Racism and Ableism are historically intertwined, the permutation addresses the flaws in both approaches

Racism and Ableism are historically intertwined, the permutation addresses the flaws in both approaches

Futurity DA: Futurity is objectively better than the alt – blackness is not static but rather exists as a force constantly propelling itself toward progress

Nihilism DA- Reducing anti-blackness to the level of ontology is counter-productive—cements nihilism and has no alt

No social death – history proves

Brown, 09 (Vincent Brown is the professor of History and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, December 2009, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/vbrown/files/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

THE PREMISE OF ORLANDO PATTERSON’S MAJOR WORK, that enslaved Africans were natally alienated and culturally isolated, was challenged even before he published his influential thesis, primarily by scholars concerned with “survivals” or “retentions” of African culture and by historians of slave resistance. In the early to mid-twentieth century, when Robert Park’s view of “the Negro” predominated among scholars, it was generally assumed that the slave trade and slavery had denuded black people of any ancestral heritage from Africa. The historians Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits argued the opposite. Their research supported the conclusion that while enslaved Africans could not have brought intact social, political, and religious institutions with them to the Americas, they did maintain significant aspects of their cultural backgrounds.32 Herskovits ex- amined “Africanisms”—any practices that seemed to be identifiably African—as useful symbols of cultural survival that would help him to analyze change and continuity in African American culture.33 He engaged in one of his most heated scholarly disputes with the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, a student of Park’s, who empha- sized the damage wrought by slavery on black families and folkways.34 More recently, a number of scholars have built on Herskovits’s line of thought, enhancing our understanding of African history during the era of the slave trade. Their studies have evolved productively from assertions about general cultural heritage into more precise demonstrations of the continuity of worldviews, categories of belonging, and social practices from Africa to America. For these scholars, the preservation of distinctive cultural forms has served as an index both of a resilient social personhood, or identity, and of resistance to slavery itself. 35 Scholars of slave resistance have never had much use for the concept of social death. The early efforts of writers such as Herbert Aptheker aimed to derail the popular notion that American slavery had been a civilizing institution threatened by “slave crime.”36 Soon after, studies of slave revolts and conspiracies advocated the idea that resistance demonstrated the basic humanity and intractable will of the enslaved—indeed, they often equated acts of will with humanity itself. As these writ- ers turned toward more detailed analyses of the causes, strategies, and tactics of slave revolts in the context of the social relations of slavery, they had trouble squaring abstract characterizations of “the slave” with what they were learning about the en- slaved.37 Michael Craton, who authored Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, was an early critic of Slavery and Social Death, protesting that what was known about chattel bondage in the Americas did not confirm Patterson’s definition of slavery. “If slaves were in fact ‘generally dishonored,’ ” Craton asked, “how does he explain the degrees of rank found among all groups of slaves—that is, the scale of ‘reputation’ and authority accorded, or at least acknowledged, by slave and master alike?” How could they have formed the fragile families documented by social historians if they had been “natally alienated” by definition? Finally, and per- haps most tellingly, if slaves had been uniformly subjected to “permanent violent domination,” they could not have revolted as often as they did or shown the “varied manifestations of their resistance” that so frustrated masters and compromised their power, sometimes “fatally.”38 The dynamics of social control and slave resistance falsified Patterson’s description of slavery even as the tenacity of African culture showed that enslaved men, women, and children had arrived in the Americas bearing much more than their “tropical temperament.” The cultural continuity and resistance schools of thought come together pow- erfully in an important book by Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Re- sistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. In Rucker’s analysis of slave revolts, conspiracies, and daily recalcitrance, African concepts, values, and cul- tural metaphors play the central role. Unlike Smallwood and Hartman, for whom “the rupture was the story” of slavery, Rucker aims to reveal the “perseverance of African culture even among second, third, and fourth generation creoles.”39 He looks again at some familiar events in North America—New York City’s 1712 Coromantee revolt and 1741 conspiracy, the 1739 Stono rebellion in South Carolina, as well as the plots, schemes, and insurgencies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner—deftly teasing out the African origins of many of the attitudes and actions of the black rebels. Rucker outlines how the transformation of a “shared cultural heritage” that shaped collective action against slavery corresponded to the “various steps Africans made in the process of becoming ‘African American’ in culture, orientation, and identity.”40

Homogenization DA: The neg conceptualization of anti-blackness as political ontology creates a false dichotomy between destroying this world or being subjected to it --- that homogenizes the experience of the 35 million black people in the US and displaces the possibility of pragmatic practices which can resist anti-blackness.

Kline, 17 (David Kline, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University, “The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology,” Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2017, p. 51-69, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5325/critphilrace.5.1.0051.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents )

Wilderson’s critique of Agamben is certainly correct within the specific framework of a political ontology of racial positioning. His description of anti-Black antagonism shows a powerful macropolitical sedimentation of [End Page 56] Black suffering in which Black bodies are ontologically frozen into (non-) beings that stand in absolute political distinction from those “who do not magnetize bullets” (Wilderson 2010, 80). In the same framework, Jared Sexton, whose work is very close to Wilderson’s, is also right when he shows how biopolitical thought—specifically the Agambenian form centered on questions of sovereignty—and its variant of “necropolitics” found in Mbembe has so often run aground on the figure of the slave (see Sexton 2010).5 Locating the reality of anti-Blackness wholly within this account of political ontology does provide an undeniably effective analysis of its violence and sedimentation over the modern world as a whole. However, in terms of a general structure, I understand Wilderson’s (and Sexton’s) political ontology to remain tied in form to Agamben’s even as it seemingly discounts it and therefore remains bound to some of the problems and limitations that beset such a formal structure, as I’ll discuss in a moment. Despite the critique of Agamben’s ontological blind spots regarding the extent to which Black suffering is non-analogous to non-black suffering, as I’ve tried to show, Wilderson keeps the basic contours of Agamben’s ontological structure in place, maintaining a formal political ontology that expands the bottom end of the binary structure so as to locate an absolute zero-point of political abjection within Black social death. To be clear, this is not to say that the difference between the content and historicity of Wilderson’s social death and Agamben’s bare life does not have profound implications for how political ontology is conceived or how questions of suffering and freedom are posed. Nor is it to say that a congruence of formal structure linking Agamben and Wilderson should mean that their respective projects are not radically differentiated and perhaps even opposed in terms of their broader implications and revelations. Rather, what I want to focus on is how the absolute prioritization of a formal ontological framework of autonomous and irreconcilable spheres of positionality—however descriptively or epistemologically accurate in terms of a regime of ontology and its corresponding macropolitics of anti-Blackness—ends up limiting a whole range of possible avenues of analysis that have their proper site within what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the micropolitical. The issue here is the distinction between the macropolitical (molar) and the micropolitical (molecular) fields of organization and becoming. Wilderson and Afro-pessimism in general privilege the macropolitical field in which Blackness is always already sedimented and rigidified into a political onto-logical position that prohibits movement and the possibility of what Fred Moten calls “fugitivity.” The absolute privileging of the macropolitical as [End Page 57] the frame of analysis tends to bracket or overshadow the fact that “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 213). Where the macropolitical is structured around a politics of molarisation that immunizes itself from the threat of contingency and disruption, the micropolitical names the field in which local and singular points of connection produce the conditions for “lines of flight, which are molecular” (ibid., 216). The micropolitical field is where movement and resistance happens against or in excess of the macropolitical in ways not reducible to the kind of formal binary organization that Agamben and Wilderson’s political ontology prioritizes. Such resistance is not necessarily positive or emancipatory, as lines of flight name a contingency that always poses the risk that whatever develops can become “capable of the worst” (ibid., 205). However, within this contingency is also the possibility of creative lines and deterritorializations that provide possible means of positive escape from macropolitical molarisations. Focusing on Wilderson, his absolute prioritization of a political onto-logical structure in which the law relegates Black being into the singular position of social death happens, I contend, at the expense of two significant things that I am hesitant to bracket for the sake of prioritizing political ontology as the sole frame of reference for both analyzing anti-Black racism and thinking resistance within the racialized world. First, it short-circuits an analysis of power that might reveal not only how the practices, forms, and apparatuses of anti-Black racism have historically developed, changed, and reassembled/reterritorialized in relation to state power, national identity, philosophical discourse, biological discourse, political discourse, and so on—changes that, despite Wilderson’s claim that focusing on these things only “mystify” the question of ontology (Wilderson 2010, 10), surely have implications for how racial positioning is both thought and resisted in differing historical and socio-political contexts. To the extent that Blackness equals a singular ontological position within a macropolitical structure of antagonism, there is almost no room to bring in the spectrum and flow of social difference and contingency that no doubt spans across Black identity as a legitimate issue of analysis and as a site/sight for the possibility of a range of resisting practices. This bracketing of difference leads him to make some rather sweeping and opaquely abstract claims. For example, discussing a main character’s abortion in a prison cell in the 1976 film Bush Mama, Wilderson says, “Dorothy will abort her baby at the clinic or on the floor of her prison cell, not because she fights for—and either wins [End Page 58] or loses—the right to do so, but because she is one of 35 million accumulated and fungible (owned and exchangeable) objects living among 230 million subjects—which is to say, her will is always already subsumed by the will of civil society” (Wilderson 2010, 128, italics mine). What I want to press here is how Wilderson’s statement, made in the sole frame of a totalizing political ontology overshadowing all other levels of sociality, flattens out the social difference within, and even the possibility of, a micropolitical social field of 35 million Black people living in the United States. Such a flattening reduces the optic of anti-Black racism as well as Black sociality to the frame of political ontology where Blackness remains stuck in a singular position of abjection. The result is a severe analytical limitation in terms of the way Blackness (as well as other racial positions) exists across an extremely wide field of sociality that is comprised of differing intensities of forces and relational modes between various institutional, political, socio-economic, religious, sexual, and other social conjunctures. Within Wilderson’s political ontological frame, it seems that these conjunctures are excluded—or at least bracketed—as having any bearing at all on how anti-Black power functions and is resisted across highly differentiated contexts. There is only the binary ontological distinction of Black and Human being; only a macropolitics of sedimented abjection. Furthermore, arriving at the second analytical expense of Wilderson’s prioritization of political ontology, I suggest that such a flattening of the social field of Blackness rigidly delimits what counts as legitimate political resistance. If the framework for thinking resistance and the possibility of creating another world is reduced to rigid ontological positions defined by the absolute power of the law, and if Black existence is understood only as ontologically fixed at the extreme zero point of social death without recourse to anything within its own position qua Blackness, then there is not much room for strategizing or even imagining resistance to anti-Blackness that is not wholly limited to expressions and events of radically apocalyptic political violence: the law is either destroyed entirely, or there is no freedom. This is not to say that I am necessarily against radical political violence or its use as an effective tactic. Nor is to say that I think the law should be left unchallenged in its total operation, but rather that there might be other and more pragmatically oriented practices of resistance that do not necessarily have the absolute destruction of the law as their immediate aim that should count as genuine resistance to anti-Blackness. For Wilderson, like Agamben, anything less than an absolute overturning [End Page 59] of the order of things, the violent destruction and annihilation of the full structure of antagonisms, is deemed as “[having nothing] to do with Black liberation” (quoted in Zug 2010). Of course, the desire for the absolute overturning of the currently existing world, the decisive end of the existing world and the arrival of a new world in which “Blacks do not magnetize bullets” should be absolutely affirmed. Further, the severity and gratuitous nature of the macropolitics of anti-Blackness in relation to the possibility of a movement towards freedom should not be bracketed or displaced for the sake of appealing to any non-Black grammar of exploitation or alienation (Wilderson 2010, 142). The question I want to pose, however, is how the insistence on the absolute priority of framing this world within a rigid structure of formal ontological positions can only revert to what amounts to a kind of negative theological and eschatological blank horizon in which actually existing social sites and modes of resisting praxis are displaced and devalued by notions of whatever it is that might arrive from beyond. It seems that Wilderson, again, is close to Agamben on this point, whose ontological structure also severely delimits what might count as genuine resistance to the regime of sovereignty. As Dominick LaCapra points out regarding the possibility of liberation outside of Agamben’s formal ontological structure of bare life and sovereignty, A further enigmatic conjunction in Agamben is between pure possibility and the reduction of being to mere or naked life, for it is the emergence of mere naked life in accomplished nihilism that simultaneously generates, as a kind of miraculous antibody or creation ex nihilo, pure possibility or utterly blank utopianism not limited by the constraints of the past or by normative structures of any sort. (LaCapra 2009, 168) With life’s ontological reduction to the abjection of bare life or social death, the only possible way out, it seems, is the impossible possibility of what Agamben refers to as the “suspension of the suspension,” the laying aside of the distinction between bare life and political life, the “Shabbat of both animal and man” (Agamben 2003, 92). It is in this sense that Agamben offers, again in the words of LaCapra, a “negative theology in extremis . . . an empty utopianism of pure, unlimited possibility” (LaCapra 2009, 166). The result is a discounting and devaluing of other, perhaps more pragmatic and less eschatological, practices of resistance. With the “all or nothing” [End Page 60] approach that posits anything less than the absolute suspension of the current state of things as unable to address the violence and abjection of bare life, there is not much left in which to appeal than a kind of apocalyptic, messianic, and contentless eschatological future space defined by whatever this world is not.

Blackness is not ontological – violence is contingent and social life is possible – Afropessimists are wrong

Kauanui, 17 (J. Kēhaulani, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, “Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity”, American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 2, June 2017, pp. 257-265, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663323 )

In October 2016 I attended a lecture by Frank B. Wilderson III sponsored by Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. I had read his book Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, along with select articles and interviews—but had yet to hear him present his work. The talk was titled “Afro-Pessimism and the Ruse of Analogy.” I went in already critical given my familiarity with Afro-Pessimist thought—not only through his work, but that of Jared Sexton and other scholars.1 As Wilderson himself explains, Afro-Pessimism is an “unflinching paradigmatic analysis on the structures of modernity produced by slavery and genocide.” Drawing on the works of Orlando Patterson, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers (among others), Afro-Pessimists theorize blackness as a position of accumulation and fungibility, that is, as a condition—or relation—of ontological death.2 In Red, White & Black, Wilderson theorizes the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism (an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a (reconcilable) conflict. He, along with other Afro-Pessimists, theorizes the workings of civil society as contiguous with slavery and claims the “inability of the slave to translate space into place and time into event.”3 Wilderson’s insistence of absolute negativity destroys the possibility for coalitional politics because it frames the Black Body as something that will always stand in an antagonistic position to the world.4 At Wilderson’s talk I took careful notes, and by the end of the lecture I was so perturbed, I figured I had better attend the faculty seminar the next morning to further engage. There, I mustered up the wherewithal to ask Wilderson about his argument the night before—and in his work at large—that there is no institutional capacity in which Blacks can assert leverage over anyone; that they are only instruments, not agents. I cited the case of Bacon’s Rebellion—an armed revolt in 1676 led by Nathaniel Bacon against the rule of the Virginia colonial governor William Berkeley—and asked Wilderson how he could reconcile his position in light of a tough example of black agency in uniting with indentured and other poor Europeans in committing genocidal violence against Indian tribes. He responded by asking me why I would “privilege Blacks participating in genocide over the role of whites.” I did not (and do not)—so I simply reiterated that I wanted to understand how he reconciled his argument with that particular history. He replied by asking me why I didn’t instead look to the horses they rode and the bullets they used, provided by the whites that made the Blacks mere “instruments” of their project. I noted that this was during the period prior to the hardening categories that created racially based chattel slavery in the region and that there was variation among African individuals there at that time in terms of their social and legal status. I also added that the question seemed especially pertinent given his assertions in Red, Black & White, in which much of the argument depends on his reading of Indian genocide, since he critiques “the Red Ontologist” for privileging indigenous sovereignty when genocide is essential to the ontology of the Indian.5 But this didn’t get us any farther. He pointedly told me, “We are not going to agree on this.” Given this AQ forum on Patrick Wolfe’s Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (2016), I want to take up his work to examine Afro-Pessimism in relation to issues raised by the exchange recounted above. I take up the question of Afro-Pessimism in this context, since Wolfe repeatedly states (and deftly demonstrates), “race is not a static ontology.”6 He notes, “As its name suggests, [race] is an ongoing, ever-shifting contest.”7 Among many other interventions, Traces of History challenges the understanding that blackness was or is transcendent. To assert blackness as ontological is to recapitulate colonizing thought, to take colonial ideology as truth. However, Wolfe went beyond merely stating that race is a social construct. As Ben Silverstein put it in his memorial essay, “Patrick insisted instead on thinking about race as one element of the Althusserian totality, an overdetermining level of the social formation.”8 Wolfe therefore brings “poststructuralist rigor to bear on materialist approaches to ideology.”9 Through his careful historical work, Wolfe theorized race as a process, examining racialization as practice alongside race as doctrine. He argued, “race is colonialism speaking.”10 In other words, European colonizers racialized the colonized in specific ways that mark and reproduce (in ways that can change across time) the unequal relationships into which colonial actors initially co-opted these populations. Wolfe’s theory enables a critique of racialization as an effect of colonialism, the working out in practice of colonial ideology. This is why he called for a shift “from the register of race to that of colonialism,” identifying dimensions of the colonial dispensation that “cannot be expressed in the language of phe- notypes.” The difference here, then, between Wolfe and Wilderson (as well as other Afro-Pessimists), is that they register not from race to colonialism, or even from race to slavery, but slavery to race. Wilderson universalizes a particular rendition of black experience to claim that the Black Body is in a perpetual state of ontological death because of the violence of the Middle Passage. He traces to when Arabs inaugurated this thirteen hundred years ago with the opening of the African slave trade.11 His main argument for the ontological death (cast in singular terms) of the Black Body is because of Blacks’ incapacity to develop their own subjectivity. As he puts it, “Blackness is incapacity in its pure and unadulterated form.”12 To get at this problematic, I offer a brief account of Bacon’s Rebellion as an example of a case in which the Black Body is not socially dead—not incapacitated. Thus I challenge the ontological absolutism that is endemic to Afro-Pessimist thought at large. Several black radical scholars have challenged this “ontological absolutism.” For example, David Marriott notes, “Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures the whole of being. It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic.”13 Moreover, Marriott argues that the claim that “Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve. . . . This logic—and the denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic, namely, a logic of non-recuperability.”14 My critique here is rooted in historicizing race—that active element of racialization—races as “traces” of history. Hence, looking at the case study of Bacon’s Rebellion, I challenge Wilderson’s advancement of a purity argument that also happens to be ahistorical. I come at this debate as a scholar of sovereignty, race, and indigeneity trying to reckon with these troubling formulations.15 Bacon’s Rebellion shows that racialized chattel slavery was a deliberate choice the English elites came to over time. And here I draw on Wolfe’s Traces of History, along with the work of the historian Edmund Morgan, to offer a rudimentary overview.16 In 1619 Virginia, West Africans arrived after the Dutch sold them as slaves to the English settlers. However, the English did not immediately devise this status for them; they were not slaves in the sense of persons reduced as property and required to work for life without wages.17 In 1619 Virginia had no law legalizing slavery, and many Africans were sold as bonded laborers or indentured servants who lived and labored alongside poor Europeans—bound by contract to serve a master in order to repay the expense of their passage and other debts.18 Some worked in the fields side by side, lived together, ate together, shared housing, and more. Yet, as early as 1630, the English started singling out Africans for differential treatment, such as meting out worse punishments for running away and refusing to allow them to carry arms. Still, during this period, there were property-owning free Africans in the Chesapeake (e.g., Anthony Johnson, who arrived in 1621).19 This history shows that the course of race in seventeenth-century Virginia was not predetermined, a point more than a few historians have made.20 The plantation system and the expansion of settler capitalism that furthered English settler control over and conquest of native lands demanded additional pliant, captive labor. However, a racially based system of chattel slavery was not a foregone conclusion. As Wolfe put it: “It was not until the juridical opposition of slave versus free became mapped onto the hereditary opposition of Black versus White that being born a Black person meant being born a slave.”21 Thus, as Wolfe insists, “in addition to its circumstantial trajectory, the developing equation of Blackness with slavery needs to be understood in relation to its historicity: to the particular conditions whereby this formula rather than any other—convict labour, fixed-term slavery, a contract system—came to be selected as the optimal arrangement.”22 In 1661 the Virginia Assembly began to legally institutionalize slavery, and by 1662 came codes that determined the status of a child by the status of the mother. In 1669 the law defined enslaved Africans as property. However, planters still preferred white indentured labor. But 1670 saw a decrease in the number of European indentured servants migrating to Virginia, since Governor Berkeley had restricted suffrage to landowners. These are the conditions that contributed to Bacon’s Rebellion, as six out of seven men were “poor, discontented, and armed.”23 The insurrection emerged from the outgrowth of the push for profit from the production of tobacco, and its attendant demand for both land and labor. The complaint of freed indentured servants was they faced barriers to getting Indian land because of the emergent elite planter class. Hence it should be no surprise that Bacon’s Rebellion began with conflict over how to deal with Indian tribes viewed as violent obstructionists to settler colonial expansion. Bacon saw the colony’s policy on tribes as dismissive, especially after two Indian raids (the 1622 massacre by the Powhatans and a 1675 attack by the Doeg). His demands to preemptively massacre all Indians were not accepted by the governor, and so in response Bacon rallied his own troops against Berkeley for his refusal to retaliate for Native attacks on frontier settlements. Bacon orga- nized thousands of indentured servants, bond laborers, and slaves—English, Irish, Scottish, and African—who joined the frontier mutiny. In 1675, when Berkeley denied Bacon a commission (the authority to lead soldiers), Bacon took it upon himself to lead his followers in a crusade against the “enemy.” In a classic divide and conquer move, they marched to a fort held by a “friendly” tribe, the Occaneechees, and convinced them to capture warriors from an “unfriendly” tribe, the Susquehannock. The Occaneechees returned with captives, but Bacon’s men turned to the allied tribe and opened fire, killing them. After months of conflict, Bacon’s forces burned Jamestown to the ground on September 19, 1676. They drove Berkeley back to England and effectively shut down all tobacco production for over a year. Scholars and activists alike have perpetuated some romanticized accounts of the rebellion as a historical moment when poor Africans and Europeans united to fight their common exploiters (the English elite). Other accounts narrate it as a missed opportunity, given that poor Europeans eventually went the “white way,” joining elites against those increasingly racialized as “black.” Thus the Rebellion is also told as a genealogy of “whiteness” as a racial category and the “hidden origins” of race-based chattel slavery. As the story usually goes, the English elites, fearing class unity across racial lines, began to impose different standards when punishing the rebels—with harsher sentences against Africans. And since they were more easily identifiable than Europeans, a preference toward the importation of enslaved African slaves grew. Today, Bacon’s Rebellion is often evoked among the white Left as a reminder that elites will divide and conquer, keeping whites and Blacks from unifying. But what drops out in this lamenting account is that they were allied in challenging the English elites through their united efforts to commit genocide against indigenous peoples. This settler colonial context—imbricated with the North American institution of slavery—is often erased.24 Also, to return to Wolfe, although he links racial slavery to Indian dispossession, he does not discuss what poor Europeans and Africans were unified for besides challenging the English elite. In other words, he does not mention Bacon’s fixation on eliminating Indians through genocide and contesting Berkeley’s policy regarding the tribes. Still, Wolfe and other historians have noted that the rebellion hastened the hardening of racial lines associated with slavery, as a way for planters and the colony to control some of the poor, which led to the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.25 After Bacon’s Rebellion, planters turned to Africa as their primary source of labor and to slavery as their main system of labor, rather than European indentured labor. The landed gentry systematically developed a workforce based on racial caste, and the 1680 Virginia legislature enacted laws that denied slaves freedom of mobility and assembly. New legislation sharpened the color line, and by 1710 a racially based system of chattel slavery was fixed in Virginia (and Maryland).26 Wolfe’s treatment of racial formation on black slavery and racial caste in Traces of History is key to understanding the aftermath of the revolt. He shows how race is constructed to challenge the ahistorical and universal claim that Afro-Pessimists hold. Returning to Wilderson, then, Bacon’s Rebellion offers just one example in which Blacks (in Wilderson’s terms)—or, rather, Africans not yet “Black”—exercised some capacity over another group. But, while they asserted leverage over tribes, as agents in unity with poor Europeans, the terms of agency were set by and defined within the settler racial capitalist system that was also oppressing them.27 And unlike European workers, who were exploited, the Dutch enslaved the Africans before selling them as “cargo” in North America. This is a crucial difference demarcating the vast structural differences impinging on them. Still, this historical episode challenges the timeline Wilderson claims regarding the ontological imprint and its inauguration. The specificity of racially based chattel slavery in the context of English settlement in North America—and the institutional incapacity it wrought for enslaved Africans—differs from the Middle Ages in the Arab world. It is as if Wilderson were drawing on the particularity of the experiences of African peoples in North America to make a universal argument. Furthermore, he reads “Black” outside the history of the making of race that this historical period shows was a process. This totalizing interpretation of black experience in claiming that “the Black Body” is in a perpetual state of ontological death, then, seems bound to this historically specific context, all the while disavowing that specificity. Tamar Blickstein, a mutual friend of Wolfe’s and mine, recently reminded me that Patrick said that he hoped Traces of History would be something people “could run with.” I hope that taking his work and running with it— to critically examine the argument that “Blackness is incapacity in its pure and unadulterated form”—elucidates the colonial and racial politics of what constitutes capacity in terms of agency. Attention to the rebellion, then, also illustrates the problems with ahistorical projections of blackness across space and time, showing that we must attend to how this category gets constructed in place and time—and in relation to colonial and capitalist systems. Instead of seeing Bacon’s rebellion as a missed opportunity for poor European and poor Africans, the historical event reveals a lost chance for alliance politics between African and indigenous peoples.28 Wolfe insisted that addressing questions of solidarity must include a consideration of the legacies (the functions and outcomes) of racialization. He made it clear in Traces of History that it is necessary to interrogate racial categories and complementarities, refusing simple solidarities and examining the material structures—and consequences—of colonial rule. Seeing how colonial elites pitted one against the other, in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, in a crosscutting system of oppression, offers a counterpoint and alternative framework to the nihilism of Afro-Pessimism, one that challenges ontological absolutism. Resisting the insistence of absolute negativity that destroys the possibility for coalitional politics, we can and must open up space for interconnected radical intellectual and political projects.

Extra

Purity will always be impossible

Shotwell, 16 (Alexis Shotwell is an Associate Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and cross-appointed with the Department of Philosophy. She works in social and political theory, with a current focus on complicity and complexity as a ground for ethical and political action and also engaged in a SSHRC-funded research project on the history of AIDS activism, “Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times”. Dec 06, 2016. University of Minnesota Press, https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/book/48892/)

The delineation of theoretical purity, purity of classification, is always imbricated with the forever-failing attempt to delineate material purity—of race, ability, sexuality, or, increasingly, illness. The imbrication of failure with attempt, as I’ll discuss, is a feature of classification itself. More significantly, the world always exceeds our conception of it. Despite this, we can still pursue changed worlds. Living well might feel impossible, and certainly living purely is impossible. The slate has never been clean, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no “fresh” to start. Endocrine-disrupting soap doesn’t offer a purity made simple because there isn’t one. All there is, while things perpetually fall apart, is the possibility of acting from where we are. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is not a preracial state we could access, erasing histories of slavery, forced labor on railroads, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothing we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webs of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? This book champions the usefulness of thinking about complicity and compromise as a starting point for action. Often there is an implicit or explicit idea that in order to live authentically or ethically we ought to avoid potentially reprehensible results in our actions. Since it is not possible to avoid complicity, we do better to start from an assumption that everyone is implicated in situations we (at least in some way) repudiate. We are compromised and we have made compromises, and this will continue to be the way we craft the worlds to come, whatever they might turn out to be. So, I interpellate myself into Donna Haraway’s modest yet difficult framing of situatedness as a place to start. Speaking about knowledge, she writes: So, I think my problem and “our” problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. (Haraway 1991, 187) Thinking about politics, my problem in this book, and “our” problem in this world, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency of the conditions under which we take ethical and political action, critical practices for accounting for our own situatedness in histories that have shaped the conditions of possibility for our actions, and a no-nonsense commitment to the kind of real, possible world Haraway describes. That world is partially shared, offers finite freedom, adequate abundance, modest meaning, and limited happiness. Partial, finite, adequate, modest, limited— and yet worth working on, with, and for.

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