Kritik Toolbox Supplement – bfhhr general

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They have to win their ontology accurately describes the entire social field and that that’s a good way of understanding racial identity and resistance—otherwise vote neg because they’ve foreclosed the prioritization of action-oriented ethics which are key

Gordon, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies @ UConn, 15 (Lewis, “Race and Gender from the Standpoint of Sartre’s Philosophical Anthropology” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UO0amE2oNE, transcribed by Donald Grasse)

For an identity model, one would have to do something very, very different. Which is one will have to deal with the complex ways in which a social world is able to produce meanings. Which means that the meanings, the identities, are not closed but are the possibilities to come. Which means that the constellations of identities we have now are only part of the complete story. Now, this also leads to a problem again if we go back to the afropessimists. Because if we look at the afropessimist argument and many afropessimists – one of the things by the way, my anger is not to diss afropessimists all over the place but oh my god, talk about a group that can’t take criticism. Whenever you say anything about afropessimism, it’s classic bad faith. First response is you’re charactering it. But when you dig into it, the only way you cannot character it is to agree with it.The second problem, almost always, is that “you have not read enough on it.” It’s a small body of literature. But the third part that is very complicated is that some of the people that argue for afropessimism treat the categories as ontological. And the thing about pessimism is that pessimism is an epistemic notion. And the problem with an epistemic notion is that pessimismdepends on forecast. You see. It’s about trying to figure out what you should do. And what’s missing here is if you go to Marcus Foie (sp? – inaudible) you have a different critique. Because you see from the Magus Foie perspective – you’re going to realize there is something wrong with both pessimism and optimism when you are dealing with issues of social practice. Because optimism depends on having a form of essence – the foreknowledge – that will bring the essence before the existence. Pessimism, on the other hand, optimism on the other. So in effect the real question that is often raised by existentialists – and we have heard some of it today- is about the commitment you have. It’s about what actually – whether it will work or not – you are going to be committed to doing. And that’s a very different kind of action. Because that – and this is where it actually separates itself from analytical liberal political philosophy, from some certain ways in which hermeneutics, from certain waves of poststructuralism’s functions, because you see if you are going to disentangle foreknowledge from action, then you are talking about the question of what kind of values are brought to it, which brings the existentialist problem of despair and seriousness to the forefront. Now, from that point on, we now begin to see a very different kind of conversation. Because one of them we see is going to be manifested in the kind of commitments which are very different from the prediction models of what we tend to use in theoretical examples. The other one is we see a critique of something very popular when we talk about race and racism. And to give you an example let’s put it in the gender context. Let’s make it heteronormative, just for the moment. A man and a woman go on a date. It’s a great date, everything is going fine, they are talking they are drinking everything is great. At the end of the date he drops her off, and then he says to the woman, “I had a great time,” “I had a great time too,” “Yeah you know now if I could just stop seeing you as a woman I could respect you.” Will there be a second date? Now, when I give that example people immediately see the problem. If he needs not to see she is a woman in order to respect her, he is misogynist because he doesn’t respect women. Yet, if we look at the models we use for race, that is exactly what we demand. The colorblind model basically says that for people of color to be respected, the non-person of color needs to not see the color. But if you need not to see someone as black in order to respect that person, it means you don’t respect black people. This is a different question than the ontological question of “are there really people” black or not. The basic point – and this is where a lot of people in race theory commit an error – they think the problem of race is around its ontological status. So they argue does race exist, does it not, should we eliminate race, and all that stuff –they miss the point. The real issue to argue is the ethical issue about – I think the more interesting issue - what if there were race? Does that give you a license now to do whatever you want and disrespect those people? Does it mean all bets are off?And so it’s a red-herring to deal with the ontological question. Its an interesting question – but the other question is going to be how does one establish an ethical relationship to difference. And in that book Bad Faith an example I used is something like this. There are human beings who are able to love that which they can never be. We know this in the sense of human beings relationships go up and down, or higher to lower. But lower to higher is different. For instance, the founding religious people whose conception of God – let’s just say black women, is not at all that God is a black woman. Now, on a base level that tells you human beings have the capacity to love that which is not identical with the self. And this becomes very crucial because you see it gets to a problem that happens in much race theory which is we confuse equality with sameness. We all think an ethical relationship requires similarity but the error we make there is we fail to understand that respect is a concept that does not require being identical to that which you respect. And once we begin to – maybe we have a completely different normative world to think through and build precisely because at the human reality level there is already proof that there exist actions that don’t match the received models of how we theorize human action. And this becomes crucial. One of the things I like about – what I was doing that work, and still am – is that existential phenomenology doesn’t demand for you in advance to say what your disciplinary commitment is. It doesn’t require for you in advance – you are supposed to go through a process of discovering what it may be or to discover what you’re ethical relationships may be which means you go through an epistemic and ontological and normative risk.

Anti-Blackness is a political project – not a fait accompli. Their totalizing, universalistic, theory of civil society ignores resistance and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The metric they use for measuring the efficacy of resistance is myopic and crushes a potential for an alternative future, which is possible because all human systems are incomplete and changeable.

Gordon 15 --- Lewis, Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician, Professor at the University of Connecticut in Philosophy and Africana Studies, European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy; Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor of Politics and International Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa; and Chairman of the Frantz Fanon awards committees of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, transcribed from https://youtu.be/UABksVE5BTQ, presenting and discussing his book “What Fanon Said” Transcribed from 123:00-142:15 by Marcel/Donnie

The first thing to bear in mind you may wonder why in the beginning of the talk I talked about philosophical anthropology. And many people when they are trying to talk about social change they never think about what a human being is and this is something Fanon pays attention to. Many people want to have closed conceptions of human beings because then human beings can be predicable. In fact, in fanons writing he gave an example. One of the problems is that when he would walk in reason seems to walk out. One problem we have to bear in mind when we try to look at the question of human beings in terms of rigid closed systems is that we often are trying to get as a model of how we work as theorists on issues of social change that are actually based on what we can call law like generalizations. Now what is a law like generalization? It is when you make sure that whatever you say has no contradiction down the line. So if you are to say this much [gestures with hand] the next stage must be consistent with that, and the next stage until you are maximally consistent. Do you get that? But here is the problem – and I can just put it in a nut shell- nobody, nobody in this room would like to date, be married to, or be a best friend with a maximally consistent person. You know what that is. Its hell. And this tells you something, because if somebody where maximally consistent, you know what you would say that person is not reasonable. And we have a person here who does work on Hegel that can point out this insight, that a human being has the ability to evaluate rationality. Now why is that important? Because you see the mistake many of us make is many of us want to push the human being into that maximized law like generalization model. So when we think about our philosophical anthropology, some people, our question about intersectionality for instance, what some people don’t understand is nowhere is there ever a human being who is one identity. People talk about race – do you ever really see a race walking? You see a racialized man or woman, or transman or transwoman. Do you ever see a class walking? Class is embodied in flesh and blood people. And we can go on and on. So if we enrich our philosophical anthropology we begin to notice certain other things. And one of the other things we begin to realize is that we commit a serious problem when we do political work. And the problem is this. The question about Wilderson for instance. There is this discussion going on (and allot of people build it out of my earlier books). I have a category I call, as a metaphor, an antiblack world. You notice an indefinite article – an anti-black world. The reason I say that is because the world is different from an anti-black world. The project of racism is to create a world that would be completely anti-black or anti-woman. Although that is a project, it is not a fait accompli. People don’t seem to understand how recent this phenomenon we are talking about is. A lot of people talk about race they don’t even know the history of how race is connected into theonaturalism. How, for instance, Andalucia and the pushing out of the Moors. The history of how race connected to Christianity was formed. A lot of people don’t understand – from the standpoint of a species whose history is 220,000 years old, what the hell is 500 years? But the one thing that we don’t understand to is we create a false model for how we study those last 500 years. We study the 500 years as if the people who have been dominated have not been fighting and resisting. Had they not been fighting and resisting we wouldn’t be here. And then we come into this next point because you see the problem in the formulation of pessimism and optimism is they are both based on forecasted knowledge, a prior knowledge. But human beings don’t have prior knowledge. And in fact – what in the world are we if we need to have guarantees for us to act. You know what you call such people? Cowards. The fact of the matter is our ancestors – let’s start with enslaved ancestors. The enslaved ancestors who were burning down those plantations, who were finding clever ways to poison their masters, who were organizing meetings for rebellions, none of them had any clue what the future would be 100 years later. Some had good reason to believe that it may take 1000 years. But you know why they fought? Because they knew it wasn’t for them. One of the problems we have in the way we think about political issues is we commit what Fanon and others in the existential tradition would call a form of political immaturity. Political immaturity is saying it is not worth it unless I, me, individually get the payoff. When you are thinking what it is to relate to other generations – remember Fanon said the problem with people in the transition, the pseudo postcolonial bourgeois – is that they miss the point, you fight for liberation for other generations. And that is why Fanon said other generations they must have their mission. But you see some people fought and said no I want my piece of the pie. And that means the biggest enemy becomes the other generations. And that is why the postcolonial pseudo-bourgeoisie they are not a bourgeoisie proper because they do not link to the infrastructural development of the future, it is about themselves. And that’s why, for instance, as they live higher up the hog, as they get their mediating, service oriented, racial mediated wealth, the rest of the populations are in misery. The very fact that in many African countries there are people whose futures have been mortgaged, the fact that in this country the very example of mortgaging the future of all of you is there. What happens to people when they have no future? It now collapses the concept of maturation and places people into perpetual childhood. So one of the political things – and this is where a psychiatrist philosopher is crucial – is to ask ourselves what does it mean to take on adult responsibility. And that means to understand that in all political action it’s not about you. It is what you are doing for a world you may not even be able to understand. Now that becomes tricky, because how do we know this? People have done it before. There were people, for instance, who fought anti-colonial struggles, there are people (and now I am not talking about like thirty or forty years ago, I am talking about the people from day one 17^th 18^th century all the way through) and we have no idea what we are doing for the 22nd century. And this is where developing political insight comes in. Because we commit the error of forgetting the systems we are talking about are human systems. They are not systems in the way we talk about the laws of physics. A human system can only exist by human actions maintaining them. Which means every human system is incomplete. Every human being is by definition incomplete. Which means you can go this way or you can go another way. The system isn’t actually closed. How do we know it? The reason we are seeing all of this brutality in the world today is because the systems are breaking down. If the systems were working they wouldn’t have to worry. You know how have an effective system? You make people mentally be their own prisoners. IF the system were really working, you wouldn’t have to have the police because you all would do it for them. It’s the very fact that the system is breaking down that we are seeing heightened brutality. The problem with heightened brutality is that it is not sustainable. There are studies, for instance, if you look at a paper called Mr. Y, done by the military advisors in this country. They argue that using military force to maintain the United States is not sustainable. They argue what is sustainable is for a nation to learn to be good citizens in the world. Which means it has to build up its infrastructure, education, human relations, it has to deal with the ecology, the environment, all of those things. And this is what many people are learning all over the world. And so one of the things we have to bear in mind then is this: when we begin to engage in these struggles we have to understand how we have to think differently. If we look at neoconservativism, they want to take us back to the 17th century, Hobbseianism, its all about order, control. That is what you are seeing in the streets right now, here in this country, and Latin America, and some parts of Europe. And then you have neoliberalism. Neoliberalism wants to have free markets and at the same time it wants to create a unique form of vulnerability which it places through 19th century thought which is that you are supposed to look at yourself as an individual. Neoliberals say that they don’t believe in group rights, only individual rights. Now you know what an individual is when you are dealing with a government or society. An individual is simply a vulnerable being. So in effect, that conception of rights is to ensure you have a population that’s completely vulnerable to the domination of the system. Now the problem is, many people when they respond to neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, attack it through being anti-globalism. Because we’ve got neo-conservative globalism and neo-liberal globalism. So what they do is abrogate, they give up the concrete levels in which people can build alternative ways of imagining a global future. Now, here’s the thing. On neo-liberalism, the idea is to make you forget the 20^th century. Why? The 20^th century was the age of revolution. They want you to think 19^th, 18^th, and 17^th century. And then they tell you every revolutionary effort in the 20^th century failed and this is where Fanon is interesting. Because you see, he brings an insight that you need to understand the concept of failure differently. And I’ll give an example. A lot of things that I’ve worked with, in groups that I’ve worked with, communities where we work together, every time we have a project, we always had people and somebody who says “don’t do that.” And you’ll say “why?” And they’ll say “we tried.” You see where I’m getting at? If I couldn’t do it, nobody could do it. But what they don’t understand is that their failure already started setting the conditions for a new kind of relation. When I was president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association I went and lectured in nearly every country in which there were slaves, to deal, in 2008, with the end of the British Atlantic slave trade. If you hear the popular histories, you’ll hear that “slave revolts failed.” The crappy history you have is that one day a group of people in England, in France, in Denmark said “you know, slavery is a really bad thing, let us get rid of it.” Now that is not the actual history, everywhere I went and looked at the archives and local history, every single instance, there was a slave revolt. Every single one --- the Sharpe Rebellion in Jamaica is what led to the question of getting rid of the Atlantic Slave Trade. If you look at Denmark, if you look among the Dutch, the Dutch, had a much larger slave trade, the British were pirates, they took it over. And when you go look at history, and I’ll give you an example, a lot of y’all don’t know that Denmark had a big, had a whole colonial structure. And if you go to Copenhagen, you’ll see a statute of a man, I forget his name, a governor, and it says “freed the slaves.” Okay? Now, you go to St. Martin you’ll get the real story, here is the story. It always boggles my mind how slavery functions, they had the fort, and they had enslaved people bring the supplies and everything into the fort. It also boggles my mind that slave masters had slaves cook for them, but anyways, the people would come in and deliver supplies and one morning the governor woke up and outside the entire fort, it was surrounded by black enslaved people wearing white. You better watch out when you see some Africans wearing white. They have machetes, pitchforks and they just looked at the fort. The governor looked out and said “disband,” and they just stood there. And then he said, he ordered to aim the guns to them, “disband or we’ll shoot.” And the people stood, and then he ordered “fire.” And none of the guns worked, because every day they came in they replaced gunpowder with sand. And then you know what he said? “Well now you’re all free.” The thing about Danes is that they were all Lutherans, their law was the governor’s law, and if he says you’re free, you’re free. And now, those islands were not of use to the Danes and there was a period of equality, rights, and they sold the islets to the United States that implemented segregation and all kinds of other things, but the point is different. The point is you have one history where it says he freed the slaves, and then the actual history where the slaves freed themselves. Nowhere in history, this is the Fanonian point, nowhere in history, any kind of domination, not just enslaved communities, we’re talking about structural violence of many kinds, and people talk about, for instance: Who created the women’s movement? The answer is women, and men, but mostly women, who cared about their liberation. We are able to look at the world different because women fought. It’s not that they sat down and said “treat me better.” They got up and went out in the streets. Every instance of anyone doing political activism really works. The error people make is that they think just because in the past, there were, so called “overcome” rebellions, they don’t realize that rebellions change the conditions. And thus there is no such thing, this is why I brought in the Fanon example, he didn’t fight with the presumption he would win, he fought because he had to. And why did he have to? It wasn’t in the sense of self-defense, he had to precisely because he knew it was the right thing to do. Real political work is about doing what is necessary when an understanding because it should be done and it’s not about you. If we come to the concrete levels, you need to argue, look closely at what you’re doing, if it’s going to be action beyond you, you know what you call that? If it’s only about you, it’s not only narcissism and selfishness, and even hate, but if it’s about those that transcend you, if you are not the reason, but because it’s right and for subsequent generations, what do you call if when you really do something for others? The word, and it connects to the revolutionary force that you see in the entirety of the black radical tradition, is a word that may sound corny, but it’s true, the word is love. There’s a difference in political work connected to love because its purpose is to make grow, and to make happen that which is absent. Love and power, in that sense, works.

Ontologizing social death calcifies resistance—the antagonism of antiblackness doesn’t hold both ways—voting for them resigns black subjectivity under the weight of oppression and erases a tradition of black freedom

Reed 15—Assistant Professor of English at Old Dominion University (Alison, “Traumatic Utopias: Holding Hope in Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues”, Text and Performance Quarterly Volume 35, Issue 2-3, 2015, dml)

In a landmark study of blackness as a condition of ontological impossibility, Orlando Patterson defined “social death” as slavery’s denial of legal rights to personhood for enslaved Africans and their descendants—reducing the slave to a “social nonperson” in the eyes of the law (5). This formulation, which tends to minimize the way artistic and expressive forms survived slavery and are sustained by contemporary cultural practices, is dramatically reversed in the altar film—the master is accorded social death and the slave is accorded power. While, as Patterson argues, slavery categorized enslaved peoples as nonhuman and as such having no legally recognized will, agency, personal identity, or family, his conceptualization of black nonpersonhood overemphasizes the law—the incivility of civil society—to define humanity. The law alone cannot account for the relationship between struggle and subjectivity. Black feminism has long asserted that communities define themselves outside of Eurocentric fantasy structures (see Collins; Williams). To understand power as totalizing is to ignore the global histories of people-of-color-led organizing and activism, as well as daily strategies of survival, self-definition, and community-making that exist to deflect or challenge white supremacy’s impositions of nation and heteropatriarchy. Reading race only as a form of subjection, or the formulation of race as racism, neglects to consider that the structural traumas of racism do not delimit the social meanings of race. Seeing people of color as symptoms rather than as subjects rehearses the same invidious logics that critiques of racism seek to repair. Whiteness figures the fictive, overdetermined construct of blackness as the passive object against which it writes itself into master narratives as the active subject; yet, flesh-and-blood people of the African diaspora are not the objects of their own histories—to be so would be to always occupy the third-person speaking position. In the context of slavery specifically, the actual existence of the written I in the large body of slave narratives exiles any simplistic violence of racial grammar. In love conjure/blues, social death reflects the face of its creator—white supremacy and the people invested in its perpetuation—not its imagined objects, thus continuing to critique the operation of white supremacy while refusing to surrender all hope to a totalizing concept of power. Following black feminist and radical traditions, Bridgforth’s work attests—through quare performance—to laughter, pain, and pleasure, emphasizing psychic survival against slavery’s reduction of the slave to a nonperson. Without slavery, former slaves move toward their freedom; but since Enlightenment thought needed slavery against which to define its notion of freedom, it has no basis for understanding selfhood without subjection (see Morrison Playing in the Dark). Taking Bridgforth’s recalibration of the terms of social death seriously, I argue that the existence of social death as a legal concept imposed by white supremacy reflects the deadly logics of anti-black racism, not the faces of those who suffer its injustices. Long legacies of grassroots organizing efforts for justice under the weight of oppression testify to the force of life in communities most affected by the state’s production of social death. What social death minimizes is the historical fact that—despite extreme institutional violence to and rupture of kin—enslaved Africans and their descendants fought to forge meaningful communities, families, support networks, and spaces of spiritual freedom. Bridgforth’s text conceptualizes spiritual freedom not in binary terms of domination–slavery, but as an embodied practice of honoring one’s ancestors and ethics even in the most constraining circumstances of bondage and brutality. The slave community drummer’s decision to keep making music despite severe punishment—the loss of his fingers—opens up a space for spiritual freedom, as he channels the divine energy of art not as a sole act of rebellion against or reaction to the plantation master, but as a calling to music as soul survival, a process de-romanticized through his disfigurement. While traditional slave narratives emphasize the movement from bondage to freedom through an individual’s (often a man's) lionized quest from South to North, from captivity to escape via physical and intellectual perspicacity, here freedom cannot be circumscribed by the boundaries of the self. Instead, we see a collective realization of spiritual freedom inspired by, but not limited to, an individual’s bravery backed by communal conjurational wisdom. The traumatic utopia formed around John's spirit death remains embedded in ancestral and embodied knowledges of historical traumas, not transcendent of them. From precolonial ancestors on the African continent to black Americans living in the Jim Crow South, Bridgforth’s characters evoke ancestral memory as a line of spirit communication and critical consciousness of history, never as a static representation of a vanished past. The repetition of “ga” in the altar film, and mirrored on the page, sounds out an affective code in which a ghost serves as interlocutor for the erased and covered over histories on the plantation, at the same time as the abrupt intrusion of that ghost tells forgotten stories of survival and agency. The drummer’s persistence amidst pain counters a theoretical fallacy reflected in social death’s emphasis on the legal production of nonpersonhood but routinized by the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. The hegemonic order may need a so-called “other” against which to define itself, but aggrieved communities never needed the master (narrative) for self-definition because they always already contained the potentiality of existing outside of, or in more contentious relationship to, that violent dualism (see Baldwin; Batiste). This is not to minimize the material effects of hegemonic identity production through subjection, which is to say, brutal forms of state-sanctioned and systemic violence. But whatever hold hegemonic power may sustain over the physical circumstances, cultural representations, and psychic struggles of racialized communities, there exists a long legacy of self-determination and transformation of the terms meant to dictate experience. In contrast, whiteness, as an unmarked yet nonetheless thoroughly racialized identity, needs blackness against which to define itself. This fiction of blackness, as an overdetermined fantasy projection of white desires and fears, gives meaning to whiteness alone and reflects on actual black life only at the site of white supremacist interpellation and codification. While whiteness requires the material and symbolic exploitation of nonwhite populations, people of color have mobilized, as Patricia Hill Collins describes, “the power of self-definition” (1). To shape one’s sense of self-identification without relying on someone else’s subordination sets the foundation for coalitional social justice struggles.

It’s also an inaccurate reading of history that fails to attend to more insidious methods of racial domination which rely on defining Black subjectivity as human

Rinehart 16—Department of English, Harvard University (Nicholas, “The Man That Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery”, Journal of Social History (2016), January 24, 2016, dml)

I echo Johnson's claim, with the added caveat that extending the motif of the completely “dehumanized,” “commodified,” “objectified,” or otherwise existentially flattened or socially de-complexified slave does little to articulate the lived experience of enslavement. Rather, it recapitulates an all-encompassing, static, and ahistorical view wherein the “commodified” slave is dominated absolutely by the “commodifying” slaveholder—thereby reproducing a historical paradigm according to which any social action or cultural expression on behalf of the enslaved subject is perceived as always already “resistant” and as needing to be recovered by the enterprising (and morally astute) historian. The historiographical preoccupation with the “commodification” of the slave produces the interpretative circumstances that have led many astray in just the manner Johnson laments. It should be no surprise that historians of slavery, for decades now, have found this rhetoric analytically enticing. What better way to condemn slavery than to show how it made persons into things? But this particular vocabulary derives from a precise context, and it is not historical inquiry; it derives, of course, from Anglophone abolitionism.10 When we talk about “the full enjoyment of the slave as a thing,”11 we are brandishing weapons borrowed from Harriet Beecher Stowe's toolbox—as in the original subtitle to her most famous work: “The Man that Was a Thing.” This tendency to revive the (not unproblematic) politics of a bygone era runs rampant in the historiography of slavery. Joseph Miller rightly diagnoses such rhetorical practices as “neo-abolitionist,” wherein “the rather stereotyped notion of slavery in both the academic literature and in modern popular culture derives from a nineteenth-century abolitionist negative contrast—in fact a politicized caricature—designed to stir the emotions of an emergently modern world against all limitations of the personal liberties that it seemed to promise.”12 The binary opposition of person and thing that undergirds historical work on slavery is a seemingly enthusiastic recycling of imagery perfected by the agents and presses of Anglo-abolitionism that emphasized the “all-but-defining dyad of slavery as an institution.”13 We should be wary of this habit for two primary reasons. First, the “commodification” of the slave assumes an all-encompassing master-slave dialectic that is arguably not an observable, historical phenomenon but rather “a static abstraction, independent of time or place that we imagine by observing it as such.”14 Second, it keeps us willfully ignorant of the lessons learned from comparative studies of slavery in the Americas.15 Decades of historiography, starting with Frank Tannenbaum's classic but flawed study Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (1946), have emphasized the divergent legal and social practices that shaped colonial slave regimes in North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Although their methods of inquiry have shifted—from an emphasis on inherited legal codes like the Castilian Siete Partidas to an examination of slaves' claims-making and legal activism—historians have reached the consensus (again and again) that strikingly distinct forms of enslavement, as institution and as process, were manifested in disparate regions of the New World. As there is little room to elaborate on these debates here, suffice it to say that enslaved people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, specifically in Iberian colonial contexts, were endowed to some extent with formal and informal rights, duties, and obligations rarely observable in North American or Anglo-imperial contexts.16 In addition, among the most profound disparities between slavery in North America and in Iberian America was the role of Church and Inquisition institutions, which represented a third relational axis mediating the dynamic between slaveholders and slaves. And last, urban forms of slavery were also common and sometimes as prevalent as the agricultural “plantation complex” in Mexico, Peru, New Granada, Brazil, Cuba, and other regions of Latin America for large stretches of time. To insist on the dyad of “dehumanizing” person and “commodified” thing is to privilege a “neo-abolitionist” image of the antebellum United States as “the single source of the politicized epistemology of studies of slavery as an institution.”17 Two Modes of “Commodification” With that said, I propose to show exactly how arguments about the “commodification” of the slave break down. The description of the “commodification” of enslaved persons usually takes on two aspects: the representational and the material.18 The former refers to the way that perpetrators of slavery imagined or perceived enslaved subjects, often in some abstract way (that is, at a distance). The latter refers to the way that perpetrators of slavery treated enslaved subjects, often in some corporeal way (that is, up close). The act of “commodification” could be articulated differently across time and space. In terms of the representational mode, the most commonly cited technique of “commodification” was the notational apparatus brought about by the advent of double-entry bookkeeping. “Spanish and Portuguese traders had called young African males piezas or peças—pieces—as if they and their value as potential laborers could be counted like bolts of cloth,” writes Vincent Brown. “Women, young children, and the old were designated as fractions of pieces. British slavers numbered their captives outright, according to the sequential order in which they were purchased.”19 When slaves are thus “called,” “counted,” “designated,” and “numbered” in official commercial documents, Brown rightly notes, we witness how slavers “flatten[ed] the social world [of slaves] by rendering it in the abstract.”20 Stephanie Smallwood has also written in some depth about this practice. “Commodification is fundamentally a representational act,” she writes. “Commodification's power resides in language, in discursive forms (ledgers, bills of sale) carefully crafted to define and imagine things in the terms that best facilitate their exchange and circulation.”21 If, as Smallwood claims, “Commodification is fundamentally a representational act,” then we should consider the precise dynamics of this representation. Since this notational “commodification” is really a question of historical sources, we should further examine why certain historical circumstances gave rise to particular modes of representation and documentation—the paper trails that enable historians to write about slavery in the first place, even while acknowledging the analytical (and ethical) problems they may pose. First, the “discursive forms” responsible for such representational “commodification”—double-entry account books, bills of sale, etc.—are in many cases tied to specific imperial contexts. That is, specific regimes of power produced particular kinds of documentation; the representational genres described by Smallwood and Brown were indeed characteristic of slavery in the Anglo-American Atlantic, but not necessarily in Iberian, Francophone, or even African contexts. If we tie “commodifying” practices to the production of particular modes of documentation, then it is increasingly difficult to argue that slavery itself was definitionally the “commodification” of enslaved humanity. Could it be argued that slave-trading under the auspices of the British Empire was more “commodifying” than in other imperial contexts due to its particular mode of record-keeping? How might we describe the representation of enslaved people by other “discursive forms”—say, perhaps, the diaries of Moravian missionaries in the West Indies?22 It is worthwhile, moreover, to assess whether such notational representation was unique to slavery and slaves (and therefore essential to its perpetration). Ian Baucom's discussion of the 1781 Zong massacre and the concurrent burgeoning of global finance capitalism should complicate the image of this seemingly violent representational act.23 Baucom deftly shows how the financial revolution of the eighteenth century and its culture of speculation were accompanied by, or rather enabled by, a significant “epistemological revolution.” “The credit financing that both accompanied the slave trade and, in partnership with the trade, fueled an Atlantic cycle of accumulation entailed more than a revolution in accounting procedures. It demanded an epistemological revolution [that] transformed the epistemological by fantasizing it, altered the knowable by indexing it to the imaginable,” Baucom writes. “If the epistemological was transformed so too were the ontological and phenomenological convictions of society revolutionized as both the thingly and the perceptible quality of things found themselves fictionalized but credited as no less real for their increasingly theoretical existence.”24 What Baucom suggests here is that enslaved people were not unique in their “fictionalized” representation. This transformation from the “knowable” to the “imaginable” describes an Atlantic world of credit and insurance that enables complex transactions to take place in the absence of material goods—an Atlantic world that enables the captain of the Zong to throw 133 slaves one-by-one overboard off the coast of Jamaica in order to redeem the insurance claim to his cargo, his captives. The imaginative properties of this Atlantic world were bolstered by certain “historicist” practices that emphasized the “type” and the “typical” as sources of knowledge. The paradigm of this practice was double-entry bookkeeping, the very technique that signaled a “revolution in accounting.” And while Brown and Smallwood quite fairly note the violence of representing or equating humanity with numeracy, it is critical yet to place this supposed violence within the “epistemological revolution” that Baucom describes. His account includes excerpts from the meeting minutes of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty from the month of July 1783 that indicate how the Commissioners “spent the majority of their time calibrating a fine and exact scale of recompense for those far-flung workmen of the empire whose bodies had been wounded in the service of the crown.”25 So, for example, there are several entries like this one: To Thomas Sutton, clerk in the storekeeper's office in Jamaica, who lost his sight by a “violent inflammation” in January 1782: 40 pounds. To Captain John Thomas, who had received “many dangerous wounds,” including “one through his lungs, one through his bladder, and now has seven balls lodged in his body which cannot be extracted”: 150 pounds a year and half pay.26 This section of the minute book is analogous to the “commodifying” numeracy of a slave trader's account books. The two share “the imperturbable search for an alternate, alinguistic grammar of commensurability, the casual pursuit of a financializing, decorporealizing logic of equivalence.”27 As Baucom argues, this minute book is haunted by “something the Admiralty would decidedly not have wished to associate with its loyal, suffering, subjects: the specter of slavery, the slave auction block, the slave trader's ledger book; the specter, quite precisely, of another wounded, suffering human body incessantly attended by an equal sign and a monetary equivalent.”28 The historical advent of this epistemology of the imaginable and the typical—epitomized by the “theoretical realism” of double-entry bookkeeping and its “commodifying” logic of representation—indicates how the allegedly “dehumanizing” notational practices of Anglo-American slave merchants might be better understood as part of a larger global shift in the representation of reality according to a speculative culture of finance capital. This is not to say that Smallwood and Brown are incorrect in asserting that slavers' representations of enslaved people as abstracted “numbers” or “pieces” was objectifying. It was that, but it was also much more than that. And due to the larger historical circumstances that enabled it, it also tells us little about either perpetrators of slavery or their victims. The shortcomings of this approach are further demonstrated by the second, material group of “commodifying” practices—those that were not representational or theoretical at all, but rather embodied in the mundane interactions of slaves and those who held power over them (owners, traders, speculators). My claim is this: Within the material, mundane, and corporeal processes of enslavement—that is, how slavers treated slaves—the supposed practices, theories, or logics of “commodification” inevitably break down because the enslaved subject is always perceived as human through and through. Smallwood's assertion that commodification is primarily a “representational act” may be profoundly ironic; she elaborates a theory of “commodification” in her groundbreaking Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007) that largely forgoes this representational mode for one in which “commodification” is primarily achieved through violence enacted upon the body of the slave. These forms of “psychic and social” violence constituted a science of human deprivation that “relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering,” Smallwood writes. The process of “commodification” involved “probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within.”29 Smallwood is quite right in describing the transatlantic slave trade as thoroughly dependent upon captives' suffering. What seems less clear in her account is how this science of suffering signifies the alleged phenomenon of “commodification.” On the contrary, it strikes me that the Middle Passage and its techniques of brutalization were profoundly invested in human frailty. The slave trade did not operate by treating slaves simply as things—objects, commodities, goods—it operated by treating them as persons who could suffer, and it worked to maximize that suffering without hitting the tipping point at which the slave ceases to suffer because it has died. Smallwood adds that slavers' brutalization of captive Africans “revealed the boundaries of the middle ground between life and death where human commodification was possible.”30 This “middle ground” was created by forcing captives into “unmitigated poverty,” by starving them and holding them in iron chains, by segregating enchained slaves according to sex. In so doing, slavers “reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.”31 Perhaps most crucially, the “commodification” of the slave also entailed the severing of social and communal ties. “Commodification” was an “alienating agenda.”32 Smallwood's analysis of these supposed techniques of “commodification” is thus deeply indebted to Orlando Patterson's concept of social death: “slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”33 Smallwood finds her “middle ground” in this condition—a legally or socially liminal state between initial enslavement and ultimate manumission and an ontologically liminal state between being and nonbeing: physical life without social life, belonging to no social community yet provisionally incorporated within a larger social order. Smallwood's account is striking in how it maps techniques of “commodification” directly onto Patterson's articulation of “social death.” The slave's ontologically liminal space is precisely where “human commodification was possible,” where the slave is “reduced” to “currency” by severed social ties, violent domination, and general maltreatment. Vincent Brown has rightly noted how strict adherence to Patterson's theory of social death can cause serious interpretive problems in the study of slavery. “It is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation from Patterson's breathtaking survey,” Brown writes, “a theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery in an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage.”34 The flaw in Smallwood's account is that she allows “the condition of social death to stand for the experience of life in slavery.”35 Hence, Smallwood's (and others') description of the thoroughly “dehumanized” or “commodified” slave is largely ahistorical; it maps itself directly onto a sociological abstraction, leaving no room for historical contingency or local variation. It presumes the outcome of “commodification” and describes all aspects of enslavement as constituting or producing that outcome. Indeed, the question that looms over all this analysis is: What aspects of Atlantic slavery, if any, might not have contributed to human “commodification?” If we suppose that captives were bought and sold along the west coast of Africa but that they were reasonably well fed, would these captives still be “commodified?” If slaves were not segregated by sex aboard slave ships, would they still be “commodified?” What if captives were kept in prisons, but not held in chains—would that make a difference? Analyses of the transatlantic slave trade like that above confuse historical contingency with theoretical fact. If anything, Smallwood's emphasis on the biological aspect of “commodification” undermines the very concept itself. Smallwood writes that, “Because human beings were treated as inanimate objects, the number of bodies stowed aboard a ship was limited only by the physical dimensions and configuration of those bodies.”36 This assertion that “human beings were treated as inanimate objects” contradicts the earlier statement that slave traders “reduced people to the sum of their biological parts.” How can something be both biological and inanimate? And more, when Smallwood claims that slave merchants were “probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within,” she is also revealing slavers' recognition of the continued physical vitality and biological life of the slave. Patterson himself states this outright: “A dead slave, or one incapacitated by brutalization, was a useless slave.”37 In defining the power relation internal to slavery, Patterson further observes that “Perhaps the most distinctive attribute of the slave's powerlessness was that it always originated … as a substitute for death, usually violent death.”38 And this is because slaves can die.39 I contend that even the horrific practices of starvation, torture, and other forms of “psychic and social” violence enacted upon slaves reveal a profound investment in and acknowledgement of the humanity of enslaved people by their enslavers. I use the word “investment” intentionally and ironically to argue that perpetrators of slavery, rather than treating slaves simply as inanimate things, marketable products, or exchangeable commodities—as things—understood them as thoroughly human. “Scientific” efforts to starve African captives rely on the presumption that captives can be starved. To violently subject captives to “unmitigated poverty” and deprive them of their social and familial ties is to make the fundamental concession that enslaved Africans could be violently subjected to poverty, that they could be deprived of social and familial ties. One cannot alienate a cowrie shell or starve a bale of cotton. This social fact is most evident when we venture beyond the representational mode of “commodification” and into the realm of everyday human contact. The exact terms in which Patterson defines “social death” confirm this much: If the slave is violently dominated, natally alienated, and generally dishonored, then we must recognize that only a human can be so dominated, so alienated, and so dishonored. As Patterson writes, “The counterpart of the master's sense of honor is the slave's experience of its loss. The so-called servile personality is merely the outward expression of this loss of honor.”40 This “experience … of loss” implies the loss of something that was once there. In sum, Smallwood's stunning account of the Middle Passage—surely the best we have in the literature on slavery—would be enriched by redirecting analytical attention to how this particular historical process hinged upon, rather than depleted, the humanity and vulnerability of its victims.

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

Rogers 15, Associate Professor of African American Studies & Political Science University of California, Los Angeles. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Wounded Attachment: Reflections on Between the World and Me Fugitive Thoughts, August 2015, http://www.academia.edu/14337627/Ta-Nehisi_Coatess_Wounded_Attachment_Reflections_on_Between_the_World_and_Me

The Dream seems to run so deep that it eludes those caught by it. Between the World and Me initially seems like a book that will reveal the illusion and in that moment open up the possibility for imagining the United States anew. Remember: “Nothing about the world is meant to be.” But the book does not move in that direction. Coates rejects the American mythos and the logic of certain progress it necessitates, but embraces the certainty of white supremacy and its inescapable constraints. White supremacy is not merely a historically emergent feature of the Western world generally, and the United States particularly; it is an ontology. By this I mean that for Coates white supremacy does not structure reality; it is reality. There is, in this, a danger. When one conceptualizes white supremacy at the level of ontology, there is little room for one’s imagination to soar and one’s sense of agency is inescapably constrained. The meaning of action is tied fundamentally to what we imagine is possible for us. “The missing thing,” Coates writes, “was related to the plunder of our bodies, the fact that any claim to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable.” The body is one of the unifying themes of the book. It resonates well with our American ears because the hallmark of freedom is sovereign control over our bodies. This was the site on which slavery did its most destructive work: controlling the body to enslave the soul. We see the reconstitution of this logic in our present moment—the policing and imprisoning of black men and women. The reality of this colonizes not only the past and the present, but also the future. There can be no affirmative politics when race functions primarily as a wounded attachment—when our bodies are the visible reminders that we live at the arbitrary whim of another. But what of those young men and women in the streets of Ferguson, Chicago, New York, and Charleston—how ought we to read their efforts? We come to understand Coates’s answer to this question in one of the pivotal and tragic moments of the book—the murder of a college friend, Prince Jones, at the hands of the police. As Coates says: “This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.” With his soul on fire, all his senses are directed to the pain white supremacy produces, the wounds it creates. This murder should not be read as a function of the actions of a police officer or even the logic of policing blacks in the United States. His account of this strikes a darker chord. What he tells us about the meaning of the death of Prince Jones, what we ought to understand, reveals the operating logic of the “universe”: She [referring to his mother] knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws. But if we are all just helpless agents of physical laws, the question might emerge again: What does one do? Coates recommends interrogation and struggle. His love for books and his journey to Howard University, “Mecca,” as he calls it, serve as sites where he can question the world around him. But interrogation and struggle to what end? His answer is contained in his incessant preoccupation with natural disasters. We might say, at one time we thought the Gods were angry with us or that they were moving furniture around, thus causing earthquakes. Now we know earthquakes are the result of tectonic shifts. Okay, what do we do with that knowledge? Coates seems to say: Construct an early warning system—don’t misspend your energy trying to stop the earthquake itself. There is a lesson in this: “Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen…And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory, but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.” One’s response can be honorable because it emerges from a clear-sightedness that leaves one standing upright in the face of the truth of the matter—namely, that your white counterparts will never join you in raising your body to equality. “It is truly horrible,” Coates writes in one of the most disturbing sentences of the book, “to understand yourself as the essential below of your country.” Coates’s sentences are often pitched as frank speech; it is what it is. This produces a kind of sanity, he suggests, releasing one from a preoccupation with the world being other than what it is. Herein lies the danger: Forget telling his son it will be okay. Coates cannot even muster a tentative response to his son; he cannot tell him that it may be okay. “The struggle is really all I have for you,” he tells his son, “because it is the only portion of this world under your control.” What a strange form of control. Black folks may control their place in the battle, but never with the possibility that they, and in turn the country to which they belong, may win. Releasing the book at this moment—given all that is going on with black lives under public assault and black youth in particular attempting to imagine the world anew—seems the oddest thing to do. For all of the channeling of James Baldwin, Coates seems to have forgotten that black folks “can’t afford despair.” As Baldwin went on to say: “I can’t tell my nephew, my niece; you can’t tell the children there is no hope.” The reason why you can’t say this is not because you are living in a dream or selling a fantasy, but because there can be no certain knowledge of the future. Humility, borne out of our lack of knowledge of the future, justifies hope. Much has been made of the comparison between Baldwin and Coates, owing largely to how the book is structured and because of Toni Morrison’s endorsement. But what this connection means seems to escape many commentators. In his 1955 non-fiction book titled Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin reflects on the wounds white supremacy left on his father: “I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.” Similar to Coates, Baldwin was wounded and so was Baldwin’s father. Yet Baldwin knew all too well that the wounded attachment if held on to would destroy not the plunderers of black life, but the ones who were plundered. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.” Baldwin’s father, as he understood him, was destroyed by hatred. Coates is less like Baldwin in this respect and, perhaps, more like Baldwin’s father. “I am wounded,” says Coates. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” The chains reach out to imprison not only his son, but you and I as well. There is a profound sense of disappointment here. Disappointment because given the power of the book, Coates seems unable to linger in the conditions that have given life to the Ta-Neisha Coates that now occupies the public stage. Coates’s own engagement with the world—his very agency—has received social support. Throughout the book he often comments on the rich diversity of black beauty and on the power of love. His father, William Paul Coates, is the founder of Black Classic Press—a press with the explicit focus of revealing the richness of black life. His mother, Cheryl Waters, helped to financially support the family and provided young Coates with direction. And yet he seems to stand at a distance from the condition of possibility suggested by just those examples. One ought not to read these moments above as expressive of the very “Dream” he means to reject. Rather, the point is that black life is at once informed by, but not reducible to, the pain exacted on our bodies by this country. This eludes Coates. The wound is so intense he cannot direct his senses beyond the pain.

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