1AC

Content Warning: Antiblack

Violence and mentions
terrorism
NOTE FOR GREENHILL *** - My wiki isnt working – ik this sucks and
first 3 last 3 is better BUT it refuses to upload – ive tried multiple
methods and it still doesn’t work.

Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – communication is not

a level playing field but rather geared toward productivity and
futurity. Because the logic of communication presumes a sense of
community, black communication is always seen as an instrument to
serve the future.
Brady 12 2012. Nicholas. “Louder Than the Dark: Toward an Acoustics of Suffering”,
http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/10/louder-than-the-dark-towards-an-acoustics-of-suffering/. [Edited for Ableist
Language].

- brackets in original

Discourse on race normally focuses on the material and the visual, but the video of Anna
Brown’s death points us less to the images and more to the centrality of aurality to black
suffering. The first part of the video is without audio, but this does not mean sound is
absent per se. That the video lacks audio in the beginning says more than perhaps the
soundtrack itself could, for it makes explicit the inaudibility of black suffering. We know
that Anna Brown had expressed her lasting pain, in spite of the doctor’s opinion that she
was fine. The hospital then ordered her to leave and she protested, saying that she was
still in pain. She was forcibly wheeled to the hallway and eventually arrested by the
police. Her vocal protests, critiques of inadequate service and expression of her
persistent pain, fell on deaf ears. She spoke the knowledge of her body, but her voice
was muted and over-dubbed by the knowledge of the professionals. How can the black
know about itself? How can the shadow speak back? The violence that produces the
subject (in this case, the doctor) robs Anna Brown of vocality, not so much literally as
ontologically. Insofar as An object (a commodity, a slave) can speak, it cannot be said
that it can communicate. At The etymological root of “communicate” is the logic of the
commons or community: informing to participate in the world, sharing one’s utterance(s)
to join the community. Communication, not even to imply anything as serious as the
ethics of dialogue, requires an equal ontological status amongst the communicators.
That several titles of the video online have called her the “homeless woman” evidences
one singular truth (the desire to insult her notwithstanding): Anna Brown, as the
descendent of slaves, has no home while the doctors are in their own dominion. In a
public lecture titled “People-of-Color-Blindness,” Jared Sexton describes an experience
at a jazz club where the microphones go off, but the band continues to play. Even
though the sociality between the band and the audience has been shut down, the band
still plays on. Sexton uses this example to dramatize how even though the black is
socially dead, that does not signify that black life is non-existent. Instead, our social
death signifies that black life is sealed off from the world and happens elsewhere:
“underground or in outer space.” In this way Anna speaks, but the microphone that
would project her subjectivity to the world has been turned off. Her suffering has been
rendered unreal while her voice is heard as incoherent and dangerous. If Anna Brown’s
suffering is inaudible, the second half of the video speaks to how her voice and pain are
criminalized. When the police arrive, they surround Anna and then drag her out of the
wheelchair, handcuff her, and leave her on the hospital floor. She is given two different
charges: Her protests for better service are charged as “trespassing” and her inability to
walk due to her injury is charged as “resisting arrest.” When she is in the police car, the
camera in the vehicle has a microphone. When they arrive at the prison, Anna continues
to tell them she can’t walk and that she needs to be in a hospital. The police officers
ignore her statements and instead oscillate between asking her “are you going to get
out” and threatening her; “you have two seconds to [swing your legs out]…” Each implies
that she can move her legs and she is choosing not to. As Saidiya Hartman writes in
Scenes of Subjection, “the slave was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed
intent and rationality solely in the context of criminal liability.” Her suffering remains
inaudible, but her voice can only be heard by the police as challenging the law, resisting
arrest, disrespecting their authority; her voice can only be heard as a legitimizing force
for their violence. As they drag her out of the car, she screams out in pain before the
door is shut and her voice becomes muffled.¶ They carried Anna Brown to the cell and
laid her body on the ground as if she were already a corpse; they even refused her the
dignity of lying on the bed. As they stepped around her body and closed the cell door,
the only sign she was still alive were her wordless screams. Her screams pierce through
my speakers, haunting my mind but they seem to have no effect on the prison workers.
She was clearly not the first screaming body they had carried into a cell, for they did not
even take time to stop their chatter. There is no passion, intimacy, or perverse
enjoyment, just a multicultural group of men doing their job. Anna’s death is not the
“primal scene” that the beating of Aunt Hester (Frederick Douglass’s Aunt) was. These
two black women’s screams are connected by the paradigm of anti-blackness, yet their
screams terrify for different reasons. The beating of Aunt Hester is a spectacular
example of the “blood-stained gate” of the slave’s subjection. While the circulation of the
Anna Brown video has given me pause, her death is more an example of the “mundane
and quotidian” terror that Hartman focuses on in her text. Brown’s death was a
(non)event, concealed from the world by the walls of the prison cell. Without this video,
only those on the inside would have heard her screams. Anna Brown didn’t simply pass
away, she was killed, but who did it? Douglass’s Aunt Hester was beaten by Captain
Anthony, a man who wanted her and was jealous of her relationship to another slave.
Anna Brown was murdered by a disparate set of (non)events where her body shuttled
between a hospital and a prison, doctors and nurses, police officers and prison officials.
There is no one person who killed her; instead, a structure of violence murdered her. No
intimacy, just cold efficiency. Her scream was less of a sorrow song than the sharp pitch
of nu-bluez: an impossible scream to be heard from the depths of incarceration and
incapacity.

Whiteness necessitate living in a hyperreal in order to make

Blackness coherent and legible – which opens blackness to
gratuitous violence in civil society.
Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California,
Irvine, Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017,
https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death
brackets in original
Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a
constituted white fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-
existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists”
only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black violence.4 Achille
Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists,
most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the
power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement,
the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees
the Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and
is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must
therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The reality that
replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as
“a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby
consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and
the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each
and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the
Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to
access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm
that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of
black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to
suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through
the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the
Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death makes it harder to distinguish
white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is
meant to experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself
recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White World subjects the Black to
perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further
suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The
experience of gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White
Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact and fiction, possibility and
(non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped
because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and
syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak
against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the
semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix
of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that
White Being is promised futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the
conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness
gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that structures the
cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as
the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees
natal alienation, social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of
death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the
hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the
libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the
representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or
“the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World,
white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is
everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and
denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and
understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the
Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific
modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white
semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value.
And for this reason, like Wilderson, “[I] am more interested in the symbolic value of
Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality.
If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an
overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s
(non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the
entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic
exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that
there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that
Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being,
that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12
as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being.
Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator.
The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that
demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to
undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that
Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same
time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death
and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a
rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside
the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques
Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize
the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to
make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the
freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in
the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the
cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what
orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which
centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order
to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being?
Civil society requires gratuitous violence to blackness to function –
civil society is preconditioned to destroy the slave. The fact that
whiteness could not enslave their own grafts dirty, slave, and
criminal onto black bodies.
Wilderson 10, [Frank, Professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms”, P. 22-8]

- brackets in original
David Eltis is emphatic in his assertion that European civil society’s decision not to hunt for slaves along the banks of the Thames or other rivers in the lands of White people or in prisons or poor houses was a bad business decision that slowed

development in both Europe and the “New World.” Eltis writes: No Western
the pace of economic

European power after the Middle Ages crosses the basic divide separating European
workers from full chattel slavery. And while serfdom fell and rose in different parts of
early modern Europe and shared characteristics with slavery, serfs were not outsiders
either before or after enserfment. The phrase “long distance serf trade” is an oxymoron.
(1404) He goes on to show how population growth patterns in Europe during the 1300s,
1400s, and 1500s far outpaced population growth patterns in Africa. He makes this point
not only to demonstrate how devastating the effect of chattel slavery was on African
population growth patterns—in other words, to highlight its genocidal impact—but also to
make an equally profound but commonly overlooked point. Europe was so heavily
populated that had the Europeans been more invested in the economic value of chattel
slavery than they were in the symbolic value of Black slavery and hence had instituted “a
properly exploited system drawing on convicts, prisoners and vagrants...[they] could
easily have provided 50,000 [White slaves] a year [to the New World] without serious
disruption to either international peace or the existing social institutions that generated
and supervised these potential European victims” (1407). I raise Eltis’s counterposing of
the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to debunk two
gross misunderstandings: One is that work—or alienation and exploitation—is a
constituent element of slavery. Slavery, writes Orlando Patterson, “is the permanent,
violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”ix Patterson
goes to great lengths to delink his three “constituent elements of slavery” from the labor
that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. The forced labor is not
constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not
define the structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who
are not. In pursuit of his “constituent elements” of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us
separate experience (events) from ontology (the capacities of power—or lack thereof—
lodged within distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and Slaves),
Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and labor, and theorize the
former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the
latter as a possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially dead.x The
other misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is the notion that the profit motive is
the consideration within the slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya
Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have
gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact, slavery is and connotes an
ontological status for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not
exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of
being owned and traded. As these Black writers have debunked conventional wisdom
pertaining to the grammar of slave suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major
corrective on the commonsense wisdom that profit was the primary motive driving the
African slave trade. Eltis meticulously explains how the costs of enslavement would have
been driven exponentially down had White slaves been taken en masse from European
countries. Shipping costs from Europe to America were considerably lower than shipping
costs from Europe to Africa and then on to America. He notes that “shipping
costs...comprised by far the greater part of the price of any form of imported bonded
labor in the Americas. If we take into account the time spent collecting a slave cargo on
the African coast as well, then the case for sailing directly from Europe with a cargo of
[Whites] appears stronger again” (1405). Eltis sums up his data by concluding that if
European merchants, planters, and statesmen imposed chattel slavery on some
members of their own society— say, only 50,000 White slaves per year—then not only
would European civil society have been able to absorb the social consequences of these
losses, in other words class warfare would have been unlikely even at this rate of
enslavement, but civil society “would [also] have enjoyed lower labor costs, a faster
development of the Americas, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the
Atlantic” (1422). But what Whites would have gained in economic value, they would have
lost in symbolic value; and it is the latter which structures the libidinal economy of civil
society. White chattel slavery would have meant that the aura of the social contract had
been completely stripped from the body of the convict, vagrant, beggar, indentured
servant, or child. This is a subtle point but one vital to our understanding of the
relationship between the world of Blacks and the world of Humans. Even under the most
extreme forms of coercion in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period—for
example, the provisional and selective enslavement of English vagrants from the early to
mid-1500s to the mid-1700s—“the power of the state over [convicts in the Old World]
and the power of the master over [convicts in the New World] was more circumscribed
than that of the slave owner over the slave” (Eltis 1410). Marx himself takes note of the
preconscious political—and, by implication, unconscious libidinal—costs to civil society,
had European elites been willing to enslave Whites (Capital Vol. 1, 896-905). In fact,
though widespread anti-vagabond laws of King Edward VI (1547), Queen Elizabeth
(1572), King James I, and France’s Louis XVI (1777) all passed ordinances similar to
Edward VI’s which proclaimed that: [I]f anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned
as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his
slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the
right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the
slave is absent for a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded
on the forehead or back with the letter S...The master can sell him, bequeath him, let
him out on hire as a slave, just as he can any other personal chattel or cattle...All
persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and keep them as
apprentices, the young men until they are 24, the girls until they are 20. (897) These
laws were so controversial, even among elites, that they could never take hold as
widespread social and economic phenomena. But I am more interested in the symbolic
value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness’s value), gleaned from a close
reading of the laws themselves, than I am in a historical account of the lived experience
of the White poor’s resistance to, or the White elite’s ambivalence toward, such
ordinances. The actual ordinance(s) manifests the symptoms of its own internal
resistance long before either parliament or the poor themselves mount external
challenges to it. Symptomatic of civil society’s libidinal safety net is the above
ordinance’s repeated use of the word “if.” If anyone refuses to work...if the slave is
absent for a fortnight... The violence of slavery is repeatedly checked, subdued into
becoming a contingent violence for that entity which is beginning to call itself “White;” at
the very same moment that it is being ratcheted up to a gratuitous violence for that entity
which is being called (by Whites) “Black.” All the ordinances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries which Marx either quotes at length or discusses are ordinances which seem,
on their face, to debunk my claim that slavery for Whites was/is experiential and that for
Blacks it was/is ontological. And yet all of these ordinances are riddled with
contingencies, of which frequent and unfettered deployment of the conjunction “if” is
emblematic. Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that the archive of African slavery shows
no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh.
From Marx’s reports on proposed vagabond-into-slave legislation, it becomes clear that
the libidinal economy of such European legislation is far too unconsciously invested in
“saving” the symbolic value of the very vagabonds such laws consciously seek to
enslave. In other words, the law would rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic
development of the New World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers
and vagabonds might find themselves without contemporaries, with no relational status
to save. In this way, White-on-White violence is put in check (a) before it becomes
gratuitous, or structural, before it can shred the fabric of civil society beyond mending;
and (b) before conscious, predictable, and sometimes costly challenges are mounted
against the legislation despite its dissembling lack of resolve. This is accomplished by
the imposition of the numerous “on condition that...” and “supposing that...” clauses
bound up in the word “if” and also by claims bound up in the language around the
enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on condition that s/he
is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24. Hortense Spillers
searched the archives for a similar kind of stop-gap language with respect to the African
—some indication of the African’s human value in the libidinal economy of Little Baby
Civil Society. She came up as empty handed: Expecting to find direct and amplified
reference to African women during the opening years of the Trade, the observer is
disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the
overwhelming debris of the itemized account, between the lines of the massive logs of
commercial enterprise [e.g., a ship’s cargo record] that overrun the sense of clarity we
believed we had gained concerning this collective humiliation. (Spillers 210) It would be
reassuring to say that Europeans rigorously debated the ethical implications of forcing
the social death of slavery upon Africans before they went ahead with it; but, as Marx,
Eltis, and Spillers make abundantly clear, it would be more accurate simply to say that
African slavery did not present an ethical dilemma for global civil society. The ethical
dilemmas were unthought.

They will construct the future distinct from the "status quo" with their
imagination which extends the racism of white supremacy through
normalizing tropes of futurity.
Dillon 13 PhD in American Studies at U of Minn, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory “It's here, it's
that time:” Race, queer futurity, and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames. Stephen Dillon. University of Minnesota,
MN, USA Published online: 23 May 2013
In one of the first lines of the film, a state newscaster covering the celebration of the
revolution’s tenth anniversary says that the news program will look “at the progress of
the last ten years, and will look forward to the future.” Progress is central to the
discourses produced by the revolutionary state and is the liberal conception of time that
the Women’s Army attempts to undo. Progress is named as a time that is cyclical and
forcefully forgetful (Söderbäck 2012, 303). Indeed, progress, patience, and reform are
the temporalities used by the state to justify and erase the violence that continues under
the names of justice, equality, and democracy. The state describes the future as a space
of safety and security in order to maintain the violence of the present, and to temper the
rage of those who refuse to wait for the future’s warm embrace to arrive. According to
the state media, the Women’s Army is not “interested in the progress of all of us”
because their actions and demands contradict the teleology of state development and
reform. The state declares change will come, to be patient, to trust in the progress of
time. Critically, this narrative is not just produced by the state, but also by the white
feminist editors of the Socialist Youth Review. When asked about the actions of the
Women’s Army, and more specifically about the continuation of sexual violence in the
revolution, they respond: Well, I think statistics will show you that the percentage of rape
and prostitution at this point is lower than it was in pre-revolutionary society and that
obviously it’s an advancement, it’s a step forward. It’s impossible to talk about the
complete, you know, abolition [of sexual violence], because this is not the nature of this
government, they don’t abolish … it’s a question of a gradual move toward something,
and I think everything is leading up to the point where those things will no longer exist.
Here, white feminism aligns itself with the state through its adherence to liberal Western
notions of time and history. This is a notion of history where the passage of time washes
away the violence of then and now so that the future is free from the horrors of the past.
In this way, the past is constructed as a space of radical alterity, an aberration to the
progress of the future. Sexual violence will be left behind by the progress of the
revolution. Time will temper terror. Yet, the very ability of the editors to believe in the
progress of time is tied to the immunity of whiteness from structural forms of racial
violence, regulation, and social death. For instance, when Adelaide Norris, the black
lesbian leader of the Women’s Army, goes to the editors of the Socialist Youth Review to
ask for their support, their conversation highlights the divergent temporalities of black
feminism and white feminism. When Norris tells the editors, “You’re oppressed too and
it’s pathetic that you can’t even see it!” they respond, “There are problems, we know. But
things are so much better than they were before. Things are not going to happen
overnight. It’s important that the party remains strong so progress can be made. ” 7
Norris’s response sutures gender and race to a different theorization of time: You know
the way my mom brought us up; there were eight of us and she took care of the
domestic work all by herself. And abortions; she couldn’t even think of abortions. And
daycare – hmph – we took care of ourselves, no one took care of us. And there are
plenty of women who are living now in the same manner: Black women, Latin women,
young women living in that same lifestyle. 8 For the editors, the future of the revolution
will be free from state and non-state forms of racialized and gendered violence because
the reforms sutured to time’s progression will undo the horrors of the present. But for
Norris, gendered racism built into the banality of everyday life undoes the imagined
progress of time, so that time’s passage is merely the modification and intensification of
older modes of subjection and subjugation. For those bearing the brunt of white
supremacy and heteropatriarchy, the past, present, and future are not distinct temporal
spaces. In other words, Born in Flames documents the amplification, modification, and
protraction of the past in the present, where the past is not an isolated aberration of what
is here, but, rather, is an anticipation of the present and future. The past is an image of
the future because the future will be a repetition of the past. In this way, the film critiques
normative notions of time and a liberal conception of history. In Specters of the Atlantic:
Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Ian Baucom argues for a
conception of history that undoes liberal notions of progress, change, and time.
Baucom’s theory of history centers on the massacre of 132 slaves aboard the slave ship
The Zong in 1781. Over three days, the slaves were handcuffed and thrown overboard
in order to collect the insurance money that sealed their value even in death. For
Baucom, the massacre is the paradigmatic event of modernity. It encompasses the
racial, financial, and epistemological regimes that have not only failed to dissolve with
the passage of time, but instead, have intensified so that our current moment finds itself
anticipated and enveloped by this event. As Baucom argues: “Time does not pass, it
accumulates” (Baucom 2005, 24). Time does not erase what has happened, dissolving
terror and violence into the progress of the future, nor is the past passively sedimented
in the present. Rather, the past returns to the present in expanded form so that the
present “finds stored and accumulated within itself a nonsynchronous array of past
times” (29). The present is possessed by the logics and protocols of racial capitalism’ s
past – by a perfectly routine massacre that was and is repeated endlessly across space
and time in the (post)colony, prison, frontier, torture room, plantation, reservation, riot
zone, and on and on. Racial terror returns from a past that is not an end to take hold (of
bodies, institutions, infrastructure, discourse, and libidinal life) and does not let go. In this
way, the past and present are not ontologically discrete categories, but are, rather,
complex human constructs. The present is not a quarantined, autonomous thing. What
was begun does not end but instead intensifies so that the past and present become
indistinguishable. Hortense Spillers provides a powerful theorization of time as
accumulation in her classic essay, “ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book: ” Even though the captive flesh/body has been “ liberated,” and no one
need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter , dominant symbolic activity,
the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains
grounded in originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither
time nor history, nor historiography or its topics, show movement, as the human subject
is “ murdered ” over and over again by the passions of a blood-less and anonymous
archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.

The resolution augments the "electoral unconscious," a rhetorical

artifact that situates democratic authority within a cycle of interest,
action, and dividend – that coaxes investments into blackness as the
antithesis of political possibility.
Warren ‘15
[Calvin, WGSS at Emory. 2015. “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215#metadata_info_tab_cont
ents] pat
In the essay “A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African American Vote in the 2004
Election,” Grant Farred (2006) exposes a kernel of irrationality at the center of African
American political participation. Traditionally, political participation is motivated by self-
interested expectancy; this political calculus assumes that political participation,
particularly voting, is an investment with an assurance of a return or political dividend.
The structure of the Political—the circular movement between self-interest, action, and
reward—is sustained through what Farred calls the “electoral unconscious.” It
“historicizes the subject in relation to the political in that it determines the horizon of what
is possible it maps, through its delimitation or its (relative) lack of limits, what the
constituency and its members imagine they can, or, would like to expect from the
political” (217). In this way, the electoral unconscious, as the realm of political fantasy,
mirrors the Lacanian notion of fantasy; it maps the coordinates of the political subject
and teaches it how exactly to desire the Political. For Farred, there is a peculiar logic
(“another scene”) operating as the motivation for African American participation in the
Political. Unlike the traditional political calculus, where action and reward determine civic
engagement, African American participation does not follow this rational calculus—
because if it did, there would actually be no rational reason for African Americans to
vote, given the historicity of voting as an ineffective practice in gaining tangible “objects”
for achieving redress, equality, and political subjectivity. African Americans, according to
Farred, have an “irrational fidelity” to a practice that, historically, has yielded no concrete
transformations of antiblackness. This group is governed not by the “electoral
unconscious” but by the “historical conscious,” which is the “intense [and incessant]
understanding of how the franchise has been achieved, of its precarious preciseness as
well as their (growing) contemporary liminality, their status as marginalized political
subjects” (217). African Americans are a faithful voting block not because of voting’s
political efficaciousness but as a way to contend with a painful (and shame-full) history of
exclusion and disenfranchisement. Political participation becomes an act of historical
commemoration and obligation; one votes because someone bled and died for the
opportunity to participate, and “duty” and “indebtedness” motivate this partial political
subject.
Within this piece, we get a sense that black fidelity to the Political is tantamount to the
Lacanian notion of drive—one perpetuates a system designed to annihilate—
participation, then, follows another logic. The act of voting, according to Farred, is
legitimate in and of itself; it is a means as an end (or a means without an end, if we
follow Agamben’s logic [2000]). The means, the praxis of voting, is all there is without an
end in sight. African American political participation is an interminable cycle of
reproduction, a continuous practice of reproducing the means of reproduction itself. This
irrational fidelity to a means without an end gives rise to “the politics of despair”—
representation for its own sake and the apotheosis of singular figures—and a politics
without hope:
African American fidelity, however, takes its distance from Pauline “hope”— like faith,
hope is predicated upon a complex admixture of expectations and difference. In this
respect, the African American vote is not, as in the colloquial sense, hopeful: it has not
expectations of a shining city appearing upon an ever distant, ever retreating, hill in the
unnamed-able future. Fidelity represents the anti-Pauline politics in that its truth, its only
truth, resides in praxis. (223)
This brilliant analysis compels us to rethink political rationality and the value in
“means”—as a structuring agent by itself. What I would like to think through, however, is
the distinction between “hope” and “despair” and “expectations” and “object.” Whereas
Farred understands political participation as an act without a political object, or
recognizable outcome—without an “end,” if we think of “end” and “object” as synonyms
—I would suggest that the Politics of Hope reconfigures despair and expectation so that
black political action pursues an impossible object. We can describe this contradictory
object as the lure of metaphysical political activity: every act brings one closer to a “not-
yet-social order.” What one achieves, then, and expects is “closer.” The political object
that black participation encircles endlessly, like the Lacanian drive and its object, is the
idea of linear proximity—we can call this “progress,” “betterment,” or “more perfect.” This
idea of achieving the impossible allows one to disregard the historicity of anti-blackness
and its continued legacy and conceive of political engagement as bringing one
incrementally closer to that which does not exist—one’s impossible object. In this way,
the Politics of hope recasts despair as possibility, struggle as triumph, and lack as
propinquity. This impossible object is not tethered to real history, so it is unassailable
and irrefutable because it is the object of political fantasy.
The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call “cruel optimism” for
blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about redress, equality, freedom,
justice, and progress into a political object that always lies beyond reach. The objective
of the Political is to keep blacks in a relation to this political object—in an unending
pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is detrimental because it strengthens the very anti-
black system that would pulverize black being. The pursuit of the object certainly has an
“irrational” aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means without expectation;
instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In
other words, the pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the
continued widening of the gap between historical reality and fantastical ideal.

Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We

must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our
deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken
the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation
happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being
parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world.
Gillespie 2 (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson
University, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death,” Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1,
Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD

brackets in original
The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters
crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The
Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here
is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order
of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary
World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black
paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the
Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of
knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a
monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our
order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to
whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white
structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “[I] am more interested
in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a
world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the
hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology
that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White
Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black
death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself
over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing
between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological
capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose
essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it,
then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it
concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use
already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response
emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject
positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said
to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is,
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness
exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the
moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure,
enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes,
“The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure—
one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that
the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the
structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection
and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography
of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the
structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very
Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit
the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in
favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory
that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one
finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing
pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its
colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way
out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it
fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and
black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a
negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero
degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it
were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only
through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the
spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is
somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility
of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its
disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As
Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular
present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them
with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism
that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s
calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that
we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism
and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-
Pessimism. If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this
World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of
diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a
space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an
undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and
the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to
excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the
specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what
might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the
inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that
death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean
Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when
there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery,
and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a
terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by
those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror,
violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the
system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one
to the “desert of the [Black] Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon
the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death
embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a
radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto-
epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the
decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White
Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror
terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall
2017) 9 only have the power to end the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The
radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are
the system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United
States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the
capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but
the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-
Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what
happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is
(non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism
steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to
his own White Being and the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees
all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way.
Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity
throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own
natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the
singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts
literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic
stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray.
But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed
symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part,
only others are going to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the
(un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being.
Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only
choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But,
ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “[T]he first lesson a
revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the
perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is
White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and
flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented
immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to
secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private prison and the
militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of
enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land
and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard
for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the Apocalypse.
Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be
“destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it
Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a
kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all
know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this
Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s
words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is
immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a
response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/

The role of the ballot is to allow niggas to engage in refusal of spaces

like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Refusal is not
just a “no,” but a generative process that challenges sanctioned
modes of protocol and decorum in civil society.
Tiffany Lethabo King, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of
Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Taja1h
Within Native feminist theorizing, ethnographic refusal can be traced to Audra Simpson’s
2007 article, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” In this seminal work, Simpson reflects on and
gains inspiration from the tradition of refusal practiced by the people of Kahnawake.14
Simpson shares that Kahnawake refusals are at the core and spirit of her own
ethnographic and ethical practices of refusal. I was interested in the larger picture, in the
discursive, material and moral territory that was simultaneously historical and
contemporary (this “national” space) and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the
“people of Kahnawake,” had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn. The
ways in which their formation of the initial membership code (now replaced by a lineage
code and board of elders to implement the code and determine cases) was refused; the
ways in which their interactions with border guards at the international boundary line
were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate
repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are,
these are my rights.”15 Because Simpson was concerned with applying the political and
everyday modes of Kahnawake refusal, she attended to the “collective limit” established
by her and her Kahnawake participants.16 The collective limit was relationally and
ethically determined by what was shared but more importantly by what was not shared.
Simpson’s ability to discern the collective limit could only be achieved through a form of
relational knowledge production that regards and cares for the other. Simpson recounts
how one of her participants forced her to recognize a collective limit. Approaching and
then arriving at the limit, Simpson experiences the following: And although I pushed him,
hoping that there might be something explicit said from the space of his exclusion— or
more explicit than he gave me— it was enough that he said what he said. “Enough” is
certainly enough. “Enough,” I realised, was when I reached the limit of my own return
and our collective arrival. Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here
and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why? And “enough” was
when they shut down (or told me to turn off the recorder), or told me outright funny things
like “nobody seems to know”— when everybody does know and talks about it all the
time. Dominion then has to be exercised over these representations, and that was
determined when enough was said. The ethnographic limit then, was reached not just
when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort)— the limit was arrived at when the
representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we
have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years.17 Extending her discussion of
ethnographic refusal beyond the bounds of ethnographic concerns, Simpson also
ponders whether this enactment of refusal can be applied to theoretical work. Simpson
outright poses a question: “What is theoretically generative about these refusals?”18 The
question that Simpson asks in 2007 is clarified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the
2014 essay “R- Words: Refusing Research.” Arguing that modes of refusal extended into
the theoretical and methodological terrains of knowledge production are productive and
necessary, Tuck and Yang state: For the purposes of our discussion, the most important
insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive,
but are theoretically generative, expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to
ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration
of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of
refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.19 In line with
Simpson’s intervention, Tuck and Yang posit that “refusal itself could be developed into
both method and theory.”20 For Tuck and Yang, a generative practice of refusal and a
decolonial and abolitionist tradition is making Western thought “turn back upon itself as
settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without
horizon.”21 In fact, the coauthors suggest “making the settler colonial metanarrative the
object of . . . research.”22 What this move effectively does is question the uninterrogated
assumptions and exposes the violent particularities of the metanarrative. Scrutiny as a
practice of refusal also slows down or perhaps halts the momentum of the machinery
that allows, as Tuck and Yang argue, “knowledge to facilitate interdictions on Indigenous
and Black life.”23

Even with debate being encapsulated by the hold, our intensification

of pessimism and negativity allows niggas to create language for
themselves to communicate the seemingly uncommunicable
response to anti-black liberalism.
Nicholas Brady et al, September 1st 2017, “Wishing Against Hope: The Radical
Prospects of Afro-pessimism,” Vitamin Decolonial podcast,
https://www.mixcloud.com/Vitamin_D/wishing-against-hope-the-radical-prospects-of-
afro-pessimism/, transcribed from audio [6:20 - 33:33]) Taja1h
Nicholas Brady: [Laughter] Yeah, yeah. So, I’m originally from Baltimore. I kind of came
to Afropessimism in kind of two different things that were happening to me. One, I was a
participant in high school debate, and debate is a kind of weird space. It’s a white-
controlled space, as everything was. It was “formally segregated.” It is formally—as in
formal, formally though—or informally still segregated. And I kind of came up through
these organizations called Urban Debate Leagues which were created as white
philanthropist organizations to supposedly take the tools of debate and bring them into
the cities so that you can teach the quote-unquote…or not quote-unquote but like what
they kind of think of us as kind of urban monkeys, you know, to kind of teach us and to
civilize us, in the process. So often times in their grant-writing processes, like, they’ll talk
about, you know, the fact that Black people can’t read and write and debate as being a
kind of tool to kind of bring them up to speed and kind of take them away from crime or
recidivism and other issues. But what they didn’t predict was going to happen was that,
by introducing us to debate, that not only would we enjoy the activity, but we would
actually excel at it and eventually, become better at it than they are. So, once a lot of
people from, in particular, our Urban Debate League—the Baltimore Urban Debate
League—moved on to college debate, they—and I say they, because I didn’t really
participate that much in college debate, but I just kept my finger on the pulse and we all
were friends and I kind of kept in touch with them in that way—as they progressed into
college debate, they kind of, I know they eventually came into contact with Wilderson
and Sexton’s work because they kind of helped us to give a language for what is the
relationship between Black people and these kind of white-controlled institutions. There
was a kind of liberal movement at one point in time in debate about saying that you need
to make space for Black people, like you need to make space for the way that we talk,
you need to make space for our culture, blah blah blah, but even that became kind of not
good enough, right? So Black people started exploring kind of the radicalism of their
antagonism. Like, why is it that even in a world where Black people can win
championships or Black people can become competitively successful, why is it that the
institution itself not only remains as antiblack as it started, but why did it actually get
worse? Like why did it weaponize itself against Black people as they got better and
better at debate, and became better at pushing these white and nonblack debaters
better? So I think Wilderson and Sexton’s work kind of helps to clarify that problem, i.e.,
debate is fundamentally and ontologically antiblack so it cannot integrate Black people
into it no matter how many Black people win championships, no matter how good Black
people become at it. It can’t actually bring them in. And I think it kind of spoke to, you
know what I’m saying, it spoke to…it spoke to our voices. And for myself in college, as I
was kind of keeping abreast of what was happening in, kind of, college and high school
debate, and coaching, and still staying active, in my own, like, activism on campus, like I
went to John’s Hopkins University and that’s an incredibly antiblack institution. I’m from
Baltimore, so I have a very, very particular relationship to that institutions because
John’s Hopkins owns a lot of property in the city and is generally an oppressive entity for
all people who live in Baltimore. They regularly experiment on folks. When I was a kid,
my mom…like when she wanted me to not go outside or to run away, like she would tell
me, “if you run away, like, the white coats will come and get you”—the white coats being,
like, the doctors from John’s Hopkins. You know what I’m saying? So like, you know,
parents like kind of almost would like use Hopkins as like a fear tool, because like we
know the different things they’ve done to Black people in the city, to their bodies or
whatever. So…but I went there because they had this program called the Baltimore
scholars program which is essentially a white guilt scholarship program where, if you’re
from Baltimore, you get tuition for free, and their tuition is like $50,000 a year and my
parents told me, very specifically like “yo, we can’t afford to put you through college, so
you better…you have to find a scholarship somehow, someway. So, once I was
accepted, I went there and we’re like 2% of the population at the school, so you know,
Black people, as we always do, like you kind of create your own internal community
given the antagonism and how bad it becomes. But the weird thing that happened my
junior year as we were organizing through the Black student union was that the Office for
Multicultural Affairs—the organization that houses all of the “cultural organizations”—the
Office of Multicultural Affairs became our enemy, right? We had a room in the basement
of a dormitory. That was our BSU room. I could go into more detail, I’m just trying to be
quick about it. But basically, a long time ago, Black students actually broke into that
room and made it their own. Like they stole it, they cultivated it, they made it their own.
The walls are painted with murals, like we made it ours. So jumping fifty years into our
time, the university decided that they wanted to make that room into a game room. It’s
kind of almost like a mini version of gentrification, like Black people made it a hot spot
and now the university was like “yo, we want that, we want that, like it’s beautiful. Give it
to us. It’s ours.” And the Office of Multicultural Affairs threatened us. Like they were like
“you know what, you need to get in line with the university. They want the room. They
are going to take the room no matter what you do. So you need to get in line.” And they
literally like bought alumni to guilt us to giving the room to the university and they did all
of these different things to try to…to try to get us to give it up. And I think in that time, I
didn’t have a language to understand like why is there…why is it that the organization
that’s supposed to represent us to the university, why is it actually the direct opposite
thing, i.e., they actually are the wing or the arm of the university in this situation. And
reading Afropessimism was the thing that finally allowed me to understand like, “no, I’m
not crazy. No matter how much you say you’re my ally, you are not my ally. No matter
how much you say that we are in a coalition together, we are not in a coalition together,
right? You are actually my enemy in this situation.” And it allowed for me to name
multiculturalism as the problem, multiculturalism as being fundamentally antiblack. So at
least in that situation, it made me feel not as crazy. And long story short, you know what
I’m saying, Black people, the Black students, we organized, and the room is still ours to
this day, because in that moment we decided like no, we are not going to let the Office
for Multicultural Affairs play us at all. So we just strong-armed them and we just refused
to move. We occupied the room, you know, for a good period of time, and eventually the
university just gave up because it was a protracted struggle and they didn’t really want it
like that. But that was just, for me, was just like an example of like the different ways that
Afropessimism kind of gave me a language to name why liberalism, multiculturalism,
diversity were problems for Black people instead of solutions.

Antiblackness is a prerequisite to solving every other form of

oppression implemented by the state
Sexton 10 – Sexton, Jared. (2010). People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife
of Slavery. Social Text. 28. 31-56. 10.1215/01642472-2009-066.
The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the category of
blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical
opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the center of
discussion. Every analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and
the machinations of the racial state without accounting for black existence within its
framework — which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or
returning to it as an afterthought — is doomed to miss what is essential about the
situation. Black existence does not represent the total reality of the racial formation — it
is not the beginning and the end of the story — but it does relate to the totality; it
indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the
whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this
vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance
under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses
that are feminist and queer.75 What is lost for the study of black existence in the
proposal for a decentered, “postblack” paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale
and nature of black suffering and of the struggles — political, aesthetic, intellectual, and
so on — that have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack
nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and
symbolic power relative to the category of blackness.76 This is why every attempt to
defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to make
substantial gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the prototypical
targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around
them. Without blacks on board, the only viable political option and the only effective
defense against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack
civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the apex of
the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their
1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black freedom entails “the
necessarily total revamping of the society.”77 For Hartman, thinking of the
entanglements of the African diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of
the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world: I
knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my
past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not
been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that
identity. Terror was “captivity without the possibility of flight,” inescapable violence,
precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going
beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet another revolution.78

Regardless of the flow vote for niggas to surrender to blackness.

Nonblacks should not be rewarded for their relationship to blackness
Brady and Murillo 2014 [Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of
Coalition,” January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-
in-the-age-of-coalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of
the University of California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are
broad, and include extensive engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory;
Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics; Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore,
Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a
doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program.]

“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because syntactically

it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to
blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible
hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders:
“Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought and
being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a
revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must
centralize, which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real
love for, the blackness [preposition] which “an authentic upheaval might be born.”
#BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative as legible, let alone heed and
meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to
draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and
tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary interjections
into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example,
#solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal
commentary, usually in direct opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of
respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here,
here, here, here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much
more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But broadly, the
intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition
politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between
the communities for the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’ For those
nonblack participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a purely innocent and
unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are rendered
as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we
are all human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never
“move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a wonderful thing the
blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing
others were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the unthought
question remains: have you truly earned the right to act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to
even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to
our hearts? Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have images we have
transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people and
Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole?
And who is to blame for the fact that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies
that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the face of this,
confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional
bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey
come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This is the logic behind much
of the Asian confessing – white supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and
also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression olympics, that’s
what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be
simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity with no equivalent force – “anti-
Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism or islamophobia.
Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and much more than
that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand antiblackness as
the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and unspeakable,
unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define
antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all
corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the little racist
microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the
world – not simply whites – bond over and form their lives inside of and through. What
#BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition politics
remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III
(@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady
(@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit of that
singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence
of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness. From
outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and politics of
nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global, and singular nature
of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive
blackness and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the
scene. All of this in the name of “coalition.” This is because “coalition” politics and
possibilities are fetishized, not loved. The fetish denies the necessary recognition of
antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left unattended renders the
imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the
heart of the coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and
terror meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on
how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must
be made in excess of the hashtag and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of
the imperative. Instead of fetishizing the object, you must surrender to blackness.