Jackie Wang
Art by David Barthold
Jackie Wang will give the Closing Address at the 2020 Singapore Lit Fest event “The Future of Abolition,” on Saturday, October 3, 2020, 9.30-10.30 pm (EST). RSVP for Zoom link.
David Barthold - Happy Hour (2020) 12" x 16"
Brush and Ink collage on panel
Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day—the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to …
Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!1
While I was reading the local newspaper, I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a seventeen-year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007, when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. When Simmons was unresponsive, the counselors dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for more than forty minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out. None of the counselors involved in his murder were charged. An article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.”2 By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article immediately flags Simmons as a criminal, signaling to readers that his death is inconsequential and thus not worthy of sympathy. Every comment posted on the article was crude and contemptuous. The general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all.3 There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the myriad issues bound up with Simmons’s death: youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth.
For weeks after reading the article, I contemplated these questions: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored? In the wake of the Jena Six, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high-profile cases,4 I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of mass antiracist political campaigns. These campaigns often focus on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the state and the criminal justice system as allies and protectors of the oppressed. When the “innocence” of a black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause.5 An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary antiracist politics. Within this framework, empathy can be established only when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be cleansed of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition happens only when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” activist model, which involves the isolation of cases considered “exemplary,” also tends to emphasize the individual rather than the collective nature of racist injuries. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from structural violence.
“What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored?”
Using “innocence” as the foundation to address antiblack violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs docile subjects. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous—there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Wilderson notes in “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” the cop’s answer to the black subject’s question—why did you shoot me?—follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”6 In the words of Frantz Fanon, the cause is the consequence.7
Not only are black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt.8 Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the state. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A., notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy.9 The desire for recognition compels political subjects to seek alliance with the state and to sacrifice themselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood. This is also the logic of rape-revenge narratives: only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can audiences begin to tolerate her rage (outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners).
Although it is sometimes necessary to make “innocence” appeals for strategic reasons—to win a case or to influence public opinion—these strategies become problematic when they reinforce a framework that renders revolutionary and insurgent politics unimaginable. The prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes that “while saving anyone is a good thing to do, to try to assert innocence as a key political organizing strategy is to turn a blind eye to the system and how it works.”10 For Gilmore, the problem “is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.”11 These appeals to innocence are also anachronistic because they do not address the transformation and reorganization of racist strategies in the post–civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively color-blind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling, or personal prejudice, though there is certainly a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal color-blind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment.12 This effectively conceals racism because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Such cases as the execution of Troy Davis—in which the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias—also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent black man. Innocence, however, is often code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other black men—the bad ones—and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this, for they assume that trials are intended to be fair). The state is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that “Justice means ‘just-us white-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”13
David Barthold - Happy Hour 2 (2020) 15" x 20"
Brush and ink collage on panel
While there are countless examples of overt racism, black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via coded discourses of “criminality” and mediated forms of state violence carried out by an impersonal carceral apparatus (a matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, and so forth). In other words, incidents where a biased individual attacks or discriminates against a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, a scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”14
The abandonment of black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975 to 1986, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of black Americans. Imprisoned black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”15 Between 1986 and 1990 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that exemplifies the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and ceased publication of articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile, these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists.
Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This [hesitation to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W. E. B. Du Bois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”16 When the black leadership and middle-class blacks differentiate themselves from poorer blacks, they feed into a notion of black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle antiracist struggles. This class of exceptional blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the image of America as a post-racial society.
The root of this shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps a fear of affirming the conflation of blackness and criminality. However, by not advocating for prisoners, they shore up and extend the penal state by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. This disidentification with poor, urban black Americans is not limited to black men, but also affects black women, who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen, portrayed as a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hardworking white Americans). The welfare state and the penal state complement each other, as revealed by Bill Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or Social Security: he condemns former prisoners who receive welfare assistance, accusing them of deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”17 Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the penal state: the incarceration of black men profoundly increases the burden put on black women, who are forced to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and who are punished by the state when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The reconfiguration of the welfare state under the Clinton administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor black women. In this view, the welfare state is the apparatus used to regulate poor black women who are not subjected to regulation by the penal state that is directed chiefly at black men—though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in nonviolent crime policy led to a 400 percent increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.18 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.
David Barthold - Skull Slice (2020) 14" x 21"
Silkscreen collage on panel
White Space
[C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons
and urban ghettoes as “alternate universes”
where the social order is drastically different,
and the links between social structures and the
production of these environments is conveniently
ignored. In particular, although they are
public institutions, prisons are removed from
everyday US experience.
—Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners19
The urban landscape is organized according to a spatial politics of safety. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor black bodies (as well as certain nonblack people of color, trans people, homeless people, differently abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettos prevent poor black and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the sexual safety of women have sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the black male rapist. With the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas, warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “[s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”20 In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”21
At the same time that the state was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the U.S. saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of blackness. It could be argued that the state and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized penal state while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). In this view, the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash that sought to discipline women, reverse the gains made by the feminist movement, and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.”22 However, in In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society.” By insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.23
Regardless of how one assesses the question of feminists’ collaboration with the state, the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women had been a genuine concern, the “feminist” campaigns would not have focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext for the escalation of the penal state, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus populations. For Wacquant, this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of black radical movements.24 The torrent of uprisings that took place in black ghettos between 1963 and 1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison upheavals (including Attica, Soledad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). These upheavals were easier to contain and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary.
The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of “void” zones that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms.
When considering the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that are accessible to the white imaginary, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Martin was gunned down while visiting family members in a gated neighborhood; Grant was murdered by police officer Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void zones that lie outside middle-class white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? How does the public respond to cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “black is not a man.”25 In the regions where black is not “man,” there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own.
Translation
When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing oneself in that position. This framework often requires the grafting of a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was dumbfounded when a call for a protest march for Trayvon Martin posted on the Occupy Baltimore website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin—is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” (It seems unlikely that George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because he’s young!) No mention of race or antiblackness could be found in this statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue. It’s a 99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman asserts in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.”26
David Barthold - Black and Green Claw (2020) 14" x 20-3/4"
Relief print and silkscreen collage on panel
In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the U.K. after Mark Duggan, a black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftists and liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and they refused to support a passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the state and property owners (including small-business owners) as victims while criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaningless outburst.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as “the proletariat” or dissatisfied consumers whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.27 These leftists were quick to purge and rearticulate the antisocial and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analyses, insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as, to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “a sovereign deliberate consciousness.”28
Following the 1992 L.A. riots,29 leftist commentators—as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions—often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than as a riot. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is born of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and antisocial tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages—the rioters were not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that the system has failed them and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive elements, such as those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London, who said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker”30—or the politically “unreasonable” excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that “we can do what we want.”31 Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence—rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disrupters are not proper victims and, hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.
With that said, my reluctance to jam black rage into a white framework is not an assertion of the political viability of a pure politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultraleftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists who adhere to and fetishize the position of being “for nothing and against everything” are also eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their own (non)agendas. They insist on an analysis focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays antiblackness and ignores forms of gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like contemporary liberal discourses, post-left and antisocial interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimit which questions are posed and which categories are the most analytically useful. For instance, the French ultraleftist group Tiqqun explores the ways in which subjects are enmeshed in power through their identities but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life (sometimes called “biopolitics”) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (sometimes called “necropolitics”).32 This framework is decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and that capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produce ourselves, express our identities through consumer choices, and base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. The black feminist scholar Joy James rejects this productive, life-affirming conceptualization of power. Responding to Foucault’s claim that the “carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside …[i]t saves everything, including what it punishes,”33 James writes:
The U.S. carceral network kills, however, and in its prisons, it kills more blacks than any other ethnic group. American prisons constitute an “outside” in U.S. political life. […] Foucault remains mute about the incarcerated person’s vulnerability to police beatings, rape, shock treatments, and death row. Penal incarceration and executions are the state’s procedures for discarding the unassimilable in an external inferno of nonexistence. Not everything, not everyone, is saved.34
As James asserts, frameworks that view power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipse the realities of policing, the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, and the institutional violence of the welfare state, of the penal state, and of black and brown social death. While prisons certainly “produce” race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white subject-position.
Among ultraleft tendencies, communization theory notably looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late capitalism. Writing about the group Théorie Communiste (TC), Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that “TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life—beyond the walls of the factory or office.”35 However, while this reframing may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the workplace, it does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by social death are not reducible to the capital-labor relation.
Rather than reduce race to class, the Afropessimist thinker Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference between being exploited under capitalism (as worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous to capitalism (as slave, as prisoner). He writes, “The absence of black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.” 36 The cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than in terms of labor or exploitation.37 Forced labor, according to these thinkers, is undoubtedly a part of the slave’s experience, but it is not what defines the slave relation.38 Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomenon of racialized incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address antiblackness—or addresses it only as a by-product of capitalism—is deficient.
David Barthold - Skinny Skull (2018) 11" x 16"
Silkscreen
Safe Space
The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro level when white radicals manipulate “safe space” language to maintain their power in activist spaces. They do this by silencing the criticisms of people of color under the pretense that their criticisms make them feel “unsafe.”39 This use of safe-space language conflates discomfort and actual imminent danger. The phrase “I don’t feel safe” is easily manipulated because it frames the situation in terms of the speaker’s personal feelings, making it difficult to respond critically (even when the person is, say, being racist) because it will injure their personal sense of security. Conversations often come to a halt when people politicize their feelings of discomfort by using safe-space language. The most striking example of this that comes to mind is a time when a woman from Occupy Baltimore manipulated feminist language to defend the police after an “occupier” called the cops on a homeless man. When the police arrived at the encampment, they were verbally confronted by a group of protesters. During the confrontation, the woman made an effort to de-escalate the situation by inserting herself between the police and the protesters, telling those who were angry about the cops that it was unjustified to exclude the police. In the Baltimore City Paper she was quoted as saying, “they were violating, I thought, the cops’ space.”40
The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affective and emotional registers41 and can thus be manipulated to justify everything from racial profiling to war. When people use safe-space language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the language is framed as innocent, and may even amplify or politicize their presumed innocence. After the woman from Occupy Baltimore came out as a survivor of violence and said she was traumatized by being yelled at while defending the cops, many people became unwilling to take a critical stance on her blatantly pro-cop, classist, and homeless-phobic actions and comments, which included statements like, “There are so many homeless drunks down there—suffering from a nasty disease of addiction—what do I care if they are there or not? I would rather see them in treatment—that is for sure—but where they pass out is irrelevant to me.”42
Surviving gendered violence does not make the survivor incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence. Likewise, people can also mobilize their experiences with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves. When people identify with their victimization, it is important to critically consider whether they use this gesture as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power in a social space. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.
On the other side of this debate about safety is the radical queer critique of “safe-space” models. In a statement from the Copenhagen Queer Festival titled “No Safer Spaces This Year,” festival organizers explained their decision to remove the safer-space guidelines of the festival, offering in their place an appeal to “individual reflection and responsibility.”43 I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing—and the unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit—as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer performativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the “Care of the Self ”–style “politics” of choice.44 By reacting against the failure of safe space with a suspicion of articulated/explicit politics and all forms of collectivity, those who are dismissive of attempts to offset power imbalances in a space ultimately flatten these issues and miss an opportunity to ask critical questions about the distribution of power, vulnerability, and violence, questions about how and why certain people co-opt language and infrastructure that is meant to respond to internally oppressive dynamics.
On the other hand, as a Fanonian, I agree that removing all elements of risk and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that often reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is undermined by the politics of safety. When people habitually block any actions that involve risk on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe, it becomes impossible to develop a revolutionary political program. People of color who use privilege theory to argue that white people have the privilege to engage in risky actions, while people of color—because they are the most vulnerable (most likely to be targeted by the police, not having the resources to get out of jail, etc.)—make a correct assessment of the power differentials between white and nonwhite political actors, but ultimately erase people of color from the history of militant struggle by falsely associating militancy with whiteness and privilege. When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups such as the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army.45 For Fanon, it is precisely the element of risk that makes militant action more urgent: liberation can be won only by risking one’s life. Militancy is not just tactically necessary; its dual objective is to transform people and “fundamentally alter” their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity, and cleansing them of “the core of despair” crystallized in their bodies.46
The politics of safety prioritizes personal comfort, which in turn inhibits action in consensus-based groups or spaces. For instance, when people at Occupy Baltimore confronted sexual assaulters, I witnessed a general assembly (GA) become so bogged down by consensus procedure that the only decision made about the assaulters in the space was to stage a ten-minute presentation about safer spaces at the next GA. No one in the group wanted to ban the assaulters from Occupy. (As Stokely Carmichael said, “The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone, and therefore he is incapable of presenting any clear alternative.”)47 Prioritizing personal comfort can bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill. The politics of innocence and the politics of safety and comfort are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity. Comfort and innocence produce each other when people base their demand for comfort on the innocence of their location or subject position. Perhaps it goes without saying there is no innately ethical subject position. Even though I am a queer woman of color, my existence as a person living in the United States is built on violence. As a non-incarcerated person, my “freedom” is understood only through the captivity of people like my brother, who is serving a forty-year prison sentence. When considering safety, we sometimes fail to ask critical questions about the co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We need to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and necessary underside of security, particularly white security. Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies onto which they project hostile feelings, allowing them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence.
The precarious founding of the United States required the disappearance of Native American people, which was justified by associating the Native body with filth. Andrea Smith writes, “This ‘absence’ is effected through the metaphorical transformation of native bodies into pollution of which the colonial body must constantly purify itself.”48 The violent foundation of U.S. freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed by those who live in relative safety because their lives are mediated in ways that have rendered that violence invisible or, when visible, may be considered legitimate and fail to register as violence (such as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections between our lives and the generalized atmosphere of violence is submerged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and—above all—are constituted by this repetition of violence.
“Militancy is undermined by the politics of safety. When people habitually block any actions that involve risk on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe, it becomes impossible to develop a revolutionary political program.”
Abjection and Sexual Violence
When innocence is used to select the proper subjects of empathetic identification, it also regulates the ability of people to respond to other forms of violence such as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is inevitably used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity of a woman’s claim. “Promiscuous” women, sex workers, women of color, women experiencing homelessness, and people addicted to drugs are not seen as legitimate victims of rape—their moral character is always called into question (they are always-already asking for it). In Southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, police officers would close all reports of rape and violence made by sex workers, gang members, and addicts by placing them in a file stamped “NHI”: No Human Involved.49 This police practice draws attention to the way that rapeability is also simultaneously unrapeability in that the rape of someone who is not considered human does not register as rape. Only those considered “human” can be raped. Rape is often conventionally defined50 as “sexual intercourse” without “consent,” and consent requires the participation of subjects in possession of full personhood. Those considered not-human cannot give consent. Which is to say, there is no recognized subject position from which they can state their desires.51 This is not to say that bodies constructed as rapeable cannot express consent or refuse to engage in sexual activity—but that their demands will be unintelligible because they are made from a position outside of proper white femininity.
Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus unable to access the sexual purity at the core of white femininity. As Smith writes in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Native American women are more likely to be raped than any other group of women, yet the media and courts consistently tend to pay attention only to rapes that involve the rape of a white woman by a person of color.52 Undocumented immigrant women are vulnerable to sexual violence—not only because they cannot leave or report abusive partners owing to the risk of deportation, but also because police and border patrol officers routinely manipulate their position of power over undocumented women by raping and assaulting them, using the threat of deportation to get them to submit and remain silent. Black women are also systematically ignored by the media and the criminal justice system. According to the civil rights lawyer and advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Black women are less likely to report their rapes, less likely to have their cases come to trial, less likely to have their trials result in convictions, and, most disturbingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services.”53 Black women are less likely to report their rapes because seeking assistance from the police often backfires: poor women of color who call the police during domestic disputes risk losing custody of their children, arrest, or sexual assault by police officers. Given that the infrastructure that exists to support survivors (counseling, shelters, and so forth) often caters to white women and neglects to reach out to poor communities of color, it’s no surprise that women of color are less likely to make use of survivor resources. However—when noting the widespread neglect of the most vulnerable populations by police, the legal system, and social institutions—it is important to be critical of the assumption that the primary problem is “neglect,” for this assumption implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role is to protect oppressed people, and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order and protect the interests of propertied white people. If these institutions are violent themselves, then expanding their jurisdiction will not help those who want to end the white supremacist order, especially while racism and patriarchy endures.
Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapeable, even if we are strategically using such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we challenge sexual violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap for ourselves by reinforcing the assumption that white cis women’s bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated, because only white femininity is sanctified.54 As Kimberlé Crenshaw writes, “The early emphasis in rape law on the property-like aspect of women’s chastity resulted in less solicitude for rape victims whose chastity had been in some way devalued.”55 Once she “gives away” her chastity, she no longer “owns” it, and thus it cannot be “stolen.” However, the association of women of color with sexual deviance bars them from possessing this “valued” chastity.56
David Barthold - De Profundis (2020) 22" x 38"
Linoleum cut relief print
Against Innocence
The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law and instead ally ourselves with the state. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, and that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing, I read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did not fit into a nonviolent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and—in cases like Baltimore— anticapitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “violent” protestors after more than four hundred arrests made during an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was pleased that Lewis affirmed rather than excised people’s anger:
AMY GOODMAN : Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent?
MARIA LEWIS : Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend, and I think that the anger the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning to fight back. And I think that’s a really inspiring thing.57
Although the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the “violent”58 elements, c) legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, and d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, it rejects a politics of innocence that reproduces the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”59
The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. Although it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Martin were armed? What if he was able to defend himself? Had the situation resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Martin, it is unlikely that the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent.
Prior to Zimmerman’s acquittal, many people on the left had faith that there would be “justice for Trayvon,” as though prison time for Zimmerman could somehow compensate for Martin’s death. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that the nation or even the black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a black trans woman who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting McDonald’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter.
Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position againstracism. We need to challenge the use of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail, maybe we also should question why the public is morally outraged by the killing of a cop and not the 136 unarmed black Americans murdered by police officers, security guards, and self-appointed vigilantes in 2012 alone. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.”60 Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective—it is a lived position.
“Against Innocence” is excerpted from Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang (Semiotext(e), 2018). Reprinted by permission from publisher and author.
Singapore Unbound, an NYC-based literary non-profit, is holding its 4th Singapore Literature Festival from October 1-3, 2020. To be held online for the first time, this independent, biennial festival brings together Singaporean and American authors and audiences for lively conversations about literature and society. All events are free and open to everyone. The theme of this year's festival is "The Politics of Hope." Check the website for the full festival program.
Notes
1. Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” 189.
2 . “Charges Dropped Against 5 in Juvenile Offender’s Death,” CBS Baltimore, March 29, 2012.
3. However, there was a critical response when the case initially broke.
4. This article assumes some knowledge of race-related cases that received substantial media attention in the last several years. For those who are unfamiliar with the cases: The Jena Six were six black teenagers convicted for beating a white student at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, on December 4, 2006, after mounting racial tensions, including the hanging of a noose on tree. Five of the teens were initially charged with attempted murder. Troy Davis was a black man who was executed on September 21, 2011, for allegedly murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, though there was little evidence to support the conviction. Oscar Grant was a black man who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California, on January 1, 2009. Trayvon Martin was a seventeen-year-old black youth who was murdered by George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida.
5. During a speaking engagement at Morgan State University, Michelle Alexander described her disillusionment with legal responses to the problem of mass incarceration, which tend to capitulate to a politics of respectability. Alexander describes her experiences as a lawyer to illustrate her point. While she was working as a civil rights lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, a young black man brought a stack of papers to her after hearing about their campaign against racial profiling. The papers documented instances of police harassment in detail (including names, dates, badge numbers, and descriptions), but the ACLU refused to represent him because he had a drug felony, even though he claimed that the drugs were planted on him. Later, a scandal broke about the Oakland police planting drugs on people of color, including an officer he identified.
6. Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” 225–40.
7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 30.
8. In Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, Lisa Marie Cacho discusses how, in American law, radicalized subjects are deemed guilty of status crimes, defined as “specific activities that are only transparently recognized as ‘criminal’ when they are attached to statuses that invoke race (gang member), ethnicity (‘illegal alien’), and/or national origin (suspected terrorist)” (43). Cacho argues that a politics of respectability cannot be responsive to groups deemed “ineligible for personhood” (6).
9. Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought.”
10. For Gilmore, the carceral state works by “mov[ing] the line of what counts as criminal to encompass and engulf more and more people into the territory of prison eligibility.” See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race, Capitalist Crisis, and Abolitionist Organizing” in Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge, Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, 43.
11. Ibid.
12. In “Methodologies of Imprisonment,” Avery F. Gordon writes that “most of what passes as critical discourse today cedes first and foremost to the legitimacy of criminalization, the rule of law, and the morality of innocence” (653). See “Methodologies of Imprisonment,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 651–57.
13. H. Rap Brown, Die, Nigger, Die!, 121.
14. Loïc Wacquant, “Social Identity and the Ethics of Punishment,” Center for Ethics in Society (Stanford University, 2007).
15. Ibid.
16. Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” 118.
17. Ibid., 120.
18. See Cassandra Shaylor, “ ‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole.’”
19. “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39, no. 1: (2011): 270–90.
20. Quoted in “From Civility to Self-Defense: Modern Advice to Women on the Privileges and Dangers of Public Space,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2011): 86.
21. Mary Conroy, The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense, 8.
22. Georgina Hickey, “From Civility to Self-Defense,” 86.
23. Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State, xii.
24. Wacquant, 95–134.
25. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 8.
26. Hartman and Wilderson, 189.
27. Zygmunt Bauman described the rioters as “defective and disqualified consumers.” Žižek wrote that, “they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realize itself in the ‘proper’ way—by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly—so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology—so much, perhaps, for the ‘postideological society.’ From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive.”
28. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Harasym Sarah, The Post-Colonial Critic, 109.
29. Riots erupted in LA on April 29, 1992, after three white and one Hispanic LAPD officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King, a black man, following a high-speed chase.
30. Zoe Williams, “The UK Riots: The Psychology of Looting,” The Guardian, August 9, 2011.
31. “London Rioters: ‘Showing the Rich We Do What We Want,’” BBC News. August 9, 2011.
32. Biopolitics and necropolitics are not mutually exclusive. While the two forms of power coexist and constitute each other, necropolitics “regulates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in a mere existence below every life minimum” (Marina Grzinic). Writing about Mbembe’s conceptualization of necropower, Grzinic notes that necropower requires the “maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Though Mbembe focuses primarily on Africa, other examples of these deathscapes may include prisons, New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Palestine, and so forth. See Mbembé, J-A., and Libby Meintjes. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
33. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 301.
34. Joy James, Resisting State Violence, 34.
35. Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” 224.
36. Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” 22.
37. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
38. This paradigmatic and decidedly pessimistic view of race has come under scrutiny recently, most notably in the book Race Defaced. Drawing on examples from the United States and Great Britain, Race Defaced systematically critiques both left and right “pessimist” race doctrines, which render the project of human emancipation impossible by asserting that racialized thinking is intrinsic to the modern capitalist world order. According to Kyriakides and Torres, pessimistic race doctrines, such as doctrines that psychologize racism and naturalize hatred, are politically untenable. See Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
39. This tactic is also used to silence and delegitimize other people, such as femmes who are too loud or queers who engage in illegal actions.
40. Edward Ericson, “Occupy Baltimore Makes Up a Movement as It Goes Along,” City Paper, October 12, 2011.
41. In “Fear and Loathing” Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners offer the following definition of affect: “Affect is the body’s response to the world—amorphous, outside conscious awareness, nondirectional, undefined, full of possibility. In this framing, affect is distinct from emotion, which is understood as the product of affect being marshaled into personal expressions of feeling, as shaped by social conventions.” Affect is useful to think of the way “the criminal” and “the terrorist” become linked to certain racialized bodies, and how people viscerally respond to the presence of those bodies even when they consciously reject racism. See “Fear and Loathing,” 272.
42. These comments were posted to the “Occupy Baltimore” article in the City Paper.
43. “No Safer Spaces 2011,” Politics—Cph Queerfestival, 2011 http://www.queerfestival.org/politics.html.
44. Post-leftists, perhaps responding to the way we are fragmented and atomized under late capitalism, also adamantly reject a collectivist model of political mobilization. In “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Maya Andrea Gonzalez advocates “inaugurating relations between individuals defined in their singularity.” In “theses on the terrible community: 3. AFFECTIVITY,” the idea that the human “community” is an aggregate of monad-like singularities is further elaborated: “The terrible community is a human agglomerate, not a group of comrades. The members of the terrible community encounter each other and aggregate together by accident more than by choice. They do not accompany one another, they do not know one another.” To what extent does the idea that the singularist (read, individualist) or rhizomatic (non-)strategy is the only option reinforce liberal individualism? In One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power discusses how individual choice, flexibility, and freedom are used to atomize and pit workers against each other. While acknowledging the current dynamics of waged labor, she shows how using the “individual” as the primary political unit is unable to grapple with issues like the discrimination of pregnant women in the workplace. She asserts that thinking through the lens of the individual cannot resolve the exploitation of women’s caring labor because the individualized nature of this form of labor is a barrier to undoing the burden placed on women, who are the primary bearers of child-care responsibilities. She also discusses how the transition from a feminism of liberation to a feminism of choice makes it so that “any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off.” See Gonzalez’s “Communization and the Abolition of Gender” and Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman.
45. In Black Is a Country, Nikhil Pal Singh gives readers a “long view” of the Civil Rights Movement that focuses specifically on the creation of black radical counter-public spheres, which resist “institutionalized forms of national belonging” and eschew “the symbolic equality enshrined in citizenship” in favor of an emancipatory politics founded on “grassroots insurgency and global dreams” (220–21). In his discussion of the Black Power movement in the chapter “Decolonizing America,” Singh asserts that the Panthers “were a threat to the state not simply because they were violent, but because they abused the state’s own reality principle.” (204) For Singh, the power of the Panthers’ use of violence was primarily rhetorical: it symbolically appropriated the state’s monopoly on violence and revealed that violence is the state’s “very condition of possibility.”
46. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 219.
47. Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 170.
48. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
49. See Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence (ed. Amy Scholder) (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993) and Elizabeth Sisco’s essay “NHI—No Humans Involved,” paper delivered at the symposium “Critical Condition—Women on the edge of violence,” San Francisco Cameraworks, 1993.
50. The New Oxford American Dictionary gives a peculiar definition: “the crime, committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse with him without their consent and against their will, esp. by the threat or use of violence against them.” To what extent does this definition normalize male violence by defining rape as inherently male?
51. To what extent is individuality a precondition for the capacity to say “no” and be heard? How is individuality itself racialized? Dwight A. McBride’s work on slave testimony examines the “impossibility” of slaves “speak[ing] of the self solely as an individual.” McBride goes on to assert that racialization functions similarly in our society: “This logic goes far toward explaining why white bodies can signify individuality and why black bodies—with their limited access to the category of the individual—almost always signify as representative bodies. Individual slave experiences of horror, torture, and scarred bodies are not in themselves meaningful.” See Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 10–11.
52. Smith, Conquest.
53. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1251.
54. Because the sexuality of white women derives its value from its ability to differentiate itself from “deviant” sexuality, such as the sexuality of women of color.
55. Crenshaw, “Mapping,” 1266.
56. Early rape laws focused on the “property-like” aspects of women’s sexuality that liberal feminists are today attempting to reclaim. Liberal feminists frame debates about women’s health, abortion, and rape around a notion of female bodies as property. But using bodily self-ownership to make our claims is counterproductive because certain bodies are more valued than others. Liberal feminists also echo arguments for free markets when they demand that the State not intervene in affairs relating to our private property (our bodies), because as owners we should be free to do what we want with the things we own. In order to be owners of our bodies, we first have to turn our bodies into property—into a commodity—which is a conceptualization of our corporeality that makes our bodies subject to conquest and appropriation in the first place. Pro-choice discourse that focuses on the right for women to do what they want with their property substitutes a choice-oriented strategy founded on liberal individualism for a collectivist, liberationist one. (Foregrounding the question of choice in politics ignores the forced sterilization of women of color and the unequal access to medical resources between middle-class women and poor women.) While white men make their claims for recognition as subjects, women and people of color are required to make their claims as objects, as property (or, if they are to make their claims as subjects, they must translate themselves into a masculine white discourse). In the U.S., juridical recognition was initially extended only to white men and their property. These are the terms of recognition that operate today, which we must vehemently refuse. Liberal feminists try to write themselves in by framing themselves as both the property and the owners.
57. Maria Lewis in an interview with Amy Goodman, “Occupy Oakland: Over 400 Arrested as Police Fire Tear Gas, Flash Grenades at Protesters,” Democracy Now, January 30, 2012.
58. In contemporary liberal discourse, property destruction is considered a form of violence.
59. Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 168.
60. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, 41.
