeiros, Sergeant Gonçalves, and Officers Vital and Maia participated in the torture. Major Édson dos Santos, the commanding officer, oversaw the activities from his cubicle in an adjacent container. Other officers on duty were forced to stay inside the containers and hear the terrible sounds. One female officer covered her ears and said to her colleagues that what was being done to Amarildo should not be done even “to an animal.” According to this officer, the torture lasted about forty minutes. Then silence. Then laughter.2 While twelve officers surrounded the containers to isolate them from residents and other officers, Amarildo perished. His body, wrapped in plastic and tape, was removed from the police station through an opening in the roof, and temporarily placed in the bushes behind the compound. To conceal the body’s removal, one of the female officers turned off the lights outside the UPP.3

Amarildo’s Death and the New Security Paradigm Amarildo’s case is an opening into a complex, and strange, political crossroads. To signal a transitioning from authoritarian, corrupt, and excluding forms of social management to more democratic and inclusive governance,

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in 2008 the state of Rio de Janeiro’s administration established a new paradigm of public security.4 The new paradigm was primarily aimed at reclaiming urban territory from the control of drug dealers, and in the process increase social services in communities historically marked by the negative presence, or complete absence, of the state. The UPPs became the main primary innovation and symbol of this alleged paradigm shift. State governor Sérgio Cabral and public security secretary José Mariano Beltrame invested much of their political capital on this initiative. The plan was to combat violence while constructing or improving schools, health clinics, day care centers, public transportation, and sanitation. Under the aegis of UPPs, these communities—­impoverished and working class, disproportionately Black, yet close to airports and freeways, surrounded by mostly white and tourist areas5—­would also witness the dismantling of the long-­dominant drug-­dealing paramilitary organizations and the corrupt and brutal police force. In their stead, officers oriented toward human rights and community accountability were to inaugurate local trust in the police and the state. A few words on the language of “pacification” are required. When i use “pacification,” i will be interrogating the assumptions about the people and the area on which pacification is to be imposed. I take pacification as a trope indicative of the political moment. Invoking a just war, pacification campaigns require clear lines defining danger versus safety, corruption versus virtue, totalitarianism versus democracy, and exclusion versus belonging, among other dichotomies. Notice how such dyads resonate with the ways rolezinhos were represented in the dominant news media and by nonblack, especially middle-­and upper-­class Whites. At its most basic, pacification defines an enemy and the communities that produce and harbor the enemy. These communities—­mostly the historical Black areas known as favelas—­become battle theaters on which the just war is carried out. Implicit but powerful is the understanding that, unless contained, the evils defining such geographies will spill over, affecting the already challenged surrounding areas. Although narratives supporting pacification often focused on the favela dwellers’ involuntary submission to the local drug dealers, it was understood that, left unchecked, terror emanating from favelas as zones of evil would continue to victimize all the city’s residents and its visitors. Indeed, large-­scale, spectacular police operations designed to reclaim embattled territory from drug commerce gained prominence as the city

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embarked on pharaonic construction projects aiming at neighborhood “revitalization,” transportation, sport facilities, and tourism improvements in preparation for the 2013 Confederations Cup, the 2014 World Cup, and the 2016 Olympic Games. Specifically, the 2010 takeover of Vila Cruzeiro and the Complexo do Alemão were watershed moments that forcefully signaled the new political climate and its public-­safety paradigm shift. Drawing on 350-­plus men and women from the Special Operations Division (Batalhão de Operações Especiais, BOPE), regular police officers, and military personnel, the November 25, 2010, Vila Cruzeiro operation marked the state’s much-­publicized successful reclaiming of the area. After an initial futile attempt at resistance, the alleged drug dealers fled. Live television footage showed about two hundred heavily armed young men leaving the neighborhood and making their way to the adjoining communities known as Complexo do Alemão.6 Three days later, an estimated 2,600 BOPE agents, civil and military police, and army and navy troops took over the Complexo do Alemão without resistance.7 The new chapter in public security was a complex, if unprecedented, political moment characterized by what seemed like broad public support. An apparently powerful consensus not only approved the favela takeovers but also demanded more such operations. While public officials boasted their triumph over well-­armed drug cartels, news media organizations, including openly supportive anchors and reporters, pundits, researchers, and academics, joined in a celebratory chorus. Even the people of the affected areas, traditionally reticent about state interventions, were said to approve the takeovers. In a 2010 survey conducted by O Globo with six hundred residents of UPP communities before the Vila Cruzeiro and Alemão occupations, 93 percent felt safe or very safe. Among six hundred residents of disadvantaged areas without UPPs, 48 percent considered their communities unsafe; 70 percent were “supportive” or “very supportive” of having a UPP in their neighborhood.8 What these surveys reflect accurately is not so much what was actually happening in pacified communities, but rather the impressive social consensus about pacification. A robust, popular, cross-­class mandate for the implementation of UPPs had come to define Rio’s political climate.9 This broad support was based on the appearance of a widespread desire for pacification—­not exactly a new fact given Rio’s long-­term troubled relation with favelas and their people—­and, more important, the initial UPPs’ seeming effectiveness. Well-­coordinated narratives coming from officials,

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the news media, and reputable research centers played an important role in assuring the political climate and its defining consensus. For example, during the Vila Cruzeiro and Complexo do Alemão occupation operations, news reporters embedded in the police and military formations provided accounts of the confrontation with the alleged bandits as it unfolded. Media conglomerates such as TV Globo and Record employed helicopters to inform the public and deliver additional real-­time intelligence to the officers presiding over the drug dealers’ expulsion. And in the studio, sympathetic news anchors, security analysts, academics, and politicians gave expert descriptions of the operations, their positive social and political consequences, and how they augured the dawn of a new Rio. Since these impoverished areas were considered the “headquarters of crime,” it was hoped that the directly affected communities, and the city as a whole, would immediately experience sharp drops in robberies, shootings, and kidnappings. Pacified, these communities would be unable to generate and spread their evils.10 Studies conducted in the midst of this optimistic climate tended to accentuate dramatic and positive changes. In contrast to areas still dominated by drug organizations, reports indicated that UPP community residents felt safer and unfettered to talk about any topic, including the police. Now that intense gunfire and lost bullets, and as important, coercion from drug dealers, were mostly events of the past, residents felt greater liberty to come and go. Due to a noticeable decrease in the availability of heavy weaponry, and the marked presence of the new police, the drug dealing that continued was not as widespread or violent as it was previously. Indeed, many residents of UPP communities noticed how the until recently quotidian display of automatic weapons by those associated with the drug bureaucracies had almost vanished. Since UPP neighborhoods were now again state territories (as opposed to semi-­autonomous zones where the state’s presence—­and lack of presence—­was often criticized), gone were the anxieties about the prospect of drug turf wars and their violent, often lethal, collateral consequences.11

Fading Optimism, Accumulated Disadvantages, and Vulnerability to Violence: The Social Climate in UPP Communities A closer look at these available studies and data, as well as my own ethnographic observations, reveal greater variation of opinions in the UPP

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communities than the dominant political climate suggested. To access such nuances, however, is no easy task. On the one hand, dominant positive and optimistic assumptions about pacification, and on the other, the default negative hegemonic representations about Black spaces and peoples that are the fundamental object of pacification, present considerable analytical and ideological challenges to a critique of UPPs. I have been severely reprimanded by colleagues and audience members, in England, the United States, and Brazil, when presenting what i consider to be a measured critique of UPPs; and i have had texts rejected by anonymous reviewers who found it inconceivable to (a) link UPPs to race, and blackness specifically, and thus (b) focus on the ways the state apparatus and social actors enact forms of antiblackness. Personal experience makes for an avowedly weak case about a larger pattern. Yet the academic critiques colleagues and i have encountered, and the generalized optimism about UPPs that transpired through the news media and statements by pundits and academics, seem to be related phenomena. To speak of nuances in UPP communities is to acknowledge temporary pragmatic improvements and lingering problems. First let us consider the most obvious aspects of the improvements, which for good reasons fueled the broad consensus about the new social security paradigm. Between 2008 and 2011, among the first thirteen pacified communities,12 the number of violent deaths diminished 75 percent. While homicides diminished at a more modest pace, from 0.35 to 0.15 average occurrences per month, deaths during police activity (euphemistically registered as “Resistance Acts,” or Autos de Resistência),13 decreased from 0.5 per month to almost zero. To account for variations in community size and the different points in time when UPPs were implemented, rates of occurrences per hundred thousand inhabitants per month, considering numbers collected before and after pacification, offer a more reliable indicator. According to such rates, violent deaths go from 10.03 to 2.21, homicides from 3.37 to 0.87, and Resistance Acts from 5.70 to 0.12.14 The fall in violent deaths, in both absolute and relative terms, is a compelling explanation for the optimistic climate discernible in news media, mass opinion surveys, and political and academic influential circles. Even considering that trends within UPP communities reflected trends already underway for the city of Rio as a whole prior to 2009—­that is, prior to pacification—­the decrease in violent deaths in UPP communities was nevertheless more intense than in the city overall, as studies have shown.15

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Based on the overall decrease of lethal violence, on average, every two months there was one less victim of lethal violence in each of the UPP communities. This is the equivalent of a net decrease of sixty victims of violent death per hundred thousand inhabitants per year. A likely explanation for this improvement is that pacification meant a drastic reduction, or even the actual end, of armed confrontations between the police and drug dealers. Without these confrontations, which also often affected residents not involved in the drug trade—­a complaint favela dwellers and activists repeatedly formulated—­and the effective reclaiming of the state’s monopoly of violence, the exchange of gunfire became far less common. A marked change in UPP communities was the end of the quotidian scenes in which young men associated with the drug commerce circulated in their communities, by foot or on motorcycles, unencumbered, displaying guns and high-­powered automatic weapons. Such display of local militarized power was the case in the early 2000s, when i had to negotiate my entrance into the Jacarezinho community several times every week. To collaborate with local activists who were engaged in denouncing police abuse, i had to make my way to the neighborhood association, a two-­story house located in a central area of the favela, at the top of a hill. Between the association and the bus stop in front of one of the favela’s main entrances, next to a fetid canal sheathed in concrete, there was a barricade made of bricks, empty metal containers, old car parts, and chains. Standing guard in front of the barricade would be three, sometimes four boys no older than fourteen. Barefoot, raggedy, and as apprehensive as the people they routinely stopped and interrogated, they had become accustomed to my presence. “Neighborhood association, right, Uncle?” they would say, carelessly holding up their automatic rifle. Upon my confirmation, a short dialogue would ensue. Often, i would be asked if i knew of jobs “downtown,” or if there was something they could do for me for a modest compensation (pay bills, escort visitors in or outside Jacarezinho, arrange meals, etc.). They feared their days were numbered, which revealed a relationship with the drug commerce bureaucracy that is very different than what mass news media and even specialized studies proposed. Instead of the glamour and status that supposedly came with the drug-­related occupation,16 there was constant preoccupation about routine confrontations with the police and competing cartels, leading to injury, arrest, and death. Jacarezinho, the second largest favela in Rio, was at that point heavily

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barricaded. Waist-­high concrete blocks and seven-­foot-­tall steel gates protecting strategic points marked the drug dealers’ supremacy over the territory. Contrary to the accusations we frequently heard in the news from “favela experts,” the neighborhood association did not have formal ties with the dealers. Its members and i, in an effort to diminish violence, were engaged in monitoring the police and drug transactions, especially the former. For a short period, favela countersurveillance of the police and drug transactions was performed via security cameras operated by the neighborhood association.17 A routinized state of war prevailed. The favela’s unique status as a territory governed by an autonomous and parastatal organization was made evident in the scenes described above and many others. Even state officials, when visiting Jacarezinho upon accepting our invitation to see and understand our work of preventing police abuse (then vilified by journalists, politicians, and academics), had to submit to the local rules. Their chauffeured cars would be parked in a designated area while the officials would coyly make their way, by foot, to a bar or another public place we had chosen. Meanwhile, heavily armed young men passed by, on foot or motorcycles, in an apparent show of force and supremacy. In their cool demeanor, they unmistakably indicated they owned that territory. The state and its dignitaries were not only mere invitees—­while in Jacarezinho they were under the young men’s jurisdiction. I vividly remember one such meeting that took place with a sympathetic high state official over beers one night. While her driver sat uncomfortably in the official car parked two hundred yards away from the noisy bar and a thick crowd of young people socializing and enjoying the music, the official, prodded by one of the locals, looked up. The dealers’ automatic weapons’ laser beams had formed a strange spectacle of crossing red and green rays in the sky. Onlookers were reminded of the dealers’ ubiquitous presence, their might, and our complete submission to this high-­tech paramilitary, antistate formation with power over life and death and almost everything else in between.18 The strange spectacle was also evidence of a powerful war machine, one confident enough to allow visitor status to those representing the state. I offer this ethnographic vignette because it is indicative of a time-­ specific political climate. In the early 2000s, the state was unwilling to conclusively take over dissident territory. In Jacarezinho, for example, even though a police station had been installed in the community, the dealers’

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supremacy was not structurally challenged. Indeed, the police officers stationed in favelas, continuing a trend that had become commonplace, were beneficiaries of, and therefore willing participants in, the drug trade.19 By charging commissions from dealers so that the drug commerce would remain unperturbed, the officers had a stake in the trade. They offered the acquiescence, indeed the protection, of the state. This arrangement explains these seemingly incongruous scenes: on the one hand, the institutionalized presence of the police in the community; on the other, the drug dealers’ barricades isolating Jacarezinho and the normalization of drug transactions in that territory. There were frequent flare-­ups between dissatisfied police and dealers, between dealers of different factions, and incursions by BOPE personnel, which caused the fatalities of those directly involved and of residents. Yet such was the political order of things; the neighborhood was governed by its own rules and interests involving drug dealers and the police, and for this simple reason it was hardly challenged. By contrast, in Chapéu Mangueira, where a UPP was established in 2009, police officers were the only visible bearers of weapons. In 2011 and 2012 i visited the neighborhood occasionally and became acquainted with some of its residents. Police officers could be seen from almost anywhere in the small hillside community about two hundred yards from Leme beach, better known as Benedita da Silva’s birth place (and where she still maintains a house).20 Before i continue with the analysis of UPP communities, of which Chapéu Mangueira is an example, let me propose a working definition of social climate. Once we are able to grasp the social climate in occupied favelas, we will gain a finer understanding of the circumstances under which Amarildo’s death took place. By social climate i mean shared representations, sentiments, and interpersonal practices that give meaning to, acquiesce with, and perhaps challenge the new order. The social climate engages and is affected by (although it is obviously not restricted to) the technologies of control, surveillance, and community relations UPPs inaugurate. Social representations and practices, and technologies of social management, in turn, happen in embattled geographical actualizations of historical patterns of inequality, of which social class dynamics and gendered modalities of antiblackness are central. Social climate, then, refers to the collective outcomes emanating from the ways people negotiate forms of control under circumstances not of their choosing. Neither drug cartels nor UPPs are

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products of favela demands. UPPs are, after all, initiatives that come from the top and from the outside: they are the product of state interventions that have no input from local residents. Drug dealers, on the other hand, are usually well-­known in such communities—­at once respected, feared, and despised. This close relationship is part of the reason their totalitarian and often brutal form of governance is tolerated (the main reason, of course, is the dealers’ effective monopoly of violence). Still, they are recognized as local benefactors and as products of the same historical and social exclusion that defines residents’ lives. Without the support of drug dealers, many day care centers, educational and recreational programs, health posts, sports facilities, samba schools, music and dance parties, and a litany of other cultural and political initiatives would simply not exist in favelas. Dealers fund these initiatives and/or allow them to take place.21 Based on recent ethnographies (including my own), qualitative studies, and news media reporting (principally those not aligned with the local monopolies), the social climate in UPP communities, given the recent momentous changes, in the early 2010s was one marked by a combination of fading optimism, uncertainty, and vulnerability. In Chapéu Mangueira, for example, while the people with whom i interacted recognized the positive changes, they were nevertheless skeptical that the UPPs would remain effective beyond 2016, after the Olympic Games. Although residents mentioned with some fondness their relationship with members of the drug organization that ruled the neighborhood—­ relationships that ranged from casual friendship to close kin—­they were generally appreciative of the expulsion of long-­established cartels. Gone were the frequent gunfire, the turf disputes, the confrontations between dealers and the police, and dealers’ control over and occasional aggression against residents. (Police aggression against residents, also a ubiquitous aspect of favela life, will be examined below.) Whereas the drug cartel imposed strict lines of socialization, prohibiting contact with communities whose territories belonged to competing factions, after UPPs came about, for the first time in people’s memory, it was possible to walk through and socialize in the adjoining Babilônia neighborhood. A new ecological park had recently opened at the crest of Babilônia, something unthinkable during the drug gang’s hegemony. A woman in her fifties who had lived in Chapéu Mangueira for most of her life, along with her adult daughter, guided two friends and me through Babilônia and toward the park. They remarked on the novelty of their freedom to

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circulate through that area. Walking up the steep trail, through scattering houses, and briefly pausing at a few explanatory signs neatly placed on the ground by plants and trees, we admired the vegetation, rocks, and occasional fauna. At a resting point, while marveling at the Botafogo Bay below, and contemplating an almost vertical rock formation that abruptly marked the end of the northern part of the walkable part of the hill, the mother reminded us that the site had been where dealers tortured, killed, and dumped bodies. Things were changing rapidly in the early 2010s. Fading enthusiasm coexisted with an enduring awareness of vulnerability and a newfound nostalgia for quickly disintegrating social networks. The family i was acquainted with—­four generations dividing a three-­story house (soon to be four stories) centrally located in Chapéu Mangueira—­shared the country’s widespread optimism and yet cautiously, even skeptically, remarked on the UPP presence. Unprecedented access to credit and consumer goods, educational opportunities (especially at the university level), and a sense of economic possibilities dominated conversations and the general mood. The adult daughter and her husband, who lived with their three-­ year-­old on the house’s top floor, were first-­generation college-­educated; the daughter worked at a government agency and was planning on postgraduate studies, perhaps abroad, while the husband, a filmmaker and a college student, made a living freelancing. The late-­fifties father, who for decades had been a doorman at a building in nearby Copacabana, and the mother, a domestic worker who also headed a Pentecostal denomination that met on the house’s ground level, seemed content with their station in life. Their daughters were doing well (the older one lived in another big southeastern city); their house was expanding, and they could afford construction materials, including window frames, that until then were superfluous items. The window frames still did not have glass, but the house had new-­looking appliances: washing machine, microwave, stereo, and at least a couple of televisions. From the family’s rooftop, where we once had a barbecue with friends, against the sliver of ocean piercing through the middle-­class apartment buildings that stood between the beach and the community one could see a proliferation of similarly expanding houses: freshly laid bricks announcing a soon-­to-­be new level, satellite dishes, well-­kept cement narrow streets and stairs, all symbolizing the moment of local relative prosperity. Whether that family had the formal ownership of the house—­a rare

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occurrence in areas such as favelas, where auto-­construction on unclaimed land are defining features—­i am uncertain. What is certain is that the reigning cautious and fading optimism coexisted with the evidence of rapid transformation and dissolution of decades-­old local networks. Hostels for European, North American, Asian, Australian, and New Zealander young people were mushrooming, as were side businesses targeting this new audience, now more common than ever in the neighborhood. These businesses offered homemade meals, transportation and laundry services, and Portuguese, capoeira, surf, soccer, beach volleyball, and futevolei lessons.22 Residents remarked on the velocity with which longtime neighbors, lured by cash offers for their arduously self-­constructed houses, left the neighborhood for distant areas, sometimes settling in suburban and even rural communities that rendered continued contact with Chapéu Mangueira residents difficult at best. So, although there was a certain pride in the fact that their long-­stigmatized area was now the object of avid real estate and business speculation, and that it had become a tourist destination, there was also a sense of loss—­a feeling of community disintegration that ironically happened at the same time as the long-­desired integration into the city. The irony, of course, was that, with integration into the asphalted city imminent, many of the people who had struggled through a lifetime of deprivation and perseverance to build the physical and social neighborhood were now quickly vanishing. Displacement, then, was not only a process that affected your neighbor. You could very well be the next one unable to refuse a cash offer. Or, as it happened in other favelas, the entrance of the state, and along with it the formal capitalist market, also meant the formalization of services that were considerably more expensive than the ones previously available. If UPPs brought the possibility of sanctioned home and land ownership, along with the extension of electric, water, gas, and garbage services, it also meant the end of the affordable, extralegal gato era. Gato, as a noun, described the informal and improvised connection between one’s house and the city’s wires. And quite appropriately, Gatonet was the actual underground company that provided cable and Internet services at a much lower price than the formal market options. With the end of the gato era, so, too, ended the unofficial availability of a number of services at low prices (or even free). Despite the sense of economic prosperity, the selling of a family’s house in a favela is unlikely to bring about a marked improvement in the lives

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of those immediately benefiting from the sale. Rio de Janeiro, specifically, represented then one of the most expensive and inflated real-­estate markets in the world.23 It is unlikely that the cash obtained with the sale will generate added wealth, especially if the sum is divided among family members. As important, moving away from centrally located impoverished neighborhoods means giving up relatively easy access to the public transportation, better-­quality public schools, hospitals, health clinics, and commerce that result from the favela’s proximity to middle-­and upper-­ class areas of Leme, Copacabana, and Ipanema. Indeed, the farther one moves away from predominantly White areas, the lower the quality of public services and infrastructure will be. Paradoxically, then, the sale of a family’s house in a UPP community will likely lead to further transgenerational disadvantages.

The Increase in Registered Bodily Injury It was in this context of marked changes (whose intensity of course varied depending on the UPP community), including the near elimination of violent deaths, that the puzzling increase in recorded bodily injuries—­ along with a series of other nonlethal crimes such as rape, domestic violence, threats (ameaças), and robberies—­took place.24 What accounts for these increases in bodily injury? In what follows, i will briefly explore plausible answers. My intent is not so much to formulate a definitive explanation, but rather to use these numbers as proxies for the social climate within UPP communities. The provisory explanations that appear below are presented as windows into complex and shifting social environments that witness dramatic reductions in lethality but are, nonetheless, defined by long-­term forms of uncertainty and vulnerability. To engage with this new social reality, we should ask ourselves the same question i repeatedly heard from residents of recently pacified communities: How long will the UPPs last? When will intense drug commerce, dealers, and their social rules return? Are UPP officers in fact more humane and respectful than their predecessors? Will our lives improve? While the rule of law is formally introduced in those neighborhoods, a high degree of vulnerability persists. It is not only vulnerability to violence as suggested by the reports of bodily injury. Just as important, and despite pre-­2015 economic developments brought about by the redistributive polices of the Workers’ Party federal administrations, we must keep in

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mind that these majority Black communities are still defined by transgenerational disadvantages, including poverty. Whereas access to credit and increases in personal and family income were indeed widespread prior to the economic downturn of the second Rousseff mandate, they did little to affect the accumulated disadvantages of wealth across generations.25 Even though it is widely celebrated that Blacks constitute the majority of the new middle classes, Blacks are also unmistakably overrepresented among the impoverished.26 One plausible explanation for the increase in bodily injury is that the arrival of the UPPs, which generates a considerable increase in the police officer per inhabitant ratio, facilitates the formalization of complaints. While there is an average of 18.2 police officers per thousand residents for the first thirteen UPP communities (with wide variations among them), there are only 2.3 police officers per thousand residents for the state of Rio as a whole.27 Since police officers can supposedly assist victims in the process of registering crime, the increase in victimization may be due to an increase in reporting (or, as demographers would say, a decrease in underreporting). The increase in reporting can also be due to the challenge UPPs present against the strong social control drug factions exerted on those communities. Part of that control was to discourage contact with and reliance on the formal justice system. Greater reporting, thus, suggests a transition from local and informal law (dominated by drug commerce bureaucracies) to the official rule of law. Another possible answer is that, with the end of the overt control of drug cartels, and the demise of the social norms of justice they imposed via a combination of coercion, consent, and custom, UPP communities begin to experience greater social anomie, of which interpersonal violence is one manifestation. Without the presence and mediation of the “owners of the hill” (donos do morro), and the ubiquitous presence of a foreign police force (which reinforces the perception of the current radical cultural and political shift), disputes multiply and the increase in interpersonal violence is, at least in part, channeled through formal justice mechanisms. Yet another explanation requires a longer analysis and takes us back to Amarildo’s case. Expanding on the three possible answers above, this fourth synthetic explanation zeroes in on the social climate resulting from pacification efforts. Specifically, it explores the relationship between UPP community inhabitants and the new police.

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Persisting Antagonism: The New Police and Favelas While Amarildo’s murder may be read as an aberration in an otherwise new era of improved community–­police relations, when informed by recent studies his ordeal allows for drawing hypothetical connections between it and long-­term patterns of police disrespect. Read against the grain of the fading but still strong support for UPPs in the early 2010s, and improvements notwithstanding, these studies, particularly their qualitative findings, lend themselves to the following hypothetical proposition: Rather than constituting an unmistakable rupture, a paradigm shift in public security, the UPP initiative falls in a continuum according to which residents of disadvantaged, historically Black communities and the police, especially the rank and file, are in an antagonistic relationship. This relationship is structurally unequal, disrespectful, violent, and often lethal. Allied to the persistence of accumulated economic disadvantages that resist (and indeed may be even aided by) the entry of the state and formal market into favelas, police abuse is not a cause but a symptom of a social climate in favelas whose main characteristic is persistent and multifaceted vulnerability. Such vulnerability is of an economic nature, but not only; it is social vulnerability brought about by the dislocation (or threat of dislocation) of neighbors and one’s family; it is vulnerability to violence permitted or engendered by the new police; and it is vulnerability to a host of factors associated with the structured and gendered aspects of antiblackness that translate into diminished life chances and early death by preventable causes. Social dynamics reflect the antiblack structure of positionalities.28 Police abuse, thus, can be considered an important factor contributing to and reflecting a social climate defined by Black vulnerability. In the case of Amarildo’s murder, the historical and enduring police abuse is not an abnormality; rather, it confirms the persistence of an antiblack logic whose most obvious manifestation is vulnerability to state-­sanctioned violent death. To be sure, the above is a controversial statement. How can this new police force that guarantees the rule of law, keeps drug cartels at bay, and brings about the virtual end of lethal violence be held responsible for continuing patterns of disrespect and abuse they purport to have eliminated? Despite the new public security paradigm’s emphasis on a human-­ rights oriented, communitarian, and overall improved policing approach, there remain structural and historical dynamics of police disrespect

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toward the Black and impoverished.29 Amarildo’s assassination, when contextualized in recent ethnographic and qualitative studies,30 suggests that the new public security policy, although celebrated widely, does not translate into an effective change in the perception police officers—­even those trained to appease rather than repress—­have of favelas and their people. The reluctance UPP officers demonstrate in accepting their roles as conciliators rather than repressors suggests deep-­seated antiblack dispositions that are impermeable to short-­term training. Extensive interviews with UPP officers conducted by sociologist Ignacio Cano’s team are instructive.31 They reveal officers’ dissatisfaction that is practical and ideological in nature, and suggest that Amarildo’s death, rather than an aberration, fits the current narratives of police discontent and the historical antiblack nature of policing. At a practical level, many officers assigned to UPP communities complain about pay and the conditions in which they have to work. As was the case in Rocinha, UPP police posts are often improvised accommodations, built from metal shipping containers in which doors and windows are cut out. They are frequently too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter; air-­conditioners are not common. Bathroom facilities are precarious or nonexistent. And because these new posts are built in densely populated neighborhoods where space is at a premium, they are usually found in the less desirable areas where access is difficult. To make matters more complicated, officers often live far away from UPP communities, especially the UPPs located in the central and southern parts of Rio. Not only does the distance increase the length of one’s workday, but transportation costs are an additional burden to the officer’s budget. In theory, in 2014 UPP officers received a R$ 500 monthly bonus. In practice, however, this bonus became another source of frustration. Each month it was taxed at a variable rate, making it difficult to know exactly one’s salary. And worse, it was often late. In contrast, in 2014 regular Military Police officers received a R$ 350 monthly bonus that was at least more reliable. More important than the practical concerns, UPP officers express ideological disagreements with the new public security policy. Specifically, many low-­ranked cops hold the perception that favela residents are either gang members or support gangs—­and so they act accordingly. We’ll engage the officers’ views below. For now, it is instructive to hear residents’ descriptions of police officers’ practices. A twenty-­two-­year-­old resident of Cidade de Deus, a large favela in the western part of the city, remarked

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on how, on the one hand, the UPP brought temporary peace, but on the other, “the officers are unprepared and come with thoughts about who lives in this community that are completely wrong. They still act like the old cops that every now and then raided the neighborhood. They are young, very young . . . but with the same messed-­up mind-­set [as mesmas safadezas].” Another twenty-­two-­year-­old, a woman resident of Morro dos Macacos, a UPP community in the Maracanã stadium region, noted of the new cops, “When they are patting down people, they are already hitting us. I’ve seen this near my house. They say, ‘Stay there, we got you’ [‘Encosta ai, acabou’]. They intimidate and provoke, ask for your ID. . . . They do this until they find something.”32 More brutal than, but akin to, the stop-­and-­frisk approach made infamous in New York City, these intimidation practices contradict the narratives that differentiate the UPP paradigm from the truculent Military Police. Lingering conflicts between the police and locals relate to the police rank-­and-­file resistance against the pacifying project, which they interpret as part of a political game that seeks short-­term news media visibility and approval rather than long-­lasting change; and deeply ingrained notions about the role of the police vis-­à-­vis historically Black areas. Below, i expand on these two sources of conflict, taking into account the police officers’ own thoughts. Low-­level officers see the UPP initiative as part of a political game whose objective is not to improve the police or the communities, but rather to benefit politicians, their parties, and related special interests. These officers complain about what they consider objectionable political theater by pointing to their uniform. “The uniform,” says one UPP officer, “is completely inadequate to work in a favela [morro], because we go up and down stairs, jump, climb houses.” Another officer elaborates: “Light-­ colored slacks, man, how are you going to use this to walk in the middle of the bush? Look at how raggedy my pants are already! That’s what I’m talking about. We have the worst conditions, the worst.”33 It is thus not surprising that 70 percent of officers interviewed in a study believe the UPPs were created not to bring about long-­lasting change, but to generate a sense of security for mega sport events like the Confederations Cup, the World Cup, and the Olympic Games.34 Residents of UPP communities, as noted above, share this view. The fact is that most officers do not like working in UPP communities. A 2011 survey applied to a representative sample of UPP cops showed

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that 70 percent would rather be stationed in a traditional Military Police battalion.35 At play here is a shared perception of the police that is antithetical to the UPP project. Young people, and especially cisheteronormative men, join the police expecting to repress and control communities rather than establish cordial relations with them. They see the role of the police as chasing and shooting at bandits rather than mediating local conflicts. In their minds, arrests and armed confrontation sum up the attraction they have for the differentiated role of the police. As one officer who was more understanding of the UPP project stated, “Everyone enters the police to exchange gunfire and make arrests. They think this [UPP patrolling] is not police work, but I see it as the same work.”36 According to this logic, it makes sense that most UPP officers conflate the communitarian approach to a second-­class type of policing, one devoid of the bellicose mystique that attracted them to the profession in the first place. Officers stationed in pacifying units resent what they perceive as lack of respect from locals, who call them “UPP” rather than “officer” (policial). This is interesting because it suggests the officers perceive in the more horizontal relation UPPs try to forge with the community the source of their disrespected status. Absent the proactive, military occupation–­like stance, UPP officers see themselves in the eyes of the locals as, at best, decoration (enfeite). Since officers are most of the time patrolling the area on foot, and wear a uniform that conveys a civilian rather than military position, they feel restricted in what they call their “liberty to act.” “In the [Military Police] battalion,” an officer said, “there is a better system, there’s liberty to work. To tell you the truth, people respect you more.” On the issue of liberty, which stands as an index of one’s autonomy and discretion, another officer elaborated: “In the streets things are different than here [a UPP area]. Here, anything you do, someone will pull out their phone and will record you. . . . In the streets, if you stop a car, you think the car is suspect, you get your gun out because you don’t know what’s coming. . . . Here, you can’t do that, because someone will film you and next thing you know it’s on TV. Why? Precisely because of all this politics.”37 The orientation coming from the top, as the officers narrate it, is one that stresses conflict resolution and the avoidance of negative news coverage. In an unprecedented political climate marked by an apparently robust popular consensus about the current public security policy, it is not surprising that the police high brass is so concerned with the UPP’s public image. Yet here

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lies an important contradiction. To the rank and file, the appeasement orientation and the concern about news media translate into politics—­here conceived negatively as short-­term, lacking substance, and special-­interest driven. In other words, there is a symbolic short circuit between the theoretically more democratic form of policing the UPP paradigm is attempting to implement, and the low-­ranking officers’ perceptions of how the police should behave in historically Black impoverished neighborhoods. The language of conciliation and citizenship does not harmonize with the antiblack and truculent orientations of most police recruits.

An Announced Death: The Intractable Questions of Blackness and Antiblackness UPP agents’ expectations and frustrations are products of the social construction of the police role, and a deeper, historically constituted set of social representations about Black spaces and people that define favelas. As stated by an officer stationed in a pacified community: Society has the wrong idea of the community. It thinks that the criminals in favelas are only 2 percent of the population, but this is wrong. They may be 2 percent, but there are those who are associated with drug dealing. Why? We say the criminal is a product of the community, they have relatives there, father, mother, cousin. So when something happens, who do you think these folks will side with? With the police or with the criminals? The person who grew up in a favela for sure is going to side with [those people] who grew up in the favela, so you can bet 60 percent of the population is against pacification.38 As is culturally mandated in an alleged racial democracy, the language of race does not emerge explicitly; yet race, and blackness in particular, is coded and well understood as the mostly silent yet highly effective signifier of favelas. In the social imaginary, as in demographic studies, favelas are indeed disproportionately Black spaces.39 Blackness is the default parameter according to which favelas, and the activities that are thought to characterize them, gain meaning. In the officer’s statement above, criminality is not restricted to the actual criminals, but includes their networks of kin and friends, and therefore pervades the entire community. Add blackness to the officer’s analysis, and the proposition is quite forceful:

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as Black spaces, favelas not only produce but also harbor and reproduce crime. And if you still find questionable the centrality of blackness in normative references to impoverished urban spaces, consider the following 2007 pronouncement from Rio de Janeiro state governor Sérgio Cabral: “I am in favor of women interrupting an undesired pregnancy. . . . You look at the number of children born in Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, Tijuca, Méier, and in Copacabana [elite neighborhoods], it’s a Swedish standard. Now, you look at Rocinha [a favela in the southern part of Rio]. It is Zambia, Gabon standards. That is a criminal assembly line, an industry of criminals.”40 Even though Cabral’s statement is about his view on abortion, specifically his eugenic defense of it for impoverished Black women, it voices the dominant perspective on Rio’s racialized geographies and its residents. By linking Rocinha to Zambia and Gabon, two African nations, Cabral confirms the social perception of favelas as Blacks spaces. He goes on to remark on the wide networks of criminality in favelas, which is the point the UPP officer conveyed above. This powerful symbolic linkage between urban space, blackness, and crime is a contemporary actualization of a historically constructed and structuring representation. It is the main reason why the UPP rank-­and-­file cops resist approaching their work according to more democratic and horizontal premises. Since favelas are spaces of blackness, and blackness symbolizes not only crime but all that needs to be separated, contained, surveilled, and isolated, to engage spaces of blackness is therefore to engage bodies that are always threatening and in need of control. In this cognitive context, a 2015 Datafolha opinion poll on criminality shows that 53 percent of Brazilian Whites agree with the statement “a good criminal is a dead criminal.” The fact that 44 percent of Blacks agreed with the same statement only shows the obstinate socially shared assumption about blackness, criminality, and the lesser value of Black lives.41 In attempting to reform the police, those pushing for the new security paradigm are hitting the wall of socially shared antiblack cognition. • • • Amarildo’s murder, contextualized within historical and contemporary symbolic currents and institutionalized practices, becomes a foretold tragedy. His neighborhood, Rocinha, is the same which, a few years earlier, the governor used as an example of an “industry of criminals.” In the mid-­1980s Rocinha became nationally notorious for the absolute control

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young drug dealers had over its territory and population. Buzunga, one of the young men who briefly controlled the local drug transactions before being assassinated, proudly posed for news media photographers toting his assault weapons and bags of cocaine carefully arranged around his waist. The moral panic about favelas and its people were of course part of a broader political context in which leftist populist governor Leonel Brizola tried to reform the Military Police, known for its brutality against the Black and impoverished. In the preparations for the upcoming large-­scale sporting events, and in a climate (presently gone) of triumphant optimism, there remained a strong current of moral panic about Black spaces. Unlike in previous historical eras, however, the 2008–­16 moral panic happened in the midst of an unprecedented multiracial public awareness of Black suffering. It is to this expanded multiracial awareness of Black suffering, and how it related to Amarildo’s case, that i now turn.

Multiracial Protest: Nonblack Recognition of Black Suffering That Amarildo met his death by the same police force that represents Rio’s new dawn of democratic and inclusive public security attests to the interminable difficulty that the question of antiblackness poses to the Brazilian polis. This difficulty is evidenced by the wave of multiracial protests that followed Amarildo’s disappearance. Protestors demanded that Amarildo be found, and voiced serious critiques against the UPPs, linking them to the Brazilian dictatorship period. A community in the heart of Rio de Janeiro’s elite area, the Zona Sul, Rocinha is a vital center for small businesses, the arts, sports, and varied forms of organizing, both governmental and nongovernmental. There are at least four hundred NGOs in Rocinha.42 This profusion of organizations, and the local, state, national, and international networks that converge in the neighborhood, provide some explanation for the notoriety that Amarildo’s case achieved. Also important to understanding the repercussions of Amarildo’s case was the singular political moment in Brazil at that time, as explored in chapter 4. The 2013 wave of popular protests happened just when details of Amarildo’s disappearance were disseminated by the dominant and alternative news media, which certainly helped fuel popular mobilization. What follows are brief analyses of four moments illustrative of the protests that emerged in the wake of Amarildo’s death. In each moment, multiracial blocs demanded an end to police corruption and brutality. They called

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attention to the second-­class citizenship of the impoverished, residents of favelas, and Blacks. On July 22, 2013, thousands of people gathered at the downtown Largo do Machado square and walked a few miles to the Guanabara Palace, where the office of the state of Rio governor is housed. As in the other protests in various Brazilian cities, this one was multiracial but visibly dominated by White, college-­educated, and middle-­class persons. In audiovisual footage of the event, protesters express their indignation about Amarildo’s disappearance. Differently than the broad positive consensus about UPPs in the news media and academic research, the protestors link UPP practices to those of the police during the dictatorship, when, as extensively documented, torture and disappearances of political opponents where routine. Protesters yelled slogans like “UPP is dictatorship!” and “UPPs are a farce!”43 The generalized empathy toward Amarildo and impoverished residents of favelas, combined with a sharp critique of the state’s complicity in the systematic abuse of the most vulnerable and excluded Brazilians, is communicated in clear terms. The crowd speaks from an awareness that it occupies a position of privilege relative to that of the main victims of police brutality who are not only the poor, pushed away into informal and precarious neighborhoods, but also the Black. Several statements about the police brutalization and killing of “the poor, the Black, and the resident of the periphery” appear in videos of the demonstration.44 Nonblacks’ awareness of and indignation about Black suffering seems widespread. In a similar vein, on July 31, 2013, TV Brasil reported on an organized protest in Copacabana demanding justice for Amarildo’s disappearance. This time the protest was smaller and more specific. It connected Amarildo’s case to thirty-­five thousand similar cases of police-­related disappearances since 2007. According to Antônio Carlos da Costa, of the NGO Rio de Paz, Amarildo’s case exemplified a pattern of state action that revealed the “banalization of human life, especially when it’s the life of the impoverished and the Black.”45 Costa, the protest’s main organizer, is White; so is the seaside neighborhood where the art installation, featuring human-­size figures, placed on the beach sand, represent disappeared persons. Here again, indignation about state terror affecting “the impoverished and the Black” serves as the catalyst for mobilization and protest. On August 1, 2013, residents of Rocinha, in alliance with several nongovernmental organizations, independent news media outlets, political

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parties, as well as artists, teachers, lawyers, and university professors, held a vigil and a march from Rocinha to Leblon, where the state governor resided. “Where is Amarildo?” signs, as well as several people wearing T-­ shirts featuring Amarildo’s photograph, can be seen as Elizabete da Silva, Amarildo’s wife, as well as some of her children, relatives, and neighbors, gather on the street to protest once again the construction worker’s disappearance. While this manifestation shows a greater proportion of Blacks and residents of Rocinha, it is a markedly multiracial and multiclass affair. As the marchers make their way to the adjoining neighborhoods of the Zona Sul, they interrupt the flow of traffic through the Zuzu Angel tunnel that links Rocinha and the elite waterfront neighborhood of Leblon. At that point, according to the images produced by the independent media channel Jornal A Nova Democracia, there is still a visible number of Black persons in the crowd. Upon arriving in Leblon, the protesters coming from Rocinha are joined by activists who had been camping near the governor’s residence for a few days.46 Self-­defined anarchist members of the Occupy Leblon movement, these youths claimed to have no political agenda and no leaders. However, the anarchists affirmed their support for the mass protests that had swept the country a few weeks earlier. Like the protestors elsewhere, they supported free public transportation and demanded that “there be no World Cup, Olympic Games, elections; that Cabral be impeached, and out with the corrupt leadership of the teachers’ union.”47 Once in Leblon, the multiracial crowd had become visibly whiter; chants of “Cadê o Amarildo?” were now drowned by “Fora Cabral!” and several light-­skinned youth, wearing ski masks, began to monopolize the cameras’ attention. The images don’t show it, but shortly thereafter, despite the apparent solidarity and fusion of movements (the Occupy movement and the one coming from Rocinha), Rocinha residents dispersed and made their way back home. They knew that were there any police violence, they would be the first to be attacked. On October 7, 2013, “Somos Todos Amarildo” (“We Are All Amarildo”), a “journalistic video,” was published as part of the campaign to protest Amarildo’s disappearance and to pressure the state for a final determination on the case. In the video, Marcelo Freixo, a state representative for the leftist Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL, or Socialism and Freedom Party), and the president of the Human Rights Committee, at the state capital, explain that Amarildo’s case is part of a historic moment,

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when multitudes are in the streets protesting the government. Echoing previous protests, Freixo emphasizes that the post-­1985 democratic period in Brazil saw more people go missing than during the military dictatorship. “The reason why we don’t know this,” he states, “is because, unfortunately, dignity has a zip code. And since the missing people are Black, impoverished, and residents of favelas and the periphery, they remain invisible, they don’t make the news. The ethical concern is not there. It’s as if they weren’t one of us.”48 Elizabete da Silva is featured walking up a narrow alley in Rocinha. At the time of the recording, it had been almost a month since Amarildo’s disappearance. Elizabete, however, sees her husband’s case as an example of a pattern: “they [the police] have done a lot of cowardice with lots of people. The difference is that everyone else has stayed quiet, and we began to protest out loud.” Two actors accompany Elizabete: Fernanda Paes Leme, and Érico Braz. Like Freixo, Leme is White; Braz is Black. Leme and Braz express surprise at what they find in Rocinha. “I’m not used to walking so much,” states Braz, after he introduces himself by saying he does not come from such “communities.” Leme is just as impressed. As they follow Elizabete to her and Amarildo’s house, up narrow and winding alleys, streets, stairs, and open sewer canals, Leme states that “this is more like a trail, not a street, it’s dangerous, narrow, slippery, dirty, a lot of trash, no sanitation system. The few minutes I spent here showed how precarious everything is. I can’t imagine living here.”49 Following scenes inside Elizabete and Amarildo’s former home (due to the ongoing investigation and threats they moved out), Freixo addresses the UPPs: “The idea of not having dealers, no armed conflict, obviously it’s important.” Yet, he notes, in line with the qualitative research analyzed above, “the police will only do good work if they respect the residents, if there’s integration. There’s got to be a different type of training, a different logic.”50 A few residents interviewed suggest a state of terror engendered by the UPP. One of them, identifying herself as Amarildo’s cousin, speaks from a window on the third floor of a building: “Before the UPP, I would go out and leave my children home. Now I can’t do this anymore. I’m afraid of them [the police]. They shot my husband, almost killed him, right there where you are standing. After the UPP, we don’t have peace anymore. The favela is gone. Rocinha is crying for help.” Amarildo’s oldest son has a similar take on the state of terror the UPP inaugurated: “After 6:00 p.m., we don’t leave the house anymore.”

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Freixo makes one of the last statements in the video. He explains that the threats Amarildo’s family members experience at the hands of the UPP illustrate the common assumption that favela residents are criminals by association. This assumption clearly emerges out of the study analyzed above. Conducted with the UPP rank and file, the study shows how police officers reject the idea that only a small fraction of favela inhabitants are linked to drug-­dealing organizations. Freixo’s point is to show how favela residents, from the perspective of police officers, become indistinguishably linked to crime, and therefore should be treated as such, with preemptive force and violence.

Omissions, Conflations, Slippages: Oblique Identification at Work In the four moments analyzed above there repeatedly emerge tropes of “the poor, the Black, and the resident of the periphery.” While suggesting social awareness, moral indignation, and empathy toward the most vulnerable members of society, the recognition of Black suffering brings with it interesting omissions, conflations, and slippages. The key omission is that, even among the impoverished and those who reside in areas bereft of urban infrastructure, Black women and men are disproportionately targeted by agents of the state. This is one of the principal conclusions of numerous specialized and reputable studies, quantitative and qualitative.51 Thus, if Blacks experience multiple and cumulative forms of violence, including those perpetrated by the state, then when mentioned in the same phrase as “the impoverished” and “the residents of favelas and the periphery,” Blacks have their experiential uniqueness diluted in the larger universe of those persons negatively affected by social class and geography. For to be Black, impoverished, and the resident of a favela is not the same as being nonblack, impoverished, and residentially segregated by social class. Blackness adds to, intensifies, and thus renders unique and incommensurable the experience of social exclusion. Important works on experiences of blackness show the ways in which, in social environments defined by poverty, Black women and men occupy the areas less serviced by basic urban infrastructure such as piped water, sewage, trash collection, public transportation, and asphalt; stay longer in those areas; are disproportionately victimized by the police; and are disproportionately abused or neglected by public health care workers and

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institutions.52 The gendered condition of blackness, then, is related to but far exceeds those of poverty and geographic exclusion. It is this fundamental omission of the irreducibility of the Black experience that allows for the cognitive conflation of social class, blackness, and location. While this conflation enables a critical perspective that identifies broad and vulnerable social segments that are the primary victim of police brutality, and nonblack identification with Blacks and Black suffering, it also prevents an engagement with a more precise appreciation of the dynamics and logic of antiblackness. In Amarildo’s case, more precise analytical questions would ask about institutionalized antiblack dispositions and the role they played in his torture, presumed death, and disappearance. Regardless of the offending police officer’s race, the fact is that blackness is the central, irreducible factor that explains the devaluing and destruction of life; the presumption of guilt (of the Black) and innocence (of the perpetrator of antiblack violence);53 and the negative social representations of the geographies of dispossession and vulnerability where police crime happens. Favelas are paradigmatic Black spaces. As an index of social death, antiblackness equates with gratuitous violence perpetrated against the Black body, dishonor, and genealogical rupture. Amarildo is sequestered from his community, abducted from his family, and subsequently killed and disposed as if he had no relevant and valuable social connections. In the words of one of the police officers at the scene of Amarildo’s torture, he was indeed treated like an animal. As repeatedly asserted by local residents and serious students of police lethality, such state-­sanctioned acts of terror against Black people are the norm, not the exception. Amarildo’s tribulation, unfortunately, is the rule, not the exception. What is exceptional, then, is that his case became the cause of multiracial indignation. Yet this earnest indignation, while suturing and energizing the protesting multiracial blocs, is unable or unwilling to engage antiblackness as an overdetermining, irreducible, and indeed foundational element of the Brazilian social formation. The next chapters will show that such dynamics of identification with Black suffering and simultaneous negation of antiblackness define the people-­of-­color ethos, the assumption and practice of multiraciality, and oblique identification. That the “journalistic video” about Amarildo’s life and death ends with a statement from the video’s producers about their “hope that better days will come” suggests a troubling connection

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between oblique identification and hopes/tropes of multiracial democratic redemption. Amarildo’s death and its antiblack logic reveals diasporic continuities. Police lethality in the United States is currently at the center of multiracial mobilization. More specifically, young people’s incarceration in Austin suggests mechanics of surveillance and dispossession not unlike those that render Black spaces such as Rocinha the permanent loci of society-­ sanctioned social and physical death. The next two chapters explore the role that progressive multiracial blocs such as those mobilized after Amarildo’s death, those that claim empathy toward Black suffering, may play in furthering, rather than placating, such diasporic logic of antiblackness.

Part III

The Denial of Antiblackness

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6

Michael Zinzun The Fall and Rise of the Black Cyborg

The Black cyborg is a product of collective representations. The Black cyborg incarnates political ambitions and projects an imagined future. Michael Zinzun was a cyborg because his political persona emerged in the feedback loop between, on the one hand, his personal experiences, qualities, and limitations, and on the other hand, the expectations of the collective ensembles that drew inspiration from him while also sustaining him. There is no Black cyborg without the remarkable human being that is able to incarnate this figure of social fiction; there is no Black cyborg without the collective symbolic environment that requires and produces that unusual, seemingly superhuman, or extrahuman subject. To study the Black cyborg is to recognize both Michael Zinzun’s unusual qualities and the cognitive and political idiosyncrasies that defined his allied blocs. Despite the regime of state terror he inhabited, tirelessly cataloged, and opposed, Michael never gave up. At great personal cost, including his family’s exposure to illegal police scrutiny, intimidation, and physical brutality, he never gave up denouncing the persistence of a racist power structure and finding ways to reform it. Michael wanted to be included in the very society that systematically victimized him and others similarly positioned—­a reformed version of that society. Even though he studied and had sympathies for autonomous and maroon-­like social formations, such as the Republic of New Afrika,1 Michael conjured up his various projects, political alliances, his often devastating critiques against state institutions, and indeed his dreams of a better world unmistakably in oppositional dialogue with the dominant legal, political, and economic structures. As a former member of the Black Panther Party he was highly critical of how those structures operated, but he did not advocate their immediate overthrow. He believed that collective wisdom and effective, studied mass mobilization would, in time, if not correct the evils of racial 211

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capitalist exploitation, at least generate entry of those previously excluded into spheres of justice, work, consumption, and decision making. The 1991 campaign for a Civilian Police Review Board, which Michael and the Coalition Against Police Abuse spearheaded,2 was an example of that approach. As in that campaign, he worked tirelessly in Black communities and with members of nonblack constituencies—­namely, Latin@s, Asians, and progressive Whites. Michael often collaborated with organized gay, lesbian, and transgender groups as well. Analyzing Zinzun’s organizing trajectory, this chapter explores the ways in which the figure of the Black cyborg illustrates and adds to our previous analyses of nonblack oblique identification with Blacks. The Black cyborg enables the multiracial bloc that is aware of and wants to put an end to Black suffering. Because the Black cyborg embodies, studies, explains, and politicizes Black experiences, to associate with the Black cyborg is to recognize Black suffering: the Black cyborg mediates the relationship between the nonblack and Black lifeworlds. And since the Black cyborg embodies Black wisdom, will to educate, capacity to love, and organizational knowledge, s/he personifies an idealized Black political ally. The Black cyborg reaches out, invites, informs, explains, and offers a project of multiracial democratic redemption—­all while typifying Black suffering and refusal to be victimized. Zinzun’s trajectory manifests the ways in which the Black cyborg enables awareness of Black suffering while disabling a sustained and vigorous collective acknowledgment of the foundational aspects of antiblackness. Zinzun’s lifetime political work offers angles through which to analyze the dichotomy awareness of Black suffering/disavowal of antiblackness. This dichotomy is at the heart of nonblack–­Black relative recognition, which i have termed oblique identification. At the end of this chapter, i offer explanations for why the Black cyborg simultaneously engenders nonwhite relative empathy toward Black suffering and hampers incisive critiques of structural antiblackness. • • • Born in Chicago on February 14, 1949, in an impoverished family and under legalized racial segregation, Michael knew firsthand the effects of poverty and antiblack racism. The son of a Black mother and an Apache father, he grew up in the Cabrini–­Green residential projects, where he often experienced hunger. Michael sometimes reminisced that to quell his

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hunger, like other kids he ate plaster from the walls of his cold, damp, and crowded apartment. In 1957, when his father died, Michael was sent to Pasadena, where an aunt lived; there he remained for his entire life. After finishing high school he worked as a car mechanic, and eventually he managed a car repair shop in Altadena. In his early twenties Michael was already involved in local organizing with youths and protesting against police misconduct. In 1970 he joined the Black Panther Party, and upon its effective dismantlement by state repression, with activists B. Kwaku Duren and Anthony Thigpenn, following a string of community-­ organizing initiatives ranging from youth-­centered pest control and supplemental school education, in 1975 he launched the Coalition Against Police Abuse. The bus. That was the image Zinzun often used to conclude public speeches. It served as a metaphor for his method of social organizing and change: a bus without preferential seating, a bus conducted by the people, a bus leaving a time and space of struggle and heading toward a more just, solidary, and integrated social world. Michael at times talked of this imagined bus traveling sideways—­a futuristic projection that, engineering challenges notwithstanding, stressed the egalitarian philosophy of his political dreams. It was not just the refusal to give up despite the overwhelming evidence of antiblack dispositions in the empire-­state machine and in society at large that made Zinzun a cyborg. Having endured repeated indignities and pains resulting from the regime of antiblack terror and from his active opposition to it, Michael consistently showed unusual will and strength. And if he didn’t openly extend love to his powerful adversaries, contrary to how they consistently acted, he counted them as his fellow human beings. A few times he confided with me about his moral dilemmas concerning the suffering he or his Panther comrades may have inflicted on their adversaries during the height of the war the police and the U.S. empire-­state apparatus waged against them in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was acutely aware that the people in the adversarial social and political camps, particularly those invested in forms of antiblack supremacy (Whites and nonwhites), did not seem to share his expanded ethical perspective. Planned assassinations of young Panthers, of which there is an abundant documental and photographic archive,3 reveal striking similarities to lynching scenes.4 In both sets of scenes, the obvious contentment shown by White spectators and police officers are stark reminders of the ethical incommensurability between Michael’s moral standards and

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those of his political adversaries. Whereas Michael considered himself a member of an expanded human universe and drew his ethical values from it, those willing to degrade, subjugate, and kill, apparently without moral dilemma, forcefully negated his values. This worldview incommensurability was well illustrated in the permanent exhibit of mutilated Black bodies Michael arranged in the CAPA office: disfigured bodies victimized by police and mob beatings, dog bites, explosions, and gunshots, many of them barely recognizable as human. And that was just the point: Michael inhabited an inclusive moral world which, though foreign to people who harbored antiblack sentiments and the institutions that implemented them, made it necessary to include, engage, educate, and love the other, the ignorant, the adversary, the White, the nonblack, and the Black antiblack even despite—­and perhaps precisely because of—­the continuing manifestations of antiblack terror. Educate and love the ignorant and the hateful, and reform and occupy institutions of power: such was the mandate. Michael was a firm believer in broad, cross-­class, multiracial political alliances. For example, he was a longtime member of the socialist, democratic, feminist, environmentalist, and antiracist Peace and Freedom Party, under which in 1989 he unsuccessfully ran for the Pasadena City Council; and he was one of the main organizers of the Latin@, Asian, and Black gang truce initiated in 1992. Temporary, shifting, pragmatically designed and carried out, such multiracial alliances provided the fundamental political energy needed for achieving precisely delineated, momentary goals. Goals included marches and rallies, campaigns (protesting police brutality; for public office; for or against legislative propositions), press releases and events targeting the news media, and national and international encounters and seminars. As circumstances and goals changed, as adversaries changed, so did the alliances. The one constant was that Michael and his primary affiliations—­the Coalition Against Police Abuse as well as the Community in Support of the Gang Truce—­provided the core of the alliances’ organizational strategy, the institutional and historical knowledge, the infrastructural and financial resources, and perhaps more decisively, the expanded ethical–­human principles on which recognition, solidarity, and even love between differently positioned political subjects materialized. Michael’s charisma exerted pronounced gravitational pull: he made otherwise self-­centered, scattered, suspicious, even violent people work together for a common cause. Just as important for the political projects in which he was involved, but perhaps not as perceptible, was that the force

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field he energized required his personal, seemingly endless energy, his tireless will to engage those who inhabited familiar and foreign ideological worlds. In this capacity to give love, political love, Michael was superhuman, and thus a cyborg. Zinzun was a cyborg due to the charisma he commanded and turned into practical action. This capacity to transmute charisma into action made Zinzun quite unusual, gave him apparently extrahuman powers, and thus placed him—­at least part of him—­in the realm of the metaphysical. But of course Michael was his body; he incarnated the charismatic cyborg in his collaborators’ perceptions, and perhaps even in his own perception. Perceptions are the product of collective craft, and this craft is often a concoction of magical and engineering pursuits attempting to make sense of and change the world.5 Perceptions, then, are socially produced fictions. As Erica Edwards argues, “If charisma is not a static social structure but rather a portable structure, a sketch, of sociopolitical history and engagement—­again, a cultural regime—­then it might be deciphered as a fiction emerging from a particular cultural context.”6 This line of reasoning resonates with Donna Haraway’s 1983 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” wherein the author constructs her notion of a feminist cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” Haraway’s project is “an effort to contribute to socialist–­feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-­naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-­oedipal apocalypse.” Whereas for Haraway the cyborg is “a creature in a post-­gender world,” and cyborg politics “is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism,”7 the Black cyborg is a creature of and immersed in the cisheteropatriarchal antiblack world seeking the post-­antiblack multiracial integrated polis. Zinzun, Black charismatic cyborg, while an agent of a utopia where and when (principally but not exclusively) the nonblack would cease to oppress, is a social fiction that strategically embraces salvation history. If salvation history is understood as a narrative of progress, or successive political, cultural, and social gains leading to greater levels of Black and

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nonwhite inclusion, then the Black cyborg is placed smack in the middle of this narrative, and is in fact its propulsive symbolic and practical engine. It is a strategic embracing of salvation history, though, because Zinzun’s ultimate horizon explodes his allied bloc’s references of progress and belonging. In the ultimate horizon, the utopian destination that is reached by Michael’s sideway bus, social differences are disentangled from social inequality, rendering irrelevant the Black cyborg’s political imaginary. In the utopian world arrived at after the political journey in the Black cyborg’s sideway bus, the Black–­nonblack differences become mere superficial details, they lose their structuring meaning. Like a one-­ way interstellar ship, Michael’s sideway bus, and the political engineering that made it possible, is rendered obsolete once the destination is reached. The fictive nature of the charismatic Black cyborg makes compelling, because socially recognizable, his political performance. Fictive means not unreal, but rather socially crafted, thus socially relevant and effective. As a charismatic Black cyborg, Zinzun catalyzed shared anxieties and desires, and thereby enabled the agglutination of diverse constituencies around common goals, finite and indistinct. Zinzun’s cyborg embodied both a collective melancholia and a corresponding urge for redemption of the empire-­state and its inclusive ideals. Yet the Black cyborg’s compelling performance, reflecting a catalog of shared expectations, and as a model of collective mobilization, reaffirmed normative protocols. Normative gender roles, and a default cisheteropatriarchy, drew sharp lines around the Black cyborg. Who could, should, and would be a cyborg was readily understood, among Zinzun’s collaborators, as he who knew the ways of organized protest and had the moral, physical, and material resources to withstand the arduous road to reform. Even Michael’s continued attempts at understanding gendered dynamics of racial oppression did not relativize the normative cismasculinity under which he operated. The same can be said about all us who participated in the collective efforts in which he was a central player. The black cyborg, as a socially located and historically specific fiction, activated expectations of leadership that were unmistakably embedded in heteropatriarchal, unequal gender dynamics. As much as women and LGBTQ persons were genuinely valued, their presence around the cyborg only reinforced a predictable pattern of Black mobilization in which exceptional heteronormative men—­often assisted by women who, behind the scenes, contributed a disproportionate share of the everyday labor, including affective

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labor—­performed the most visible, powerful, and prophetic duties. Put another way, the Black cyborg and the fictions of charismatic leadership that made this figure possible required and reproduced heteropatriarchal hierarchies of gender whose underlying violence forces us to call into question the type of reformist utopia the Black cyborg and his collaborators pursued.8 As we will see, cisnormative gender was not the only blind spot in the Black cyborg’s practice. Zinzun was a cyborg because he refused victimization. In the forceful and confident manner that was a central aspect of his public persona—­a persona he often credited to his years as a Black Panther Party member—­ Michael was the bearer of a political desire of integration. A radical embodiment of assertive heteronormative male blackness, Michael punctuated his public pronouncements with memorable phrases. Following the 1991 police beating of Rodney King and the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, when he was often featured on television with police officers, he concluded his thoughts by hailing the cops with whom he shared the TV program, saying “I’ll see you in court!” and then “Backwards never, forwards ever, power to the people!” He wanted his seat in the bus—­the vessel that would lead to the desired integrated republic—­and he wanted a good seat for his people and allies. He performed his conviction and project of belonging with gusto: “You may not like it,” he’d often say humorously, “but I belong here and I ain’t going nowhere.” “You,” of course, signified both individuals not able to accept Blacks as full citizens and, more important, institutions, like the police, whose perverse logic and operation Michael intended to radically reform. Michael’s notion of integration had an imperative to it. To him it was a necessary integration, one that would come about despite the racial antagonisms of which he was, due to experience, research, and study, acutely aware. Based on a boundless, selfless, patient, and giving disposition, Michael’s integration was the medium through which a loving community would emerge, a community built on the excess of Black love despite antiblack hatred. This required excess of Black love made Zinzun a cyborg. Anyone who knew Michael knew he was as generous as he was vulnerable: he continuously trusted, he gave, he shared, he helped, he listened—­all of which made him an easy target of unscrupulous requests, disappointment, and of course physical and spiritual pain and exhaustion. • • •

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As a cyborg, Michael was a “modified, improved human whose increased ethical, spiritual, and physical capabilities generate unusual strength, omniscience, and boundless love.”9 Near-­mythical male Panther figures such as Huey Newton, George Jackson, and Geronimo Pratt informed many of Michael’s cyborg characteristics. Less obviously but just as powerfully, some of James Baldwin’s cogitations on the place and function of Blacks in the actualization of the inclusive project of democracy are instructive in our effort to understand Zinzun’s ethical standpoint. It is fitting that Baldwin’s cyborg, consubstantiating accumulated Black wisdom, courage, and strength, is represented as a Black cisheteronormative male cyborg. Although aware of gendered inflections of racialized social dynamics—­ brought to life (and death) in many of his fictional works, where, for example, he explored Black cisgender homosexual masculinities—­Baldwin often ventured into sustained ethical and political reflections that privileged the experiences of men, variegated as they may be. In his political–­ philosophical work, and in his public interventions, he thus left unchallenged patterns of cisnormative masculinity and its heteropatriarchal logic.10 This limitation transpires quite evidently in the passages i focus on below. It is a limitation that equates the rescue of the empire-­state multiracial project to the extrahuman work of Black charismatic heteropatriarchal men. It is a fitting and instructive juxtaposition because as a cyborg, Michael thought and acted for all Blacks. And just like Baldwin’s cyborg, Michael understood Black struggle as the gateway to the redemption of the entire polis. The Black male cyborg was the indispensable agent of the multiracial project of integration.11 How does Baldwin’s cyborg come about? In “My Dungeon Shook,” writing to his nephew James on the hundredth anniversary of emancipation, Baldwin gives Blacks a central, disproportionate, and indeed superhuman role in the required empire-­state-­building efforts. To bring about the beloved integrated polis, it was necessary that we [Blacks], with love, . . . force our [White or nonblack] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is our home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in

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the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.12 To “make America what America must become” requires unusual strength and determination. Choked by a suicidal antiblack formation, the American democratic experiment had been seriously impaired. But not irreversibly. In Baldwin’s perspective, the empire-­state’s redemption could not depend on those who had brought about its near ruin. Instead, and dialectically, the persons who had been formally stripped of their very humanity and rendered fungible objects, but who had maintained their ethical principles intact—­those Black subjects were now hailed to put into practice their historical salvaging mission. The time had come when Blacks were called to reestablish the polis’s moral center and historical vocation. Blacks had, in effect, physically built the empire-­state while preserving their moral aptitude amid the country’s degradation. They were, therefore, the ones with the greatest connection and commitment to the republic. Such unique connection—­moral and affective—­resulted in a fundamentally unequal distribution of responsibilities. In Baldwin’s worldview, Blacks were charged with lovingly yet forcefully educating Whites and other nonblacks about the beauty and necessity of the democratic multiracial project. In this process of conscientization, there would emerge a collective recognition of Black people’s humanity, importance, worth, and indeed centrality in the country’s rebuilding effort. The Black cyborg configured in Baldwin’s narrative, one whose endurance and dignity are ostensibly superhuman without analog, is the foremost protagonist of the society’s redemption project. The Black cyborg redeems fellow citizens from their ignorance and bigotry, and hence rids them of their self-­destructive formations of ontology and sociability. By redeeming its citizens, the Black cyborg redeems the democratic inclusive project. Yet, as the Black cyborg engages in this project of democratic and inclusive redemption, normative social perceptions and relations are radically disrupted. Similar to Frantz Fanon’s ontological scheme, Baldwin’s nonblack and, principally, White subjects depend on the fixed Black nonsubject.13 To redeem the polis means to shake up its structures of sociality and self-­understanding; to create the very cognitive and moral conditions that, while necessary for the empire-­nation’s improved rebirth, will destabilize nonblacks, principally Whites, and certainly endanger Blacks. The ensuing cognitive and moral earthquake will be hazardous to Blacks

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inasmuch as, in the corrupted country’s symbolic and social maps, Blacks are not supposed to be anything but nothing, with no say, no vision, no ethics, no agency. There is no question about on whom falls the burden of redemptive transformation. It will be difficult, but after all, like Baldwin’s nephew James, Blacks come from remarkable stock—­from accumulated collective experiences that have generated monumental, superhuman qualities. The Black cyborgs that populate this particular Baldwin text,14 endowed of endless compassion toward those who despise them and who, unknowingly, render the empire-­state project inviable, want to recuperate this same project, to shape “America” into what, they assume, is an existential and historical preordainment. That is to say, the democratic project is redeemable only if and when Blacks, at their own likely-­to-­be-­actualized risk, take on the necessary mandate of salvaging it. Blacks embrace salvation history; they have no other choice. Baldwin’s Black subject is a Black cyborg because, despite strength and foresight accumulated over generations, he knows beforehand that much suffering, and possibly death, will have to be endured. Superhuman determination, love, and strength will be required. But for the cyborg, they already exist; these qualities are indeed constitutive. Unlike Fanon’s transformative project, one that aims at the destruction of the colony and builds on the colonized’s odium of the colonist and the colony, Baldwin’s rebirth is one of recuperation. It is one that wants to rid the polis of its moral bankruptcy by resuscitating its democratic spirit. “I love America more than any other country in the world,” asserted Baldwin, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”15 While in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth it is hate and cleansing and empowering violence that leads to transformation, in Baldwin, the Black cyborg’s unbounded love as well as moral and physical strength rescue the country’s concept and its substance. Indeed, Baldwin’s cyborg appeases rather than provokes; he soothes, reconciles, ponders, educates, and transforms. Here lies the crux of Baldwin’s method of social transformation: the beloved community results from the struggles necessary to establish lucid dialogue and ethical commitment according to which antiblack dispositions become acknowledged and unacceptable. Through the work of the Black cyborg, ever undeterred, antiblack terror is cataloged and explained, thus becoming unbearably visible, unjustifiable, and via the laborious moral elevation of the imperial–­national subjects, finally neutralized. But

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what, precisely, must precede the method—­what are the method’s conditions of possibility? Baldwin’s cyborg must lovingly embrace those who stand in diametrically opposed, antagonistic social and ontological positions vis-­à-­vis Blacks: nonblacks, and Whites in particular: “You [meaning James, but James is, after all, Baldwin’s prototypical cyborg] must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”16 The burden of engineering and carrying out the redemptive method is unambiguously on Blacks. The burden of acceptance, love, and wisdom is on Blacks: not only do they put up with White (and nonblack) hate and ignorance, they patiently build archives of information that they subsequently share with and explain to Whites (and nonblacks). The burden of suppressing rage while being victimized by White hatred; the burden of establishing communicative rationality and a collective ethical contract when, precisely, the antitheses of rationality and ethical commitment inform the normalized regime of antiblack terror—­the burden of carrying out the method of redemptive social transformation is the burden and mission of the Black cyborg. At once victim and controlled, degraded but forgiving, dehumanized yet all-­inclusive and humanizing, the Black cyborg must be a super/extrahuman whose unnatural capacity to suffer and love make him the necessary political subject on whom relies the republic’s project of redemption. Without the Black cyborg, the nonblack, and above all the White, is irremediably corrupted; hopeless in her hate and ignorance. The Black cyborg is the moral reservoir and prophetic hope of the empire-­state.17 • • • Michael Zinzun was a cyborg because, like Baldwin’s cyborg, he not only recognized the redemptive project’s burden, but embraced it. “The Law Wants to Shut Him Up,” read the headline of a 1982 Los Angeles Reader cover story. “Mike Zinzun,” the article announced, “is the city’s staunchest cop critic. Make that was. He’s about to go on trial for the crime of talking back to the police. This is his story. It could be your story.”18 By 1982 Michael had a well-­known public trajectory of activism in Pasadena and Los Angeles. Upon amassing extensive evidence that undercover agents had infiltrated CAPA, in 1979 Zinzun and 130 plaintiffs from various civil rights organizations who had similarly gathered proof

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of infiltration sued the LAPD for violating their constitutional rights to assemble, to expect privacy, and to associate freely. That case resulted in a $1.8 million settlement in 1981 and the disbanding of the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division.19 Besides providing assistance to victims of police misconduct at the Coalition Against Police Abuse, Michael was involved in a series of community initiatives: nontoxic, environment-­conscious pest control (the “Off the Roach Program,” based on Michael’s meticulous study of boric acid as a safe deterrent to insects), around which he held training classes and employed local young women and men to serve the surrounding communities; video-­making courses; production and hosting of Message to the Grassroots, a monthly cable television show that started in 1988 and ran for approximately a decade; a recycled plastic dome housing project for the homeless; silk screen and computer instruction for youth; and supporting transnational collaboration between activists of Los Angeles and Brazil.20 Zinzun seemed tireless. At almost every turn, however, he was confronted with obstacles of various kinds: financial, interpersonal, and legal in addition to problems with the police. Michael’s disputes with law enforcement evidenced, as David Marriott puts it, “the question of how cultural and unconscious fantasies of black men as icons, types and antitypes lay claim to particular accounts of the nation [empire] state.”21 The Los Angeles Reader article describing Zinzun’s disputes with the police reveals the ways in which he inhabited certain archetypes that, while effective in projecting a sense of collective and historical purpose, made him increasingly more vulnerable. This is how sympathetic journalist Steve Erickson introduces Michael to his readers: Mike Zinzun lives in Pasadena. Arrived from Chicago at the age of eight. He is now thirty-­three years old. Very big dude, wary, charismatic. Isn’t that what they call guys like this, charismatic? Picked up on the Black Panthers when he was in his late teens, split from them around 1972 over political differences. . . . During the seventies, Zinzun was involved in community free-­breakfast programs, roach-­control programs, recreation and summer-­employment programs for kids, emergency medical and first-­aid programs, and, six years ago, he co-­founded with fellow Panther Robert Duren the Coalition Against Police Abuse which, as you may know, is Daryl Gates’s favorite charity.22

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Sometime between 1969 and 1971 Zinzun and his wife, Florence, barely escaped a predawn police raid that would have claimed their lives, just as similar raids had decimated a substantial part of the national Black Panther Party leadership.23 Luckily, they happened to be awake in the wee hours of the night. Hearing suspicious noises around the house, Florence went to the door and noticed a large concentration of cops and special agents geared up to act. A well-­trained Panther, with a shotgun in her hands she demanded to see legal documents justifying the police visit, which started a lengthy negotiation between Florence and Michael, on one side of their home’s door, and police authorities, on the other. Florence’s presence of mind stalled an operation that did not count on having its intended targets awake, much less cognizant of legal procedures; both facts paralyzed the cops. I bring up this story, which Zinzun occasionally recounted as an example of the war climate during the Panther years, to suggest a dynamic specific to the performance of the apparently tough, intensely focused, and charismatic Black militant—­a version of the Black cyborg. This dynamic is such that, the more the Black cyborg survives and is successful, the greater the chances he will meet violence and terror in the following phase. Marriott’s quotation about black men’s performance of cultural types and antitypes is instructive because it stresses the gendered aspect of this racialized dynamic of terror. Perceived as a “very big dude, wary, charismatic,” Michael incited specific types of personal, public, and institutional expectations and responses, each carrying antiblack anxieties. Dominant parameters of gendered racial subjectivity depended on and multiplied such antiblack anxieties. Reflecting an openly oppositional type of politics, Zinzun’s presence synthesized a combination of symbolic forces difficult to ignore. Although there existed complex sentiments traded between the cyborg and his bloc’s members—­not the least of which were related to his performance of a specific type of Black cisnormative maleness—­to his allies Zinzun galvanized mostly positive, collective energy. To his detractors he magnetized corresponding levels of ire and violence. The incident the Reader refers to, tense and uncertain for Michael and his family, in retrospect constituted a prelude to a much grimmer episode a few years later in which Zinzun was again centrally implicated. In February 1982 Michael lived in a low-­income apartment building in Pasadena. He sees three cops arresting a man, when a resident, apparently coming to the arrested man’s help, hurriedly stumbles down stairs and falls against or,

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depending on who does the recounting of the facts, shoves one of the officers. A gathering of people quickly forms in the building’s courtyard. True to his calling and the daily work against police abuse he had been doing since at least 1975, from the courtyard Zinzun tells the persons around him that they should pay close attention to the events and make notes if possible. Zinzun was closely following the manual of community organizing he and CAPA members began writing in the mid-­1970s:24 police-­abuse events were opportunities for communities to come together and later discuss, research, and possibly protest specific grievances as well as broader structural problems affecting them. At this point, an officer recognizes Michael and addresses him. This is how Erickson describes the scene: One of the sergeants—­a veteran of nearly forty years who goes by the name of Reinke—­comes up to Zinzun and talks to him. “Michael,” he says, “if you ever do one thing for me in your life, will you get back?” Zinzun turns around and walks back to the fence and slides under it to the other side; he’s now standing on the driveway. He says to Sgt. Reinke, “All right, I’m cooperating with you. Now will you do something for me?” He wants the sergeant to keep the rookies under control. He’s worried about them, he’s worried they’ll get out of hand. The courtyard is filled with humanity and there are upwards of ten cops, at least one or two with shotguns. One of the rookies walks up to Zinzun and pokes him through the fence with a nightstick, pushing him farther back. Zinzun tells the officer with some irritation that if he pokes him again, he’s going to get that nightstick shoved up his ass. The cops lead the arrested men to the cars and the crowd begins to disperse, and it’s over.25 But it wasn’t over. Five days later Zinzun was arrested and charged, not by the Pasadena prosecutor, who would have jurisdiction over misdemeanors committed in the area, but by the Los Angeles County district attorney. The charge: not the customary “incitement to riot,” but four counts under the obscure Penal Code 69. Dating back to 1872, Code 69 defines as illegal, “by means of any threat or violence, to deter or prevent an executive officer from performing any duty imposed upon such officer by law.” If convicted, Michael was facing twelve years of incarceration (three years for each count.) It was an extraordinary charge, one that revealed

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an extraordinary intent to destabilize and indeed silence Zinzun. Penal Code 69 had been used only a handful of times. The explanation for the draconian and highly unusual charge against Zinzun, as the Reader suggested, was his well-­known work at the Coalition Against Police Abuse. Zinzun and CAPA had been targeted for infiltration and disruption practically since day one of the organization’s inception. Penal Code 69 provided an excellent opportunity to silence Zinzun and potentially shut down CAPA. A few months before Michael’s arrest, and as a result of the lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department i described above, the LAPD released its Public Disorder Intelligence Division espionage files, in which CAPA and Zinzun featured prominently. They revealed that four LAPD officers had infiltrated CAPA—­Eddie Solomon, Connie Malazo, Eddy Camarillo, and Georgia Odom—­posing as radical or revolutionaries. So adroit were the infiltrators that they were able to assimilate into several local organizations, and some of them, such as Odom in CAPA, even rose to prominent positions. It was typical FBI Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, tactics.26 Fed by a constant stream of reports and phone calls from the infiltrators, official intelligence divisions at the local, state, and national levels were able to closely monitor and affect organizations deemed threatening. CAPA and Zinzun, in particular, had been the most prominent thorns in the LAPD’s side. They had tirelessly reached out to aggrieved communities and instructed individuals on how to file complaints against the police; they had succeeded in forcing police officers to carry identification cards and provide the cards upon request; they had called attention to and created a public debate about choke holds; they had passionately and in great detail protested the use of lethal police force; and they had become quite effective in using the streets, news media, and principally the courts to combat state abuse. Long before the increased public awareness of police abuse and state-­sanctioned violence against Blacks and nonblacks, Michael and CAPA members had assembled extensive dossiers on Anthony Brown, Ron Burkholder, Anthony Reeves, Reyes Martinez, George Ward, Dwayne Standard, Eula Love, Larry Morris, and Ron Settles, among many others, killed either in confrontations with, or under custody of, law enforcement.27 Michael had reason to believe his extensive, detailed, and well-­known archive of police brutality, much of it housed in the CAPA building, was the object of numerous suspicious break-­ins—­suspicious because, when these frequent invasions happened,

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even though the office was left in disarray, no objects of value, such as cameras, lenses, and computers, were ever taken. Michael and his comrades knew perfectly well they were being monitored a long time before they sued the LAPD in 1979. Indeed, as early as 1971, COINTELPRO had labeled Zinzun, then a Black Panther Party member, “potentially dangerous” and “subversive.” In a November 2, 1971, memorandum FBI director J. Edgar Hoover signed, Michael is categorized as showing “evidence of emotional instability” as well as “a propensity for violence and antipathy toward good order and government.”28 Since at least 1977, Zinzun had sent repeated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the United States Department of Justice.29 As a result of these requests, documents such as the 1971 FBI memorandum, along with many others i encountered while researching the Southern California Library’s CAPA archives in 2013 and 2014, became valuable evidence of the illegal government surveillance practiced against Zinzun and his collaborators. The evidence was valuable because it gave CAPA the legal basis and moral upper hand in the disputes with law enforcement bureaucracies. Michael often uttered, “I’ll see you in court,” in public, sometimes televised debates. This type of hailing was meant to surprise and intimidate agents and supporters of law enforcement who were called to defend, or at least justify, the recurring acts of police misconduct and violence against vulnerable people. Furthermore, the evidence of spying was valuable because it provided primary material based on which activists like Michael gained finer understanding of the illegal tactics of official institutions. Critically, the evidence of spying and infiltration (which the FOIA documents reaffirmed) and, even more pointedly, the botched predawn raid of his house, demonstrated that Zinzun and his family’s physical integrity, and indeed their survival, depended on being constantly informed about the tactical minutiae of law enforcement and on knowing how to respond when the occasion demanded. All of this is to say that, when Zinzun was arrested and prosecuted on Penal Code 69, even though the district attorney’s charges were distinctly aggressive, they were not surprising. In the court hearings, as they demonstrated indignation at the draconian obscure nature of the accusation, Michael and his attorney performed a well-­rehearsed legal strategy that drew from his effective familiarity with proceedings and from his higher moral ground vis-­à-­vis the already and repeatedly demoralized law enforcement agencies, specifically the LAPD.

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After a year of hearings, expensive legal maneuvering, and, for all of Michael and his attorney’s confidence, a heavy psychological toll due to the possibility of long-­term imprisonment, on June 29, 1983, on the first day of trial, Pasadena Superior Court Judge Xanthos dismissed all charges.30 As Los Angeles social management agencies carried out a “cleanup” campaign preceding the 1984 Olympic Games—­quelling protests, removing the impoverished and homeless from downtown and tourist areas, and intensifying surveillance and policing of Black and Brown neighborhoods—­ Zinzun’s court victory was a dissonant note. He was certainly swept up and charged in the heat of the pre-­mega-­sport-­event climate which, together with the COINTELPRO-­like strategies of making up accusations aiming at long-­term prison sentences, could have put him out of circulation for a considerable amount of time. Yet his emergence from this ordeal consolidated his cyborg persona and set him up for subsequent, more threatening confrontations. • • • Although it is tempting to stress the parallels between, on the one hand, Zinzun’s embodiment and performance of his multifaceted politics, and on the other, that of paradigmatic figures of transnational Black struggles such as Safiya Bukhari, Assata Shakur, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, anticolonial theoreticians and (perhaps with the exception of Bukhari) advocates of violence against the apparatuses of oppression and their agents, the parallels would miss that which made Michael singularly compelling as a public figure and organizer. Early on during his activism, probably in his mid-­twenties, he grew weary of violence. Despite recognizing that indiscriminate antiblack and racist violence was a fundamental aspect of the social order he passionately wanted to transform, Michael began doubting the ultimate effectiveness of physical violence as a political tool. Although his public performance and political vocabulary hardly indicated it, and while always advocating and practicing self-­defense, Zinzun began a lifelong internal struggle hastened by the violent deaths of comrades, allies, family members, and political enemies. Many of the walls inside his house on North Marengo Avenue, including the bedroom where he slept, were covered with large photographs of assassinated Panthers. Many times i wondered about the effects, over time, of constant exposure to reminders of the brutality meted on those individuals, many of whom were Michael’s close friends. It was evident that Michael and his family drew

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much strength from those portraits, but it was also inescapable that each of those individuals had perished under violent conditions: their photographs were reminders of the lingering and ubiquitous terror that had claimed their lives. That brutal world was also the world of Michael and his family. Beginning in his Panther years and continuing during his lifetime of organizing, Michael’s troubled experiences and memories of violence calibrated his political perspective as well as his public personality. Perhaps the culmination of this enduring internal reflection, Michael became one of the main architects and stately figures of the 1992 historic gang truce between Crips and Bloods that eventually gained national and international relevance. Yet the path to this political position—­that of the cyborg who values appeasement over conflict—­was tortuous and tortured. In 1986 he would find himself the victim of an atrocious act of empire-­ state violence, one that left him blind in his left eye and made an indelible mark in both his personal life and his political outlook. This incident illustrated the archetypical dynamic of the Black cyborg: because Michael emerged victorious in the 1982 incident with the police—­as he had in the earlier dismantling of the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division—­he had become a highly visible representative of the organized opposition to police abuse. His greater visibility rendered him more vulnerable to state repression. The events described below solidified Zinzun’s presence in the Los Angeles area activist map, increased the level of official surveillance on him, his family, associates, and his organization, and not surprisingly intensified his internal dilemmas about violence. After experiencing firsthand the sheer brutality of the police force, the temptation to revert back to his early Panther years, and to focus on the use of violence as a legitimate instrument of active self-­defense, must have been considerable. Yet the deeply traumatizing experience brought Michael closer to Baldwin’s cyborg—­one who, even in the face of unjust, extraordinary physical and psychological pain, through committed pedagogical and organizing work, insists on recuperating the empire-­state project of democratic multiracial integration. • • • Less than two years after the dismissal of the accusations based on Code 69, Michael Zinzun found himself in another confrontation with the Pasadena Police. In the early hours of June 22, 1986, Steve Rivers, a Black

MICHAEL ZINZUN · 229

man, was arrested on suspicion of burglary. When officers began beating him with their batons, Rivers, already sprayed with Mace, handcuffed and lying on the ground, cried for help.31 His shouts got the entire neighborhood’s attention, and dozens of people poured out of their homes, including Frank Taylor and Michael Zinzun. When Taylor and Zinzun pleaded to get the names of the officers, they were brutally beaten and arrested for “interfering with police.”32 Maced and struck with a flashlight, Michael suffered a severe gash on his head, which required forty stitches on his face and scalp. Such was the violence with which he was met that his skull was fractured. His left eye’s optic nerve did not resist the flashlight blows and became detached, rendering that eye blind. The police brutality at the low-­income Community Arms Apartments did more than irreversibly harm Michael physically. In a depressed state, unable to work or pay the rent on his home, and facing eviction along with his family, Zinzun appeared defeated. At the time, he lived with his wife Florence, thirty-­five, and four children: Michael Jr., nineteen; Kindra, sixteen; Anthony, fifteen; and Michelle, thirteen. All were affected, financially and psychologically. Florence had a job as a nurse’s assistant. Her salary was enough for food and utilities. But the $210 monthly rent on their three-­bedroom had not been paid in a year. And within days of the incident, Anthony began using crutches even though he did not appear to have any injuries. According to Zinzun, the psychologist with whom the entire family was having regular appointments said that Anthony was “trying to share my pain.”33 If, as the Los Angeles Reader stated in 1982, the law wanted to “shut him up,”34 then four years later it apparently succeeded. In a newspaper photograph taken a few days after the beating, Michael is the very image of defeat. Gone is his defiant pose, his swagger, his assured gaze. I was taken aback when, conducting research at the Southern California Library, i first came across Kathy Braidhill’s 1987 article.35 It was not so much because of the sheer brutality Michael’s face registered, but because during the time i had known him there was hardly a moment when he allowed his public persona to be anything other than that of a confident, proud warrior. Michael did allow for his vulnerabilities to show, but only in private, with very few people, and his show of vulnerability was part of his genuine search for interpersonal improvement.36 The public image of a battered Zinzun, therefore, shocked as much at it revealed, yet again, the considerable effort required to overcome personal

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catastrophe and persevere in the mission of salvaging the democratic multiracial project. Baldwin had warned about this: “It will be hard . . . but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.” Blinded in one eye, psychologically wounded, and experiencing domestic disarray, Michael wobbled but didn’t fall. His physical and psychic predicaments were not resting points. Rather, and following a script of mastery over hardship not unlike that of Baldwin’s cyborg, Zinzun refused the destiny the empire-­state had imposed on him. Zinzun refused being broken; he refused victimization. His physical modification—­a ruptured optic nerve, a broken skull, and several worrisome emotional and bodily bruises—­announced renewed focus. The posttraumatic period became a time to gather information, regroup support networks, and put into practice his already extensive organizational and legal knowledge accumulated while combating state excesses at the Coalition Against Police Abuse. By then CAPA was an organization with a decade of experience, a well-­ known and constant regional presence, and at least one significant legal victory to its credit. A central aspect of Michael and his supporters’ counteroffensive was the formation of the Michael Zinzun Defense Committee (MZDC). “Free speech is on trial,” the committee protested. It continued: “After years of community organizing, Michael Zinzun is facing the possibility of a jail sentence for speaking out against police brutality in his own neighborhood. The Zinzun case is in the forefront of community efforts to protect all of Los Angeles area residents against police abuse.”37 MZDC members were a constant presence at court hearings, city council meetings, the mayor’s office, and police stations; and they organized marches, rallies, and fund drives. For example, shortly after the beating incident, more than 150 supporters, led by the MZDC, “packed a Pasadena City Board of Directors meeting to demand an independent investigation of the incident and the filing of criminal charges against the police officers involved.” Among the supporters were representatives of the NAACP, the ACLU, the Peace and Freedom Party, and several other community groups that formed a multiracial political ensemble.38 Zinzun reemerged supported by MZDC, progressive and civil rights groups, and sympathetic news media. Utilized in the MZDC press release as well as accompanying articles in newspapers, Michael’s new

MICHAEL ZINZUN · 231

photograph indicated a transformed look and spirit. No longer the person battered by the police,39 nor the brash former Black Panther activist clad in leather clothing and a carefully kept Afro,40 Zinzun was now donning a three-­piece, pinstriped suit, dark tie, and a patch over his blinded eye. His hair was shorter. He posed in front of bookcases. (One of the book covers, purposefully facing the camera, was a collection of speeches and addresses edited by Philip S. Foner titled W. E. B Du Bois Speaks.) His gaze was firm but serene. The MZDC press release’s first paragraph read, “Here today, just as in Pretoria, we have to sound the call for the defense of those who have long committed themselves to the fight against injustice in the Black Community. On January 22nd, exactly six months after the South African–­style police attack on Michael Zinzun and others outside the Pasadena Community Arms housing project, formal charges have finally been filled by the Special Prosecutor John A. Slawson against Zinzun. The arraignment date is February 13.”41 Michael’s personal pain had been transfigured into collective moral energy and a statesman-­like stance. By referencing similar struggles in South Africa, and equating U.S. police practices to those common in the country of formal apartheid, the MZDC projected a sense of diasporic ethical empowerment. The press release’s tone, in line with Michael’s photograph showing him formally dressed, suggests a principled high ground from which wrongs would inevitably be righted. Framing the legal battle in terms of constitutional entitlements, the Defense Committee asked, “Do citizens have the right to witness police arrests, to ask the police to identify themselves, and to protest when ‘alleged suspects,’ already handcuffed and lying on the ground, are beaten with baton and flashlights?” It was a question dear to Black Panthers like Zinzun; but now, more than twenty years after the Panthers’ beginnings in Oakland, California, the question was being posed again, inserted in a transnational context, and backed up by a sharp analysis of the then current domestic political climate. “Zinzun’s indictment,” the MZDC press release contextualized, “is not the only outrage against civil liberties in the Los Angeles area. On January 26, nine people, 8 Palestinians here on Jordanian passports and a Kenyan, were arrested by the INS. Six are now threatened with deportation under a McCarthy era law prohibiting the publication and dissemination of communist literature. This is an attack on the right to the legal expression of political views.”42 Zinzun’s case, after all, was not unique. Was what unique was Zinzun’s will to persevere, his ability to mobilize multiracial, energized, and relatively organized constituencies.

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As important, Michael had been able to transform his bodily and psychic trials into advantages. “I may have lost an eye,” he often repeated, “but I see a lot clearer.”43 A special kind of cyborg, indeed: one that gained powers (of analysis, perception, and vision, in the physiological, ethical, and political senses) following physical trauma and impairment. Zinzun was a cyborg because, as he coped with his deeply destabilizing, painful, and life-­altering ordeal, he was able to activate a political bloc that was energized, mobilized, informed, transnational, and diverse. Encompassing a broad multiracial political spectrum—­former Panthers, the NAACP, the Peace and Freedom Party—­the MZDC transformed Black suffering into collective demands for reparations in the legal sphere and reform of key institutions such as the police and the courts. While presently discriminatory and unjust, it was assumed that society and its institutions could be rectified. A synergetic connection between on-­ the-­ground organized pressure and a well-­planned legal strategy would make change possible. “We must mobilize a strong defense in the streets as well as in the courtroom,” the MZDC asserted, “demanding an end to Apartheid-­style injustice in the Black ghettoes and Latino barrios of Southern California.”44 By including Latino barrios in its analysis, the MZDC made evident the terms according to which the multiracial effort operated. The multiracial effort relied on the assumption that Black experiences were translatable to nonblacks. If Zinzun’s experience represented experiences common to Blacks, and if Zinzun’s superhuman efforts were examples of a Black cyborg, then Black suffering, Black resistance, and Black willingness to work with nonblack social groups provided the broad political front’s conditions of possibility. The segregation of barrios made sense because it was commensurable to the apartheid-­like conditions Blacks faced. The critique of and organized opposition to Black residential segregation and the criminal justice apparatus that sustained it, therefore, was assumed to be immediately adaptable to Latin@ experiences. In the name of constitutional reform and ethical multiracial democratic integration, the Black cyborg made Black people’s suffering, strategies of coping, and visions of a better future meaningful to nonblack peoples in the United States and elsewhere. Although Southern California was the immediate battleground, and the Black experience generated the conceptual matrix, the troops, inspiration, and ramifications reached far beyond that particular

MICHAEL ZINZUN · 233

battleground and matrix. Indeed, this Black cyborg vitally reaffirmed the assumption of analogy between Black and nonblack experiences. Fifteen months after a protracted legal battle and mobilization effort, whose turning point was Zinzun’s filing of a civil rights suit against the city in which he alleged he was beaten and wrongfully arrested, the City of Pasadena agreed to an out-­of-­court settlement that awarded $1.2 million to Zinzun, to be paid over thirty-­five years. “It’s all over, and now I can begin picking up the pieces of my life,” Zinzun said. “The money will . . . send a clear message to the city and the Police Department that they can no longer act like judge, jury and executioner.”45 Zinzun announced as soon as the settlement was official that with the money he bought a house in Pasadena, got himself a Timex watch, and allowed his children one wish, which turned out to be a swimming pool. He also set aside college funds for them. To the dismay of his adversaries, he let it be known he had no intention of moving to some paradisiac Caribbean island. Instead, he reaffirmed his commitment to “increase his protests of [domestic] police brutality and South Africa’s apartheid policy.”46 As part of this commitment to expand the political networks that had coalesced around him, in 1989 Zinzun decided to run for the Pasadena City Council. Zinzun and Chris Holden, his main rival for the District 3 seat, knew the election would be close, as indicated by the voting projections.47 Holden, son of Nate Holden, the Los Angeles City Council member who at the time was challenging Mayor Tom Bradley in the mayoral race, received a considerable boost when, in the midst of the campaign, former assistant police chief Robert Vernon used an LAPD computer database to obtain information about Zinzun and falsely suggested Zinzun had been investigated by the LAPD’s antiterrorism division.48 Michael narrowly lost the election. But he sued the City of Los Angeles for defamation, and five years later, on July 27, 1994, he was awarded $512,500 to settle his claim. • • • A considerable portion of the settlement funds Zinzun won from the cities of Pasadena and Los Angeles went to maintaining the Coalition Against Police Abuse—­rent, utilities, staff, equipment, office supplies, and programming. Michael did indeed try to pick up the pieces of his life. That meant taking care of his family’s immediate housing and other material

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needs, investing in stress-­reducing activities such as semiprecious stone collection, jewelry crafting, pet tending (he kept snakes, lizards, birds, and dogs), cooking classes, and traveling. Still, emerging victorious from the confrontations against established official bureaucracies, Zinzun renewed his commitment to organizing, now financially empowered in ways unimaginable a few years earlier. With his new resources he invested in photography and video equipment to be used by young people at the CAPA office; he continued to research and develop new devices and chemical formulas for safe and environmentally responsible pest control; convinced of its usefulness in combating homelessness, he conducted extensive research about and purchased a recycled plastic dome, which he installed in the Western Avenue office’s backyard; in the dome he placed silk screen equipment, and he had professionals hold classes on this technique for community members. In 1992, in the midst of the Los Angeles Uprising, he provided material and logistical resources to the formation of a gang truce between Crips and Bloods, an initiative that led to the formation of the Community in Support of the Gang Truce, which would be housed with CAPA until the office’s closure; in 1993 and 1995, he helped organize and funded people from the United States participating in a conference series on the “African Diaspora in Dialogue” in Rio de Janeiro; in 1995 he began acquiring computers and offering classes targeting Black and Latin@ kids and residents of adjoining neighborhoods; and in 1995 and 1996 he played a critical organizational role in the conceptualization and execution of the third and fourth anniversaries of the gang truce, which by then had become a national and international movement.49 Until his death in 2006, Michael was a well-­known and celebrated advocate for police accountability and for peace in impoverished areas. He continued to suffer from bouts of depression, however, and often self-­ medicated in ways that were self-­destructive. I interacted with him in two of those psychological crises, once when i lived in San Diego, and another time when i was in Austin. While Michael’s pain was apparent and, as he implied, connected to personal and collective suffering—­the loss of his eye and recurring pains and nightmares related to the police beating he suffered; the loss of close friends, family, and entire generations of young people to the effects of violence, drugs, and incarceration—­he didn’t allow himself to wallow in his depression for too long. After each bout, which lasted a few weeks, he would self-­impose dietary restrictions, cut out alcohol, and establish daily routines that included work at the office but also

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the cultivation of less demanding activities such as culinary classes, short trips with family members (especially with his grandchildren, to whom he was joyfully attached), and projects involving a variety of domestic pets. Michael was now a mature organizer—­many of the teenagers he worked with called him grandpa—­someone people recognized in the streets and whose charisma easily came across in his frequent television appearances and in the written press. In 1998, with a front-­page photograph and article, the Black-­owned Los Angeles Sentinel reported that Michael Zinzun, along with Johnnie Cochran Jr., were “honored for their tributes to excellence during a ceremony Sunday aboard the Queen Mary by Police Watch, a non-­profit civil rights organization.”50 Next to actor Danny Glover, Cochran, actor Mario Van Peebles, and attorney Jorge Gonzalez, Michael seemed genuinely pleased. The photograph captured him wearing his hair net, a dark embroidered dashiki, and some of his self-­crafted jewelry. His lifelong work had made a difference at the local and international levels, and this type of recognition confirmed his prominence in activist circles and in the broader Black, Brown, and progressive intelligentsia. • • • Michael’s compelling personality and political trajectory were tethered to the belief that people’s cultural understandings (including their racialized unconscious), institutions, and indeed the entire social world could be reformed. Had he stuck to his early advocacy of armed struggle, he would probably not have reached as many people and received this type of praise and recognition for his work—­the type expressed in mainstream news media, banquets, prizes, and other similar rituals. Nor would he have succeeded in attracting to his efforts against police brutality, for the gang truce, and for community programs that aimed at the full inclusion and citizenship of the impoverished and disenfranchised, the broad constituencies that cut across political and gang affiliation, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and social class. Since at least the late 1980s defining himself as a “radical socialist,”51 Zinzun was relentless in his oppositional work. His radical political orientation was certainly disruptive of social institutions and their protocols. Yet, by design, he and his allied bloc did not advocate the overthrow or elimination of institutions such as the police, the courts, and prisons. Radical reform was the goal: it required coming to terms with and correcting long-­standing patterns of discrimination, and including, via democratic

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processes, the formerly excluded in the decision-­making spheres of various institutions. His brief preference for a three-­piece suit notwithstanding, Michael’s political agency departed from the protocols of normative respectability. He was proficient at “in your face” shock performance, which included witty phrasing, a booming, Panther-­inflected confidence, and colorful clothing not usually associated with most established public personalities. His political persona was consciously tailored to produce stark contrasts with the usual business of public debate. Michael was skilled at oppositional routines, which made the messages he performed during his frequent participation in local news television broadcasts crisp and memorable. Despite his unusual style, Zinzun radiated his own type of respectability, one that equated with his unapologetic, informed, generous, and tireless commitment. Michael’s excess of energy, obvious to anyone who met him, came across emphatically as i went through the CAPA boxes at the Southern California Library. The number of simultaneous cases of abuse, wrongful conviction, and deaths he was involved in; the intense correspondence he kept with many prisoners, victims of police abuse and court discrimination, and their relatives; the dozens of manuals and specialized articles on pest control, recyclable materials for housing, police equipment (so that he could give expert advice to victims and testimony in juridical processes), and photography and video recording; as well as the folders upon folders of newspaper clippings, academic articles, handwritten and typed lectures and speech notes—­this documentary evidence only confirmed Michael as someone defined by his unflinching commitment and consistent capacity to offer assistance to organizations and private persons who needed his expertise, attention, sympathy, moral support, and often material resources. In this commitment, he habitually reexperienced his own episodes of brutality and loss. He would be visibly shaken by many of the cases he took on—­some of which would last months, even years—­but he was methodical in their analysis and in formulating the best course of legal and political action. This capacity to bracket personal suffering and insist on collective service marked Michael’s life trajectory; it made him a cyborg very much in line with Baldwin’s recommendations on the imperatives of painful yet necessary and redemptive political action. Zinzun’s cyborg was the fulcrum of a series of interconnected multiracial collective initiatives. Without his tireless commitment, there would be no Coalition Against Police Abuse, no Community in Support of the

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Gang Truce, no campaigns for civilian police review boards, no celebration of the gang truce, no organized trips to Europe, Africa, and South America. Without this Black cyborg, there would be no sustained investment in multiracial alliances. Michael’s experience of brutal and quotidian discrimination provided the ideological grounds on which was rooted the assumption of experiential analogy and recognition between Blacks and those termed peoples of color. The multiracial bloc’s conditions of existence were precisely those assumptions of analogy and recognition. As the next chapter shows, however, the assumptions of analogy and recognition came with a price. For the multiracial bloc, the price was the elision of structural and persisting antiblackness. Operating under the aegis of oblique identification, the cyborg’s bloc performed the disavowal of that which was the most essential to Black people’s struggle. The Black cyborg’s political bloc, then, was as effective as it was in pushing antiblackness out of cognitive, affective, and tactical awareness. Michael sought alliances beyond the United States. In Brazil he established collaborations with activists in Rio and Salvador in the early 1990s that remain active to this day. For example, there would be no diaspora course in Rio with Criola were it not for Michael’s insistence that i connect with the Favela Popular Movement in 2001. His insistence is at the root of my ongoing work with Black activists in Brazil. At a deeper level, his insistence revealed a recognition that the diaspora was defined by common traits of antiblackness. To him, diasporic patterns of impoverishment, residential segregation, punitive schooling, and police brutality suggested the political necessity of organizing across so-­called nation-­states. To connect dynamics of juvenile incarceration in Texas with facts of police lethality in Rio, then, is to apply the Black cyborg’s theory and practice of the diaspora. However, as the next chapter shows, the diasporic political blocs that galvanized around the Black cyborg were able to engage such patterns of exclusion only partially. Although empathy toward Black suffering was evident in these transnational political formations, the transhistorical, structural, and ubiquitous fact of antiblackness was seldom addressed.

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7

Black Suffering as Catalyst Multiracial Blocs in Diaspora

Drawing from the analyses of asymptotic forms of recognition, Black disidentification, and the Black cyborg, here i evaluate political assumptions informing oblique identification in two empire-­states of the Black diaspora. I begin with a few words on how asymptotic recognition and disidentification relate to oblique identification. Asymptotic recognition is a form of oblique identification at its minimum. Latin@ kids in prison (chapters 2 and 3), even though they have experienced the same antiblack forces of transgenerational dispossession and hypersurveillance as Black kids, vis-­à-­vis Black kids they were nevertheless on a distinct life track, and were therefore under a distinct logic of social containment. Latin@ and Black kids hardly interacted and identified with each other. Relative to Black kids, Latin@ young men and women could reasonably expect less disadvantages in and out of prison even though they were, by nature of their shared areas of residence—­occupied zones in the contemporary United States—­similarly targeted by state-­sponsored militarized policing and disadvantaged in punitive schools. Latino kids expected their family and friend support networks to provide them with material and affective resources in ways that Black youths could not realistically expect. Latin@ kids were the numeric majority in the juvenile prison, yet they were not subjected to the intensifying and increasing forms of punishment Blacks experienced the deeper they moved in the institutions of punishment; nor were they as disproportionately represented in prison as were Blacks: Latin@ kids were often represented in juvenile prisons approximately according to their proportion in the general population. The antiblack structure of positionality is such that Latin@s did not experience antiblack technologies of repression in the same intensity as did Blacks. Yet Latin@ young women and men were aware of structural and transgenerational forces of oppression that affected all of them. In this regard, even if only 239

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obliquely, they were aware of antiblack technologies of control and deprivation as the broad umbrella that affected everyone during, before, and after imprisonment. This form of Latin@ asymptotic recognition of antiblackness suggests that the afterlife of slavery, informing current carceral regimes in the African diaspora, inevitably affect nonblacks, particularly the most vulnerable. In this multiracial dystopian scenario, the potential for nonblack recognition of antiblackness is at least a theoretical possibility. “If the prison continues to dominate the landscape of punishment throughout this century into the next,” ponders Angela Davis, “what might await coming generations of impoverished African-­Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian-­Americans?”1 As happened during the 2013 mass protests in Brazil, Black disidentification occurs when Blacks recognize the antiblack logic organizing public–­political mobilization. Chapter 4 showed that, even though the protests in Brazil addressed antiblack phenomena such as police brutality and unemployment (and therefore performed oblique identification of antiblackness), Blacks perceived in the nonblack (mostly White) protestors’ sense of entitlement to the public square, their conflict (as opposed to antagonism) with the police, and their negotiations with state representatives, including then president Dilma Rousseff, a fundamentally antiblack (and pro-­nonblack) logic whose assumption placed the nonblack protestors at the heart of the empire-­state’s constitution. Whereas nonblacks, and especially Whites, could voice their discontent in public, Blacks know that the public sphere, and civil society in general, is the stage of antiblack indiscriminate violence. Whereas nonblacks, and especially Whites, could generate and count on collective scandal when the police brutalized them, Blacks know that scandalous Black pain is an oxymoron. Whereas nonblacks suffered violence that was contingent on their protests against the established forms of power, Blacks know they are constantly the objects of gratuitous violence. Black disidentification, then, is a product of the capacity that nonblacks, and especially Whites, have to perform their belonging in the empire-­state’s civil society. Nonblack, and especially White, capacity to perform belonging is anathema to Black belonging. The nonblack is a citizen because the Black is not.2 In both asymptotic recognition (chapters 2 and 3) and black disidentification (chapter 4) there is potential for nonblack recognition of the Black positionality—­at least recognition of Black suffering. But there exists a

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missing link: a disposition, a fact, a figure, an incentive that transforms the potential into actualization. The Black cyborg is the missing link, although it is not the only one possible. Yet the Black cyborg is certainly effective. The Black cyborg catalyzes nonblack recognition of Black suffering, even if oblique recognition. The Black cyborg makes possible the emergence of the multiracial bloc, engendering a familiarity with Black suffering that, in the cyborg’s absence, would remain faint at best. The Black cyborg allows for nonblack oblique identification of Black experiences. The focus on oblique identification is useful because it explains how nonblacks, when addressing the excesses of the antiblack, violent, and corrupt empire-­state, assume and/or suggest a familiarity with Black suffering. Such presumed familiarity is telling of the underlying logic informing the constitution of the multiracial bloc, which works for and imagines an improved democratic polis.3 Such assumed familiarity with Black suffering, however, is nothing new.4 It is precisely the obliqueness of the identification—­its partiality, belatedness, unwillingness, and strategic employment as a tool to constitute democratic multiraciality—­that allows the nonblack to recognize, address, employ, and thus render her own the quandary of blackness. This chapter will show how such assumptions of familiarity with Black suffering, and blackness more generally, are integral to the people-­of-­color concept, a critical component of the multiracial bloc. Importantly, it will illustrate how these assumptions also serve to disavow the acknowledgment of antiblackness as a foundational, structural, ubiquitous, transhistorical, and present fact. Insisting on the wide-­ranging effects of White supremacy across the racial spectrum, the people-­of-­color analytical framework allows for recognizing specific ways in which differently racialized groups are victimized, yet such differences are ultimately judged secondary to detecting and challenging the common source and assumedly comparable outcomes of racialized oppression and degradation. Both oblique identification and the people-­of-­color framework, then, require and generate the simultaneous acknowledgement of Black suffering, the assumption of common experiences across nonwhite racial lines, and the incapacity to engage historical, contemporary, and structural facts of antiblackness as foundational to the establishment of the empire-­state and the current tableau of relationalities. Such incapacity to engage structural antiblackness is tantamount to the denial of antiblackness. The Black cyborg, central to the constitution of the multiracial bloc and its people-­of-­color praxis, paradigmatically

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incarnates the simultaneous acknowledgment of black suffering and the denial of structural antiblackness. The Black cyborg is the condition of the multiracial bloc—­without the cyborg’s super/extrahuman knowledge, strength, and love, there is no multiracial bloc. At the same time, the Black cyborg is the product of the multiracial bloc insofar as the multiracial bloc provides the cyborg with the human resources and collective energy s/he needs to come about and survive. Still, the multiracial bloc’s method of operation requires that the acknowledgment of structural antiblackness be pushed aside which, in effect, disavows the very specific conditions and constitution of the Black cyborg, it disavows the very cyborg’s being. Such was evidenced not only in Michael Zinzun’s lifelong efforts at organizing collectively (chapter 6), but also during the multiracial protests following Amarildo de Souza’s disappearance (chapter 5). The people-­of-­color framework is part of a paradigm shift that, in the United States at least, arguably became the post–­civil rights era hegemony.5 Orienting research, policy making, as well as political organizing, the people-­of-­color framework claims to replace what is perceived as an undue emphasis on the Black–­White binary. For example, Bonilla-­Silva has proposed a “Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the USA,” according to which “the bi-­racial order typical of the United States, which was the exception in the world-­racial system, is evolving into a complex tri-­racial stratification system similar to that of many Latin American and Caribbean nations. . . . Specifically, I suggest that the emerging tri-­racial system will be comprised of ‘Whites’ at the top, and intermediary groups of ‘honorary Whites’—­similar to the coloreds in South Africa during formal apartheid . . . , and a non-­White group or the ‘collective Black’ at the bottom.”6 Even though Bonilla-­Silva stresses that “the centrality of the Black identity will not dissipate,” to challenge the “new order,” “we need to short-­circuit the belief in near-­whiteness as the solution to status differences and create a coalition of all ‘people of color’ and their White allies.”7 Howard Winant and others have suggested that the “beyond Black and White” perspective has been hegemonic in Brazil since at least the 1930s, which would qualify the tropical empire-­state ideology of multiracial democracy as a precursor of similar tropes in the United States and elsewhere, tropes whose primary effect is to disqualify claims of the uniqueness and centrality of antiblackness as a structuring fact.8 By stressing common White-­supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, capitalist denominators of oppression, emphasizing race mixture (mostly but not exclusively

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in Brazil) and/or multiracial/multicultural conviviality (as a project or even as a reality, mostly but not exclusively in the United States), the people-­of-­color framework, in its progressive versions, simultaneously acknowledges the specifics of the lived experience of blackness and elides from critical analyses and organizational efforts a serious and sustained consideration of structural and foundational antiblackness. The people-­ of-­color framework is able to locate and generate protest against Black suffering; yet the specificity of Black suffering as a product of structural and foundational antiblackness is negated when Black suffering becomes the point of departure from which multiracial, usually nonwhite allegedly analogous experiences of suffering are presented as evidence of White supremacy. White supremacy, in turn, is conceptualized as the oppressive force field that, if it is to be challenged, theoretically and experientially requires the people-­of-­color framework. What i am pointing to is as simple as it is canonical. Think of the ways in which multiracial arguments for analysis and mobilization often operate normatively. In the Introduction i offered an auto-­critique of my previous books, showing how they unproblematically employed a people-­ of-­color framework. In what follows i generalize from decades of participating in progressive multiracial organizing efforts, in the United States and in Brazil. The organizing dynamics vary little depending on whether the person or group who conceives the effort is Black. Here is a schematic sequence of how the typical, progressive well-­meaning multiracial organizing effort emerges, proceeds, and consolidates itself into a bloc: 1. It usually starts by focusing on an example of Black suffering—­be it police abuse, domestic violence, AIDS/HIV infection, forced dislocation, unemployment, exposure to environmental toxins, or harsh school punishment; 2. It proceeds to move, almost always seamlessly, as if Black suffering is common to other nonblack persons; 3. Experiences of suffering by nonblack women, Latin@, Asian, Muslim, non-­U.S. citizens, and impoverished persons or groups are used as examples to show their correspondence with the initial example of Black suffering; 4. In this attempt at showing correspondence between Black and nonblack suffering, Black suffering is presented as the suffering of the people of color—­or at least it is perceived as the suffering

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that allows for the suffering of people of color to be brought to light, analyzed, analogized, and combated; 5. Black suffering thus becomes the catalyst that forms and consolidates the multiracial bloc; 6. Yet, unlike what happens with the catalyst in a chemical reaction, during the consolidation of the multiracial bloc Black experiences are diluted into, and made analogous to, those of the people of color; 7. What is specific, incommensurable, fundamental, structural, foundational, and some would say incommunicable about Black suffering gets lost. Below is an example of an event organized in February 2015 by the International Socialist Organization (ISO) at the campus of the University of Texas to discuss Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness in the context of recent police killings of unarmed Black women and men in the United States. Besides suggesting a strategic appropriation of the Black Lives Matter approach, the passage illustrates the simultaneous recognition of Black suffering and the pivoting away from structural and foundational antiblackness. This simultaneity is unremarkable. A central component of the people-­ of-­color framework, this simultaneity defines the multiracial bloc. The people-­of-­color framework is hardly a function of political orientation. It inhabits conservative, liberal, and radical analyses and practices. The self-­proclaimed radicality of the ISO, which demands an end to mass incarceration (faintly radical at this point given that even major party presidential candidates endorse it) and capitalism, is at ease in the people-­ of-­color world: “Following the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Aiyana Jones, Larry Jackson, and dozens of other innocent people of color, a new movement is finding its place in the fight for justice. To succeed, the Black Lives Matter movement needs a solid understanding of where this systemic racism comes from and how it supports the ruling class. Join the International Socialist Organization for a discussion on why and how capitalism needs The New Jim Crow to survive, and what we can do to shut it down.”9 It is the seemingly normative ease with which the ISO moves from the state-­induced and extralegal murders of Black people to “dozens of innocent people of color” that is at the heart of the people-­ of-­color framework and the multiracial bloc it intends to bring together.

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An analysis of structural and foundational antiblackness as the source of Black death is pushed aside; systematic racism and capitalism become the common sources of suffering. The multiracial bloc gains a blueprint. Examining oblique identification and the people-­of-­color framework as variations on the common themes of transracial (mis)recognition and solidarity, this chapter critically evaluates the ensuing ethical and political possibilities. What types of ethical orientation and political program can emerge when the nonblack-­Black frame of reference (that posits the uniqueness and centrality of blackness, irreducible to “racism” and “capitalism” as discussed in the Introduction) is negated by or substituted for the practices of oblique identification and the people-­of-­color framework (that stress differentiated yet commensurable types of racialized victimization under White supremacy)? To tether this chapter, i review significant aspects of the Black cyborg’s constitution and political performance that explain (a) the formation of the multiracial bloc that is aware of and wants to end Black suffering; (b) the multiracial bloc’s awe of and dependence on the Black cyborg; (c) the multiracial bloc’s unwillingness and/or inability to elaborate a compelling critique of foundational and structural antiblackness; and (d) the posthumous widespread absorption and performance of the Black cyborg. We are, in varied but significant measures, Black cyborgs. We are Black cyborgs when we address Black suffering and perform a belief in societal reform (despite the ineffectiveness of institutional reform as it concerns antiblackness); we are Black cyborgs when we insist on educating Blacks and nonblacks on social injustices whose multiracial relevance originates with the recognition (and eventually erases the specificity) of Black suffering; we are Black cyborgs when we evoke love (despite the enduring and structural antiblack hatred) as that which will make full transracial recognition possible; we are Black cyborgs when, despite all evidence to the contrary, we maintain our hope that nonblacks, once they recognize the dependence of our current concept of humanity on antiblackness, will eventually divest themselves from this corrupted matrix of humanity (and the psychological, social, and material advantages that accrue from it), and embrace an alternative, pro-­Black, even post-­Black praxis of collective belonging.10 Our performance of the Black cyborg is only possible, or made more plausible, because the Black cyborg, qua identifiable political bodily subject, has effectively vanished. What remains are her mind and spirit. Still, the death and absence of the cyborg, perhaps even more effectively

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than the living and present cyborg, furthers the imagination and practice of the allegedly progressive multiracial bloc. The death of the cyborg gives renewed hope to the empire-­state’s project of multiracial integration. The multiracial bloc is greatly dependent on the Black cyborg’s magnetism. Yet this magnetism also immobilizes and repels allies. Zinzun, like other Black cyborgs, fascinates, attracts, and compels. Those who become his collaborators and allies, even though willing to put in the work and take responsibility for their education, assume that the cyborg will provide the fundamental questions and strategies. Key components of the Black Power theses as developed by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton, published in 1967,11 these assumptions have the positive effect of centering Black experiences in political praxis, thus minimizing or, ideally, neutralizing nonblack, and principally White, undue influence on collective efforts. These same assumptions, without the Black feminist critique, will tend to center Black cisnormative men’s experiences. Black cyborgs such as those suggested by Zinzun and Baldwin perform the disavowal of progressive Black women’s voices. Proponents of Black feminisms, and more broadly, radical organized Black women, have maintained the Black Power focus on Black experiences yet have valued transformative perspectives arising out of positionalities defined by the intersecting experiences of blackness and a combination of factors such as being female, LGBTQ, worker, placed in or outside the U.S. empire, and attuned to the metaphysical and spiritual worlds. Black feminisms, except perhaps the revolutionary strands as defined by Joy James, enact and/or expect their respective cyborgs.12 Cyborgs like Zinzun often do the bulk of the conceptual, research, and organizational work required to show and oppose the ways in which antiblack processes affect Blacks and nonblacks. Michael’s extensive personal archives on racial dynamics affecting the criminal justice system, the environment, education, and health, even though often focused on the experiences of United States Indians, Latin@s, and vulnerable Whites,13 was organized primarily around conditions afflicting the Black. So were his educational efforts targeting Black and nonblack persons, especially the youth. Yet, perhaps because he wanted to preempt allies’ passivity, Zinzun’s approach departed somewhat from Baldwin’s. Baldwin’s cyborg was delegated with the historical–­ethical mission to educate the profoundly ignorant nonwhite—­principally the White. Zinzun’s cyborg, although still willing to do most of the educational work, nevertheless asked that Blacks

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and nonblacks be more invested in the labor of analysis and transformation. “I’ll work with you, not for you,” Michael often said, a variation on the Panther mantra “We’ll work with you, not for you.” And there are numerous examples of nonblacks doing just that. One of CAPA’s longtime collaborators and Michael’s close friend, Maybe Settlage, a White woman who decided to relocate from Atlanta and live in South Central Los Angeles to work at local schools, embodies this needed political investment from nonblacks—­one that lessened Michael’s burden and also made more graspable the multiracial project. For nonblacks, this investment means a disinvestment of their nonblackness as a source of symbolic and concrete material benefits.14 A substantial aspect of nonblack participation in Black-­led efforts is the recognition, by Blacks and nonblacks, that to render the multiracial analysis and action program more acceptable, nonblacks must commit to refine it, work on it, and carry it out. However, the premise and act of centering Black experiences and knowledge can also produce hesitation and passivity, precisely what Zinzun often attempted to avoid. Because the Black cyborg tends to monopolize political analyses, nonblack allies, though willing to serve as foot soldiers, may feel they are not required, expected, or wanted as collaborators in the intellectual labor. When Zinzun said, “I’ll work with you, not for you,” he was possibly often heard as saying “We [Black cyborgs] will tell you what to do; you should just listen, follow our lead, and work accordingly.” And indeed, over a decade, in the various organizing strategy meetings where i witnessed Michael in action, his role, invariably, was that of (a) devising an agenda and making sure participants stayed focused; (b) providing the broad theoretical guidelines (e.g., to protest an individual case of police brutality is to mobilize diverse constituencies against a pattern of multifaceted institutionalized abuse on vulnerable communities); (c) laying out specific strategies on how to approach the media, elected officials, and the police; (d) suggesting a division of labor for the agreed-­on action (protest, rally, press conference, etc.); and (e) donating varied amounts of financial resources, almost always unbeknownst to participants. Adding to allies’ hesitancy and passivity, and indeed their resistance against sustained collaboration, was the impression that recognizing Black suffering and identifying with the Black cyborg was synonymous with entering an uncertain and fearful social universe. The universe of the cyborg is cut through the desire for change, which requires challenging

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established forms of power infused with symbolic and actual violence, and thus is intrinsically conflictive, insurgent, dangerous, and unstable. The cyborg’s universe is one where fear of bodily and mental harm is constant. Zinzun’s continued personal struggles with bodily and psychological injury, as well as with the death of family, friends, and collaborators, often provoked among his supporters a paralyzing and fearful awe. Nonblack and Black participation in the everyday workings of both Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and Community in Support of the Gang Truce (CSGT), as well as in the many events Michael helped organize in his more than thirty years of consistent activism, remained sparse. The assumption of the cyborg’s intellectual and moral preeminence, and allies’ hesitations generated by the proximity to the cyborg, make unsurprising this scant involvement. Zinzun achieved important victories in the courts; he stirred public debates on law enforcement and the need for a civilian police review board, which was the object of repeated animated but unsuccessful public campaigns starting in 1979; for a decade he successfully ran a television program focusing on his organizing efforts across the Black diaspora; he brought together warring gang factions; he started a number of local programs, such as speakers bureaus, computer literacy classes, and pest control initiatives, that led to autonomous sources of income for young people; and he established lasting alliances with like-­minded organizations and individuals in the European, African, and South American continents. Yet such achievements were disproportionately dependent on his seemingly unbounded energy, charisma, organizational shrewdness, and financial resources. Zinzun never commanded a large, readily mobilizable bloc. Rather, his political effectiveness—­his capacity to engage institutions of power—­depended on the everyday and capillary one-­on-­one contact with various constituencies, and his capacity to seize unique moments, such as the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, and apply to those moments the wisdom accumulated in his lifelong everyday efforts. In short, Zinzun made sure that, when the dance of death started, he’d be ready. Yet his multiracial blocs of allies were not always on the same wavelength. So it was not surprising that, when Michael passed in 2006, CAPA and CSGT dissolved, and to this day there is a gaping vacuum once filled by his presence, charisma, and energy. In the Brazilian cases analyzed in chapters 4 and 5, the Black cyborg emerges posthumously. The cyborg’s presence and effectiveness are the

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result of his and her forced absence. She is the latest victim of genocide. Genocide = systematic homicide.15 Cláudia da Silva Ferreira, like Amarildo and the countless Brazilian Blacks who succumb to empire-­state-­sanctioned genocidal dynamics, at times synthesize the multiracial bloc by generating empathy, research, and organizational efforts. Their superhuman qualities emanate from personal experiences of unspeakable terror, and in the capacity their ordeal has to galvanize a multiracial cross-­class bloc of solidarity. Yet Cláudia (like Amarildo) becomes posthumously superhuman only after she has been thoroughly dehumanized, disfigured, assassinated, then lynched again. The memory of Cláudia and Amarildo’s suffering is mobilized as the substance that congeals otherwise scattered multiracial cross-­class constituencies. Acquired postmortem, these martyrs’ charisma engenders recognition of Black suffering yet, as is characteristic of oblique identification and multiracial blocs, disables a sustained engagement with facets of structural antiblackness. On March 16, 2014, in broad daylight, the dead body of Cláudia da Silva Ferreira was filmed hanging from a police car and dragging on the ground. The macabre scene extended for over 270 yards. Earlier that day, Ferreira, who worked in a local hospital, had been killed by two gunshots fired by the police. One shot entered her back, the other entered her neck. Ferreira—­the mother of four and the foster parent of four nieces and nephews who lived in the same household—­had left home that morning to buy bread. The police claim she was caught in the crossfire when they engaged drug dealers. Local residents disagree with the claim, and affirm Ferreira was killed when the police arrived in the community “already shooting,” as is common practice in law enforcement operations against alleged drug traffickers in historical Black residential areas. It is not difficult to imagine the scenes of police preemptive shooting when we go back to chapter 5 and revisit the UPP officers’ statements suggesting frustration at their pacifying roles and their wish to engage in armed confrontation in Black zones deemed irremediably criminal.16 Ferreira’s gendered blackness was an important aspect around which multiracial protests quickly formed: “If she were a doctor, white, resident of Leblon [an elite area of Rio de Janeiro], and dragged on Ataúlfo de Paiva [a busy Leblon street], the commotion would have been far greater. But Cláudia da Silva Ferreira, 38, is ‘just another’ worker, mother, black, and impoverished.”17 Made by Felipe Aveiro, a self-­described activist of Juntos!

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a multiracial coalition of progressive groups focusing on LGBT, Black, and workers’ rights, this indignant statement reflects the understanding of how social class, race, and place of residence intersect to produce the accumulation of both advantages and vulnerabilities depending on one’s positionality. I engage Aveiro’s article seriously for it demonstrates an honest and, in a multiracial context, rare attempt to grapple with blackness. This genuine indignation, multiplied by a robust social media and street campaign anchored in the images of Cláudia’s postmortem lynching, quickly led to a national commotion. It was as if Cláudia had been assassinated twice. It forced a commentary by then president Dilma Rousseff. Rousseff stated on her Twitter account that “Cláudia’s death shocked the country.” Yet, as Aveiro remarked, the president did not mention that the police killed Cláudia, nor that Cláudia’s neighborhood, like many others of similar characteristics, is subjected to routine militarized and murderous police operations. Aveiro suggests that, due to their structural disadvantages, residents of such neighborhoods are not able to generate social empathy. Quite the opposite. In the predictable pattern that characterizes police homicides, the implicated police officers initially tried to justify their action by claiming self-­defense given that Ferreira “possessed arms.” The symbolic calculus informing such claims, similar to the one employed in the “Autos de Resistência,” is that blackness, poverty, and place of residence are easily equated with strong assumptions of criminality, which in turn justifies police-­induced deaths. “The quotidian violence in favelas and peripheral areas of Brazil,” continues Aveiro, “are nothing but a reflex of our society that is racist, authoritarian, and organized according to segregationist economic values.”18 Aveiro’s analysis goes on to connect Ferreira’s gruesome fate to that of Amarildo, which i analyzed in chapter 5. Both assassinations by the police are presented as evidence that the “greater debate about public security brought about by the . . . [2013] street protests needs to be kept alive and approached with courage and honesty. Besides the debate about decriminalization of drug use . . . the issue of police demilitarization is urgent and necessary.”19 This statement shifts the focus to public policy, demanding a deep reform in police institutional structure and orientation. It also critiques the 2008 pacification policies and the UPPs analyzed in prior chapters. Speaking for Juntos! Aveiro demands that the state intervene in impoverished areas not through police repression, but by securing (rather than violating) individual citizenship rights and implementing

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education, health, recreation, and basic infrastructure programs. Making a case against the city’s capitalist orientation that privileges businesses and profits and disregards basic human rights, Juntos! offers its solidarity to Cláudia’s family and friends, and refuses to stay silent. By referring to the 2013 street protests, and embracing Amarildo and Cláudia’s personal tragedies as the source of moral indignation that engenders the multiracial bloc, Juntos! activists produced an unflinching analysis of the corrupt Brazilian empire-­state and its constitutive excesses, especially its historical brutality, anchored in capitalist exploitation, against the Black and the impoverished. In their attempt to single out blackness as an important aspect of the critique, Juntos! activists were unusually insightful. Central to Aveiro’s analysis is the way it transmutes the systematic oppression of Blacks into moral energy. Cláudia and Amarildo, the victims of institutionalized dehumanization, become the enablers of multiracial recognition. Cláudia and Amarildo’s symbolic powers, which generate critical and expanded consciousness, render them unusual. Posthumously, Cláudia and Amarildo enable the composition of a movement that draws its ethical orientation from the realization of the methodical and unchecked institutionalized brutality affecting Blacks. Rendered martyrs of the multiracial bloc’s cause, deceased Blacks, having experienced unimaginable suffering, become more than human, superhuman, extrahuman. Cláudia and Amarildo, in their power to inspire analysis, compassion, and solidarity, become, in death, the cyborgs around whom the newly formed movement crafts its theoretical orientation, moral substance, and mobilization capacity. The posthumous Black cyborg receives solidarity and compassion; she cannot give it. She is the object of study, not the subject of her own analysis. She is spoken for, not spoken with. The posthumous Black cyborg, while the galvanizing element of the political bloc, is absent: she produces the bloc, lends her symbolic and moral powers to it, but is not present, and therefore is not, in effect, of it. This curious present absence, or absent presence, is analogous to Zinzun’s position in the coalitions of which he was a vital participant. Cláudia and Amarildo, in death, and Zinzun, in life, made possible the multiracial bloc. In life, Zinzun offered endless compassion, recognition, and love; he received some of it back, but only partially. Cláudia and Amarildo, in death, received compassion, recognition, and love; in life, they were, from the eyes of the nonblack, the

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seemingly indistinguishable members of the dispossessed Black masses, and ultimately the predictable objects of empire-­ state-­and society-­ sanctioned terror. Zinzun, in life, gave much more than he received; Cláudia and Amarildo, in death, received far more than their structural positionality allowed, far more than they ever imagined possible. The inverted symmetry between the indispensable symbolic and practical roles Cláudia and Amarildo, on the one hand, and Michael, on the other, performed vis-­à-­vis their respective mobilized multiracial collectives, shows the placelessness the Black cyborgs occupy, and not only in such collectives. As well, the placelessness of the Black cyborg is symptomatic of the Black (non)subject’s absent presence in the world’s structure of positionality. The Black cyborg’s absent presence exemplarily reveals Blacks’ constitutive placelessness. When we expand our notion of what constitutes the African American positionality to include all Blacks in the Americas, and embrace the relational approach proposed in the Introduction, the insights of Erica Edwards become applicable to grasping the symbolic and practical functions of the Black cyborg. A charismatic leader, the cyborg “functions in contemporary African American culture as a spatiotemporal impossibility: caught between loss and promise, mourning and hope, yesterday and tomorrow, here and there . . . [she] can never actually exist in the present except as a specter.”20 This placelessness is a product of the timelessness, the transhistorical character of structural antiblackness. And this placelessness is indicative of the hesitancy with which antiblackness is acknowledged. In the multiracial bloc of sympathizers and genuinely concerned allies, while Black suffering and its connection to structural and institutional dynamics are recognized, Black suffering is not rendered its own, independent sphere of analysis, derivative of a specific, structuring logic. Rather, Black suffering is rendered analogous to the suffering of the impoverished and resident of the periphery (in Brazil) and the nonwhite (in the United States). Black suffering becomes the substance that enables transracial, pansexual, and multiclass congregations. Yet Black suffering is not engaged as a singular, defining, ubiquitous, and constitutive aspect of the very same polity that the progressive multiracial bloc wants to reform. The activists of Juntos! did show unusual will to engage Black suffering. In the absence of a critical and structural perspective on antiblackness, however, they could not comprehend that rather than anomalies or accidents, Amarildo and Cláudia’s fates were normative: predictable, ever present, timeless, merely prefigurative. Terror

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is a fact of Black life and death, not an aberration. As Black placelessness is paradigmatic of our social world, so is Black expendability. It now becomes all the more evident that, as much as the Black is dispossessed of material resources, including access to housing, quality education, and health, she is dispossessed, principally, of being. Whereas most radical activists of Juntos! demanded an end of the “racist system of capitalist exploitation,” as is possible to hear them say, to the Black only the end of the antiblack structure of positionalities will do. As the examples of noncapitalist political formations indicate, the antiblack structure of positionalities, because it formats nonblack ontologies while rendering Black ontology impossible, is impervious to calibrations in economic and political systems. The antiblack structure of positionalities precedes and shapes social management. Even though Cláudia was assassinated twice, and, like Amarildo, was killed even before she was born, the transgenerational, ubiquitous, and thus foundational aspect of antiblackness did not figure in the multiracial bloc’s analysis and moral indignation. The Black cyborg’s bio/necrography evinces the pervasiveness of antiblackness. Yet, to maintain the cohesiveness of her bloc, the Black cyborg cannot emphasize the immanently antiblack genocidal nature of the empire-­state. To do so would require a political project, not of reform, but of complete refusal and change. Framed by genocide, and embracing transfiguration as the only path out of structural abjection, blackness becomes untranslatable to nonblacks committed to redemptive multiraciality, which requires experiential common denominators. In this context, the partial recognition of antiblackness that glues the multiracial front would be revealed as a timid stance, or, less forgivingly, as farce. Black genocide can only be grasped once the full dimensions of structural and foundational antiblackness are engaged. Zinzun’s lifelong challenges—­poverty, hypersegregation, police and FBI harassment, the loss of several of his Black Panther collaborators to imprisonment and violent death by the empire-­state, the incarceration and death of family members victimized by local violence—­as he frequently remarked, were not his alone, but those of Black and vulnerable people everywhere. These forms of Black suffering were part of a historical pattern: systematic, institutional, ubiquitous, persistent, continuously present tense. Even though Michael spent most of his public political life valiantly pressing for institutional reform, his less-­known long-­standing affiliation to uncompromising organizations suggested he was fully aware of

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the constitutive, structural, and perhaps immovable antiblack core of the United States and indeed diasporic formations. He was a founding member of the National Black United Front (NBUF), a left-­leaning and nationalist organization formed in the late 1970s in Brooklyn and based in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s. Zinzun closely followed NBUF’s regional and national meetings, as the many letters and newspaper clippings in his files attest. For example, on May 14, 1997, Zinzun received the minutes of the NBUF’s Spring Central Committee Meeting in Houston, signed by the organization’s national chair, Conrad Worrill.21 A year earlier, Worrill called on the United Nations to label an act of genocide the charges that the CIA introduced crack cocaine to South Central Los Angeles. With the claim of genocide against the United States, Worrill voiced an informed analysis of the contemporary antiblack societal structures. According to journalist Chinta Strausberg, “Worrill said he believes there is a link between the introduction of crack cocaine in African American areas and the proliferation of imprisonment of African Americans, the three-­strikes-­and-­you’re-­ out policy and mandatory sentencing. ‘We want the U.N. to affirm that genocide is taking place against Blacks in America,’ Worrill said.”22 Yet, from the perspective of the people-­of-­color framework, the cyborg’s successful challenge against Black suffering and antiblack formations depends on rendering the Black experience translatable and compelling to nonblacks. The manner in which the cases of Cláudia and Amarildo were rendered legible to multiracial blocs, which emphasized Black suffering yet disavowed structural and foundational antiblackness, reveals this imperative of translatability. While Black suffering becomes episodically compelling, the claim of antiblack genocide—­one that requires an analysis of antiblackness as ubiquitous and foundational—­does not lend itself to such translation. The claim of fundamental antiblack genocide implicates the entire social formation—­its institutions, modes of cognition and sociality, and of course its members—­in its dependence on Black social and physical death.23 The claim of antiblack genocide requires a suspension of accepted progressive wisdom that stresses experiential commonalities between Blacks and nonblacks. The claim of antiblack genocide dramatically alters the political stakes. Rather than reform, what is now required is a complete destruction of formations of cognition, sociality, and resource distribution. If the Black is to become whole, repossess her being, the structures of the mind and of the lifeworld that make her a necessary nonperson need to be annihilated. It is therefore unsurprising that, even

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though Zinzun was a consistent NBUF supporter, his political bloc’s commitment to redeeming the empire-­state project of multiracial inclusion made it impossible to openly endorse anti-­antiblack genocide agendas. Still, even avoiding the structural and foundational analysis of antiblackness, Michael’s lifelong efforts at building and sustaining a multiracial bloc showed that the possibility of translation across differentiated racialized experiences was hardly actualized. The CAPA office remained predominantly Black throughout its two decades, as did the staff and participants in key events to which Zinzun lent his energy and funds. For example, my own ethnographic witnessing as well as available documentation show only a sprinkling of Latin@, White, and Asian involvement in the planning of and participation in the 1996 commemoration of the gang truce’s fourth anniversary.24 A similar insight can be drawn from the mobilizations that followed the deaths of Amarildo and Cláudia. Such actions would be quite unimaginable were it not for those individuals’ well-­publicized deaths. It is this quality of being unimaginable in times other than when there emerges multiracial episodic outrage, derived from news and social media evidence of inflicted terror on Black bodies, that makes the coming to terms with antiblackness unlikely. As long as Black pain is perceived as episodic, rather than structural and foundational, antiblackness will remain unchallenged. Zinzun wanted to be ready for revolution, as were the activists of Juntos! Yet the multiracial blocs that congregated around Zinzun and Aveiro were unable to grasp that, above and beyond legal and economic integration, transfiguration required an unapologetic confrontation with structural antiblackness and its thorough destruction. As long as, and only if, foundational and structural antiblackness is disavowed, the progressive multiracial bloc’s embracing of the empire-­state project of integration, via political struggle, is morally sound and practically achievable. The Black cyborg’s enabling presence (even if physically absent) in the political spaces of civil society disavows antiblackness. Despite Zinzun’s numerous experiences of state violence perpetrated against him precisely because of his civil society interventions, his assertive public presence had the inevitable effect of disavowing the view that civil society is, for the Black, a permanent state of antiblack war.25 If the Black cyborg is able to survive, navigate, and even concoct significant victories in/against/ with civil society, then civil society cannot be entirely or permanently antiblack. The same is true for the cases of Amarildo and Cláudia: their

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posthumous presence in the public consciousness and protest suggest that, after all, the Brazilian polis is not as antiblack as i’m indicating. Their allied blocs believed in and were willing to work for Black people’s full integration in the res publica. According to this perspective, rather than an impossible project of multiracial integration,26 the Brazilian empire-­state, like Baldwin’s United States, although reluctantly so, is porous to Black demands, and therefore salvageable. The Black cyborg’s insistence and presence, despite the antiblack violence marking traditional public–­political spaces, suggests that Black-­led multiracial, oppositional mobilization on the terrain of civil society (as opposed to Black declaration of war against the so-­called civil society that is already and always at war against Blacks) is not only doable but eventually effective. The preferred realm of the Black cyborg and her allied front, because the most effective in terms of political and legal gains, is not the Black counterpublic,27 but the unqualified public, the empire-­state’s allegedly multiracial, democratic, and inclusive spaces of congregation and dialogue. By forgoing the analysis of foundational antiblackness, the Black cyborg operates as if the multiracial bloc in which she belongs is in resolvable conflict with civil society and the state apparatus. By resolvable conflict i mean that, analogous to the demands put forth by nonblack exploited workers, immigrant, women, LGBTQ constituents—­the so-­called junior partners of civil society28—­ the Black cyborg’s demands are assumed to be legible by the deputies and managers of state power. If the demands of the Black cyborg’s bloc are legible, they are resolvable. The political game in which the Black cyborg participates addresses the empire-­state without endangering its foundational cognitive and moral bases. The modern, diverse, idealized empire-­state subjects of political action are not threatened in any way. Rather, they are celebrated, reconstituted, affirmed as permanent experiments, and lauded as the essence of the modern democratic project. Redemption is always right around the corner. History will show and save. The Black cyborg’s multiracial bloc is fundamentally optimistic; it embraces the future as the eventual realization of its dreams of reform. However, the political game of multiracial democracy is suicidal when we recognize that the foundational, cognitive bases of the empire-­state, irrespective of diasporic location, are antiblack. The antiblack structure of positionalities inaugurates and sutures this ongoing modernity. Suicidal elements notwithstanding, recent protests against Black suffering in Brazil and the United States suggest the persistence of socially shared assumptions defining

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the Black cyborg. Our analysis has shown the ways in which collective recognition of Black suffering animates the mobilization against the repeated homicide by the police of unarmed Black women, children, and men. The nonblack recognition of Black suffering, even if/when not directly related to the work of the Black cyborg, is nevertheless a similar phenomenon because both the work of the Black cyborg, typically exemplified in Zinzun’s trajectory, and the current multiracial protests (a) empathize with individual victims of police lethality perpetrated on Black people; (b) link such cases to the nonblack (“persons of color” in the United States; “the impoverished and the residents of favelas and the periphery” in Brazil); and (c) resist a sustained analysis of antiblack social, institutional, structural, ubiquitous, and foundational dispositions. Such an analysis can be extended to events marked by the Black cyborg’s seeming absence. In the multiracial protests against police killings of Black women and men in the United States and in Brazil, the traditional, living (though essentially absent) figure of the Black cyborg does not seem immediately visible. The apparent absence of the Black cyborg from our transnational political moment may be the ultimate realization of the Black cyborg as the ideal charismatic leader/enabler of the multiracial bloc. The Black cyborg’s present absence, or absent presence, as embodied in the representations of Juan, Amarildo and Cláudia, Trayvon, Michael, Sandra, Freddie, and Laquan, among many other recent victims of empire-­state terror, allows for a sense of intimacy with Black suffering as well as with a Black-­centered analysis. This sense of intimacy establishes a consensus based on the (partial) recognition of Black suffering; and this consensus grounds the formation of multiracial blocs of solidarity and political pressure. It is the presumption of multiracial analytical openness to and affective awareness of Black suffering that preempts the emerging bloc’s coming to terms with structural and fundamental antiblackness. In the physical absence (but persisting symbolic power) of the Black cyborg, we become supporters and versions of the multiracial front’s Black cyborg. Insofar as we assume to grasp Black suffering; inasmuch as we imagine understanding the Black experience; and as long as we mobilize our intellect and body to protest and reform the polity, we appropriate some of the cyborg’s defining qualities. As important, when we accept the multiracial premise that Black and nonblack suffering is comparable, we embody one of the cyborg’s fundamental concepts. We thus become, partially at least, Black cyborgs. The Black cyborg is further realized in

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the disavowal of a vigorous, no-­strings-­attached-­with-­the-­world-­we-­ know engagement with antiblack societal principles. And in her present absence, the Black cyborg lessens the hesitation that arises from actual physical and political proximity to her. Physically absent, the cyborg’s symbolic persuasion intensifies. When we embrace the Black cyborg as an agent of a potentially hegemonic multiracial front, we perform the occlusion of antiblackness. We thus perform, obliquely, the multiracial project of the empire-­state. As it is constituted, however, the empire-­state has no place for the Black, except placelessness. What social world are we prefiguring when we embrace the people-­of-­color framework and the multiracial bloc’s oblique identification with Black suffering? What are we giving up when we refuse to imagine beyond the empire-­state’s imaginable, and refuse to dance the dance of death? Introducing the figure of the slave, this book’s conclusion suggests that, if we are to move beyond the limitations of current multiracial formations and their complicity with empire-­state projects, then alternative political horizons must be explored. Embracing the imperative of transcendence, the figure of the slave frontally engages the modern foundational symbiosis between blackness and social and physical death. It is a foundational symbiosis because it gives life to the living nonblack and kills the Black dead, thus structuring the republic. Transcendence becomes an imperative insofar as, for the Black to un-­die, she must destroy that which kills her before birth. And even though George Jackson and Assata Shakur, who explicitly embrace the transhistorical slave as the paradigmatic and transcendental revolutionary agent, focus on the nuts and bolts of this society’s necessary destruction, it is the precipice, the unknowable that comes next, the pregnant syncope, that constitutes the temporary objective. This means that the ultimate objective cannot be imagined for it requires that we first lose our coordinates; that we become culturally incompetent, unable to imagine according to our current parameters of imagination; that we transfigure, destroy our current world, and thus unlearn antiblackness: such is the dance of death. And to destroy our current world will demand that, in the words of Huey Newton, we first commit revolutionary suicide.

Conclusion

The Slave against the Cyborg

If the social construction of the Black cyborg and her multiracial bloc are put aside for a moment, then there arises an opportunity to devise modes of reflection and collective organizing that engage foundational antiblackness. To move beyond the idea and praxis of the Black cyborg’s multiracial bloc is to let emerge transcendental, still mostly unimagined horizons of possibility that embrace fully, rather than avoid, or engage only obliquely, the ubiquity, centrality, and persistence of antiblackness. The slave, the embodiment of social death, of fundamental absence, can exist fully only if she embraces the imperative of transcendence. So that the nonslave can emerge, the slave must revolt. Just like the cyborg, the slave is a social fiction, a product of partial historical archives, collective imagination, and struggles against the antiblack empire-­state machine. To be a social fiction is to be recognizable and effective in the collective; it is to incarnate the ungraspable. But the slave’s nonslave future is not visible on the cyborg’s horizon. Vis-­à-­vis the cyborg, the slave as a fiction and as a collective agent operates in a diametrically dissimilar symbolic universe. The slave is not interested in redeeming multiracial democratic empire-­state structures that require her permanence as absence and abjection. The slave desires the anti-­future of the nonslave. Through the figure of the slave, this conclusion briefly explores imaginative terrains that appear once the Black cyborg is suspended as the sine qua non of progressive political praxis in multiracial, allegedly democratic settings. To suggest such transcendental imagination is not without a challenge for, before such transcendental imagination can surface, our current imagination, including our political imagination, necessarily immersed in antiblackness, needs to be recognized as such and eliminated. Our contemporary progressive perspectives on the social are limited by a normative multiracial political subjectivity that, as this work has shown, is unable or unwilling to address foundational antiblackness. Self-­proclaimed 259

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progressive and even revolutionary outlooks often stem from a notion of multiracial alliances that depend and reproduce Black absence. Such outlooks identify a common enemy—­heteropatriarchal, cisgender, White supremacist, imperial capitalism—­in relation to which they derive common denominators of oppression across diversely racialized and gendered experiences. The emphasis on a common enemy and on common denominators of oppression crowds out the utter incommensurability of Black lifeworlds. We have seen examples of this crowding-­out scenario in the midst of the diasporic uproar against police abuse perpetrated against unarmed Black people, in both Brazil and the United States. Yet this progressive stance has roots that go back to at least the 1960s, to a version of Black Power that affirmed the need for a global revolution against imperialism, and sought to bring together insurgent struggles across the so-­called Third World. Here is George Mason Murray, the first Black director of the San Francisco State College English department’s undergraduate tutorial program, and eloquent Black Panther minister of education: When we talk about becoming free, we have to talk about power, getting all the goods, services, and land, and returning them equally to the oppressed and enslaved Mexicans, Blacks, Indians, Puerto Ricans, and poor whites in the U.S. and the rest of the oppressed and hungry people of the world. . . . A revolution will smash, shatter, and destroy the oppressor and his oppressive system, return all the power, the milk, eggs, butter, and the guns to the people. . . . Listen to this: freedom is a state not limited to a particular culture, race, or people, and therefore, the principles upon which a struggle for human rights is based must be all inclusive, must apply equally for all people.1 Immersed in the multiracial struggle that led to a five-­month strike and to the establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, the first of its kind in the United States, Murray and his allies employed an analytical framework that, while recognizing the centrality of Black accumulated insight in the transnational war against imperialism, emphasized the need for multiracial solidarity. In the midst of heavy militarized police presence, Murray celebrated “the first time in the country that barriers have been dissolved between black, brown, yellow, and red people.”2

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The Black cyborg’s origins are beyond the scope of this book. What i have shown is that the cyborg’s operation and imagination suggest linkages to Baldwin’s ideal Black political subject, which in turn reemerges, transformed yet recognizable, in this Black Power–­inflected theoretical outlook and political practice.3 Michael Zinzun, like Murray and members of the Black Panther Party—­as indeed its multiple and related Black diasporic political formations—­embodied this reconfigured cyborg and analytical framework. In this framework, the Black cyborg’s bloc projects a desired future that is achievable only when the wretched of the earth join forces. Now part of a planetary multiracial effort, at least in theory, the Black political subject, mirroring herself in the cyborg, is compelled to calibrate her demands to that of the Third World, which means that, while graspable gains may indeed be had (e.g., local numeric minorities become, on the world stage, a majority of allied constituencies, which allow them to yield greater power), an engagement of the antiblack structure of positionality—­or Black abjection more simply—­is left for a second moment, at best. Although Blacks in multiracial fronts will offer insight and strategy accumulated from the everyday encounters with antiblack institutions, the alliance is hardly founded on reciprocity, either locally or, as the example of Brazil shows, transnationally. Zinzun’s life trajectory, which intersects in multiple ways with this Black Power–­inflected, Third World–­conscious approach, illustrated this: while he was invariably at the frontlines of protests and, in his youth, of the war declared by the police and the empire-­state against his political bloc, risking limb and life, save for rare exceptions, Michael did not find himself in the consistent company of nonblacks. Progressive nonblacks, especially Whites, on the other hand, though they hardly faced the same type of repression, often drew much political insight and capital from their alliances with Blacks. Such was the case in the United States as it was in England, Spain, South Africa, Namibia, and Brazil. By force of their singular global experience, and the specific accumulated analysis that stems from it, Blacks are often not only at the frontlines of collaborative efforts, but also at their vanguard. Often, Blacks will also be the most vulnerable to surveillance, physical violence, and death. A case in point: in the San Francisco State strike, “small groups of Latino, Asian American, and White students picketed the campus while members of the Black Student Union engaged in more disruptive tactics.”4 Since at least the 1960s, in Brazil, the United States, and South Africa, for example, multiracial

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progressive fronts, varying in their orientation from reformist to revolutionary, consistently produced examples of how their Black members, when caught by the repressive apparatus of the state, underwent punishment, including torture, far more intense than did their nonblack allies.5 Having collaborated with the Black Panther Party in California in the early 1970s before joining the Black Liberation Army, Assata Shakur was deeply immersed in the anti-­imperialist multiracial praxis. In the passage below, although she spoke mostly of the White left, her perspective applies to the analysis of anti-­imperialist multiracial efforts: Although i respected the work and political positions of many groups on the left, i felt it was necessary for Black people to come together to organize our own structures and our own revolutionary political party. Friendship is based on respect. As long as much of the white left saw their role as organizing, educating, recruiting, and directing Black revolutionaries, i could not see how any real friendship could occur. I felt, and still feel, that it is necessary for Black revolutionaries to come together, analyze our history, our present condition, and to define ourselves and our struggle. Black self-­determination is a basic right, and if we do not have the right to determine our destinies, then who does? I believe that to gain our liberation, we must come from the position of power and unity and that a Black revolutionary party, led by Black revolutionary leaders, is essential. I believe in uniting with white revolutionaries to fight against a common enemy, but i was convinced that it had to be on the basis of power and unity rather from weakness and unity at any cost.6 Shakur recognized the imperative of a social critique that centered on Black experiences. This centering of Black experiences had the immediate effect of making valuable Black accumulated collective knowledge, which was derived from and allowed for an autonomous analysis. Shakur does not say it in these words, but Black autonomous analysis is a necessary first step toward recognizing the specificity of the Black condition, which in turn necessitates a specific perspective on what social transfiguration means, and how it must be achieved. It is this specificity that is expressed in the phrase “and if we do not have the right to determine our destinies, then who does?” Still, like Murray and Zinzun, Shakur valued

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multiracial alliances. In her autobiography, she frequently mentioned her admiration of and will to struggle with progressive nonblacks, including Whites, Latin@s, Indians, and Puerto Ricans. Yet she also detected among Black radicals an unexamined drive toward multiracial “unity at any cost.” This is the drive that seems to have become canonical, both in the Black cyborg’s political formations and in critical social analysis, what i termed above the people-­of-­color framework. Shakur did employ the anti-­imperialist multiracial perspective, yet she stressed the Black singular positionality. Crucially, she underlined autonomous and self-­determined Black spaces and study as conditions of possibility for the appreciation and germination of Black transformative praxis. According to Shakur’s perspective, then, multiracial alliances were a possibility, not a requirement; if deemed relevant, they were to necessarily follow, and not precede, or much less disavow, Black self-­determination. And even though she deployed an intersectional analysis of oppression, according to which race was one among many factors determining one’s position in the lifeworld, she also stressed the unique experiences of blackness.7 It is in this sense, then, that i interpret Shakur’s employment of the “slave” and “people of color” tropes in her 2013 open letter from Cuba: “My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-­political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984.”8 “I am a 20th century escaped slave”: Skakur is unambiguous about what defines her condition. Because it renders present a fact that is normatively understood as a finite event, part of the historical past—­slavery—­and since slavery is marked by social death, as discussed in the Introduction and several of this book’s chapters, Shakur’s narrative conjoins the contemporary condition of blackness to that of social death. Slavery and social death are thus specific to blackness (although slavery and social death are not necessarily and always reducible to blackness, as the discussion in the Introduction indicated). It follows that the condition of the slave is both related to yet distinct from that of the “people of color.” Shakur, the slave, is related to the oppressed multiracial masses insofar as she, a Black woman, is subjected to the forces of U.S. racialized capitalistic heteronormative subjugation. Yet the overarching logic of racialized capitalistic heteronormative subjugation is antiblackness. As we have analyzed in the contexts of juvenile incarceration in Texas and public security

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policies in Brazil, structural and foundational antiblackness works differently for Blacks and for nonblacks: it produces different social results, and indeed generates distinct social logics and their corresponding dynamics. In her writings, Shakur presented the institutional apparatus of justice as a contemporary actualization of slave law. For example, she equated to a lynching her preemptive criminalization in the March 25, 1977, murder trial of a New Jersey state trooper.9 “The [empire-­]state,” Joy James asserts, “has explicitly identified the slave” and confirmed the ontological condition of slavery—­a condition that is reinforced by the carceral regime but necessarily exceeds it. The carceral regime, exceeding its legal and political underpinnings,10 establishes a social world of transgenerational hypersurveillance and dispossession that has rendered the Black obsolete.11 The definition of slavery as an acceptable punishment for a crime in the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which otherwise formally abolished slavery, solidifies slavery in the present tense, a juridical category legitimized by the current empire-­state’s protocols. Fundamentally, the slave is the product of a transhistorical antiblack structure of positionality that attains actualization in myriad ways: from the cultural to the legal–­political, from the unconscious to the empirical. In it, the Black, the socially dead, the slave, is in a relationship of antagonism, not conflict, with the state in particular, but with the citizen and the human more generally.12 The slave, already socially dead, expects to die tomorrow. In chapter 1, i proposed a cycle of hypersurveillance and dispossession defining the transgenerational feedback loop between imposed segregation, punitive schooling, and the criminal justice system. The emphasis on the cycle was meant to contrast with the common notion that there is a linear, contained, and finite process that consistently subjugates Blacks. An example of a linear process is the “school-­to-­prison pipeline,” which leads an individual from punitive schools to the prison system. Absent in this linear perspective is the continuous, cyclical, transgenerational, ubiquitous, and structural nature of antiblack institutions and socially shared cognition. Generation after generation of individuals are removed from zones of containment (neighborhoods), targeted by empire-­state institutions (the police and schools), immobilized in warehouses (prisons), and returned to zones of containment, where the process restarts. Continuous and expanding time, continuous and expanding spaces. The expanded and cyclical perspective on structural and foundational

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antiblackness developed in this study gains further support in Shakur’s analysis. In a revealing dialogue with Eva, a Black woman who had spent about “10 years in the clinton correctional facility for women in new jersey,” Shakur describes contours of Black social death under conditions of permanent surveillance and repression. I quote at length because the dialogue also reveals the transcendental imagination of the slave, the dehumanized person who is aware of the panoptical and degrading essence of the antiblack social formation. Eva’s transcendental imagination, which takes her to Jupiter and anywhere else she can conjure up, is profoundly connected to her sharp and accurate depiction of the carceral state’s omnipresence. As Cedric Robinson would have put it, the slave’s structures of the mind, by necessity, analysis, and design, always transcend the almost unbearable here and now. The slave’s embodiment of the transcendental imperative—­her willing immersion in accumulated revolutionary knowledge—­suggests an epistemology that “granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.”13 “This was a revolutionary consciousness,” Robinson asserts, “that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formation of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism.”14 Assata and Eva’s mutual recognition is evidence of how the embodiment of the transcendental imperative is not only a categorically unique Black insurgent perspective, but also an effective strategy for preserving the “historical being” that, in spite of—­ and indeed precisely because of—­the structure of antiblack positionalities, is not reducible to slavery, capitalism, and colonialism. While she experiences the consequences of capitalist exploitation and colonial dispossession, the slave’s condition is not explainable by these processes. Her dispossession is, fundamentally, of being. Neither simply a worker nor a colonial subject, the slave, in the antiblack structure of positionality, is the nonbeing that, by contrast, makes possible nonblacks to be. The slave makes this world possible, but she is not of this world: My first encounter with Eva was when she came over to the bars and sat down outside my cell and told me she could astro-­travel. She called it something like astro-­space projection. “I can go anywhere i want to, whenever i want to,” she told me. “I just come from Jupiter.” “How was it?” i asked her. “Oh, it was fine. They had these cute little people. They were

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purple with crocodile skin and blue hair. You can go anywhere you want to,” she told me. “You just have to project yourself.” “Can you show me how to project myself the hell out of here?” “Oh, that’s easy,” she said, “I do that all the time. As a matter of fact, i’m not here right now.” “No,” i said, “that’s not good enough. I want to project my mind and my body out of here.” “You’ll be in jail wherever you go,” Eva said. “You have a point there,” i told her, “but [i’d] rather be in a minimum security prison or on the streets than in the maximum security prison in here. The only difference between here and the streets is that one is maximum security and the other is minimum security. The police patrol our communities just like the guards patrol here. I don’t have the faintest idea how it feels to be free.” Eva told me that she knew how i felt. She had to know. Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don’t know what it feels like to be free. We aren’t free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person in amerika isn’t even free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.15 As hypersurveillance and incarceration are inescapable, so is the realization that an existential and bodily apartheid structures Black experience. To not know freedom is to come to terms with slavery and social death. In contrast to the Black cyborg’s bloc’s reformist position relative to civil society and the empire-­state, and being the nonsubject in contrast to which all other subjects attain relative measures of subjecthood, the slave has no demands other than the complete destruction of the reigning ideological and social order.16 “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” affirmed Shakur.17 The “historical being,” then, is that which emerges once the antiblack structure of positionality is recognized. It is the revolutionary drive, the vision, that results from the imaginative imperative, the anti-­future imperative. Shakur’s radicalization was in significant ways related to her immersion in the Black Panther Party. It is unsurprising, then, to find in the writings of one of the party’s main theoretical thinkers and leaders, George Jackson, substantial attention to contemporary forms of slavery and its

CONCLUSION · 267

attendant manifestations of social death. At San Quentin Prison, Jackson had initiated and coordinated an influential Black Panther chapter; much of the ensuing unprecedented prisoners’ movement, which garnered national and international attention, was credited to his ideas.18 One of Jackson’s well-­known statements stresses the imperative of revolution, which is a result of the awareness of his social position of enslavement: “As a slave, the social phenomenon that engages my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution.”19 The slave serves as a proxy description of the present, of the Black collective condition. The slave is in a position of fundamental antagonism—­not conflict, as the Black cyborg’s bloc would have it—­with the empire-­state and its symbolic fundamentals of sociality. For Jackson, the slave, antiblackness informs and is reproduced by this foundational antagonism. Antiblackness manifested as social and physical death requires at least two modes of critical reflection. First, an analysis of the structure of positionality that makes the Black expendable; second, the embracing of the dance of death, a prefigurative scenario in which the slave engages in the destruction of the cognitive and material conditions that determine her experiences. The scenario is one of negation, to be sure, but it is also generative insofar as the “historical being,” who recognizes her structural nonbeingness, comes to terms with the realization that, unlike the cyborg, there is nothing to salvage. Below is a quotation illustrating Jackson’s analysis of the structure of positionality. This structure that continuously degrades the slave resonates with the diasporic logic and dynamics of antiblackness i examined in Brazil and the United States. The litany of quotidian neglect and abuse by the empire-­state and members of the so-­called civil society prove the accepted banality of Black suffering and premature death, the most graspable manifestation of a structuring antiblack antagonism and its unending and multiple actualizations. Antiblackness renders the experience of blackness permanently uncertain—­the only certainty being, precisely, uncertainty. It is not a matter of whether brutalization and degradation will happen. It is matter of when. The Black is not (citizen, human) so that the nonblack is (citizen, human). Hence my son’s request for a bulletproof vest. Social death makes premature physical death socially acceptable and brutality predictable, banal. Social death, then, is the condition of possibility of premature physical death: Born to premature death, a menial, subsistence-­wage worker, odd-­ job man, the cleaner, the caught, the man under hatches, without

268 · CONCLUSION

bail—­that’s me, the colonial victim. Anyone who can pass the civil service examination today can kill me tomorrow. Anyone who passed the civil service examination yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity. I’ve lived with repression every moment of my life, a repression so formidable that any movement on my part can only bring relief, the respite of a small victory or the release of death. In every sense of the term, in every sense that’s real, I’m a slave to, and of, property.20 If the slave is to survive yet another day, civil society needs to be analyzed and approached as an antiblack war machine that operates at the pragmatic and the representational levels. Notice how in Jackson’s analysis the prison is only one aspect of an antiblack constellation of social forces—­it is part of a continuum that structurally degrades Blacks. The social world of Black social death is a constantly replenished and expanding carceral system. The deputization of police powers, which nonblacks and Blacks alike perform, makes this carceral system ubiquitous and commonsensical; it suggests its hegemony. The carceral system exceeds the institutions of surveillance and control. The gratuitous violence that it inflicts on the Black is as ominous and as widespread as it is constitutive, expected, already represented, ever-­present, transhistorical. This violence has nothing do to with what Blacks do, but rather with who Blacks are, or are not. Gratuitous antiblack violence is not dependent on any act the Black executes—­it is not, as it is for the nonblack, contingent on the nonblack’s opposition to the hegemony (e.g., monitoring or protesting the police, not paying the landlord, striking against unfair work conditions and wages). The slave, then, is constantly subjected to violence. If she is to survive yet another day, she must engage in a concerted effort at insurgent thought and transfigurative action, which in theory at least opens up the range of possible outcomes. At minimum, Jackson’s proposal of embracing the dance of death announces an ambit beyond the Black social life of social death. Jackson, too, is deeply immersed in the imperative of Black metaphysics. He calls it revolution. It could not be more different than “long-­ range politics”: reformist, hopeful, multiracial “unity at any cost”: To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-­inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t “cool” or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred!

CONCLUSION · 269

It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction. If revolution, and especially revolution in Amerika, is anything less than an effective defense/attack weapon and a charger for the people to mount now, it is meaningless to the great majority of the slaves. If revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of “long-­range politics,” it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow.21 By negating its conflict-­resolution protocols, the slave interrupts the chronos of the empire-­state. She refutes the socially accepted concept of time as redemption. Instead, she embodies the vision of the anti-­future. By contrast, the Black cyborg’s multiracial bloc acts as if it is in a relationship of resolvable conflict with civil society and the state. Routinized and expected, the Black cyborg’s political bloc’s public presence—­despite the cyborg’s own experiences of brutalization—­denies the foundational and immovable antagonism between the Black and the antiblack social formation. The slave, by definition, cannot be present in spaces of political articulation for she is neither citizen nor human; her presence marks a fundamental antagonism with those spaces’ foundational principles; those spaces exist because the Black, qua slave, does not exist as either citizen or human. By embracing the dance of death, by rendering normative politics meaningless, by rejecting the chronos of the empire-­state, the slave reclaims nonslave meaning. The dance of death is the imagination of freedom. To recognize the antiblack constitution of the world is to come to the realization that, if the Black is to survive, she has no choice but to identify, oppose, and rebuild. She has to identify and oppose antiblackness at its root—­the cognitive and structural aspects of antiblackness that endlessly actualize themselves in multiple social facts. And just as importantly, she has to embrace transcendence. Transcendence is the opposite of reform; it is the negation of institutional calibration. For example, how can the empire-­state’s police be adjusted, tweaked, and bettered if the implicit social understanding that produces the very need for the police, that supports it, and that informs its policies and functionaries is unmistakably antiblack? Jackson, along with all Black persons who are honest with themselves, recognize that “anyone who can pass the civil service examination today can kill me tomorrow. Anyone who passed the civil service examination yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity.” Is a calibrated antiblackness a reasonable

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demand? To dance the dance of death, to embrace transcendence, is to give up on, or operate according to a conceptual matrix different than, the fight for incremental fractions of citizenship and humanity, which does nothing to change the paradigm that necessitates Black diminished existence. The invitation to the dance of death has been extended to Blacks and nonblacks since at least the sixteenth century. The dance of death is not interested in the reform of the multiracial empire-­state. It is not interested in a priori analogies between Black and nonblack experiences. It results from accumulated, collective, transhistorical Black knowledge, and affirms that there is nothing to be lost, nothing to preserve, when antiblackness structures our entire social world. The ensuing full experience of blackness allows for the engineering of a world that is not antiblack. In these terms, the invitation itself already prefigures a reality beyond the antiblack structure of positionality, for “the black who extends a hand to make contact with the Other has done so as a paradoxical act of faith by attempting the impossible, for no black can be equal to a [nonblack or] white in an antiblack world, but from the standpoint of acts like that of loving the dead, such an impossibility doesn’t matter. The act itself ‘is’ its own freedom, its own authentic upsurge, that transforms the impossible into the ironic. It is the absurdity of the act that makes it possible.”22 It is the naturalized absurdity of antiblackness that should compel us to engage it and seek what seems impossible. Antiblackness makes transcendence via Black experience an imperative. In this regard, the transcendental urgency is akin to that of Afrofuturism, which “is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation.”23 More specifically, transcendence is graspable in the attempts at Black autonomous organizing, such as those of Reaja ou Será Morta / Reaja ou Será Morto, that refuse the antiblack genocidal premises and conditions of the multiracial empire-­state, its civil society, and their deputies, and embrace failure as a foundational principle. Failure, here, means the opposite of linear time, of success. Success, as uncritically accepted, is dependent on the empire-­state logic and chronos of incremental inclusion of the previously excluded, of multiracial redemption and its mechanisms of Black co-­optation; it is contingent on the disavowal of antiblackness. Failure, on the other hand, means the embracing of the fundamental and ubiquitous antiblack terror as that which must be unapologetically understood and combated. It means challenging the algorithm of antiblackness at the front lines of

CONCLUSION · 271

systematic and never-­ending police killings, forced segregation, industrial imprisonment, denial of basic formal education, and vulnerability to poverty and early death by preventable causes, among many other urgent manifestations of antiblack genocide. Failure means incarnating the figures of the Boçau, the recently arrived enslaved African in the Americas who saw revolt as an imperative,24 and the Cabulos@, who carved autonomy in the midst of the antiblack social formation.25 Failure means the refutation of victimization—­no to multiracialism at any cost, which means at the cost of Black lives; no to a political imagination, practice, and schedule, that reaffirms a multiracial social order that is irremediably antiblack. The transcendental imperative requires a type of Black self-­determination that begins with the end of this social world, which means the suspension of accepted modes of normative antiblack subjectivities, and ends with a beginning. “You can go anywhere you want to,” Eva said, knowingly. “You just have to project yourself.”

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Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank each and every one of you for the ways you made this project come to fruition: Jason Weidemann, Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus, Gabriel Levin, Nicholas Taylor, Michael Zinzun, Florence Zinzun, George Lipsitz, Rene Valdez, Czarina Thelen, Lilia Rosas, Edmund Gordon, Daysi Garth, Ishan, Wyatt, Charles Hale, Melissa Smith, Sofia, Amalia, Marceu, Moon-­Kie Jung, Caroline Yang, Jaime Alves, Dylan Rodriguez, Setsu Shigematsu, Damien Sojoyner, James Stone, Daniele Ross, Shana Redmond, Yusef Omowale, Michele Welsing, Joy James, Laura Pulido, Barbara Ransby, Faye Harrison, Frank Wilderson, Howard Winant, Anna-­ Lisa Plant, Nia Crosley, Joel Suarez, Maria Andrea Soares, Mitchell Faust, Monique Ribeiro, Mohan Ambikaipaker, Brianna Mohan, Clyde Woods, Lúcia Xavier, Jurema Werneck, Sonia Santos, Luciane Rocha, Luceni Ferreira, José Marmo, Cida Patroclo, Douglas Belchior, Rosana Chagas, Davi Pereira Junior, Deize Carvalho, Francilene Fernandes, Daniela Gomes, Dora Santana, Ana Flauzina, Carla Silva-­Muhammad, Dan Siefken, Denize Ribeiro, Osmundo Pinho, Paul Amar, Marcelo Paixão, Irene Rossetto, Sarah Ihmoud, Billy Higgins, Maybe Settlage, Courtney Morris, Martin Perna, Jeff Valdez, Miguel and Melissa Burch, Kathryn Bedecarre, Connie Wun, Dean Pollard, Lily Valdez, Melba Garcia, Kody, Ujju Aggarwal, Jackson Brown, Tony Araguz, Tshepo Chery, Nicole Burrowes, Caitlin Dunklee, Kevin Witt, Omi Jones, Bruce Saunders, Russell Haight, Brannen Temple, Charles Medearis, Steve Schwelling, Seth Carper, Angelo Lembesis, Scott Laningham, Juli Grigsby, Eshe Cole, Phillip Alexander, Jafari Allen, Eric Tang, Paula Rojas, Alex da Costa, Simone Browne, Pablo Gonzalez, Kevin Foster, Ben Carrington, Lisa Thompson, Stephen Marshall, Connor Healy, Beth Baker, Alex Villalpando, Hamilton Borges, Andréia Santos, Vitor, Fred Aganju, Anthony Jerry, Mari Palafox, Alfonso Gonzales, Esther Portillo, Mariam Lam, Poliana Martins, Ellen Oléria, Zaíra, Flávio, Pedro, Anna, Mônica, Jim, Uma, Ava, Carla, Leonardo, Andréia, Manoel, Laércio, Lucas, Hermes, Marcia, Julia, Lindy, Glenn, Kyle, Helion and Anna Maria Vargas, and Toussaint Pierre-­Vargas.

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Notes

Preface

1. Eligon, “Racial Violence.” 2. Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth / White Wealth.

Introduction 1. For Hortense Spillers, gendered dynamics specific to Black people are certainly related to, but yet distinct from the dominant gender codes. Spillers’s argument locates the Middle Passage as a defining process by which overriding violence and the exigencies of the Black flesh trade resulted in an imposed suspension of gender distinctions. As a result, struggles over Black people’s humanity and gender performance became emblematic of the Black presence in the diaspora. And while the uncertain relationship between blackness and gender constitutes a significant axis along which one’s individual and collective worth is protested, it also enables possibilities of gender performance beyond normative expectations; it is therefore also potentially transformative. See Black, White, and in Color, 214–­15. 2. For a compelling example of the use of “i” noncapitalized, see Shakur, Assata. Dylan Rodriguez, in “Inhabiting the Impasse,” argues that the phrase “mass incarceration” as it is employed in the current public debate is useless because it obscures racial disparities in dynamics of punishment. The effort here, precisely, is to examine such disparities and, more specifically, to zero in on the antiblack logic of social management that leads to massive imprisonment. Hence my employment of “targeted mass incarceration.” 3. See, for example, the work of Simone Browne that shows the ways in which legal and practical technologies developed to police the enslaved, such as the lantern laws, are precursors to, and share their assumptive logic with, contemporary forms of antiblack policing in the Americas. Browne, Dark Matters, esp. chap. 2. It is well-­known that Nixon had a special appreciation for Blacks. In the midst of the war on drugs, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, paraphrased the president’s thought as such: “P [the president] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that

275

276 ·  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

recognizes this while not appearing to. Pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true. Says Africa is hopeless. The worst there is Liberia, which we built.” He continued, recording that the great administrative and political challenge of their time was to acknowledge that “the whole problem is really the blacks” while operating the state machine as if this were not the case. See New York Times, “Haldeman Diary.” 4. Gilmore, Golden Gulag. 5. For a detailed argument on why the United States is an empire-­state, rather than a nation-­state, see Jung, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy, esp. chap. 3. Proposing that “we see less like the state and more like the ruled,” Jung reminds us of the following: “For the indigenous peoples, the United States immediately became one more empire-­state with which they had to contend” (61). From its very beginning, the formation of the U.S. state “comprised not only the states but also other political spaces, which were to be ruled ultimately as Congress saw fit and would not have voting representation in the federal government” (62). Shaping the usurpation and annexation of political spaces and territories, contiguous or not, is the fact that the empire-­state project “has always been a racist process. The politics around conquering and taking possession of Texas and what would become the U.S. Southwest from Mexico, for example, was patently structured by anti-­Mexican racism, as numerous studies have shown” (63). Throughout this book, as a heuristic proposition, the Brazilian state will also be categorized as an empire-­state. The U.S. and Brazilian empire-­states engaged in genocidal usurpation of indigenous land. Both annexed territories claimed by other countries. For example, in 1903, the Petropolis Treaty effectively annexed the Acre territory to the Brazilian state, thus annulling the political control Bolivia had over it. It is known that, at least since the 1200s, multiple indigenous groups, most of which spoke Pano and Aruak, occupied land around the rivers Acre, Iaco, Chandless, Purus, Envira, and Jurua. Since the 1500s they have been embattled, and often killed close to extinction, by weapons, forced dislocation, and disease; and by expansionist missions originating in Spain, Portugal, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, among others (see, for example, Meirelles, “Os Indios Isolados no Acre,” 519). Relevant to this discussion is the current migration of Haitian citizens to Brazil, not unrelated to Brazil’s role in the UN mission in Haiti. The UN’s mission in Haiti, as several commentators have argued, is an obvious imperial occupation, thus rendering Brazil’s prominent participation in it equally imperial. Elsewhere, i remarked on the antiblack character of the Brazilian mission in Haiti, and its parallels to favela occupations in Rio (see Vargas, “Gendered Antiblackness,” 9–­10). Antiblackness informs much of the Brazilian military presence in Haiti. The number of people killed in military operations would be unimaginable in a nonblack nation. Brazilian political, military, and economic actions confirm Jung’s theorizations on the nature and process of the empire-­state. Another critical consequence of the adoption of

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION · 277

the empire-­state theoretical approach is that “the racial domination of colonized peoples [e.g., Indians] does not happen in isolation from that of noncolonized peoples [e.g., Blacks], and vice versa. Though qualitatively different, they are intimately and intricately linked. Rather than a series of self-­contained dyadic relations between Whites and various racial others, White supremacy comprises a web of crisscrossing discursive and practical ties. It is a unified, though differentiated, field that calls for a united, though differentiated, theoretical framework” (Jung, 68.) In this book, i propose that antiblackness provides the discursive and practical ties that, while paradigmatically objectifying Black bodies, connect all racialized groups in a system of advantages and disadvantages. All nonblacks attain social value relative to their distance from Blacks. The greater the distance, the greater the value. 6. This argument can be drawn from Flauzina, Corpo Negro Caído no Chão. 7. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 227. 8. Davis, “End Mass Incarceration.” 9. In 1968 only ten U.S. states had automated state-­level criminal justice information systems; by the mid-­1970s, all fifty states were part of the National Crime Information Center (NCIS). NCIS requires increasingly sophisticated and expansive surveillance and data processing technologies to feed it. See Parenti, Lockdown America, 20. On federal law changes made in the 1980s to allow local enforcement agencies to retain and use all resources acquired from asset forfeitures, see Alexander, New Jim Crow, 78. In the context of an expanding carceral network, it is thus established an obvious feedback loop between the increasing need for surveillance and the increasing need for resources. 10. Farrell, “Omnipresence.” 11. I thank Moon-­Kie Jung for this discussion. His insight about the expansive carceral system helped me fine-­tune the formulation of antiblackness. 12. See, for example, Waiselfizs, Mapa da Violência; Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório das Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil. 13. Many critical Brazilian studies authors have emphasized continuities, rather than fundamental differences, between social relations in Brazil and the United States. See, for example, Gilliam, “Black Feminist Perspective”; Hanchard, “Acts of Misrecognition”; Santos, “Brazilian Black Women’s NGOs”; Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab; Alves, “Narratives of Violence”; and Rocha, “Outraged Mothering.” 14. This paragraph is based on Vargas, “Gendered Antiblackness,” 6–­7. 15. See Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório das Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil; Winant, World Is a Ghetto. Gilmore established the relationship between racism and vulnerability to death (Golden Gulag); here i follow a similar path and specify the formulation by placing antiblackness at its core. 16. Harrison, “Global Apartheid”; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.

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17. Sexton, “People-­of-­Color-­Blindness,” 47. 18. See Bullard, Dumping in Dixie; see also the Flint, Michigan, water crisis that started in April 2014. Extremely elevated levels of harmful bacteria, cancerous chemicals, and lead were found in the city’s drinking water. It is of course significant that Flint is, according to the 2010 census, almost 57 percent Black. 19. Mauer, Changing Racial Dynamics of Women’s Incarceration, 2. 20. Wolfers, Leonhardt, and Quealy, “Methodology.” 21. Waiselfizs, Mapa da Violência. 22. Goldstein, “Judge Rejects New York’s Stop-­and-­Frisk Policy.” 23. Sentencing Project, State of Sentencing. 24. Savage, “U.S. Orders More Steps.” 25. See, for example, Seelye, “In Heroin Crisis, White Families.” 26. Davis and Pérez-­Peña, “Holder Weighs Dismantling.” 27. Eisen-­Martin, We Charge Genocide Again! 28. Secretaria Nacional da Juventude, “O Plano.” 29. For an analysis of the 2013 protests, see chapter 5, as well as Vargas, “Black Disidentification”; and Alves and Vargas, “On Deaf Ears.” 30. Secretaria do Estado, “Segurança UPP.” 31. For the paradigmatically antiblack nature of residential segregation in the United States, see Massey and Denton, “Hypersegregation,” where among many other census-­based arguments, the authors show that, compared to Latin@s, “not only are blacks more segregated on any single dimension of residential segregation, they are also more likely to be segregated on all five dimensions [evenness, exposure, clustering, centralization, and concentration] simultaneously, which never occurs for Hispanics. Moreover, in a significant subset of large urban areas, blacks experience extreme segregation in all dimensions, a pattern we call hypersegregation. . . . We conclude that blacks occupy a unique and distinctly disadvantaged position in U.S. urban environment” (373). In American Apartheid Massey and Denton show that the richest Blacks were more intensely segregated than the more impoverished Latin@s; Blacks did not seek all-­Black neighborhoods (differently than Whites, who reveal a low tolerance for even modest proportions of Black neighbors); levels of Black residential segregation varied little by levels of income; and a combination of discriminatory lending practices and steering by real-­ estate agents contributed to consolidate what the authors call Black hypersegregation. For the interplay between residential segregation and wealth, see Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth / White Wealth; and Shapiro, Hidden Cost. See also Vargas, Never Meant to Survive, where patterns of antiblack residential segregation in Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles are analyzed and rendered commensurable rather than distinct phenomena. Analyses of antiblack residential segregation in this book will show the ways in which it persists and is compounded by a litany of empire-­state-­ and society-­sanctioned technologies of surveillance and dispossession.

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32. Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education,” 524. 33. Hartman and Wilderson, “Position of the Unthought.” 34. See, for example, Miles, Ties That Bind and House on Diamond Hill; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters. 35. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21. 36. Or, as Frank Wilderson and Tryon Woods would say, the problem of Black revolution is the problem of human freedom. See, for example, Woods, “Beat It Like a Cop,” 21. 37. United States Department of Justice, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, 4. 38. See Garza, “Creation of a Movement”; and Reaja ou Será Morto / Reaja ou Será Morta, “Quem Somos.” 39. PBS Newshour, “Democratic Debate.” 40. Kohan et al., Orange Is the New Black. 41. Vargas, Catching Hell. 42. Vargas, “Inner City and the Favela.” 43. Vargas, “When the Favela Dared.” 44. See Werneck, “De Ialodês e Feministas.” 45. The campaign’s URL, http://www.racismovirtual.com.br/virtual-racism, is no longer active, but archived pages can be viewed using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org. 46. Secretaria Nacional, “Mulheres Ocupam.” 47. Gomes, “Against the Current.” 48. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, 94. 49. Audre Lorde noted how blackness overdetermines gender and sexuality when she commented on her son’s experience of discrimination not because he lived in a household headed by two women (Lorde and her lover Frances), but because one of them, Lorde, was Black: “In the namecalling at school, boys shouted at Johnathan not—­‘your mother’s a lesbian’—­but rather—­‘your mother’s a nigger.’ ” Sister Outsider, 75. 50. Moten is the source for the “objection of the abjection.” See his In the Break. 51. On blackness and well-­being, see a growing literature that explores Black people’s susceptibility to medical experiments, exposure to environmental hazards, and disease, including Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness; Washington, Medical Apartheid; Metzl, Protest Psychosis; and Bullard, Dumping in Dixie. See also Nelson’s Body and Soul for how Black people have attempted to implement their own medical practices and notions of well-­being. 52. There is of course an extensive and ongoing debate about “structure” and “agency” as principles of sociability and categories of analysis. Questions about their definition and how they interact remain. In his discussion of slavery and social death, which is central to this project, Patterson touches on the problem.

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Whereas i have been emphasizing the feedback loop between structure and agency, and specifically the primacy of antiblack structuring principles over individual and social agency, Patterson prefers to stress distinctions between “mental structures” and “what is actually going on.” He also locates in the “mental structures” not structuring forces, but rather attempts to explain how sociality happens. Patterson’s understanding of the feedback process between structure and “reality,” however, is closer to the argument i am formulating. Here is Patterson: “In all societies, of course, there is a distinction between what is actually going on and the mental structures that attempt to define and explain the reality. I do not mean normative patterns, for these are merely prescriptive. I refer, rather, to what Lévi-­ Strauss has termed ‘a culture’s homemade models,’ developed to explain the actual social processes. . . . At their most sophisticated, such native models may take into account the variance between practice and norm and also provide ‘explanations’ for such variance. It is the difference, for example between the legal codes and the jurisprudence of a culture, and their application to actual legal practice and procedure. The mental structures have some basis in reality, although their explanatory power varies considerably from one culture to the other. More important, they not only reflect with varying degrees of accuracy the reality that informs them, but in turn feed back on and shape the ordering of that reality” (Slavery and Social Death, 19–­20). For other theorizations on structure and agency, see, for example, Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason; Alexander, Twenty Lectures; and a number of instructive review articles on the theme, such as Hays, “Structure and Agency.” 53. Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” 294. 54. Bell, “Racial Realism,” 302, 308. 55. Elsewhere, i discussed this canonical move in the context of a dialogue with Clyde Woods. See Vargas, “Clyde Woods.” 56. See Goff et al., “Not Yet Human.” On the consequences of implicit antiblack bias on the detection of crime-­relevant objects, see Eberhardt et al., “Seeing Black.” 57. Following Howard Winant, we could say that in the United States a shift in empire-­state consciousness, and its attending policies, took place in the 1950s. In Brazil, arguably a similar shift took place in the 1930s with the consolidation of the racial democracy theses. Both contexts are marked by a corresponding change in the official approach to social conflict. Such change was marked by the transition from forms of White supremacist governance marked by domination to new forms marked by hegemony. The shift is evidence of global White supremacy’s capacity to adapt, and not of global White supremacy’s decline. See Winant, World Is a Ghetto. 58. Tesler and Sears, “President Obama”; Pasek, Krosnick, and Tompson, “Impact of Anti-­Black Racism.” 59. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION · 281

60. By emphasizing structural positionalities, i certainly moved away from Gordon’s take on antiblack racism as an existential phenomenon. Gordon’s analysis of the above passage of Black Skin, White Masks is critical of Fanon’s failure to engage with the existential aspect, the lived experience, of blackness. “The ontology he [Fanon] is criticizing,” says Gordon, “is the form that demands ontology to look at the black from the ‘outside.’ Yet his own experience of being the black man seen as being seen—­‘Look, Negro!’—­can only be understood as a realization of perspectivity, as an existential situation. His analysis calls for, and in fact is, an appreciation of the body as an ontological figure constantly confronted by the possibility of a bad-­faith reduction of itself, a reduction into pure Presence or pure Absence” (Bad Faith, 135). 61. The quotation comes from the following passage, where the field of asymmetrical relational positionalities is described as a flawed but effective logic. It is flawed because “all human beings are present and . . . simultaneously absent,” yet it is effective because it structures human interactions. “The white body is expected to be seen by others without seeing itself being seen. Its presence is therefore its perspectivity. Its mode of being, being self-­justified, is never superfluous. Unlike the black, whose transformation from Absence to Presence poses a threat to the precarious balance of reality, the white is already Presence and therefore poses no such threat—­except, perhaps, in his absence. This is because, as once pointed out by William James, there is no more reality than what there is. The conclusion, then, is that reality is threatened by the inclusion of blacks, whereas reality is jeopardized by the exclusion or diminution of white presence” (Gordon, Bad Faith, 103). 62. Ibid., 105. 63. As Gordon posits, “There is no black consciousness from the standpoint of an antiblack world” (ibid., 116). 64. Wilderson, Red, Black, and White, 58. The next paragraphs are re-­ elaborations of what i previously wrote in “Black Disidentification,” 2–­3. 65. See, for example, Winant, World Is a Ghetto; Barlow, Between Fear and Hope. 66. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 10; see also Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 45, where she asks, “What was the afterlife of slavery and when might it be eradicated?” 67. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx.” 68. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 85. 69. Wilderson, Red, Black, and White, 55. 70. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 6, 10, 13, 24. 71. “Voluntary servitude, however, was not slavery” (ibid., 27). 72. Patterson’s sample is a subset of anthropologist George P. Murdock’s study that focuses on 186 world societies. For Patterson’s methodology and the societies he analyzed, see ibid., 343–­52.

282 ·  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

73. James, New Abolitionists; see also Rodriguez, Suspended Apocalypse. 74. This assertion is not to negate Cedric Robinson’s claim that the Black’s degradation, the advent of the “Negro,” is a European phenomenon that precedes the colonial enterprise and the enslavement of Africans. See Black Marxism. Rather, it is to emphasize the present-­ness of slavery as a structuring principle informing antiblackness. 75. Wilderson seems careful in assembling this group of thinkers. “Though they do not form anything as ostentatious as a school of thought, and though their attitudes toward and acknowledgement of Fanon vary, the moniker Afro-­ pessimists neither infringes on their individual differences nor exaggerates their fidelity to a shared set of assumptions. It should be noted that of the Afro-­ pessimists—­Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Kara Keeling, Jared Sexton, Joy James, Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, and Orlando Patterson—­only James and Patterson are social scientists” (Red, Black, and White, 58). 76. Of course this generalization merits scrutiny. It is made in the spirit of inciting a reflection that is mostly lacking: the complicity of canonical critical studies, including U.S. Black studies, not only with U.S. imperialism but also with antiblackness. Most Brazilian studies on Blackness are not any less suspect as they rarely engage the proposition of a foundational antiblackness animating formations of subjectivity, sociality, and empire-­state, which of course include the ways in which research inquiries are elaborated and carried out. 77. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Wilderson, Incognegro. 78. See, for example, Wilderson, “Biko and the Problematic of Presence.” 79. McKittrick, Sylvia Winter, 49. Notice, for example, the attention that the latest Black performance at the National Football League Super Bowl’s halftime receives from U.S. cultural critics and academics, while the event’s very foundational imperial and capitalist logic—­a logic that in this particular case produces no subtlety, as military might and commodity consumption are the order of the day—­is absent from the analysis. The dearth of critical works linking imperialism, capitalism, and antiblackness is therefore unremarkable. 80. Noliwe Rooks’s assessment of contemporary Black studies harmonizes with Wynter’s musings. Rooks shows that at the height of Black Power–­inspired mobilization and revolt, and the demands for Black studies that sprung from them, the Ford Foundation played an important role in carrying out containment strategies in colleges and universities. Rooks states that “the grants made between 1968 and 1971, with two exceptions, were awarded to programs and institutions that viewed Black Studies as a means to diversify a predominantly White curriculum and institution, promote integration, and perhaps most importantly, give the more militant version of separatism and Black Nationalism a wide berth.” Rooks, White Money / Black Power, 94; also referenced in Saucier and Woods, “Hip Hop

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION · 283

Studies in Black,” 271. The Ford Foundation explicitly sought to weaken the influence of the militant Black Power movement that led to the formation of U.S. Black studies in the first place. It sought to foster a Black studies that would service the needs of White people for racial understanding and acceptance. According to P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon Woods, it is thus unsurprising that “much of what constitutes black studies today . . . is not radical and revolutionary in its intellectual impulses or practice; it is not the progeny of black revolution and opposition. Rather, it is in large measure the outgrowth of an intentional strategy of containment.” “Hip Hop Studies in Black,” 271. The focus on antiblackness is anathema to canonical Black studies which, funded and structured to appease rather than to fundamentally challenge, has little place for the absolute freedom that the Black and her social life of social death demands. (For the formulation on the social life of social death, see Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death.”) This, of course, is not to discount the emergence of several, more openly oppositional Black studies projects and related academic concentrations since the 1970s, nor the anti-­antiblack work and organizing initiatives that sprung from and/or articulated with them. By painting the canonical picture with broad strokes, my intention is to show that such anti-­antiblack initiatives, and the focus on the structures of antiblackness, are not the norm. 81. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 737. Moten’s appreciation of Afro-­ pessimism is particularly relevant since in previous writings he had been quite critical. In “The Case of Blackness,” Moten suggested that Afro-­pessimism not only incorporated tropes of Black pathology into its analysis, but also revealed Wilderson and Sexton’s investment in the tragic and the neurotic. In his previous critique, then, Moten provided a voice to the canonical response to Afro-­pessimism. 82. Ward, Men We Reaped, 127–­28. 83. Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself, 47–­48. 84. Other efforts to grapple with the fantastic from a Black perspective, in various degrees of engagement with death, include Moten, In the Break; Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic; and Holland, Raising the Dead. 85. See Saucier and Woods, On Marronage, where Robinson’s insights are contextualized in a critical discussion of Black studies. 86. McKittrick, Sylvia Winter, 62–­63. Wynter’s project intersects with that of the theorists of the afterlife of slavery insofar as they recognize the limitations of the Marxist framework (40) and find in Fanon’s writings a generative set of concepts. Both zero in on the urgent question of freedom by asking who and what we are as humans. Importantly, both projects recognize the transhistorical Black experience as that which can and must serve as the/a basis from which to reconceptualize human freedom. Following McKittrick’s analysis in Demonic Grounds, Wynter sees the Middle Passage as origin of a “dialectical terrain of struggle” where the question of who we are as human is foundational (62).

284 ·  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

87. Wilderson, “Prison Slave as Hegemony’s [Silent] Scandal,” 32. 88. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 130. 89. Yancey, Who Is White? 15, 72, 76, 71, 80. 90. On Black–­nonblack racial disparities in health and well-­being, nutrition, access to social security, access to education, and victimization by violence and the police, see Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório das Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil; on Black–­nonblack racial disparities in vulnerability to homicide and police homicide, see Waiselfizs, Mapa da Violência; on patterns of antiblack residential segregation, see Oliveira, “O Caso do Estado”; and Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness. 91. On why data on pretos and pardos reveal proximity in the social experiences of Blacks of varied complexions, and reveal a persistent distance to the social experience of Whites, see Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório das Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil, 26–­27. Here the emphasis is on income, formal education, life expectancy, and vulnerability to homicide. 92. See Mariani et al., “Mapa.” 93. For an analysis of the city of São Paulo’s patterns of antiblack residential segregation and their relation to police homicide, see Vargas and Alves, “Geographies of Death.” 94. Reaja ou Será Morto / Reaja ou Será Morta, “Quem Somos.” 95. See Cable, “Racial Dot Map.”

1. Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? 1. See, for example, Cacho, Social Death; and Márquez, “Black Mohicans.” 2. State of Texas, “Overview of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.” The Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) was created on December 1, 2011, when the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission (TJPC) and Texas Youth Commission (TYC) were abolished. Delinquent conduct involves violations such as (1) a felony offense or a misdemeanor punishable with jail time; (2) a violation of lawful court orders; (3) driving, flying, or boating while intoxicated, intoxication assault, or intoxication manslaughter; (4) a third or subsequent offense of driving under the influence of alcohol, which requires only a detectable amount of alcohol in a minor’s system (Office of the Attorney General, Juvenile Justice, 24). According to the Texas Family Code, there are seven types of CINS: (1) any fineable offense; (2) public intoxication; (3) truancy; (4) running away; (5) inhalant abuse; (6) expulsion for violation of a school district’s student code of conduct; and (7) violation of a reasonable and lawful “child at risk” court order (Office of the Attorney General, Juvenile Justice, 23).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 ·  285

3. Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, State of Juvenile Probation, 16. 4. Ibid., 8. 5. See, for example, Parenti, Lockdown America; and Acuna, Occupied America. 6. State of Texas, “Overview of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.” 7. Travis County, “Juvenile Court.” 8. State of Texas, “Overview of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.” See Figure 1. 9. Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, State of Juvenile Probation, 12, 14. 10. The term “Hispanic” is inadequate for several reasons, not the least of which is that it suggests Spanish as the main language a “Hispanic” person speaks. Among the so-­called Hispanic incarcerated kids, a considerable number of those who came from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala spoke indigenous languages. Latin@s include non-­Spanish-­speaking people of Central and South America, and is therefore a category with broader reach. There are, of course, a number of other categories, such a Chican@, Xican@, Xicanindi@, and Indi@, that are used to self-­identify. Those, however, unless pointed to in the text, were not used by the incarcerated kids. 11. Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, State of Juvenile Probation, 12. 12. See, for example, Alexander, New Jim Crow. 13. Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home. 14. Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, State of Juvenile Probation, 14. 15. Ibid., 18. 16. Ibid., 16–­18. 17. See, for example, Davis, City of Quartz; Donziger, Real War on Crime; Kelley, “ ‘Slangin’ Rocks.” 18. See Alexander, New Jim Crow; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Parenti, Lockdown America. 19. Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, State of Juvenile Probation, 17. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Alexander, New Jim Crow; Donziger, Real War on Crime. 24. Zehr and Villalpando, “Income Segregation in Austin.” For a historical perspective on labor markets and residential segregation in Austin between 1950 and 1973, see Busch, “Building ‘A City of Upper-­Middle-­Class Citizens.’ ” 25. Zehr and Villalpando, “Income Segregation in Austin.” 26. Ibid. 27. See, for example, Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Vargas and Alves, “Geographies of Death”; Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab.

286 ·  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

28. Chandler and Kingery, “Speaking Out against State Violence”; Chesney-­ Lind, “Imprisoning Women”; Richie, “Social Impact of Mass Incarceration on Women”; Sudbury, Global Lockdown. 29. See Cable, “Racial Dot Map.” 30. Central Texas Sustainability Project, 2012 Data Report, 37. 31. Zehr and Villalpando, “Income Segregation in Austin.” 32. Central Texas Sustainability Project, 2012 Data Report, 32. 33. Ibid., 34, 35. 34. Texas Appleseed, Texas’ School-­to-­Prison Pipeline, 1. 35. Ibid., 25, 17. 36. Ibid., 26. 37. See, for example, Goff et al., “Not Yet Human.” 38. Texas Appleseed, Texas’ School-­to-­Prison Pipeline, 61. 39. Ibid., 4, 38. 40. Ibid., 4. 41. Like Black and, to a lesser extent, Latin@ kids, special education students experience levels of referrals that are disproportionate to their numbers in school districts. Even though they constitute 11 percent of the total Texas public school population, in 2005–­6 special education students were 22 percent of the DAEP referrals, 26 percent of OSS, and 21 percent of ISS. And to press home the finding that Texas public schools have a special fondness for the most vulnerable, between 2001 and 2006, about 3,200 pre-­K, kindergarten, and first graders were referred to DAEPs—­even though, by law, only bringing a firearm to school constitutes an offense for which this type of punishment is mandatory. While these patterns, on the surface, may suggest an anti-­nonwhite institutional disposition, the close analysis in this book shows a fundamental and overarching antiblackness that affects nonblack constituencies, albeit not as intensely as it oppresses Blacks. See Texas Appleseed, Texas’ School-­to-­Prison Pipeline, 5. 42. Ibid., 35. 43. American Psychological Association, Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools? 4–­5. 44. Ibid., 6. 45. See Texas Appleseed, Texas’ School-­to-­Prison Pipeline, 29. 46. On patterns of antiblack residential hypersegregation, see Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; on the absolutely unique and blocked patterns of intergenerational transmission of occupation and wealth for Blacks, see Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth / White Wealth; and Shapiro, Hidden Cost. 47. Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 261. 48. See, for example, Glasser, “Drug Busts.” 49. Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness. 50. Roser and Coppinger, “How Deadly Is Your ZIP Code?”

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 ·  287

51. Ibid. 52. Massey and Denton, “Hypersegregation.” 53. SOY Collective, Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? 37. 54. Ibid., 15. 55. Woods, “Les Misérables of New Orleans.” 56. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 57. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 26. 58. See, for example, Márquez, “Black Mohicans”; and Márquez, Black–­Brown Solidarity. 59. Tang and Ren, “Outlier.”

2. Stanzas of Oppression and Hope 1. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”; Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! 2. On the imaginative labor of insurgency and freedom, see, for example, Harney and Moten, Undercommons; and Holloway, Change the World. 3. Gomez, “Against the Current.” 4. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 2. 5. As a number of authors would have it, for example, Márquez, Black–­Brown Solidarity. 6. This expression is drawn from Wilderson, Red, White, and Black. 7. Márquez, “Browning of Black Politics,” 48. 8. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. 9. This set of theoretical propositions was elaborated in the Introduction and derives from Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Gordon, Bad Faith; Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death”; and Wilderson, Red, White, and Black. 10. For social death theses see, for example, Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Wilderson, Red, White, and Black; and Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death.” 11. Aizer and Doyle, “Juvenile Incarceration.” 12. Sojoyner, “Black Radicals.” 13. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 33. 14. Ibid. 15. On surveillance and sousveillance, see Browne, Dark Matters. 16. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 33–­35. 17. State of Texas, “Overview of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.” 18. This, in fact, was the result of extensive research conducted by Texas Advocates for Justice in 2015 with formerly incarcerated adults and their families. In these individuals’ accounts, the themes of personal responsibility and accountability were prominent.

288 ·  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

19. There were multiple nonprofit and for-­profit organizations whose workers’ schedules intersected with ours, so we’d see them while circulating in and out of the juvenile prison. Their mere presence suggests a sizeable industry that depends on the incarceration of young people. Of course, if one were to speak with these workers, they would probably say they were interested in the rehabilitation of the youths and even, perhaps, that the juvenile prison system should be abolished—­ just like us. For reflections on these contradictions, see, for example, Incite! Revolution Will Not Be Funded. 20. A young Black woman, VV, wrote about an incident with the nurse: “Today I was angry about this nurse / who hurt my feelings. / I wanted to hit her / but I thought before I acted . . .” Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 30. 21. SOY Collective. Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? 53. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Ibid., 50, 55. 24. On the differentiated impact of economic trends on Black families, see Irwin, Miller, and Sanger-­Katz, “America’s Racial Divide”; on family structure and incarceration, see Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home. 25. Roberts, Shattered Bonds, 8. 26. SOY Collective, Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? 37. 27. Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death.”

3. Negotiating Quotidian Violence and Uncertain Futures 1. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 12. 2. SOY Collective, Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? 47. 3. See Díaz-­Cotto, Chicana Lives, 31–­35, on families of Chicanas incarcerated or formerly incarcerated (pintas) and involved with illegal drugs. Her account is revealing of a series of similarities and differences between Chicana and Black young women’s social networks and spaces of socialization. 4. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 28. 5. Díaz-­Cotto, Chicana Lives. 6. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 13. On the same page, Thelen and Valdez, in a footnote, stated the following: “When parents haven’t been able to pay the electricity bills, some of the youth . . . found ways to keep the lights on. Often this was their first brush with ‘crime.’ ” 7. Ibid., 40. 8. For an analysis of the contradictions of sex work in Black spaces of dispossession—­work that provides relative economic autonomy for women yet tends to reinforce heteropatriarchal devaluing of women and absolution of men—­ see Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Diskfunctional! 73–­74: “One young Harlem woman, simply identified as ‘Margo,’ who turned to prostitution as early as fifteen, took pleasure in the fact that she could earn an average of $200 per customer for doing something

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 ·  289

she enjoyed—­having sex. As the product of an abusive home and grinding poverty, Margo sold her body as a means of survival.” 9. See, for example, Díaz-­Cotto, Chicana Lives; Harlow, Prior Abuse; Beck et al., Sexual Victimization. 10. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 18. 11. Richie, Arrested Justice, 42–­43, 38. 12. Ibid., 43. 13. On controlling images and their impact on Black women, see Collins, Black Feminist Thought; on the criminalization of Black women, see Alexander, New Jim Crow; and specifically on the relation between violence, drugs, and women’s incarcerations, see Richie, “Exploring the Link,” 2. 14. Harlow, Prior Abuse, 1. 15. Ibid., 2. 16. Richie, Arrested Justice. 17. Alexander, New Jim Crow. 18. See, for example, Díaz-­ Cotto, Chicana Lives; Beck et al., Sexual Victimization. 19. Richie, Compelled to Crime, 163. 20. Díaz-­Cotto, Chicana Lives. 21. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 48–­49. 22. See, for example, Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics. 23. See Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” 24. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 31. 25. Ibid., 41. 26. Ibid., 46. 27. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 28. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 21. 29. For an analysis of Black hair and its various meanings as they relate to the gender-­and race-­specific historical variations of politics and beauty, see, for example, Rooks, Hair Raising. 30. Thelen and Valdez, I Come from a Teardrop, 29.

4. Reclaiming Public Space 1. This chapter revises and expands on previous work on these matters. See Vargas, “Black Disidentification.” 2. See, for example, photographs of the caras-­pintadas during the 1992 impeachment campaign. In Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, the crowd was unmistakably white. See Dutra, “O Movimento.” 3. See, for example, Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório. 4. See, for example, Ottoni, “Os Jovens”; and Vargas and Alves, “Geographies of Death.”

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5. See O Argonauta, “Pesquisa Datafolha.” In another Datafolha survey published earlier, half of those interviewed mentioned corruption as the main reason for their participation, followed by 32 percent who protested bus fares, 27 percent against politicians, and 19 percent for public transportation improvements, among other concerns. The sum is greater than 100 percent because the people interviewed were allowed to choose more than one reason for their protest. See Cleber Toledo, “Datafolha Mostra.” 6. Pelli, “Protesters,” 33. 7. Paula, “Interactions.” 8. Saad-­Filho and Morais, “Brazilian Spring,” 237. 9. See the march manifesto in Historianet, “Zumbi + 10.” 10. See SpressoSP, “Movimentos protestam.” On March 19, 2013, the Committee against Genocide occupied the state of São Paulo’s Public Security Secretariat (Secretaria de Segurança Pública). See UNEafro Brasil Oficial, “Comitê de Luta Contra o Genocídio de SP ocupa Secretaria de Segurança Pública.” 11. G1, “Marcha Internacional.” 12. See Waiselfisz, Mapa da Violência. 13. Alves, “From Necropolis to Blackpolis.” 14. Ibid., 11. 15. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black. 16. See, for example, Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro; Human Rights Watch, Lethal Force, 31–­40. 17. For a related analysis of the nonpolitical character of the Black subject engaging Wilderson’s formulations, see Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons, 20: “We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism for politics. We are the general antagonism for politics looming outside every attempt to politicize, every imposition of self-­governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.” By stressing formal in “formal state representative,” i want to call attention to this: even though the state apparatus is indeed populated by state agents, the state far exceeds its formal, visible configuration, and operates just as forcefully, if not more efficiently, when actors who are not of the state machine enforce and reproduce protocols of the state. Here, of course, one can combine, in thought or action, any of the elements in the dichotomies outside–­inside, for–­against, beneficiary–­exploited, and form dyads, such as outside–­inside, that reflect more effectively the porous, plastic, disseminated, and permeable nature of what we call the state. For all its malleability and capacity to inhabit and get reproduced in capillary as well as ubiquitous and fluid realms of

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sociability, shared symbology, cognition, and self-­making, the state, even by inaction, is quite consistent in producing historical patterns of inequality. In Ruth Gilmore’s definition of racism, this inequality between social groups, which i insist is in great measure derived from antiblackness, is perhaps best captured in the differentiated life chances and susceptibility to early death that the state imposes (and tolerates) and from which it benefits. See Gilmore, Golden Gulag. 18. Derrick Bell’s analysis of interest convergence, which we examined in the Introduction, shows how Black collective interests occasionally gain support only when and if there is substantial analogous or related interest on the part of Whites. Bell’s analysis thus reinforces the thesis of the Black collective subject’s inability to mobilize and engage the political field in their own terms. See Bell, “Racial Realism.” 19. Fonsêca, “You Cannot Not See.” 20. Alves, “From Necropolis to Blackpolis,” 14. 21. Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” 5. 22. See the photograph in Affonso, “Tropa de Choque.” 23. Fonsêca, “You Cannot Not See,” 24. 24. See the flyer for the March 19, 2013, event at the University of São Paulo against the genocide of Black youth. In it, a Black woman, whose figure emerges from favela houses, forcefully holds the hand of a white masked police officer who has a loaded weapon. The flyer called the government’s attention to “mass incarceration; hospital procedures when those wounded in confrontations with the police are checked in; compensation for the victims’ families; investigation into extermination groups and mass killings; a commission, formed by citizens and experts, to develop a proposal to diminish police lethality; access to homicide data and how they are produced; ‘Resistance Acts’ and how they are crafted; guaranteed safety for whistle blowers; autonomy for the Coroner’s Office [IML, Instituto Médico Legal]; independence and strengthening of the Public Ombudsperson [Ouvidoria Pública].” The Committee against the Genocide of Black Youth of São Paulo, organizer of the event, hailed the state (“poder público”) to explain the crimes committed by the police. See GTJuventudeNossaSaoPaulo, “Campanha Contra o Genocídio.” 25. For a comprehensive work on Brazilian Black women’s organizations, see Santos, “Brazilian Black Women’s NGOs.” 26. Even though over the years i have had numerous conversations with Xavier about this, what follows is my interpretation of her political philosophy. Xavier has not reviewed or endorsed my interpretation, and thus i take responsibility for it. 27. Araújo, Um Retrato do Brasil. 28. Neri, Desigualdade de Renda, 9, 14, 15. 29. Here we could distinguish between PT and Lula, given that, as has been pointed out by analysts (see, e.g., Oliveira, “Hegemonia”), Lula as a political

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phenomenon is historically tied to the party but is not contained by the party’s trajectory or tendencies—­and vice versa. Indeed, while most of PT congressional representatives’ electorate wavers between the traditional and the new supporters (see, e.g., Hunter and Power, “Rewarding Lula”), Lula’s base leans markedly toward the historically marginalized social sectors and regions of the country. 30. All of this meant that, in a relatively poor country, where 66 percent of families averaging three people make at most R$ 2,034 per month (see, e.g., Canzian, “O Rolê do Brasil”), the party’s base of support were the traditionally leftist social segments, while the most impoverished classes tended to vote for parties and candidates more aligned with the right. 31. Singer, “A Segunda Alma,” 95. 32. Paixão, “Racial Inequalities.” 33. To affirm, even ironically, that “the lower classes now have a sense of entitlement, and possibly even worse, they fail to demonstrate the deference to which their taller, whiter, thinner and better dressed social superiors had become accustomed” (Saad-­Filho, “Mass Protest,” 661–­62) is of course speculation, itself not devoid of an unintended revelation of the author’s positionality. Yet the text points to a historical moment in which the government policy choices add to, rather than placate, the traditional middle classes’ anxieties. 34. Singer, “Raízes Sociais,” 85. 35. Ibid., 86. 36. Ibid., 93. 37. Oliveira, “Hegemonia.” 38. Saad-­Filho and Morais, “Mass Protest,” 229. 39. Nitahara, “Representação.” 40. As it is stated on Criola’s website, “CRIOLA considers articulations (and actions that result from them) as fundamental and inherent part of its political work. We are part of different democratic participation organisms: The District Health Council (Conselho Distrital de Saúde) of downtown Rio de Janeiro, the National Council for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Conselho Nacional de Promoção da Igualdade Racial), of the Special Secretariat of Racial Equality Policy (Secretaria Especial de Políticas para a Igualdade Racial (SEPPIR), as well as different organisms that negotiate and monitor policy concerning youths, human rights, HIV and AIDS, among others.” Criola, “Atuação.” 41. Bell, “Serving Two Masters.” 42. Criola, “Atuação.” 43. Singer, “A Segunda Alma,” 100. 44. This strategic withdrawal does not mean that more traditional civil society approaches are excluded from Criola’s menu of operations. Over the years, Criola has launched or participated in a series of public campaigns aimed at increasing awareness of race and gender discrimination. Recently, it spearheaded

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the initiative “Virtual Racism, Real Consequences.” By targeting forms of everyday antiblack gendered prejudice, Criola reaffirms its longtime commitment to change the national conversation and policy on key current problems. Yet this and similar initiatives, devoid of mass mobilization sustaining them, draw from a model of social intervention that depends on resources, ideas, and forms of implementation that in significant ways reproduce the model of state intervention, if not in its scale, at least in its top-­down approach. It also suggests that antiblackness can be addressed, redressed, and overcome. This last topic will be revisited in chapter 7. 45. Santiago, Tomaz, and Machado, “Rolezinhos.” 46. On antiblack segregation in São Paulo see, for example, Vargas and Alves, “Geographies of Death.” 47. See Folha 10, “Bonde do Rolê,” in which a police officer, in a photograph by Bruno Poletti, is seen threatening with a baton four young Black men who have been detained. 48. Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 49. Barbara, “Whose Mall Is It?” 50. For example, 18 percent of younger interviewees, between sixteen and twenty-­four years of age, were in favor of the rolezinhos, while among those sixty and older, only 6 percent did so. Moreover, the greater the income, the higher the levels of support for rolezinhos: while among those who earned between two and five minimum salaries 10 percent supported the gatherings, among those who earned more than ten minimum salaries 16 percent were in favor of rolezinhos. 51. Leite, “82% dos Paulistanos São Contra.” 52. An online comment in response to Romero, “Brazil’s Latest Clash.” 53. See, for example, Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro; and Browne, Dark Matters. 54. Vargas, “Apartheid Brasileiro”; Vargas, Never Meant to Survive. 55. Dunbar, “Highland Mall Hysteria.” 56. G1, “Conheça a história dos ‘rolezinhos.’ ” 57. In Jabor’s useful formulation about an analogous area of privilege in Rio de Janeiro that now experiences an unprecedented presence of newly economically empowered Black people, “Brazil did not become Ipanema, Ipanema became Brazil.” See Jabor, “Nunca Mais Voltará.” 58. Rebolla, “As Imagens.” See also Rio Gringa, “Rolezinho no Shopping.” 59. O Globo, “Nos Anos 90.” 60. Diário de S.Paulo, “ ‘Rolezinho’ causa pânico no Shopping Itaquera.” 61. Bartlet, Copacabana, cited in Carta Capital, “Desiguladades.” 62. Cardoso, Marinho, and Torres, “Orla do Rio.” 63. Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano. Relatório; Santos, “Brazilian Black Women’s NGOs”; Alves, “From Necropolis to Blackpolis”; Rocha, “Outraged Mothering”; Waiselfizs, Mapa da Violência.

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64. Autran, “Pichação.” 65. Berta and Bottari, “Jovem.” 66. Folha de S.Paulo, “Vídeo Registra Assassinato.” 67. On the need by nonblacks, especially Whites, to enforce boundaries of geographical belonging, see Bottari, “Jovens Detidos.” This article focuses on a group of middle-­class White youths, residents of the Flamengo neighborhood, who decided to take matters onto their own hands. They patrol the streets at night, searching for, in their words, “moleques,” yet another variation of “pivete,” who allegedly rob locals. Taken to the police station to explain what they were doing, one of the youths, frustrated that he had been accused by one of the “moleques” to be a “playboy” who wanted to harm him, stated the following: “Those kids are not homeless kids, they are moleques who come to our neighborhood to commit robberies. I think violence is something scary, as is the fact that other youths—­it wasn’t us—­had one of the moleques tied by the neck. But this shows how dire the situation is. Can’t anyone see that the kid probably deserved what he got? Here you do, here you pay. In our case, we weren’t after the kids because they were Black or poor. We were there to get the robber.” 68. Maia, “Eu Já Sentia Preconceito Antes.” The article includes a link to the video recording of the interview. 69. Ibid. 70. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black. 71. Maia, “Eu Já Sentia Preconceito Antes.” 72. These trends have of course slowed down. As of February 2016, the Brazilian economy is retracting, and unsurprisingly the Black and the impoverished are the most affected. The government’s cuts in education, health, and infrastructure, for example, according to Educafro’s director, Frei Davi Santos, disproportionately affect negatively the Afro-­descendants. See Midiamax, “Pobres e Negros.” 73. Maia, “Eu Já Sentia Preconceito Antes.” 74. Folha de S.Paulo, “Rolezinho Protesto.”

5. The Pacifying Police 1. Ramalho, “Major Reafirma.” 2. G1, “PMs Dizem.” 3. Ramalho and Bottari, “Inquérito.” See also a detailed illustration of the crime scene and how each UPP officer was involved, O Globo, “Infográfico.” 4. The “decreto-­lei” (law decree) 41.650, established on January 21, 2009, created the UPP for the “execution of special actions relative to the pacification and maintenance of public order in disadvantaged communities.” See Diário Oficial do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, “Poder Executivo.” 5. See maps of UPPs in Rio. G1, “Rio ganha.”

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6. O Globo, “Após Bope.” 7. Costa et al., “Polícia Invade.” 8. O Globo, “Pesquisa Mostra.” 9. For an analysis of the religious, political, racial, and class alliances that are pertinent to the current Rio political context, see Amar, Security Archipelago, especially chap. 4. 10. See for example, Record’s coverage of the Complexo do Alemão at ReportAlexDiaz, “Record acompanha.” To prove how graspable and consolidated the new moment was, reporters ventured for the first time into gang territories. Remarking on how narrow the streets were, and how foreign it all seemed at Alemão after the 2010 takeover, a reporter for Record shows the house of one of the main drug traffickers and describes the favela as “tight, strange, foreign.” Even though local residents say how terrorized they were during the operations, the reporter does not pay attention to them. 11. Borges, Ribeiro, and Cano, “Os Donos Do Morro”; and Stahlberg, “Pacification of Favelas.” Stahlberg uses ISP data to state that “violent fatalities, car theft and street theft . . . have decreased significantly from 2010 to 2011” (24). 12. The thirteen communities are the following: Andaraí, Batam, Borel, Chapéu-­Mangueira/Babilônia, Cidade de Deus, Dona Marta, Formiga, Macacos, Pavão-­Pavãozinho/Cantagalo, Providência, Salgueiro, Tabajaras, and Turano. 13. See Leandro, “Auto de Resistência”; and Misse, “Autos de Resistência.” Elsewhere i have analyzed these patterns and how they relate to Rio’s antiblack racialized geography. See Vargas, “Taking Back the Land.” 14. Borges, Ribeiro, and Cano, “Os Donos do Morro,” 32–­33. 15. Ibid., 38. This argument is made via graphs showing the evolution of violent deaths for the city of Rio and for UPP communities. The graphs are successful in suggesting the cumulative effects of UPPs over time, and how pacified communities present trends that parallel yet intensify the city’s falling rates of violent deaths between 2006 and 2011. 16. Zaluar, Cidadãos; and Soares, Criminalidade, among others, have linked drug dealing with the performance of masculinity. 17. See Vargas, “When a Favela Dared.” 18. Work in Jacarezinho demanded frequent consultations with the local drug bosses, the most prominent of which we had to often visit in a prison located more than three hours away from Rio by train. 19. On police corruption that made national and international news, see, for example, Vargas, “Hyperconsciousness.” 20. For Benedita da Silva’s biography, see Mendonça and Benjamin, Benedita. 21. See studies showing drug dealers’ organic ties to the communities, for example, Alves, “From Necropolis to Blackpolis”; and Vargas, “Inner City and the Favela.”

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22. This mirrors a trend common to other favelas in Rio, as reported in Romero, “Now Taking World Cup Bookings.” 23. O Globo, “Brasil Registra Segunda Maior Alta.” 24. Borges, Ribeiro, and Cano, “Os Donos Do Morro,” 49. 25. The difficulty Blacks in the United States have in passing wealth and occupational status from one generation to the next is well documented in Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth / White Wealth. Given the transnational antiblackness that defines the diaspora, it would be surprising to find patterns any less intense in Brazil. Oliveira, in “O Caso do Estado,” shows how Black families, unlike nonblack and White families, occupy less valuable areas in favelas. These same Black families tend to stay longer in favelas than do nonblack families. Oliveira’s study suggests that in Brazil Blacks are not able to accumulate wealth in the form of homeownership. Pólvora, in “Black Communities,” a study conducted in an impoverished area in Porto Alegre, found analogous patterns of Black accumulated disadvantages across generations. 26. Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório. 27. Borges, Ribeiro, and Cano, “Os Donos Do Morro,” 21–­23. Among those, Chapéu Mangueira has the highest ratio of police officers per thousand inhabitants, at 88.2, while Cidade de Deus has 9.1. 28. See Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Wilderson, Red, White, and Black; and Vargas, Never Meant to Survive. 29. See, for example, Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório; and Waiselfizs, Mapa da Violência. 30. See, for example, recent ethnographies of Black communities in Rio de Janeiro by Sluis, “Opening”; Soares, “Akoben”; and Rocha, “Outraged Motherhood.” 31. Borges, Ribeiro, and Cano, “Os Donos Do Morro.” All quoted statements are my translations. 32. Ibid., 120. 33. Ibid., 137. 34. See Soares et al., “O Que Pensam os Policiais,” 37. 35. Ibid., 37–­38. 36. Borges, Ribeiro, and Cano, “Os Donos Do Morro,” 140. 37. Ibid., 140–­42. 38. Ibid., 162. 39. On favelas as Black spaces, see, for example, Oliveira, “O Caso do Estado”; Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab; and Vargas, “Taking Back the Land.” 40. Folha de S.Paulo, “Cabral Apóia Aborto.” 41. Pagnan, “Metade do País.” 42. See http://www.rocinha.org/. 43. See, for example, the video by Zein, Cury, and Gasparian, “Papa, Cadê o Amarildo?” Starting in 2015, more negative evaluation of the UPPs began to

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finally surface among recognized White Brazilian academics and policy makers. See, for example, Racy’s interview with former national secretary of security Luiz Eduardo Soares in “A Solução.” Soares states that UPPs are in ruins and that they represent “a failed project” because “the police remain the same and the results are predictable.” My translation. 44. See, for example, Zein, Cury, and Gasparian, “Papa, Cadê o Amarildo?” 45. TV Brasil, “Protesto em Copacabana.” 46. Jornal a Nova Democracia, “Protesto na Rocinha.” 47. Nitahara, “Jovens Voltam a Ocupar.” 48. Uns Produções, “Somos Todos Amarildo.” My translation. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. See, for example, Paixão, Rossetto, and Carvano, Relatório; Alves, “From Necropolis to Blackpolis”; Human Rights Watch, Lethal Force; and Waiselfizs, Mapa da Violência. 52. See, for example, Oliveira, “O Caso do Estado”; Pólvora, “Black Communities”; Santos, “Brazilian Black Women’s NGOs”; Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab; and Rocha, “Outraged Mothering.” 53. On January 31, 2015, it was reported that thirteen of the twenty-­five police officers accused of involvement in the disappearance and death of Amarildo de Souza were condemned to prison sentences of up to thirteen years and seven months. Daniela Alvarez Prado was the presiding judge. At least eight of these officers were condemned for the crime of torture followed by death, disappearance of the cadaver, and fraud. See O Globo, “Justiça Condena.” The condemnation, while lauded by human rights activists, is a surprising exception to the pattern of assassinations of Blacks by the police that go unpunished in Brazil and the United States.

6. Michael Zinzun 1. Republic of New Afrika pamphlet, n.d., Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Southern California Library. 2. See Vargas, Catching Hell. 3. See, for example, Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression. 4. Marriott, On Black Men. 5. The split i am suggesting between the magical and the engineer modes of thought is not to be taken in absolute terms, as the magical modality involves a planned projection of the future (as the engineer proclaims) and the engineer modality, insofar as it requires the imagination of the not-­yet-­realized (as is the terrain of the magical), is necessarily immersed in metaphysical considerations. I am of course obliquely referencing a discussion in Lévi-­Strauss, Savage Mind.

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6. Edwards, Charisma, 23. 7. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 149–­50, 176. 8. For a historiography focusing on the ways in which Ella Baker challenged this pattern of charismatic Black male leadership, see Ransby, Ella Baker. 9. Vargas and James, “Refusing Blackness-­as-­Victimization,” 198. 10. See, for example, Marshall, City on the Hill, 225. 11. As i expand on the gendered universe of the cyborg, my intent is both to critique Baldwin’s and Zinzun’s phallocentrism and to take the discussion of the cyborg beyond such limitations. As in Haraway’s cyborg, the Black charismatic cyborg disrupts racialized dichotomies and barriers, yet he reinscribes normalized understandings of heteropatriarchy and black suffering, both of which disavow a frontal coming to terms with foundational and structural antiblackness. 12. Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” 294. 13. “Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” Ibid., 294. 14. Baldwin’s political thought is of course dynamic, unstable. In his later essays, such as “The Price of the Ticket,” published in 1985, in the midst of the devastating Reagan–­Thatcher years, Baldwin apparently gave up on the Black cyborg–­ engendered redemptive project, and instead trained his critical attention on the antiblack heteronormative state. Following his analysis of the murder drive animating the mob, intent on destroying “a nigger, a kike, a dyke, or a faggot” (840), Baldwin goes on to affirm the following: “But these ideas do not come from the mob. They come from the state, which creates and manipulates the mob. The idea of black persons as property, for example, does not come from the mob” (841). 15. Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” 9. 16. Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” 293–­94. 17. Contemporary events suggest the longevity and force of the Black cyborg’s orientation, one that intersects with Christian religious practices. For example, following the June 17, 2015, shooting death of six women and three men, all Black, at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a White supremacist, the victims’ relatives conveyed public messages of forgiveness to the assailant. The hatred toward Blacks that the cyborg attempts to turn into love is not restricted to these extreme forms. In Baldwin, as in Zinzun’s political philosophy, antiblack hatred is a culturally ubiquitous datum rather than an isolated event. The hater of the Black, therefore, is the dominant culture’s ordinary performer. 18. Erickson, “Law.” 19. See Rainey, “Political Activist”; and Vargas Catching Hell. 20. Chang, “Activist Ends”; Vargas, Catching Hell; Vargas, Never Meant to Survive. 21. Marriott, On Black Men, xiv.

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22. Erickson, “Law.” 23. See, for example, Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression. 24. Vargas, Catching Hell. 25. Erickson, “Law.” 26. Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression. 27. Erickson, “Law.” 28. FBI memorandum titled “Michael Zinzun, Extremist Matters, Black Panther Party,” Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Southern California Library. 29. For example, on September 23, 1977, in a letter addressed to Michael Zinzun and Anthony Thigpenn at the CAPA office, when it was on 4107 South Main Street, Los Angeles, the director of administrative program staff at the Office of Management and Finance of the United States Department of Justice stated, via a standardized cover letter, that “your request under the Freedom of Information/ Privacy Act(s) has been received.” On December 2, 1977, Gene F. Wilson, information and privacy coordinator for the Central Intelligence Agency, in a letter addressed to Zinzun and Thigpenn at CAPA, affirmed the following: “In compliance with your request and pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act and regulations promulgated thereunder, we have searched those Agency systems that might contain information regarding the Coalition Against Police Abuse (C.A.P.A.) and find that we were unable to find any relevant information or record that pertains to your organization.” All materials available in the Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Box 10, Southern California Library. 30. Hill, “Michael Zinzun”; Switalla, “Marked Man.” 31. Michael Zinzun Defense Committee, “Free Speech,” Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Southern California Library. 32. Duren, “Police and Courts.” 33. Harpe, “Zinzun.” 34. Erickson, “Law.” 35. Braidhill, “Judges Won’t Hear Zinzun Case.” 36. Vargas, Never Meant to Survive. 37. Michael Zinzun Defense Committee, “Free Speech.” 38. Duren, “Police and Courts.” 39. Braidhill, “Judges Won’t Hear Zinzun Case.” 40. Erickson, “Law.” 41. Duren, “Police and Courts.” 42. Michael Zinzun Defense Committee, “Free Speech.” 43. Duren, “Police and Courts.” 44. Michael Zinzun Defense Committee, “Free Speech.” 45. Dunn, “Police Injury Suit.” 46. Ibid.

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47. Lucas, “Pasadena’s Michael Zinzun.” 48. Rainey, “Political Activist.” 49. See Vargas, Catching Hell; Vargas, Never Meant to Survive; and Wielenga “Day of Celebration.” See also the 1995 correspondence between Zinzun and Carlos Verissimo, Los Angeles representative of the Instituto de Pesquisas das Culturas Negras, one of the organizers of the event on the diaspora in Rio. Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Box 90, Southern California Library. 50. Los Angeles Sentinel, “For Excellence.” 51. Dunn, “Police Injury Suit.”

7. Black Suffering as Catalyst 1. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 37. The most incisive studies on prisons reflect on slavery as the ideological matrix informing contemporary prison regimes. Dylan Rodriguez, for example, states that “the technology of the prison regime—­ and the varieties of violence it wages against those it holds captive—­is premised on a particular White-­supremacist module or prototype that is in fact rooted in the history of slavery and the social and racial crisis it has forwarded into the present” (“Forced Passages,” 41). 2. On nonblack, especially White, participation in protests qua belonging in the nation, see Alves and Vargas, “On Deaf Ears.” 3. Because it springs from relatively progressive political camps, this multiracial consensus is different from the multiracialism Jared Sexton analyzed in Amalgamation Schemes. Multiracialism announces the end of racial classification, racial pride, and the one-­drop rule, among others, as precondition for a postracial society. The multiracial consensus of which Zinzun and other Black cyborgs were central, on the contrary, builds from and celebrates racial pride. It is this racial pride—­such as Baldwin’s exhortations of Black people’s unusual strength and unassailable dignity—­that generates the multiracial bloc. Yet, quite ironically, the resulting multiracial bloc seems paradigmatically unable or unwilling to engage frontally the facts and the deeply transformative political imperatives of antiblackness. In this limitation, the cyborg’s multiracial bloc intersects with multiracialism in their common disavowal of antiblackness. 4. See, for example, Lott, Love and Theft; and Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. 5. As Sexton remarked, “The call for paradigm shift has become the hallmark of the post–­civil rights era, in which the initiatives of multiracial coalition politics, immigration rights, liberal multiculturalism, and conservative colorblindness operate uneasily—­and often unwittingly—­within a broad-­based strategic integration” (“People-­of-­Color-­Blindness,” 43). 6. Bonilla-­Silva, “We Are All Americans!” 4. 7. Ibid., 13.

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8. On the dawn of the Brazilian (multi)racial democracy hegemony, and its relationship to a global racial formation, see, for example, Winant, World Is a Ghetto. 9. University of Texas, “Capitalism and The New Jim Crow.” I thank Connor Healy for this reference, used in his undergraduate honors thesis, which at the time of this writing was in draft form. See Healy, “Kill the Boer,” 48. 10. In this way, George Yancy’s recent open letter, “Dear White America,” which asks Whites to recognize their own racism, is an example of the adoption of the people-­of-­color framework (because it focuses on an undistinguished “racism” that affects Blacks and “people of color”), and the incarnation of the Black cyborg as it makes a loving, didactic, and urgent appeal to Whites. In its effort to repair misrecognition and hatred, the letter concludes by asking Whites to love Blacks back, and to imagine that their White children are Black. 11. Hamilton and Ture, Black Power. 12. About a decade after the first publication of Black Power, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” emerged as a synthesis of progressive Black feminism. It stated, “Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that White women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which White women of course do not need to have with White men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. . . . We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political–­economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-­racist revolution will guarantee our liberation” (Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement”). On a typology of Black feminisms drawn according to the ways in which each strand conceptualizes the sources of oppression, and whether the state should be reformed or destroyed, see James, Shadowboxing. On a critical analysis of U.S. empire that is attentive to blackness, sexuality, and spirituality, see Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing. 13. For example, among Zinzun’s papers were publications such as the Winter 1997 Indigenous Environmental Network News; articles from the 1989 special issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association on “The Health of Black Americans,” which included data and analyses on cardiovascular diseases, AIDS cases, death rates due to injury, and homicide among young Black males, all of which drew comparisons between different racial groups; and “Oppose U.S. Intervention

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in Mexico, Support the Zapatista Army” flyers and informational materials. Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Southern California Library. 14. Similarly, George Lipsitz in his critical writings and political engagement, including his dialogues and collaborations with Zinzun, exemplifies the awareness that antiblack social phenomena affect everyone, and thus need to be fully engaged by everyone, irrespective of one’s racial background. See Lipsitz, Life in the Struggle and Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 15. Churchill, Little Matter of Genocide; Vargas, Never Meant to Survive; Rodriguez, “Inhabiting the Impasse.” 16. Police operations intensified in the weeks before the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. “In the first weeks of April 2016, at least 11 people were killed and others were injured during police operations  .  .  . in the City of Rio de Janeiro and its surrounding neighborhoods. Residents of several favelas experienced hours of intense shootings. On 2 April, a five-­year-­old boy was killed in a military police operation in Magé, a municipality in the metropolitan region of Rio, and two other persons were injured. On 4 April, five people were killed in the favela of Acari during a joint operation of the federal and civil police. On the same day, a young man was killed in the favela of Manguinhos during a different military police operation. On 7 April, at least two people were killed in Jacarezinho, also during a military police operation. Between 16 and 17 April, a major military police operation in Complexo do Alemão resulted in two people being killed and nine others being injured; residents witnessed 36 hours of intense shootings. Between 5 and 6 May, six people including a police officer were killed during a military police operation in Providência. On 7 and 8 May, major police operations took place in Manguinhos, Alemão, Rocha Miranda and Acari. Initial reports indicate that in Manguinhos, one person was killed and three others were injured on 8 May. On the same day, in the favela Jorge Turco in Coelho Neto, two people were reported to be killed during an intensive shooting between the police and criminal gang members. In Complexo do Alemão, at least three people were injured and one woman was killed during a police operation on 7 May.” Predictably, the overwhelming majority of those killed were young Black men. Amnesty International, Violence Has No Place in These Games! 17. 17. Aveiro, “Cláudia e Amarildo.” 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Edwards, Charisma, 144. 21. Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Box 53, Southern California Library. 22. Strausberg, “Worrill Says CIA Drug Plot ‘Genocide.’ ” 23. On the hegemonic and potentially transformative uses of the concept of

NOTES TO CONCLUSION ·  303

genocide, see Rodriguez, “Inhabiting the Impasse.” See also Vargas and James, “Refusing Blackness-­as-­Victimization”; and Wilderson, Red, White, and Black. 24. Out of about twenty participants in a planning meeting, including Zinzun, there were three Latin@s, among them one woman. Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection, Box 85, Southern California Library. 25. The reference to civil society as a “state of war” comes from, among others, Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; and James, Resisting State Violence. 26. Vargas, “Gendered Antiblackness.” 27. Dawson, “Black Counterpublic?” 28. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black.

Conclusion 1. Murray, “Panthers’ Fight,” 14, cited in Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 275–­76. 2. Quoted in Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 277. 3. In Black Power, on the other hand, Ture and Hamilton stress the need for Black autonomous organizing as a precondition for entering into multiracial alliances. I say this to stress the particularity of the cyborg’s version of Black power that subordinates a focus on antiblackness to the consolidation of the transnational multiracial front. 4. Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 276. 5. See, for example, Wilderson, Incognegro; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression; Ture and Hamilton, Black Power; Nascimento, Brazil, Mixture or Massacre? Alves and Vargas, “On Deaf Ears”; Healy, “Kill the Boer.” 6. Shakur, Assata, 192. 7. “Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn’t take too much brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black” (ibid., 190). 8. Shakur, “Open Letter.” 9. Shakur, “To My People.” 10. James, “Introduction,” xxiv. 11. On how Blacks have mostly become obsolete in the U.S. economy since the 1980s, see Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. 12. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black. Safiya Bukhari, a contemporary of Shakur, speaks of the process of becoming a slave as part of her radicalization: “My mother had successfully kept me ignorant of the plight of Black people in America. Now I had learned it for myself, but I was still to learn the harsher lesson: the plight of the slave who dares to rebel” (War Before, 5).

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13. Robinson, Black Marxism, 169. 14. Ibid., my emphasis. 15. Shakur, Assata, 59–­60, my emphasis. 16. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. 17. Shakur, “To My People.” 18. Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 374. 19. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 7. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 9–­10. 22. Gordon, Bad Faith, 155. Likewise, the invitation to the dance of death is not symmetrical: it is an invitation to enter the world of antiblackness, hailing the Black and nonblack who insist on negating antiblackness to leave the world of the empire-­state and enter an unknown world of impossibilities. 23. Womack, Afrofuturism, 9. 24. See James, Black Jacobins. 25. I thank Andréia Santos, Hamilton Borges, Vitor, and Fred Aganju for their generous introduction to the work of Reaja in Salvador and Cachoeira, state of Bahia, in March 2016. See various articles in the Reaja ou Será Morta / Reaja ou Será Morto newspaper Assata Shakur, wherein Santos, Borges, Aganju, and other Reaja activists describe their collective efforts toward Black autonomy. For a “general theory of failure,” see Aganju, “Balanço Estratégico.”

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Index

abjection, Black, 26–­27; and afterlife of slavery, 33; and antiblackness, 35; of Black bodies, 61; social structures of, 36; as structural fact, 31 ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 230 Africa, Ramona, 94 African American: as term, 43. See also Black people Afrofuturism, 270 Afro-­pessimism, 37, 282n75, 283n81 Aganju, Fred, 304n25 Alckmin, Geraldo, 159 Alexander, Michelle, 244 antiblackness: abjection and, 35; agency and, 28; as bad faith, 26–­27; and the Black cyborg, 242, 255, 303n3; blackness and, 267; Black studies and, 283n80; Black suffering and, 11, 243; Brazilian military and, 276n5; capitalism and, 282n79; carceral logic of, 129–­30; centering of, 28–­30, 42; collective revolt against, vii–­ix; death and, 196; denial of, 1, 18, 35–­36, 42, 166–­68, 241–­43, 253–­55, 259–­60, 300n3, 303n3; diasporic, 178–­79, 182, 208; dispossession and, 24–­25, 88, 112; empire-­state as, 17–­18, 31, 47, 158, 163, 256; excesses of, 10; foundational, 28, 40, 48,

163, 182, 212, 241, 244–­45, 253, 256, 259, 264, 282n76; global, 35; and gratuitous violence and, 33–­34, 268; and heteropatriarchy, 15; and hypersurveillance, 24–­25; and imperialism, 282n79; and inequality, 291n17; and juvenile imprisonment, vii; logic of, 3–­4, 7–­8, 25–­26, 28, 79, 101, 143–­44, 263; and “mixedness,” 142–­43; and multiracial analysis, 29–­31; and multiracial bloc, 253–­54, 259–­60, 300n3; naturalization of, 31; negation of, vii, 176, 304n22; and nonblacks, vii, 1–­5, 8–­9, 11, 14, 78–­79; and oblique identification, 18, 26, 78; and people-­of-­color framework, 241–­43; and policing practices, vii, 178, 197; and political mobilization, vii; and preemptive police practices, 165; and premature death, x–­xi; progressive responses to, vii, 25; and punishment, 4, 52, 109; and punitive schooling, vii; recognition of, 176, 240; relational analysis of, 6–­7; and residential segregation, vii, 52, 178, 278n31; and self-­determination, vii; and social containment, 2; and social death, 52, 74; social facts of, 5–­6; social processes of, 7–­8; and the state, 163; as structural fact, 241, 242; 325

326 · INDEX

as structuring principle, 17–­18, 24–­28, 31, 36–­37, 39, 51–­52, 79, 84, 112, 147, 153, 196, 237, 241, 244–­45, 255, 264–­65, 270; and surveillance, 3, 66, 70, 112; and transcendence, 25, 39–­40, 270; as transhistorical, 79, 237, 241, 252; as transnational, 296n25; ubiquity of, 28, 147, 182, 237, 241, 253, 298n17; uniqueness of, 182, 241; and UPPs, 187. See also blackness antiblackness, gendered, 1, 21–­22, 81–­82, 196; in Austin, 51; and disidentification, 155; and dispossession, 70, 81; as foundational, 14; and juvenile incarceration, 113, 123–­24, 133, 138, 147; recognition of, 147, 155; social climate of, 143; and space, 165–­66, 168; and surveillance, 70, 81; and violence, 34, 122. See also blackness antiblack supremacy, 213. See also White supremacy arrastões, 168–­70; and fear of Blacks, 172–­73; and rolezinhos, 168–­74 Articulation of Black Brazilian Women’s NGOs (AMNB), 157 Austin, Texas: economic segregation in, 61–­64; gendered antiblackness in, 51; gentrification in, 62; juvenile justice system in, 45; public schools in, 63–­64; racial segregation in, 63; residential segregation in, 51 autonomy, Black, 217, 288n8, 304n25; fear of, xi; and hip-­hop, 162; of young women, 119, 128, 130, 132 Aveiro, Felipe, 249–­51 Babilônia, 191–­92 Bairros, Luiza, 157 Baldwin, James, 28, 47, 218; on antiblack hatred, 298n17; antiblack state, critique of, 298n14; cisnormative

masculinity in, 218; cyborg of, 218–­ 21, 236, 246; ideal political subject of, 261; “My Dungeon Shook,” 218–­ 20; phallocentrism of, 298n11; “The Price of the Ticket,” 298n14 barrios, 86–­87, 121, 232; carceral logic of, 129; gentrification of, 124; in SOY mural, 86 (fig.). See also ghettos Belchior, Douglas, 177 Bell, Derrick, 11–­12, 161–­62; on interest convergence, 291n18; on racial realism, 29 Beltrame, José Mariano, 184 bias, subliminal, 26, 30–­31 Black cyborg, xi–­xii, 47–­48, 211, 239, 298n17; absence of, 257–­58; awe of, 245, 248; and Black suffering, 212, 242; bloc of, 241–­42, 245, 263, 269, 300n3; and cisnormative masculinity, 216–­17, 246; death of, 245–­46; defined, 215, 218; and democratic inclusion project, 219–­20; and denial of antiblackness, 242, 255, 303n3; gendered critique of, 298n11; multiracial and nonblack oblique identification, 241; and people-­of-­color framework, 241; performance of, 245–­46; placelessness of, 252; posthumous, 249, 251–­52; and redemption, 221; and slavery, 48; suspension of, 259; as trope for empire-­state, 221; Zinzun as, 211, 213, 215–­16, 221, 232–­33, 236–­37, 246–­48, 257, 261 Black feminism, 21, 246, 301n12 Black Liberation Army, 262 Black Lives Matter, 15, 16, 244 Black Marxism (Robinson), 39 blackness: and antiblackness, 267; as assumed poverty, 175–­76; and criminality, 200–­201; and death, 38–­39; and gender, 1, 139, 142, 249–­ 50, 275n1, 279n49; and genocide,

INDEX · 327

253; and “mixedness,” 140–­43; and modernity, viii; ontology of, 31, 219, 281n60; and people-­of-­color framework, 207, 241; and poverty, 175, 76; and presumed criminality, 250; and race, 6; repudiation of, 143; and sexuality, 279n49; and social class, 207; and social death, 258, 263; and social exclusion, 206–­7; and social gains, 178; structuring positionality of, 38; and subjectivity, 28; and surveillance, 261; and terror, 252–­53; uniqueness of, 13–­15, 245, 263; and UPPs, 182, 187; and urban space, 201; and well-­being, 279n51. See also antiblackness Black–­nonblack dyad, 12, 26, 40–­43 Black Panther Party, 218, 223, 262, 266. See also Shakur, Assata; Zinzun, Michael Black people: adult criminal justice system and, 60; alienation of, 42–­43; in Brazil, 43–­44; early death of, 4, 7; gratuitous violence against, 33–­34, 156, 175, 240; health of, x–­xi; homicide rate among, x–­xi; hypersurveillance of, 266; incarceration rates of, 8–­9; as inherently suspect, 167, 175–­76; as nonbeings, 267; as nonpolitical subjects, 155, 163, 178, 290n17; as nonsubjects, 32, 219–­20; recidivism rates among, 124, 132. See also women, Black; youth, Black Black Power: and Black studies, 282n80; and global revolution, 260; theses, 246 Black Power (Ture and Hamilton), 301n12, 303n3 Black studies, 282n76; and antiblackness, 283n80; and Black Power movement, 282n80 Black suffering, vii, 254; and

antiblackness, 11, 243; as bargaining tool, viii; and Black cyborgs, 212, 242; at catalyst, 244; empathy toward, 237; Juntos! engagement with, 252–­53; and multiracial bloc, 241–­42, 252; and multiracial organizing, 242–­44; nonblack recognition of, 241; normative analyses of, 40; and oblique identification, 18; and people-­of-­color framework, 241, 243; recognition of, 206–­7, 211, 244, 247–­49, 256–­57; ubiquity of, 253 Black Women’s March, 22 bodies, Black, 281n61; abjection of, 61; CAPA exhibit, 214; fungibility of, 12–­13; gratuitous violence against, 33–­34, 175, 240; inviability of, 72; libidinal economy of, 33–­34; and social death, 72 bodies, White: and rape, 122 Bonilla-­Silva, Eduardo, 242 Borges, Hamilton, 304n25 Bradley, Tom, 233 Braidhill, Kathy, 229 Braz, Érico, 205 Brazil: affirmative action programs in, 159, 161, 173; antiblack exclusion in, 153, 177; antiblackness, negation of, 176; antiblack racism in, 21; antiblack violence in, 173–­74, 293n67; Black people in, 43–­44; electoral realignment in, 159–­60; as empire-­state, 276n5; genocide in, 11; homeownership in, x; homicide rates in, 9; institutional racism in, 11; mass protests in, 46–­47, 151–­54, 178; military police in, 166, 168, 178, 197–­99, 202, 302n16; multicultural project of development, 46; as multiracial democracy, 242; nonblacks in, 44, 154; police brutality in, 4, 9–­10, 156, 179, 188, 202, 240; police

328 · INDEX

homicides in, 155, 157, 249–­50, 297n53, 302n16; poverty in, x, 195; pro-­Black policies in, 161–­63; racial harmony thesis, 171–­72; residential segregation in, 43, 44, 278n31; skin color in, 44; social inequality in, 158; White status loss in, 159, 167–­68, 292n33. See also favelas; rolezinhos; UPP communities Brazilian Black Movement, 154 Brizola, Leonel, 171–­72, 202 Brown, Anthony, 225 Brown, Michael, 10, 15, 244 Browne, Simone, 275n3 Brown v. Board of Education, 11–­12 Bukhari, Safiya, 94, 227, 303n12 Bush, George W., 65 Cabral, Amilcar, 227 Cabral, Sérgio, 184, 201 Camarillo, Eddy, 225 Candelaria massacre, 19 Candomblé, 21 Cano, Ignacio, 197 caras-­pintadas movement, 151, 152, 289n2 Carmichael, Stokely. See Ture, Kwame Chapéu Mangueira (favela), 190; real estate speculation in, 193–­94; social climate of, 191–­92 Chavez, Cesar, 86 City of God (film), 171 civil rights movement (U.S.), 161–­62 Clinton, Hillary, 16 Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), 18–­20, 22, 47, 222, 224, 230, 237; Civilian Police Review Board campaign, 212; dissolution of, 248; FOIA request on, 226, 299n29; founding of, 213, 237; LAPD infiltration of, 221–­22, 225; lawsuit

against LAPD, 225–­26; mutilated Black bodies exhibit, 214; nonblack involvement in, 255, 303n24; police brutality archive of, 225; sparse participation in, 248. See also Zinzun, Michael Cochran, Johnnie, Jr., 235 COINTELPRO, 225, 226–­27 Collor de Mello, Fernando, 151; impeachment of, 152, 289n2 Coltrane, John, 103 Combahee River Collective, 301 Committee against the Genocide of São Paulo’s Black and Peripheral Youth, 154 Community in Support of the Gang Truce (CSGT), 214, 234, 248; dissolution of, 248. See also Coalition Against Police Abuse; Zinzun, Michael Conselho Nacional de Promoção da Igualdade Racial, 157 Costa, Antônio Carlos da, 203 criminal justice: antiblack logic of, 16; expansionist drive of, 3; and hypersurveillance, 264. See also incarceration; incarceration, juvenile; juvenile justice system Criola, 21–­22, 157, 237; social base of, 162; state engagement with, 160–­61, 162–­63, 292n40, 292n44; “Virtual Racism, Real Consequences” campaign, 21–­22 cyborg, feminist, 215, 298n11. See also Black cyborg dance of death, 78, 258, 267–­70, 304n22; reform, rejection of, 270 Davis, Angela, 240 de Blasio, Bill, 3 delinquency, 53, 54 (fig.), 284n2

INDEX · 329

Denton, Nancy, 278n31 diaspora, Black: and antiblackness, 178–­ 79, 182, 208; dispossession of, 79; and gender, 275n1; and genocide, 22; hypersurveillance of, 79 Díaz-­Cotto, Juanita, 117, 288n3 disidentification, Black, 153, 158, 239–­ 40; and antiblackness, 155; with colorblindness, 155; and empire-­ state, 240; with multiraciality, 155; with street protests, 155–­57, 178 dispossession: and antiblackness, 24–­ 25, 70, 81, 88, 112; of Black diaspora, 79; Black life equated with, 172–­73; of Black youth, 109–­10, 239; carceral logic of, 53; and the ghetto, 75–­79, 122; and hypersurveillance, 264; of incarcerated youth, 101, 106, 137, 144–­46; and incarceration, 90, 94, 99, 208; and juvenile detention facilities, 81–­82, 145; of Latin@ youth, 234; and prisons, 76, 109; and schools, 109; and school-­to-­prison pipeline, 70–­71; and the slave, 265; and social death, 78, 134–­35; of space, 63–­64, 65, 75; and surveillance, 70, 71 (fig.), 75; of time and space, 131–­35; transgenerational, 82, 124; and urban space, 109; of young women, 113 Does Heaven Have a Ghetto?, 82, 101–­2, 108 Duren, B. Kwaku (Robert Duren), 213, 222 Edwards, Erica, 215, 252 empire-­state: as antiblack, ix, 17–­18, 31, 47, 256; Black cyborg as trope for, 221; and Black death, 2; and Black disidentification, 240; and genocide, viii, 270; multiracial complicity with,

258; and multiracial integration, xii; multiracial project of, 258; vs. nation-­state, 276n5; negation of, viii; as racist process, 276n5; redemption of, 218–­19; reform of, 270; United States as, 276n5; violence of, 46–­47 empire-­state, Brazilian, 276n5; antiblackness of, 158, 163; Black estrangement from, 173; salvageability of, 256 Erickson, Steve, 222, 224 exclusion, Black: in Brazil, 153, 172; and rolezinhos, 165–­66; from schools, 51–­52; social, 206–­7; structure of, 182; and UPPs, 182 Fanon, Frantz, 32–­33, 35, 227, 282n75; and afterlife of slavery, 283n86; distrust of the colonial, 37; on nonblack subjectivity, 33–­35; on ontology of blackness, 31, 219, 281n60; on subjectivity, 37; transformative project of, 220; The Wretched of the Earth, 220 Favela Popular Movement (Movimento Popular de Favelas, MPF), 20–­21, 237 favelas, 295n12; community–­police antagonisms in, 196–­200; countersurveillance of police in, 189; displacement in, 193; drug dealer governance of, 189–­91, 195, 201–­2, 295n18; drug trade in, 183–­86, 188–­90, 191; and fear of the Black, 170, 171; as historically Black space, 172, 200–­201, 207; homeownership in, 192–­94, 296n25; neighborhood associations in, 188–­89; police abuse in, 189, 191; police presence in, 190; residents, police perceptions of, 181–­ 82; as semi-­autonomous zones, 186,

330 · INDEX

190–­91; social climate of, 190–­91, 196; social control in, 195; tourism in, 172, 193; vulnerability of, 196. See also UPP communities; UPPs Ferguson, Missouri, police force of, 10, 15 Ferreira, Cláudia da Silva, 17; and Black suffering, 254; gendered blackness of, 249–­50; and multiracial recognition, 251; police murder of, 249; as posthumous Black cyborg, 249, 251–­52; postmortem lynching of, 249, 250 Flint, Michigan, water crisis, 278n18 Ford Foundation, 282n80 Fórum Hip-­Hop, 154 Foucault, Michel, 2–­3 Freixo, Marcelo, 200–20­6 funk ostentação, 164 Gabriel, Rumba, 20–­21, 22 Garner, Eric, 10, 244 Gatonet, 193 Geledés, 21 gender: and Black cyborg, 298n11; and Black diaspora, 275n1; and blackness, 1, 139, 142, 275n1, 279n49; gender entrapment, 124–­25; and Middle Passage, 275n1; and race, 6, 63; and space, 63; and violence, 124. See also antiblackness, gendered genocide: antiblack, 11, 254–­55; Black, 39; of Black Brazilian youth, 11, 157, 291n24; and Black diaspora, 22; and blackness, 253; and the empire-­ state, viii, 270; and land usurpation, 276n5; protests against, 155; and social death, 254–­55; of U.S. Blacks, 10, 254 gentrification: in Austin, 62; of the barrio, 124; of the ghetto, 124 ghettos: antiblack foundations of, 79;

and barrios, 87; carceral logic of, 129; and containment, 75–­76, 78–­79; and criminal justice system, 115; and dispossession, 75–­79, 122; gentrification in, 124; and hypersegregation, 70, 74–­76, 278n31; and hypersurveillance, 76, 79; and punishment, 76–­ 78; as social-­spatial enclosures, 75 Gilmore, Ruth, 76; definition of racism, 291n17; on early death, 291n17 girls, incarcerated: and depression, 127, 140; and motherhood, 125–­29, 135, 137, 144; parenting training of, 126–­29, 130; and sexual abuse, 119–­ 20; solidarity among, 139. See also youth, incarcerated girls, incarcerated Black, 134–­40; and motherhood, 125–­29, 135, 137; support networks of, 116, 144–­45, 288n3; surveillance of, 138; vulnerability of, 119–­20. See also youth, Black; youth, incarcerated girls, incarcerated Latina: and motherhood, 125–­29; and sexual abuse, 119–­20; support networks of, 116–­17, 141, 144–­45, 288n3. See also youth, incarcerated; youth, Latin@ Glover, Danny, 235 Gonzalez, Jorge, 235 Gordon, Lewis, 26, 32, 35, 282n75; on Fanon, 281n60 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 85 Gray, Freddie, 10 Haddad, Fernando, 167 Haldeman, H. R., 275n3 Hamilton, Charles, 246, 303n3 Hamilton, Dontre, 16 Haraway, Donna, 215, 298n11 Hardt, Michael, 88 Harney, Stefano, 290n17

INDEX · 331

Hartman, Saidiya, 12, 33–­34, 35–­36, 282n75 Healy, Connor, 301n9 HIV/AIDS, xi, 86; prevention programs, 162, 292n40 Holden, Chris, 233 Holden, Nate, 233 Holder, Eric, Jr., 10 Hoover, J. Edgar, 226 hypersurveillance, 266, 292n40; and antiblackness, 24–­25; of Black and Latin@ youth, 58–­59, 113; of Black diaspora, 79; and criminal justice, 264; and dispossession, 264; of ghettos, 76, 79; of incarcerated youth, 145–46; transgenerational, 124; of young women, 113. See also surveillance I Come from a Teardrop, 82, 91–­93, 288n6 Ifill, Gwen, 16 imperialism, 282n76; and antiblackness, 282n79; revolutionary politics, 260, 301n2 incarceration: antiblack logic of, 275n2; and antiblackness, 52; and biopolitics, 128; of Black people, 8–­9; and dispossession, 99, 127, 129–­30; drug treatment in, 129; as expanding social fact, 57; of Latin@s, 3; naturalization of, 99; and necropolitics, 128; of nonblacks, 2, 10; in Rio de Janeiro, 51; in Texas, 51; and time, 129–­30; transgenerational, 55, 127, 129, 134. See also women, incarcerated incarceration, juvenile: and antiblackness, 263; Blacks, discrimination against, 144; and cisheteronormativity, 128, 139; and death, 102; and depression, 93–­94, 127, 140;

and dispossession, 90, 94, 99, 208; as dystopic, 102, 129; gendered antiblackness of, 113; naturalization of, 99; and patriarchy, 128, 139; and social death, 133–­34, 138; and surveillance, 90, 139, 208. See also girls, incarcerated; juvenile detention facilities; juvenile justice system; youth, incarcerated incarceration, mass, 275n2; and mass surveillance, 55 International Socialist Organization (ISO), 244 Jacarezinho (favela), 188–­89 Jackson, George, 94, 218, 258; on slavery, 266–­67; on structure of positionality, 267–­69 Jackson, Larry, 244 James, Joy, 35, 246, 264, 282n75 James, William, 281n61 Jones, Aiyana, 10, 244 Joseph, David, 10 Judy, Ronald, 282n75 Juntos!, 249–­51, 255; engagement with Black suffering, 252–­53 juvenile, definition of, 53 juvenile detention facilities, 81–­82; and adult prison, 91; antiblackness in, 143–­44; Black overrepresentation in, 87; and dispossession, 81–­82, 145; as dystopia, 129, 132; Latin@ majority in, 45, 56, 84, 87, 108–­9, 143, 145–46, 239; outside groups working in, 288n19; solitary confinement in, 104–­5, 108, 110, 134–­35, 136; surveillance in, 81, 137, 145. See also incarceration, juvenile juvenile justice system, 23–­24; in Austin, 45; Black overrepresentation in, 57–­58, 60, 61 (fig.), 77–­78, 84, 87; entry into, 51, 55; Latin@s

332 · INDEX

in, 45, 61 (fig.), 77–­78; and personal responsibility, 100, 287n18; referrals to, 55–­56, 69–­70; and residential segregation, 51; and schools, 51–­52; as transgenerational, 92; Whites in, 56. See also incarceration, juvenile Keeling, Kara, 282n75 King, Rodney, ix, 217 Latin@s: asymptotic relationship with Blacks, 45, 87, 88 (fig.), 89, 110–­11, 113, 146 (fig.), 147, 239; “Hispanic” as term for, 285n10; incarceration of, 3; oblique identification with Blacks, 45, 78, 81–­82, 87–­90, 111; proximity to Blacks, 77, 138, 142–­43; proximity to Whites, 43; recidivism rates among, 124, 132; surveillance of, 53, 55. See also youth, Latin@ Laymon, Kiese, 37–­38 Leme, Fernanda Paes, 205 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 280n52, 297n5 Lipsitz, George, 165, 302n14 Lorde, Audre, 279n49 Los Angeles Uprising (1992), ix–­x, 19, 217, 234, 248 Love, Eula, 225 Love Supreme, A (Coltrane), 103 Luis, Jefferson (MC Jota L), 174–­77 Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), x, xi, 153; affirmative action under, 159; market-­friendly policies of, 158; SEPPIR, institution of, 157; social base of, 158–­60, 291n29 Mães de Maio, 154 Malazo, Connie, 225 Malcolm X, 94 Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), 10

Marmo, José, 22 Marriott, David, 222, 282n75 Martin, Trayvon, ix, 8, 10 Martinez, Reyes, 225 Massey, Douglas, 278n31 Mbembe, Achille, 282n75 MC Daleste, 164 McDonald, Laquan, 10 McKittrick, Katherine, 40 Michael Zinzun Defense Committee (MZDC), 230–­32; as multiracial campaign, 232 Middle Passage, 283n86; and gender, 275n1 misrecognition, 46, 301n10; oblique identification as, 245. See also recognition Morris, Larry, 225 Moten, Fred, 37, 279n50, 290n17; on Afro-­pessimism, 283n81 Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU), 154 multiracial alliances, xi–­xii, 14, 232, 237, 250, 257; and Black autonomous organizing, 303n3; of Murray, 262–­63; and oblique identification, 14; of Zinzun, 212, 214, 242, 247, 251, 255, 262–­63, 300n3 multiracial analysis: as canonical, vii, xi; and decentering of antiblackness, 29–­31 multiracial blocs: of Black cyborgs, 241–­ 42, 245, 263, 269, 300n3; and Black suffering, 241–­42, 252; and denial of antiblackness, 253–­54, 259–­60, 300n3 multiraciality, xi; Black disidentification with, 155; and empire-­state, xii, 258 Murdock, George P., 281n72 Murray, George Mason, 260–­61; multiracial alliances of, 262–­63

INDEX · 333

NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 230, 232 National Black United Front (NBUF), 254 National Commission for the Promotion of Racial Equality, 157 National Crime Information Center (NCIS), 277n9 Never Meant to Survive (Vargas), 39 Neves, Tancredo, 152 Newton, Huey, 94, 218, 258 Nixon, Richard, 8, 275n3 nonblacks: and antiblackness, vii, 1–­5, 8–­9, 11, 14, 78–­79; and antiblack racism, 27; Black suffering, recognition of, 241; in Brazil, 44, 154; incarceration of, 2, 10; police brutality against, 1–­2, 4–­5, 9; as political subjects, 155; positionality of, 28; privilege of, 154; proximity to Whites, 43 Obama, Barack, xi; and Black improvement, x oblique identification, 5, 11–­12, 47–­48, 241; and antiblackness, 26, 78; and antiblack saturation, 9–­10; Black–­ Latin@, 24, 45, 78, 81–­82, 87–­90, 111; and Black suffering, 18; and denial of antiblackness, 18, 237; as diasporic, 182; and Latin@ youth, 24, 78; among light-­skinned Brazilians, 176; as misrecognition, 245; and multiracial alliance, 14; nonblack–­Black, 207, 212; and people-­of-­color framework, 12, 13, 208; and social death, 26 Occupy Leblon, 204 Odom, Georgia, 225 Oliveira, Ney dos Santos, 296n25

Omi, Michael, 41 Orange Is the New Black, 18 pacification, 181, 294n4; media coverage of, 186; as trope, 184. See also UPPs Pacifying Police Units. See UPPs Paim, Paulo, 160–­61 Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), 153; antipoverty policies of, 158, 160, 177; base of, 159–­60, 291n29, 292n30; Family Stipend program, 158, 159; integration of Black activists in, 161; MENSALÃO vote-­buying scandal, 158; redistributive policies of, 194–­ 95; social policies of, 165, 167 Patroclo, Maria Aparecida, 22 Patterson, Orlando, 34, 35, 133 Patterson, William, 10, 279n52, 281n72, 282n75 Peace and Freedom Party, 214, 230, 232 people-­of-­color framework, 12–­13, 26, 29–­31, 263, 301n10; and Black cyborg, 241; and Black oppression, 47–­48; and Black suffering, 241, 243; and Black–­White binary, 241; disavowal of antiblackness, 241–­43, 245; disavowal of blackness, 207, 241; as misrecognition, 245, 301n10; and nonblacks, 52; and oblique identification, 12, 13, 208; as post–­civil rights era hegemony, 242; and social death thesis, 52–­53; and whiteness, 41–­42; and White–­nonwhite dyad, 40–­41; and White supremacy, 40–­41, 241, 243, 245 pivetes, 169–­72, 175, 293n67 police brutality, 2, 237, 257, 260; activism against, 18–­19, 228, 233; against Black demonstrators, 156; in Brazil, 4, 9–­10, 156, 179, 188, 202, 240; in favelas, 189, 191; homicide rates

334 · INDEX

in, 9; and Rodney King, ix–­x, 217; and LAPD, 225; against Whites, 156; and Zinzun, 47, 211, 228–­33. See also Coalition Against Police Abuse police killings: multiracial protests against, 257 policing: as antiblack, vii, 178, 197; of Black and Latino neighborhoods, 53, 55; stop-­and-­frisk, 3, 10, 55, 58, 198; and surveillance technology, 3, 277n9; and transgenerational institutionalization, 55. See also UPPs positionalities: antiblack structure of, 36–­37, 40, 173, 178, 196, 239, 253, 256–­57, 261, 264–­65, 267–­70; asymmetrical relational, 281n61; Black, 37, 89; Black–­Latin@, 87–­89; nonblack, 28; and poverty, 178; racial, 6; and slavery, 267–­69; and social death, 37; structural, 7, 28, 31–­32, 34, 267; and subjectivity, 32 poverty: and blackness, 175–­76; among Blacks, x; in Brazil, x, 158, 160, 177, 195 Prado, Daniela Alvarez, 297n53 Pratt, Geronimo, 218 “Praying for Freedom” (Valdez), 91–­93, 96–­98, 106 prison abolition movement, 14, 40 prison–­industrial complex, 14 prisons: construction of, 2; and dispossession, 76, 109; as schools, 86; and slavery, 300n1. See also juvenile detention facilities probation, 55 probation referrals, 45, 52–­53, 54 (fig.); Black overrepresentation in, 56–­59, 71–­72; and institutionalization, 57; Latin@ overrepresentation in, 56, 59; and race, 56; to TJPC, 158, 160, 177; White underrepresentation in, 56

punishment: and antiblackness, 4, 52, 109; of Black youth, 51–­53, 59, 109; and the ghetto, 76–­78; of Latin@ youth, 51–­53; in schools, 51, 237, 239 race: and blackness, 6; and gender, 6, 63; and incarceration rates, 8–­9; and probation referrals, 56; and space, 63, 159; and UPPs, 187 racism: anti-­Mexican, 276n5; and death, 277n15; Gilmore definition of, 291n17 racism, antiblack, 21; in Brazil, 11, 21; and early death, 27; and empire-­ state, 276n5; as existential phenomenon, 281n60; and rolezinhos, 177; as structuring, 28, 281n60; and well-­being, 27 rape, 120–­21; of Black women, 33–­34, 122; and incarcerated women, 122–­ 23; of Latinas, 122; racialization of, 121; of White women, 122 raúlsalinas, 23, 84, 94 Reagan, Ronald, 298n14 Reaja ou Será Morta! / Reaja ou Será Morto!, 15, 44, 154–­55, 270, 304n25 recognition, 46; of antiblackness, 147, 155, 176, 240; asymptotic forms of, 45, 239; Black–­Brown, 53, 78–­79, 84, 110–­12, 145–­47; of Black suffering, 206–­7, 211, 241, 244, 247–­49, 256–­57; of incarcerated youth, 95; misrecognition, 46, 245, 301n10; multiracial, 251; nonblack–­Black, 212, 240–­41; transracial, 245. See also oblique identification redemption: discourse of, 83; of empire-­ state, 218–­19; narratives of, 84; as official trope, 115 Reeves, Anthony, 225 respectability, 83 Ribeiro, Matilde, 157

INDEX · 335

Rice, Tamir, 10 Richie, Beth, 121–­22; on gender entrapment, 124–­25 Rivers, Steve, 228–­29 Roberts, Dorothy, 110 Robinson, Cedric, 39, 265, 282n74 Rocha, Luciane, 22 Rocinha (favela), 46, 182, 201–­2; UPP post in, 197 Rodriguez, Dylan, 275n2, 300n1 rolezinhos, 22, 46–­47, 164–­67, 174–­76, 182, 293n50; and antiblackness, 176; and arrastões, 168–­74; and Black exclusion, 165–­66; and fear of Blacks, 172–­73; media representations of, 164, 166–­67, 184; as metaphors for Black integration, 165; police responses to, 165, 168–­69, 293n47; and presumed poverty, 175; racist responses to, 177; as response to oppression, 176–­77 Rooks, Noliwe, 282n80 Rousseff, Dilma, 152, 153, 156, 160, 240; economic downturn under, 195; on Ferreira murder, 250; impeachment of, 152 Salinas, Raúl, 23, 84, 94 salvation history: Black embrace of, 220; as narrative of progress, 215–­16 Sanders, Bernie, 16 Santos, Andréia, 304n25 Santos, Édson dos, 183 Santos, Sonia, 22 Saucier, P. Khalil, 283n80 Scheindlin, Shira A., 10 school discipline: and antiblackness, 52; and transgenerational institutionalization, 55 schools, public: Black and Latin@ youth in, 64; exclusion from, 51–­52; and juvenile justice system, 51–­52; as

prisons, 86, 91; punishment in, 51, 237, 239; surveillance in, 109 schools, Texas public, 63–­64; antiblack discrimination in, 67; discretionary referrals in, 65; and dispossession, 109; dropout rates in, 67–­68; special education referrals, 286n41; suspensions in, 65; zero-­tolerance policies in, 65–­66 school suspension, 69 school-­to-­prison pipeline, 64, 264; and dispossession, 70–­71; and surveillance, 70–­71 Scott, Walter, 10 segregation, economic: in Austin, 61–­64; and health, 74; and social mobility, 51 segregation, racial: in Austin, 63–­64; and social mobility, 51 segregation, residential, 11, 237; and antiblackness, vii, 52, 178, 278n31; in Austin, 51; and Black health, 73–­74; in Brazil, 43, 44, 278n31; hypersegregation, 70, 74–­76, 278n31; and juvenile justice system, 51–­52; in Rio de Janeiro, 51; and transgenerational institutionalization, 55 self-­determination, 262–­63; and antiblackness, vii; as mode of analysis, vii; as organizing principle, vii; and transcendental imperative, 271 SEPPIR (Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality), 157, 161 Settlage, Maybe, 247 Sexton, Jared, 6, 35, 37, 282n75; Moten on, 283n81; on multiracialism, 300n3, 300n5 sex work: and young Black women, 119–­20, 288n8 Shakur, Assata, 94, 138, 227, 258, 265–­ 66, 303n7; Black Panther Party and, 266; on Black self-­determination,

336 · INDEX

262; on Black social death, 265; multiracial alliances of, 262–­63; on slave trope, 263–­65 Silva, Elizabete Gomes da, 182–­83, 204 Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula da. See Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) slave figure, 258; and dance of death, 267–­70; dispossession of, 265; as embodiment of social death, 259; as nonbeing, 265; and people-­of-­color framework, 263; as proxy for Black condition, 267; and radicalization, 303n12; and revolution, 267–­69; Shakur on, 263–­65; as social fiction, 259; and transcendental imperative, 265; and ubiquitous violence, 268 slavery: afterlife of, 33, 35–­37, 89, 230, 283n86; and Black cyborg, 48; and Black positionality, 89; and fungibility, 13; and gratuitous violence, 35; logic of, 13; as ongoing fact, 35; and social death, 34, 145, 263–­64, 266–­ 67, 279n52; suicide missions under, 39; Thirteenth Amendment, 264 Slawson, John A., 231 Smith, Yvette, 10 Soares, Luiz Eduardo, 297n43 social death, 115; and antiblackness, 52, 74; and Black bodies, 72; and blackness, 35, 258, 263; and Black positionality, 37; Blacks as paradigmatic subjects of, 77, 111–­12; of Black youth, 110–­11; and dispossession, 78; and freedom, 76; and imprisonment, 72, 74; of incarcerated youth, 145–­46; institutional dynamics of, 81; and juvenile incarceration, 133–­34, 138; of Latin@ youth, 110–­11; and oblique identification, 26; as ontological given, 84; and people-­of-­ color framework, 52–­53; and physical death, 267–­68; and positionality,

90; reproduction of, 51; skepticism of, 35–­36; slave as embodiment of, 259; and space, 76–­77; theorists of, 35–­36; and time/space dispossession, 134–­35; transgenerational, 81; and violence, 34–­35 solidarity, multiracial, xi–­xii, 14, 237. See also multiracial alliances Solomon, Eddie, 225 Souza, Amarildo de, 17, 179–­80; and antiblackness, 207–­8; arrest and torture of, 10, 182–­83, 207; and Black suffering, 254; and multiracial recognition, 251; murder of, 46, 196, 207–­8, 250, 297n53; as posthumous Black cyborg, 249, 251–­52; protests of murder, 182, 203–­6, 242, 250–­51; social context of, 201–­2 SOY (Save Our Youth), 23; mural, 85–­ 87, 86 (fig.); origins of, 94 SOY writing workshops, 81–­85, 91–­101, 134–­43; music in, 85, 103, 105–­6, 108, 134–­35; surveillance of, 93; youth poetry of, 75–­76, 107–­8, 110, 114–­21, 125–­26, 128, 130–­31, 133, 138–­39, 141, 287n18 space: and antiblackness, 165–­66, 168; Black spaces, 187; and dispossession, 63–­64, 65, 75; favelas as Black space, 172, 200–­201, 207; and gender, 63; and race, 63, 159 space, public: Black presence in, 171–­74; and fear of Blacks, 171–­72; integration of, 170–­73 space, urban: and blackness, 201; and dispossession, 109; and hypersegregation, 70; surveillance of, 109. See also ghettos Spillers, Hortense, 275n1, 282n75 Standard, Dwayne, 225 stop-­and-­frisk, 3, 10, 55; and aggressive policing, 58; compared to UPP, 198

INDEX · 337

Strausberg, Chinta, 254 street protests, Brazil, 151–­54; Black absence in, 152–­53, 182; demographics of, 153–­54; Diretas Já (1984), 152; Fora Collor (1992), 152; Marcha Zumbi dos Palmares (1995), 154; Marcha Zumbi + 10 (2005), 154; social media organizing of, 154; and Souza murder, 202–­6, 251; vinegar revolt (2013), 46–­47, 151–­54, 178 structure: and agency, 27–­28, 279n52 subjectivity: Fanon on, 33–­35, 37; fusion of Black–­Brown subjectivity, 88–­89; and positionalities, 32 subjectivity, Black, 2, 47; and blackness, 28; Blacks as nonsubjects, 32, 219–­20; and Black transcendental sensibility, 39; and politics, viii, 155, 163, 178, 290n17, 291n18 subjectivity, nonblack, 12–­13, 32, 155; Fanon on, 33–­35 surveillance: antiblack logic of, 3; and antiblackness, 60, 70, 112; of Black and Latin@ neighborhoods, 53, 55; countersurveillance, 189, 199; and dispossession, 70, 71 (fig.), 75; of incarcerated youth, 90, 139, 145–46, 208; in juvenile detention facilities, 81, 137, 145; and prison, 109; and schools, 109; and school-­to-­prison pipeline, 70–­71; technology of, 2, 277n9; transgenerational, 82; ubiquity of, 53, 55; of urban space, 109. See also hypersurveillance Taylor, Frank, 229 terror: antiblack, 10, 12, 35, 156, 163, 175–­77, 207, 220–­21; and blackness, 252–­53; and gratuitous violence, 34; state-­sanctioned, 207 Texas Advocates for Justice, 287n18 Texas Appleseed, 64–­65

Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD), 55, 101, 284n2 Texas Juvenile Justice System, 53, 54 (fig.), 284n2 Texas Juvenile Probation Commission (TJPC), 53, 56, 59, 284n2; referrals to, 158, 160, 177. See also Texas Juvenile Justice Department Texas Youth Commission (TYC), 53, 64–­65, 284n2. See also Texas Juvenile Justice Department Thatcher, Margaret, 298n14 Thelen, Czarina, 23, 81, 85, 105; introduction to Does Heaven Have a Ghetto?, 102 Thigpenn, Anthony, 213 transcendence, xii; and antiblackness, 25, 39–­40, 270; embrace of, 270; and “Racial Realism,” 29; and reform, 269; sensibility, 39; transcendental imperative, 265, 271 Ture, Kwame (Stokely Carmichael), 246, 303n3 UNEafro (União de Núcleos de Educação Popular para Negra/os e Classe Trabalhadora), 154, 177 United States: as empire-­state, 276n5; geographies of antiblackness in, 44–­ 45; residential segregation in, 278n31 UPP communities: bodily injuries in, 181, 194–­95; countersurveillance of police in, 199; crime rates in, 187, 295n11, 295n15; police perceptions of, 197–­98; responses to UPPs, 186–­87; social climate in, 194–­95; vulnerability in, 194–­95 UPPs (Pacifying Police Units), 179, 181, 250; abuse by, 183, 198; academic assessments of, 187, 203, 296n43; and antiblackness, 187; and Black exclusion, 182; and blackness, 182, 187;

338 · INDEX

community support for, 185, 191–­93, 196, 199–­200, 295n10; creation of, 294n4; intimidation practices of, 198; media coverage of, 187, 203, 295n10; police resistance to, 197–­ 200, 201, 205–­6, 249; policing paradigm shift of, 184; public consensus on, 181, 185–­86; and race, 187 Valdez, Rene, 23, 81, 85, 105 Van Peebles, Mario, 235 Vernon, Robert, 233 violence: antiblack, 156, 173–­75, 293n67; antiviolence, 227–­28, 235; Black vulnerability to, 155; against Black women, 123–­25; and empire-­state, 46–­47; gendered, 124; and gendered antiblackness, 34, 122; gratuitous, 12, 33–­34, 40, 175, 240; and incarcerated women, 124, 145; state, 156, 206–­7, 255; against women, 121–­25 Vital Machado, Douglas Roberto, 182 Vitor, 304n25 Ward, George, 225 Ward, Jesmyn, 37–­38 war on drugs, 8 Werneck, Jurema, 21, 22, 157–­58 whiteness: and people-­of-­color framework, 41–­42; and power, 138 White–­nonwhite dyad: as overdeterminant, 41; and people-­of-­color framework, 40–­41; White as paradigm of humanity in, 42 White supremacy, 277n5; adaptability of, 280n57; antiblack supremacy, 213; global, 32–­33; and governing, 280n57; and people-­of-­color framework, 40–­41, 241, 243, 245 Wilderson, Frank, 32–­33, 35–­37, 40, 279n36, 282n75; on antiblack terror,

177; on Black subjects and politics, 290n17; Moten on, 283n81; on violence against Black people, 156, 175 Wilson, Tarika, 10 Winant, Howard, 41, 242, 280n5 women, Black: hair, 140–­41, 142; rape of, 33–­34, 122; sexual abuse of, 123–­24; violence against, 123–­25. See also girls, incarcerated Black women, incarcerated: drug use among, 122–­23; and motherhood, 125–­29; and rape, 122–­23; sexual abuse of, 123; violence against, 122–­25. See also girls, incarcerated Woods, Clyde, 75 Woods, Tryon, 279n36, 283n80 Worker’s Party. See Partido dos Trabalhadores Worrill, Conrad, 254 Wynter, Sylvia, 37, 40, 282n80, 283n86 Xavier, Lúcia, 157–­58, 291n26; on “special moment” for Black Brazilians, 158, 160–­61, 163; on structural antiblackness of Brazilian state, 162–­63 Yancey, George, 42–­43 Yancy, George, 282n75, 301n10 youth, Black: certification as adults, 59–­60; criminalization of, 51; disciplinary referrals of, 69–­70; discretionary referrals of, 66–­70, 66 (fig.), 68 (fig.); dispossession of, 109–­10, 239; dropout rates of, 67–­68; drug use among, 123; fear of, 169–­71; in foster care, 110, 123; hypersurveillance of, 58–­59; in juvenile justice system, 57–­58, 60, 61 (fig.), 77–­78, 84, 87; presumed criminality of, 170, 175; probation referrals of, 56–­59, 71–­72; in public schools, 64; and

INDEX · 339

punishment, 51–­53, 59, 109; and social death, 110–­11; social membership of, 83–­84; support networks of, 116, 144–­45, 288n3; TJJD commitments to, 59–­60; unjustified arrests of, 58; vulnerability of, 109–­10, 119–­20 youth, incarcerated: and adult incarceration, 145; and antiblackness, 101; community involvement with, 100–­101; control of, 91, 102–­3, 131–­33, 137–­38, 144; and depression, 93–­94; discrimination against, 101; and dispossession, 101, 106, 137, 144–­46; futurity of, 130; as genealogical isolates, 133; girls, 98–­99; job training for, 100; medicating of, 93–­94, 103, 137; nonrecognition of, 95; and parenting, 146; recidivism rates among, 124, 132, 144–­45; and social death, 146–­47; surveillance of, 145–46 youth, Latin@: criminalization of, 51; disciplinary referrals of, 69–­70; discretionary referrals of, 66 (fig.), 66–­ 67; dispossession of, 239; dropout rates of, 67–­68; hypersurveillance of, 58–­59; intermediate positioning of, 59; as juvenile detention majority, 45, 56, 84, 87, 108–­9, 143, 145–46, 239; in juvenile justice system, 45, 61 (fig.), 77–­78; and oblique identification, 24, 78; probation referrals of, 56, 59; in public schools, 64; and punishment, 51–­53; and social death, 110–­11; social membership of, 83–­84; support networks of, 116, 144–­45, 288n3; TJJD commitments to, 59; unjustified arrests of, 58

youth, White: in juvenile justice system, 57, 61 (fig.); probation referrals and, 56 zero-­tolerance policies: consistency of discipline under, 68–­69; in Texas public schools, 65–­66 Zero Tolerance Task Force, 67–­69 Zinzun, Florence, 223, 229 Zinzun, Michael, 18, 22–­23, 302n14; activism against police brutality, 228, 233; on antiblack hatred, 298n17; as Black cyborg, 211, 213, 215–­16, 221, 232–­33, 236–­37, 246–­48, 257, 261; Black Panther Party member, 211, 213, 217, 222, 226, 228, 231; charisma of, 216, 222–­23, 248; children of, 229; cisnormative masculinity of, 218; city council run, 233; Civilian Police Review Board campaign, 212; defamation lawsuit, 233; disputes with police, 221–­25, 228; early life of, 212–­13; gang truce negotiating, 214, 228, 234, 235; on integration, 217; lawsuit against LAPD, 221–­22, 225–­ 26; lawsuit against Pasadena, 233; multiracial organizing of, 212, 214, 242, 247, 251, 255, 262–­63, 300n3; NBUF, founding of, 254; phallocentrism of, 298n11; police brutality against, 47, 211, 228–­33; respectability of, 236; state violence against, 255; violence, rejection of, 227–­28, 235; vulnerability of, 217, 222, 228–­ 29. See also Coalition Against Police Abuse

JOÃO H. COSTA VARGAS is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. He is author of Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles (Minnesota, 2006).