1AC

Blackness exists in a state of absolute dereliction – it stands in opposition to civil

society so that civil society can maintain its coherence – this pushes blackness
into a position of social death where gratuitous violence is justified because black
bodies are seen as inhuman. The state was founded on this ethical paradigm –
that blackness must be subjugated in order for white slave owners to maintain
control and access a new dimension of humanity.
Purti Pareek 15, J.D. Candidate, “Reform: Friend or Foe?: ANTI-BLACKNESS AND LIMITATIONS OF
CONTEMPORARY REFORMIST FRAMEWORKS”, Confluence,
http://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/context/interdisciplinary-seminar/reform-friend-or-foe

The above analysis throws into crisis the contemporary human rights and legal framework that is most
often cited when talking about racial inequality. The main question present here is, How can America and the policies it puts
forth take into account for all people who make up America? Problematizing this question and the idea of reform via

present day frameworks, Coates notes that the starting point of this question is itself incorrect. Instead
of questioning how can we create policies that are more inclusive of all types of
peoples and battle social inequality, we need to first question who is even considered a
person in America (10). A crucial part of this discussion is the development of the Human in opposition of the category of Black.
Blackness exists in a state of absolute dereliction. It is the zero-point of all Human
endeavors, as it serves to ground humanity’s image of itself during the Enlightenment
period and beyond. The Enlightenment, with the rise of science and loss of ontological foundation in God, found itself in crisis, as the
very fate and essence of Human could no longer be divinely ordained. Moreover, the alarming awareness that man was perhaps not in God’s
image was compounded with the discoveries of peoples in the New World and the depths of the African continent, challenging Europe’s
exceptionalist cultural practices and concept of who is Human. For example, consider how startling it was for European explorers to encounter
the African tribal life of the Khosian people in the late seventeenth century: Without the textual categories of dress, diet, medicine, crafts,
physical appearance, and most important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of the invitation to become Anthropological Man. S/he was the
void in discourse that could only be designated as idleness. Thus, the Khoisan’s status within discourse was not that of an opponent or an
interlocutor, but rather of an unspeakable scandal (Wilderson “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal” (23). The
Khosian, as
something unsignifiable in European coding of Human during this encounter, then served not only to
rupture the Human identification of Europe by challenging the social edifice upon which Europe saw
itself as civilized man, but it also moved to strike both fear and fascination in the heart of Europe. These
encounters demonstrated the possibility that behind the mask of European science, ritual, politics, and life was something as anti-Human and
“animal” as the Khosian. One
can easily imagine that, in order to heal the wound inflicted by the loss of God’s
grounding, and to reconcile the animal encounter within the civil European, that the obvious step
forward by White civic forces was to not only exclude the African from Human life by
rendering it animal, but also to juxtapose the African animal figure as a demarcation that
granted European’s a new ground for their Humanity: the color of their skin . Crisis was
averted in this way. The Human essence was secured by the animalization of another , which paved the way to render Africa a
hunting ground for animals; for slaves. This is also highlighted by Wilderson, who notes, The race of Humanism…could not have produced itself
without the simultaneous production of that walking destruction which became known as the Black. Put
another way, through
chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of
political discontent; and with these joys and struggles, the Human was born, but not before it
murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity
and the social death of Blacks (20-22) With this in mind, one can understand how the Enlightenment period, with all its talk
of liberation, was also the period most known for slavery, as it became a method to fabricate the Human essence of White populations. Even
the most supposedly progressive of the White resistance, the American revolutionaries for instance, who saw slaves on an everyday basis, could
say that they as Whites deserved freedom from such things as taxation, because at the very least, they were not slaves; they were not Black.
They were Human. It
is Blackness that serves as a dam that holds the waters of the Human in place even now,
lest the referent to Humanity’s essence is lost again. The hierarchical and interlocking relation of White
society as Human over-determines and delimits the purview and reach of Black capacity exactly in this
way. A Black body, even prenatally, is a priori exposed to a legacy of slavery and cannot transcend itself
in assuming other subject positions. The only way to reconcile this bifurcation , far from mere
Biopolitical analysis, is to destroy one of the ontological fixtures, Black or White, as
they are antagonisms. Blackness as slave could not exist without Whiteness; Whiteness
as master could not exist without Blackness. It seems clear then that the obvious ethical alignment is decidedly
against the master, who continually murders people of color. This, however, entails a structural , material struggle

that cannot occur in the confines of human rights, reform, or legal analysis in so far as neither
of these frameworks is attentive to the limits of their discussion of power for oppressed peoples.
Similarly, the granting of human rights to populations assumes that there are rights that
a citizen must attain. By the prior discussion of who is Human and how Human is defined, I indicate
that not all residents of a nation-state will be citizens. Therefore, the concept of citizen and rights that
are granted require the exclusion of non-citizens intrinsic to sovereign power. In this case, I treat the non-citizen
the same as the anti-Human, the Black. Discourses of rights, then, need the existence of the non-
citizen. The role that Black folk and legal/political non-citizens (such as refugees and migrant workers, to just name a few) play is to remain
excluded from the political orders of the nation-states they inhabit, instead shaping the modern political order via their exclusion. The
limitations of conventional reform are further illustrated when we investigate the foundations of the
institutions (e.g. governments and supranational organizations such as the United Nations) involved. US
institutions are purportedly founded upon principles of democracy, justice, and liberalism. Notions of
democracy and justice are used as justifications for governments everywhere to intervene and
subjugate different populations, inside and outside of their own nation-states. Therefore, these values
are used to justify the state’s domination over a group of individuals. In order to create a mutually beneficial
relationship between citizens of a nation and the government, John Locke’s theory of social contract was used as a framework for many
Western governments. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke elaborates that the state and citizens of the state would be bound
by a moral and social contract to act in each other’s interests. In Locke’s view, the government is only legitimate because the citizens give it the
powers to be legitimate. None of Locke’s writings take into account the concepts of race, gender, or class. Locke takes for granted this colorless
and universal approach to government and Statism, a system where the state has centralized control over political and economic affairs. The
mainstream analytic view of the Cartesian individual as per Contractarian theory influences colorblind theories that justify violence in the name
of reason and justice. In The Racial Contract (1997), Charles Mills asserts that this analytic view ignores the historical and social processes
through which identities are formed. The United States’ governmental institutions have their origins in principles developed by political
philosophers such as Locke. As a result, our institutions and their methodologies, such as reformist policies, have the same gaps that their
originating theories have. Since our institutions have ignored the historical processes through which many
person’s identities have come about, they seldom take into account the historical and present
discrimination people of color face when engaging in the political sphere . It should be noted here that many argue
historical processes have not been ignored, as illustrated by affirmative action and various other equal-opportunity policies. I would argue

that these policies address certain individualized instances of racism and anti-Blackness but
not the structural instances as such. The policies passed seldom address institutional power and
its connection with structures of domination. Having colorblind institutions and a colorblind
justice system not only fails to contest racial domination, but they assist in the reaffirmation of anti-
Blackness by leaving historically bound and oppressive structures intact. Beyond the active omission of race, gender,
and class from his theory of government, Locke anchors his theory on the principle of property ownership. The state’s primary purpose was and
is to protect private property and advance one’s rights to property. Looking
at the relationship between Blacks being anti-
Human and thus technically property and Locke’s interpretation of rights, it is clear that the state that
was created was one that protected slave owner’s rights to enslaved persons and
maintained the positionality of a Black person as enslaved . We need not go further than original drafts of
the constitution to see examples of this. In the constitution, enslaved persons were described as property that owners had the right to trade
and destroy (Wilderson, Red, White, and Black 354). Moreover, enslaved persons, and later on, their black decedents during reconstruction,
were not seen as peoples to be educated, to have rights (mostly because they were still property) even though later on, slavery was repealed
via law. If Locke’s theory of government is accepted as the foundation of liberalism, then there remains a relationship between the
establishment of Black persons as anti-Human and resembling property instead of ontologically Human in modern day liberal democratic
societies. Liberal notions of rights are not only inapplicable to Black folks in modern day society, but also the advancement of liberal rights to
sustain a Black person’s positionality as an anti-Human apolitical commodity. Even worse, it is in opposition to this idea that human rights are
developed. As the human-rights framework or any liberal-rights framework exists in the status quo, they exist from the foundation of Locke’s
liberal notions of rights vis-à-vis protection of private property. It
becomes crystal clear that rights-oriented frameworks
aggressively work to grant rights to White citizens from the political order of the nation-state that may
grant rights in the first place, and, in turn effectively rendering Black people as non-citizens regardless of
their legal status. It is this foundation of transforming African peoples to Black flesh through the Middle
Passage and adopting Locke’s theory of government that creates the notions of rights through
protection of private property on which all rights-oriented frameworks are based. Indeed if all of the above is
true, then does reform have any chance of instituting progress? Can institutional racism be challenged in society, as it exists today? A
prominent counter-example is the Civil Rights Movement. It is argued that the Civil Rights Movement was a movement that led to definite
progress; it gave Blacks the right to vote among other legal guarantees. Various scholars argue that the Civil Rights Movement was another
band-aid solution. The Civil Rights Movement, arguably, did not address the actual conditions of violence Black folk faced. Even
after
the passing of the Civil Rights Act, Black people are incarcerated at higher rates than any
other population, experience astronomical rates of HIV infection, poverty, as well as
many other material deprivations. Orlando Patterson explains in Slavery and Social Death that no other category but Black
and White served to fuel the machinations of Western understanding because of the specific position of Blackness as animal towards
Whiteness as agential human. During the Enlightenment period and thereafter, even the most hardened of European criminals could expect
death or banishment, but never enslavement—never can a White face serve as an animal in opposition to another category, as it would call into
question the content of Humanity itself. For example, the reason that Blacks were enslaved was because they were not deemed as human but
as a commodity to be traded.
Although this is such a simple point, it is important to reiterate because it means
that despite the subjectivity of other races, the Black is dead in so far as it can be reduced to
chattel and owned by others. This “death” experience is what shapes the entirety of the
Black experience, even when put into the hands of colored masters because it exposes those
marked as Black to a specific form of violence experienced by those who are not recognized
with humanity. There has been great debate over how to best challenge social death and discuss whether social death exists at all.
Many argue that despite the being socially dead, Blacks can gain power through engaging in rigorous government reform and advocating for
themselves. This approach is championed in hopes that power would be materially redistributed where Black populations would no longer be
systemically discriminated against. Conversely, there are scholars who argue that social death can only be challenged when we challenge the
very existence of US civil society, as it exists in the status quo. As discussed earlier, if we accept the assumption that the
construction of the United States itself was an unethical one, then it becomes
inevitable that any measure taken via civil society will only work to strengthen that
unethical construction of the United States. Because of this, it also becomes inevitable that even
the most liberal reformist policies can only alleviate individual instances of discrimination against Blacks
but not systemic oppression. Advancing these sentiments and arguments in a much more personal way, Coates concludes his book
by noting that we must also no longer view oppression such as slavery from within Western society but its opposite. I agree with
Coates’s take that we must take the standpoint of the oppressed and realize that Black subjugation
foregrounds White dominance from the outside and flows into all other aspects of oppression.
Only after understanding this and incorporating this framework into all other human rights,
politically reformist, and legal frameworks can we create a starting point to address racial
inequality in the United States that is not doomed for failure.

A prerequisite to debate over international relations is a recognition of antiblack

violence embedded within civil society – Policy action misrecognizes the root of
antiblack violence and only makes it worse.
Warren 15 (Calvin L., Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope; Surce: CR: The New Centennial Review,
Vol. 15, No. 1, Derrida and French Hegelianism (Spring 2015), XMT, pp. 215-248 Published by: Michigan
State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215 .
Accessed: 30/03/2015)

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. Black nihilism is a “demythifying” practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating
strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its fantastical object. Once we denude political hope of its axiological

and ethical veneer, we see that it operates through certain strategies : 1) positing itself as the only
alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2) shielding this alternative [End Page 221] from rigorous historical/philosophical critique by
delimiting the field of action to include only activity recognized and
placing it in an unknown future, 3)

legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different philosophical perspectives.

The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of “happiness” and “life.”
It terrifies with the dread of “no alternative.” “Life” itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this
logic, life becomes untenable without it. Political
hope promises to provide this alternative—a discursive and
political organization beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the
binary “alternative/no-alternative” ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the
onto-existential horizon. The terror of the “no alternative”—the ultimate space of decay, suffering, and death—depends on two
additional binaries: “problem/solution” and “action/inaction.” According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and hope provides the
accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of “the problem”; the solution, in fact,
transcends the problem and realizes Hegel’s aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the “problem” with the pristine being
of the solution. Noproblem is outside the reach of hope’s solution—every problem is connected to the
kernel of its own eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that the “solution”
is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a “solution” is nothing more than the
repetition and disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies on what we might call the “trick of time” to fortify itself
from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time “not-yet-realized,” a
future tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope
cleverly shields its “solutions” from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that
these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the
rationale that these solutions are not subject to history or analysis because they do not reside within
the horizon of the “past” or “present.” Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the proposed
solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreating to a “not-yet” and
“could-be” temporality. This “trick” of time offers a promise of possibility that can only be realized in an
indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined .
In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of
This politics secures its hegemony through time by
possibility, never to satiate or bring fulfillment.

claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing) any other conception
of time that challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then, depends on the
incessant (re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions
cannot really exist within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future
tense. The “trick” of time and political solution converge on the site of “action.” In critiquing the politics of hope, one
encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. “But we can’t just do nothing! We have to do
something.” The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between
action/ inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These exclusionary operations rigorously
reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate action
takes place in the political—the political not only claims futurity but also action as its property. To “do
something” means that this doing must translate into recognizable political activity; “something” is a
stand-in for the word “politics”—one must “do politics” to address any problem. A refusal to “do
politics” is equivalent to “doing nothing”—this nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life,
possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a “zero-state” as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). Black nihilism rejects this “trick of time”
To refuse to “do politics” and to reject the fantastical object of
and the lure of emancipatory solutions.

politics is the only “hope” for blackness in an antiblack world.

The impact is the social death of black people. Social death has no ethical
considerations behind it – none of their impacts matter to those who are already
dead - the Slave’s subject position is one of non-ontology – civil society checks
violence against any non-Black, but guarantees it against the Slave
Wilderson- 2002

Frank Wilderson- The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented a t #Imprisoned

Intellectuals # Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002, NN

Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and wages
are White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And th e invitat ion to p articipate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not ext ended to t he

. This structurally impossible position is a paradox, because the Black

unwaged. We live in the world , but ex ist out side of civil s ociety

subject, the slave, is vital to political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it
from its over-accumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth and
life-saving role played by the Black subject: from Marx and Gr amsci we have con sistent s ilence. In taking Foucau lt to ta sk for a ssum ing a univ ersal s ubject in r evolt ag
ainst d iscipline, in the same s pirit in which I have t aken Gr amsci to ta sk for as suming a u niversal sub ject, the subject of civil societ y in revolt a gainst capita l, Joy Jam es 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. In fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois self-
policing. The state routinely polices the14 unassim ilable in the hell of lockdow n, deprivat ion tanks , control units , and holes for political prisoners (Resisting State Violence 1996: 34 ) But this peculiar preoccupation is not

Gramsci's bailiwick. His concern is with White folks; or with folks in a White (ned) enough subject position that they are confronted by, or threat ened by th e remova l of, a wag e -- be it monetary or social. But Black
subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory strategy,
because Gramsci, like most White activists, and radical American movements like the prison abolition
movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity with the slave If we are to take Fanon at his
word when he writes, #Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete
disorder then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary,
# (37)

the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black
body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its
magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through
which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can
be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for
Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no data
for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog # a past, without
a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of t he Imaginary for
#whoever says #rape # says Black, # (Fanon) , whoever says #prison # says Black , and
whoever says #AIDS # says Black (Sexton) # the #Negro is a phobogenic object # (Fanon). Indeed &a phobogenic
object &a past without a heritage &the map of gratuitous violence &a program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal # not at

least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison a bolition. 15 If a social movement is to be neither social democratic,
nor Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to
assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are
to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the “Negro “ has been inviting Whites, and as well as
civil society #s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have
wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today # even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement # invested elsewhere. This is not to
say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it is almost
always “anti-Black” which is to say it will not dance with death . Black liberation, as a prospect, makes
radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its
One must embrace its
condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refus al to affirm , a program of complete disorder.

disorder, its in coherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one's
politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. If this is not the desire which underwrites one
#s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word #prison # being linked t o the wo rd #abolition #? Wh at ar e this movem ent #s lines of po litical a ccount abilit y? There #s nothing foreign, frightening, or even
unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say #gee-whiz, if
only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all. # But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness # and the state of politica l movemen ts in A
merica to day is ma rked by t his very N egroph obogen isis: #gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. # Perhaps there #s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about
the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex wit h a Negr o). Perhaps coalitions today p refer to remain in- orgas mic in the fa ce of civilsociety # with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. But if, through this stasis, or
paralysis , they tr y to do t he work of pr ison a bolit ion # that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject, or prison slave. In this
way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions bet ween worker s and s laves. T hey remain coalitions opera ting with in the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises and
more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms # they simply feed our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker # be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman
demanding a social wage # gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject # be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting # gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from

A civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a

the coherence of civil society, t he Black subject beckons with the in coherence of civil war.

positive value, which rends civil society asunder. Civil

but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of “absolute dereliction“: a scandal

war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. A
Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via
reform or reparation) but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.
Thus we advocate the end of the world
Wilderson 11 (Frank, PhD, Associate Professor, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, “The
Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents”, InTensions, Vol
5, 2011)
Ritual murders which purge White aggressivity subtend Bukhari’s impeded mourning and my dissembling scholarship, despite
the fact that the filial cleansing and affilial stability proffered by the Black imago’s intrusion as a phobic
object does not cut both ways. The Black psyche emerges within a context of force, or
structural violence, which is not analogous to the emergence of White or non-Black psyches. The
upshot of this emergence is that the Black psyche is in a perpetual war with itself because it is
usurped by a White gaze that hates the Black imago and wants to destroy it . The Black
self is a divided self or, better, it is a juxtaposition of hatred projected toward a Black imago and love for
a White ideal: hence the state of war (Marriott, “Fanon’s War”). This state of being at war forecloses upon the
possession of elements constitutive of psychic integration: bearing witness (to suffering), atonement,
naming and recognition, representation. As such, one cannot represent oneself, even to oneself as a
bona fide political subject, as a subject of redress. Black political ontology is foreclosed in the
unconscious just as it is foreclosed in the court . “[I]t may not be too fanciful to suggest,” Marriott writes, “that
the black ego, far from being too immature or weak to integrate, is an absence haunted by its and
others’ negativity. In this respect the memory of loss is its only possible communication ” (425). It is important
to note that loss is an effect of temporality; it implies a syntagmatic chain that absence cannot apprehend.
Marriott’s psychoanalytic inquiries work through the word “loss” in order to demonstrate the paucity of its explanatory power. Again, loss
indicates a prior plenitude, absence does not. [29] Marriott explains how we all work together, how we all bond over
the Black imago as phobic object, that we might form a psychic community even though we cannot form
political community. He does so by recalling that exemplary moment in Black Skin, White Masks, when Fanon sees himself through the
eyes of a White boy who cries in terror, “Look a Negro!” Symbolically, Fanon knows that any black man could have triggered the child’s
fantasy of being devoured that attaches itself to a fear of blackness, for this fear signifies the “racial epidermal schema” of Western culture—
the unconscious fear of being literally consumed by the black other. Neither the boy nor Fanon seems able to avoid this schema, moreover, for
culture determines and maintains the imago associated with blackness; cultural fantasy allows Fanon and the boy to form a bond through racial
antagonism (“Bonding over Phobia” 420). [30] This
phobia is comprised of affective responses, sensory reactions or
presubjective constellations of intensities, as well as representational responses, such as the threatening
imago of a fecal body which portends contamination. And this affective/representational performance is
underwritten by paradigmatic violence; which is to say the fantasy secures what Marriott calls “its
objective value” because it lives within violence too pervasive to describe. xvi “The picture of the black psyche that
emerges from” this intrusion “is one that is always late, never on time, violently presented and fractured by these moments of specular
The overwhelming psychic alienation that emerges from the
intrusion” (“Bonding over Phobia” 420).
literal fear and trembling of the White boy when Fanon appears, accompanied by “the foul
language that despoils…is traumatic for” the Black psyche. One comes to learn that when one
appears, one brings with one the threat of cannibalism . “What a thing,” writes Fanon, “to have eaten one’s
father!” (Black Skin, White Masks)And the Black psyche retains the memory of that eternal White “fear of being eaten … [and] turned into shit
by an organic communion with the black body … [This] is one of the most depressing and melancholic fantasies ensuing from the
psychodynamics of intrusion” (“Bonding over Phobia” 421). [31] Again, though this is a bond between Blacks and Whites, it is produced by a
violent intrusion that does not cut both ways. Whereas the phobic bond is an injunction against Black psychic integration and Black filial and
affilial relations, it is the life blood of White psychic integration and filial (which is to say domestic) and affilial (or institutional) relations. [32] To
add to this horror, when we scale up from the cartography of the mind to the terrain of armed struggle and the political trials, we may be faced
with a situation in which the eradication of the generative mechanism of Black suffering is something that is not in anyone’s interest.
Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering explored in this article, is not in the interest of the court, as Justice Taney
demonstrates as his ruling mobilizes the fantasy of immigration to situate the Native American within political community and to insure the
African’s standing as a genealogical isolate. Taney’s majority decision suggests that juridical and political standing, like subjectivity itself, are not
constituted by positive attributes but by their capacity to sidestep niggerization. Nor is the eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black
suffering in the interests of the White political prisoners such a David Gilbert and Judith Clark, Kuwasi Balagoon’s codefendants—their
ideological opposition to the court, capitalism, and imperialism notwithstanding, because such ideological oppositions mark conflicts within the
Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering
world rather than an antagonism to the world.
would mean the end of the world and they would find themselves peering into an abyss (or
incomprehensible transition) between epistemes; between, that is, the body of ideas that determine
that knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time. In other words, they would find themselves
This trajectory is too iconoclastic for working class, post-colonial,
suspended between worlds.
and/or radical feminist conceptual frameworks. The Human need to be liberated in the
world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world ; which is why
even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead .
Finally, if we push Marriott’s findings to the wall, it becomes clear that eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering is also not in
the interests of Black revolutionaries. For how can we disimbricate Black juridical and political desire from the Black psyche’s desire to destroy
the Black imago, a desire which constitutes the psyche? In short, bonding with Whites and non-Blacks over phobic reactions to the Black imago
provides the Black psyche with the only semblance of psychic integration it is likely to have: the need to destroy a Black imago and love a White
ideal. “In these circumstances, having a ‘white’ unconscious may be the only way to connect with—or even contain—the overwhelming and
irreparable sense of loss. The intruding fantasy offers the medium to connect with the lost internal object, the ego, but there is also no ‘outside’
to this ‘real fantasy’ and the effects of intrusion are irreparable” (“Bonding over Phobia” 426). This raises the question, who is the speaking
subject of Black insurgent testimony? Who bears witness when the Black insurgent takes the stand? Black political horizons are singularly
constrained, because the process through which the Black unconscious emerges and through which Black people form psychic community with
Humans is the very process which bars Black people from political community.