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CHAPTER 1
The Time of Blackened Ethics
From the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of White life.
— Frank B. Wilderson III, "The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal," 2007
Rather than a redaction of black struggle and standing in the modern world, I put on the table a reframing of what we know but disavow about our racist society. This reframing desists from the tendency, with which critical race and sex studies is rife, to assail the faulty premise of black pathology and thereby extend the interlocutory life of the very discourse being criticized within the assumptions of the critique. Accordingly, this study of the "post-racial" does not present any new facts with which to counter the dominant framework of black pathology; this book is not a scholarly equivalent to a new evidentiary hearing of the case for black humanity. Instead, it is an evaluation of the most appropriate frame for explaining the disavowal of these facts and interpreting the violence represented in this abjuration.
My argument that critical race and sex studies are all too frequently complicit in the very violence that ostensibly is their object of critique limns a deep disavowal animating the conjunction between racism and antiracism. In her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," Audre Lorde presciently observes: "Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human." Lorde's insight resonates here because I do not purport to have access to greater powers of reason or rational deduction than other scholars of the topic. Rather, by abandoning the pretense of "new ideas" I am suggesting that what is needed is to listen anew to long-standing findings and perceptions in the black studies archive.
Lorde continues, "There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations, and recognitions from within ourselves — along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage." While this project revisits history, it does so cognizant of how the "crisis of knowledge" about humanity often compels a retreat into historicism, as Lewis Gordon explains, "in which there is believed to be the possibility of emerging rigorous because of an ultimate appeal to 'facts.'" Black studies necessarily holds the archive and the empirical record at a critical distance because they are as rife with violent misrepresentations as they are fonts of discernment.
The specious appeal to "facts" and the "historical record" is a manifestation of another mistaken notion, namely that there is a method of study that will guide us out of the darkness. Frantz Fanon warns against refuge in methodology, proclaiming that "there is a point [in the human sciences] at which methods devour themselves." Gordon elaborates on Fanon's reference to the cannibalism of methodology with his notion of "disciplinary decadence." Gordon uses decadence to emphasize that "the ontologizing or reification" of disciplinary thought and its institutionalization in terms of certain protocols ("methodology") occurs within, and is itself a sign of, the process of decay. Despite their pretense to naturalization or ahistoricism — in other words, the assertion that they are absolutes, that they do not have a time and place of emergence, conditions of possibility, an intrinsically political makeup — disciplines are human creations and, as such, reflect social conditions. Gordon observes that decadence has a debilitating paradox for epistemology: "As social conditions for the life of disciplines decline, so, too, do disciplines, but they do so … primarily through treating the proof of their decay as evidence of their health." In order to effectively confront the prevailing order of knowledge, no matter the historical period, the best of black studies has always had to be more than the original interdiscipline. It has had to chip away at disciplinarity itself, to de-discipline knowledge production.
For instance, although "gender" and "sex" are not disciplines, per se, as objects of study they have realized an exteriorization of processes that are properly understood as interior to racial regime. We might say, then, that even as queer and gender studies has attacked the reification of gender and sex categories, they have reified the construction of "gender" and "sex" by giving it a life beyond racial violence. The contributions of queer and gender studies over recent decades have been numerous, and I intentionally gloss the innovations of this scholarship simply to make the point that antiblackness has provided the enabling fuel for queer and gender studies because it empowers nonblack genders and sexualities with a degree of fluidity and flexibility compared to a relatively static such social field for black people. The irony is that by exploring how gender and sex are embodied and performed, queer and gender studies have obscured the onto-epistemic structure of racism that delimits the meanings of black performativity relative to nonblack genders and sexualities.
The general failure of critical scholarship on race and sexuality to escape the entanglements of antiblack desire indexes precisely what Lorde refers to as a dream state: a set of libidinal investments that return progressive political projects to the site at which the ethical registers of black social movement are abandoned. Or, minimally, that remain blindly wedded to a set of remedies ("justice") that flaunt the propositions set forth by black struggle and ensconce ethicality within an antiblack politic. Along these lines, this chapter explores the lesson of black historical struggle that perspective is more vital than method for confronting the order of knowledge on which slaveholding rests. "Perspective" is understood to be inherently, and irreparably, subjective. As such, it amounts to a framework of analysis at the individual level. When we work at the level of the society, however, "perspective" becomes more than the aggregate of shared vantage points. It becomes paradigm.
The "time of blackened ethics" is a paradigm shift accountable to black freedom struggle across the generations. This chapter explains the features of this paradigm, and in so doing, sutures the recent contributions of the "afro-pessimists" to the black studies movement, argues against the place of "genealogy" in black studies, and begins the process of elucidating "blackhood" against the police power of the post-racial culture of politics. I anticipate that the most vexing parts of this book for readers will not be the militant blackness at the center of my analysis, but rather the treatment of gender and sex that such militancy produces. Let me be clear that they are one and the same: black militancy demands rethinking gender-sex. I am calling for the study of gender and sex as studies of antiblackness — no matter how the bodies in question are phenotypically constructed. To note the decadence of queer and gender studies is not to say gender and sex are not productive categories of inquiry; it simply means that such work may be counterproductive if it does not hold itself accountable to the structures of antiblackness in which gender and sex arise through their coupling with violence. The paradigm I lay out in this first chapter is key to understanding how queer and gender studies are patently parasitic on antiblackness and, by extension, on the black studies tradition that has singularly grappled with the holistic dimensions of this violence. I center the entire book around Bambara's concept of "blackhood" not to dispense with the study of gender and sex, but rather to bring an ethical rigor to it that, in my estimation, has been missing and has led to an avatar quality in which reality fades to black.
The Political Ontology of "Race"
The paradigm in need of specification is nothing less than the past millennium-plus in which one particular cultural conception of humanity has forcibly, steadily, and increasingly occupied global space as if it were the only way of understanding human beings and social life. In other words, one particularistic world of antiblackness has attempted to make itself into the world order. While this culture of antiblackness is most closely associated with the imperialism and settler colonialism of the rise of Europe, it is not reducible to this historical and geographic trajectory, as the Arab slave traders' desire for using Africans as exploited labor, sexual objects, and fungible status symbols in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean region as far back as the eighth century demonstrates. This book's argument does not rest on an archaeological excavation of the original genesis of blackness, antiblackness, and racialism generally; it is concerned, rather, with understanding the operation of the worlds that antiblack violence creates. This agenda cannot take for granted, however, how things came to be. As such, this study approaches the question of black freedom as the key to human liberation itself, the emancipated person as trussed to independent territories, bodies, and minds. To contest the world the police power has made, and remakes on a daily basis, we must look for a critical language it does not already colonize. This chapter explores conceptual territory that in and of itself does not escape this capture, but does enjoin this collective practice of marronage. I illustrate the paradigmatic intervention recently formulated by the afro-pessimists to elucidate the onto-epistemic structure in which we must agitate for freedom through a brief examination of the Ramarley Graham case. Graham was an eighteen-year-old young black man shot to death by New York Police Department detectives in the bathroom of his apartment in the Bronx, on February 2, 2012, a few weeks prior to the better-known case of George Zimmerman's murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012. The police had followed Graham back to his apartment building and gained entry to the building by pointing a gun at another resident and his young child to force the resident to open the door. Within seconds after breaking into Graham's apartment, the police shot Graham in his own bathroom, claiming afterward that they believed he had a weapon, which he did not.
Critical coverage of the case by the media, as well as the calls for justice from the black community, focused largely on the police misjudgment of the danger Graham posed when they burst into his apartment to confront him. The Graham incident, it was said at the time, exposed police tactics as heavy-handed. Largely overlooked were the two main features of the case that foretold Graham's death. As with the Oscar Grant case, the police would not have been in a position to kill Graham had they not construed him as a criminal suspect in the first place, exclusive of any discernible behaviors that would have legally provided them with probable cause to make an arrest. Above all else, then, every single act of police violence that ends in death begins with an act of noticing, of apprehending blackness visually as suspect qua danger. Secondly, there would have been no shooting that day had the police not flagrantly flaunted constitutional requirements and illegally gained access to Graham's home. Seeing Graham is the first racist act; his bodily vulnerability, and the absolute dereliction of his home as a constitutionally protected zone of safety and privacy against unwarranted police intrusion, is the aftereffect of this violence, the meaning of "race."
Here we encounter the first constituent element of the black studies paradigm guiding this study: blackness is the product of a structure of gratuitous violence, as opposed to contingent violence. Black people experience violence and punishment not in response to some action or transgression on their part, such as law breaking (this would be contingent violence). Instead, blacks are subject to violence for being black, punishment for punishment's sake — a function of structural positionality in the antiblack world. Gratuitous violence produces a singular grammar of suffering, the hallmark of black existence relative to other positions in the structure of humanity. All ethical questions therein are authorized by this structure of gratuitous violence. As the afro-pessimists have shown, this defining fact of black existence is the scandal that is catastrophic for each and every humanistic discourse that society relies upon for its conceptual integrity and ethical coherence. When policing is formulated as a question of tactics, a matter of how society conducts itself — for example, did the officers obtain a warrant or probable cause before entering the home? — then the violence is contingent and the transgression lies with either the criminal suspect or with the officers. Somebody broke the law and unleashed the violence. To the contrary, when we recognize policing as the structure in which violence against black people is the precondition for society and all of its rules, including constitutional protections against "unreasonable search and seizure," then we have a very different situation. Police violence then becomes purely gratuitous and detached from the actions of a black "suspect."
The deafening silence on how the police obtained entry to Graham's apartment underscores the second constituent element of the black studies paradigm. The structure of gratuitous violence signifies blackness as the defining marker of the nonhuman. While the first element of the black studies paradigm is grounded in an empirical, sociohistorical reading of black life, the second feature of the paradigm attends to the ontological, axiological, and epistemological violence — or, a political ontology — constructing, enshrouding, entrenching, and extending the empirical. The political ontology of race is not a metaphysical notion, because it is the explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to historical challenge through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of political status either, because it functions as if it were a metaphysical property across the premodern, modern, and now postmodern eras. We can see this captive state in the absolute vulnerability of black domesticity across time and space. Under slavery, the black family and "blood" were functionally outlawed, an impossibility, rendering inapplicable identities and categories of scholarly inquiry customary in the Eurocentric convention — gender, sexuality, labor, family, marriage, generations, ancestors — or, at best, leaving these classifications "indissociable from violence." Under the contemporary war on drugs, the police practice of raiding black homes and neighborhoods becomes the context for the rise of militarized policing in the form of the now-ubiquitous SWAT, as well as asset forfeiture laws that permit law enforcement to confiscate the features of the black domestic sphere without criminal conviction or even due process. Structurally analogous to the slave quarters, black domesticity is neither private nor home: that there is no sanctuary for black bodies underscores how captivity is a constituent element of black life.
The third element of the black studies paradigm expounds on blackness as absent presence, redirecting our analytic away from a preoccupation with political economy and instead toward a more robust apprehension of slavery as a structure of libidinal desire. Orlando Patterson's 1982 comparative study of slavery elucidates the culture of slavery via the concepts of natal alienation and generalized dishonor. In Slavery and Social Death, natal alienation refers to how the slave ceases to belong to a social order of either ascending or descending relations. In Patterson's succinct phrasing, the slave is "truly a genealogical isolate," existing within a social world that is not only unrecognized as such but, moreover, is explicitly proscribed by law. Numerous documents in the black studies archive instruct us on the arc of this structure of violence as it came to be inscribed in legal, cultural, economic, and political narrative: the forcible removal of children and other family relations, the utter vulnerability of slave sexuality, and so on, into the contemporary era as noted above with the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex. Dorothy Roberts's work on the junctures of the criminal justice and child welfare systems vividly documents this process of natal alienation today. Perpetuity and inheritability both derive from natal alienation, which also generates what Patterson terms "generalized dishonor." Patterson uses "honor" to underscore the relationship between power, on the one hand, and recognition, value, and standing, on the other, leading him to assert that slavery really meant "the direct and insidious violence, the namelessness and invisibility, the endless personal violation, and the chronic inalienable dishonor."
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Excerpted from "Blackhood Against the Police Power"
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Copyright © 2019 Tryon P. Woods.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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