Wake KT 1AC

Debate is structured by a network of white trust and monopolies that sustain anti-
black exclusion and suffering; organized for the maintenance of the monopoly of
white supremacist visions of competition against the racialized outside – the various
ordinary, boring logistics of debate are controlled by antiblack, segregationist
relationships and solidarities – racist MPJ, asymmetrical hiring and pay practices,
alumni influence, racist jokes in the squad room.
These anti-competitive business practices control the business of debating and
debating as a business in the training of future managers of racial capitalism – these
ordinary practices are constant even as they sometimes intensify in more
spectacular form like the PRL – the trust white people have in other white people
sustains the attempted monopolization of debate by white racists.
The moment that is the merger between CEDA and NDT universalized a set of rules
and guidelines that altered the trajectory of debate argumentation. The question of
implementing antitrust policy requires challenging the antiblack networks of trust
that create the foundation of financial markets because even the very space in which
we contest is structured by the white monopoly on the “marketplace of ideas”.
Tabroom.com is no exception to this rule – the hosting site controls a vast set of
variables in policy debates from seeding to prefs to prep time in between rounds to
when rounds begin and end to the length judges get to decide – The racialized codes
now effectively control the organizational structure of nearly every debate
tournament via his website. The creation of Tabroom.com entailed the elimination
of smaller tabbing services like speechwire; Tabroom permanently monopolized
tournament hosting services, since no one can reverse engineer his coding.
Tabroom exemplifies the transformation of the white male despotism of the
traditional tab room into the algorithmic distribution of aptitude and value – it’s a
mistake to think Tabroom is the source of the malaise that tabroom.com produces –
no one man can control the trajectory of argumentation now – instead we are
subject to operationalized and manufactured controversy
Verbatim is a technology infrastructure that, Aaron Hardy, the leader of the PRL
and a crypto-fascist, constructed the technology we all use to structure our debate
evidence and arguments – from how we write tags, to how we cite evidence – the
mundane elements of this technology fundamentally alter how we debate. The
representational site that “normative” evidence formatting, and production
occupies reveals how Verbatim disincentivizes performance-based debate and non-
traditional evidence. The 1AC is the need for a rupture that enables the systems of
calculation that cohere a White monopoly over interpretations of the resolution,
debate, and the very nature of value and exchange.
Sam McKenzie Jr. 19, essayist with background in nonprofit and government work, 1/17/19, “How
the Business of Whiteness Is the Ultimate Antitrust Violation,” https://sammckenziejr.medium.com/how-
the-business-of-whiteness-is-the-ultimate-antitrust-violation-3d5ec1f28ae5
The other day, I listened to my Alexa device echo back the attorney general confirmation hearing for William Barr. I heard a senator lob
preschool questions at William Barr about tech companies and antitrust regulations. Based on the senator’s leading questions, the senator
believes antitrust laws are necessary to prevent companies from becoming too powerful and
eliminating competition. Apparently, that’s bad for business owners, and it’s bad for the public. As I heard the
questions and answers, my face balled up and I thought, “ Isn’t that what white supremacy does in
America? ” The answer is yes and here are a few ways it happens: Deals with white suppliers Anticompetitive deals
between companies and suppliers, that reduce or end competition, can increase monopolies. In the past ,
America’s immigration laws created white and wanton deals with countries to maintain white
majorities in America . Those racist compacts allowed millions of white Europeans to come to a
racist America while excluding other nations. As America’s white majority declines, it’s no surprise the current battle with
immigration is about the market share of whiteness in America with certain countries as the preferred suppliers. The mergers of whiteness
Mergers by large corporations can create a monopoly too. In the past, as whiteness merged with
European immigrants, the united state of whiteness benefited by eliminating competition
from Black people and people of color . White racism enacted against Black people made it easier for new European
immigrants to enter the workforce and the middle and upper classes of society. White
America exists — in its fixed and rigged position
— because white America instituted, reinforced, expanded, and reiterated white supremacy through slavery,
discriminatory laws, the Homestead Act, the G.I. Bill, the New Deal, and a bad host of other inhospitable policies and
practices. White supremacy has unjustly enriched white people — even poor whites relative to their counterparts —
based on the merger of whiteness . The cost of the merger of whiteness to Black people from
stolen income and opportunities must be many trillions of dollars . Price discrimination against Black people
Price discrimination involves charging different prices to different consumers. With price discrimination, the
value of a service changes depending on the buyer, and it can be illegal. If you’re Black in America, you are more likely to
die earlier, go to jail, suffer greater health disparities, make less money, and be the target of
discrimination and hate crimes. The unnecessary, disproportionate, and discriminatory price of life that

Black people pay in America is exorbitant because of white supremacy . Barriers to entry for Black
people When companies create barriers to enter the market , they can violate antitrust laws. The barriers make it

impossible or unduly difficult for other companies to start and compete. Today, the structural barriers of whiteness
make it harder for Black and Brown people to compete and achieve at every level . Those barriers include
the need for multiple college degrees that do not pay off themselves. Those barriers include hand-me-down wealth that automatically passes ill-
gotten gains and material privilege to generations of white people. Those barriers also include social and professional networks engineered and
serviced by white supremacy that white employees use to get their white friends a job. Remedies and Regulation The word “trust” can refer to
property or big business. Way back in the 90s, legal scholar Cheryl Harris described whiteness as property with all the benefits and entitlements

of property ownership held by white people. If whiteness is property, as Harris said, then whiteness is a
monopoly  — that’s inherently discriminatory in a white-supremacist society —  and it violates
the principles of antitrust laws too . Strangely, the same Justice Department that investigates and prosecutes antitrust
violations supposedly does the same with cases of discrimination. The antitrust laws aren’t perfect; officials can
underutilize and misuse them. For example, the Trump administration and his Republican accomplices want to misuse antitrust
laws to punish companies they think silence “conservative voices.” Meanwhile, white supremacy — as a conglomerate of

cruelty with workers and workings — is the biggest antitrust violation in American
history that continues to silence voices. The principle of fair competition within antitrust laws should
apply everywhere . If the Justice Department had eyes on every industry of white supremacy, as
it does on antitrust violations, that
would be better. To overhaul the state of the union, the disparate impact principle
has to be retroactive, and it must forever reign over every part of American life with militant
enforcement. The stimulated economy of white supremacy roars like a well-oiled machine. America is not a meritocracy; a
white monopoly runs America. The business of whiteness has to stop passing go and running the board. Jail it, and its outcomes for
life. In its place, set free the business of humanity that all Americans can trust .

Chris Thiele's creation of ooDebate, a for-profit program that scraped, compiled,

and categorized debate files from the open-source wiki, proves how antitrust
policies' reliance on competitiveness and free market economics always maintains
inequity - white people weaponize algorithms and antiblack technologies to extract
symbolic and material property from the shared commons –

MPJ functions as mundane algorithm used by teams in the PRL to structurally

exclude Black judges from debates. This reordering of “consumer choice” reveals
how standard mathematical functions like mutual judge prefs sustains Black
exclusion from participation in debate; fashioning debate into a whites-only activity
in which the only anti-competitive business practices is the Trust white people have
in whiteness as a project of property and ownership.

The trust that white people have in white supremacy within the space in debate
manifests as violent projects of exclusion: the PRL, which is the foundation for the
creation of economic monopolies and trusts – requires a form of critical skepticism
towards the resolutional question that is anti-trust reform.

Voting affirmative is a divestment of trust in the monopolies of whiteness that

produce various technologies that constitute antiblack violence within debate.

The 1AC is a re-thinking of thinking; an induction of Black inoperability –

destitution of deliberative space in order to create fugitive modes of Black sociality
towards the disintegration of the public/private individuations that animate
whiteness’ continual project of extraction and exclusion – extracting trust from the
monopolies of white debate is a necessary prerequisite to challenging the antiblack
algorithms that produce black suffering. The affirmative produces the generative
space of ‘sharing’: creating alternative socialites that requires a
rethinking/restructuring of the networks of trust that enable the material
acquisition of wealth.

Elliot C. Mason 20 [Elliot C. Mason is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, researching the
intersection of Black studies and contemporary architectural theory. His first monograph, Building Black:
Towards an Antiracist Architecture, will be published in 2021. “Thing: a fugitive in( )operation”, Journal
of Italian Philosophy Volume 3 (2020)]//comradeken

Peformance
LOVE (OF) THING / THING OPTIMISM
There’s a song Fred Moten loves, and it begins:
I’ve been so many places in my life and time
I’ve sung a lot of songs, yeah, and I’ve made some bad rhymes
I’ve acted out my life on stages, with ten thousand people watching me But we are alone, and I’m singing
this song for you.
(Temptations, 1975; Moten, 2018c)
Moten is talking about the song with contemporary artist Sondra Perry. They have been discussing the
complexity of Perry’s work and its relation to misrecognition, the pop song’s love lyrics endlessly
reworking the ‘I thought I saw you today’ paradigm, the ‘I saw someone who looked just like you’ and
whether this is directed at you or at precisely the everything that is necessarily not you, in a world where
everything is you in your absence except you, because what defines you (and my pop song love for you)
is that you are not here. The conversation then moves into Moten’s fury at the institution, Frieze’s
capacity to consume ‘like medicine’ the criticism of itself and the awful paradox of serving an
institution (‘the university as glorified real estate company’ [2018c: 20–22”]) that posits itself as the
space of opening while violently closing every possibility of thought. Then back to another song.
Moten is in love with the song, with its idea, and he keeps calling its singer ‘Dennis Franklin’ although
his name is Dennis Edwards (who had an intense love affair with Aretha Franklin, whom Moten only
calls ‘Aretha’), adding another accidental layer to the bizarre slippage of recognition, the opening of
the possibility of a radical doubt in the object-recognizing capacity of the speaker. Perry and Moten
are alone on stage, watched by all these people expecting to plug into the speakers like work stations, to
offload all their shit; ten thousand people ‘all up in our fucking faces’ (Moten, 2018c: 36–37”), leading
Moten to the question, ‘What are we doing here? ’ (2018c: 20–21”) But first, in the song, perfectly
titled ‘A Song for You’, there is the duality of the public and the private, the aloneness after the
performance; ‘and so of course any time you do a live performance of the song, that produces that
irony’ (2018c: 38–40”).
There is a pause in Moten’s moment of release, his performance of privacy in front of the crowd.
‘That thing of … Uh … See … Black sociality is not a private thing … It obliterates
privacy. It cannot tolerate privacy or privatization. It must be shared. It doesn’t
belong to anybody. It doesn’t even belong to us. … But by the same token it can’t
be public either … It can’t exist within that sort of brutal public-private
partnership that everything seems to be bound up with now’ (2018c: 39–42”). Sitting in
front of this crowd, two friends in their private conversation, the arranged publicity of Perry’s art and the
advertisement for Moten’s books at the beginning of their talk, and their frustration at being watched,
at being plugged into, it arrives finally at a position that nestles into the liminal aspatiality of being
‘alone’ and ‘singing this song for you’.
The subject of the song — and we could use its singer, Dennis Edwards, as that subject — is emerging
into an active absence of singularity. Edwards has been everywhere, displaced globally as an abstract
spectacle to be watched, to be set into performance. He is, like any artist, as Moten says, plugged into like
a work station, a machine onto which people offload all their tumult, their unbearable excess. And
Black people are also ‘ubiquitous as work stations, for other people to work out
their shit’ (2018c: 18–19”). Edwards has toured the world, accumulating these performative
transferences of visuality. The eyes of crowds, of tens of thousands, elicit his performance for the
depletion of their own temporal accumulation. Time has built up in them, the cruel labour of years, and
watching Edwards and his beautiful voice is a chance to charge the void, to plug in to the pump and drain
some of that miserable excess. Edwards takes it all on. He recognizes, brilliantly, that it’s not necessarily
the perfection of his performance that allows this, since he sings some ‘bad rhymes’. It’s something else,
something far deeper than that. Edwards’s is — and it’s clear now, at this point in the essay, what I am
proposing for this singing subject — an ontological condition. He was born to be a travelling
performance, to exist as a work station that is never allowed to stop moving and
plug in . Edwards is always, forever unbearably operative, and that operativity is a condition of his
ontological status as non-body. Aristotle asks himself if the worker is born before his labour, and the
answer is yes. The being is inherently inoperative. Edwards must, then, not be a being. Edwards, instead,
is Black. His precorporealized position is also his position as an emblem of an antemodern community.
He represents — and exists only as the representative of — a mythical community that signifies
pure togetherness which is at once fetishizable as beautiful, as the hard-working,
chain-ganging, plantation-song- singing slave, and anathema to the individual
bourgeois subjectivity of modernity .
Agamben is of course looking to go back, somehow, to this inoperative state. But Edwards here reveals
the reality of that state. The reality is that it is built on the premise of something having been thrown
under the landscape where the polity and the subject constitute each other. The reality is that a modal
ontology assumes an already-completed constitution of the subject who can now endlessly reconstitute
herself as a form-of-life that does not assume a free subject who exists a priori. The potentiality that
grants the sovereignty that inoperativity shifts out of is a world-constituting European potentiality
that has already constituted the world of European ontology’s emergence, leaving its racializing residue
wherever that subject moves, even if into a modal ontology that pulls down the grotesque statue of
subjectivity; and that world is based on something that looks like ‘you’ but is not ‘you’; something
that defines the possibility of ‘you’ being recognized; a dark thing in the machine, stolen
life, back as black and blur, in the whatever universal machine . Agamben is under
world, reformulating, but Dennis Edwards, disguised fugitively by Moten as Dennis Franklin, merging
into Aretha and her own fugitive sociality, is the name of ‘under’ and the thing that ‘under’ refers to in the
deictic world of European subjectivity.
The first two lines of the song rhyme, although the imperfect rhyme is acknowledged in the sentiment
itself, while the second couplet is posited on a different form of coherence. It is a semantic rhyme. ‘Me’
and ‘you’. They sound nothing alike, but precisely the theorization achieved in these lines, in this song, is
that what ‘you’ are is anything but ‘you.’ ‘You are everything except you’ (2018c: 18–19”). What ‘you’
most rhymes with is, for the fleshy subject who is shared in the antecedent form of Black sociality,
possibly ‘me’, or ‘we’ or ‘us.’ We are alone. We are pushed out of the landscape of bourgeois
subjectivity and the Whiteness of modernity’s ontological singularity , but that is where the
performance of this gestural escape from individuality is enacted, where the work of Black
sociality is found, unexcavated, and listened to. This, the impossible outside in the
aloneness of a genuine ‘we’, is where the self is shared. This is where sharing is the real act of the
being.
Sharing is a concept that Moten and Harney have been working on recently. It is not mentioned once in
The Undercommons and is not part of Moten’s 2017–18 trilogy, consent not to be a single being, so it is
difficult to attain any steady practice of study with it yet. The concept emerges in an interview with
Moten and Harney on 4th July, 2020. Moten’s signal is bad, and it is hard to hear him (‘And I’ve made
some bad rhymes,’ Dennis Edwards might say if The Temptations were stuck in a pandemic in New York
with no signal). Responding to a question about patriarchy and its force in the performance of recent
Black Lives Matter protests, Moten focuses on the ‘extraction of sharing’. ‘Even in zones that are
preserved for the protection and cultivation of normative white interests, the simple capacity for people to
maintain anything like a liveable individual life […] has been the function of the chorus and forced
enactment and practice of sharing of women, which is to say: the extraction of sharing, and that’s crucial.
Literally, the taking of sharing . That’s how Donald Trump himself made it to his third birthday’
(2020a: 36–41”).
Moten goes on to describe this more specifically as ‘the extraction of what has often been conceived of
as women’s work, or the labour of reproduction’. Sharing is a duty of the being in whom the task of
maintaining the sociality of individuals is placed. The given ontology of capital extracts sharing from
the labouring subject, the subject who is unpaid because she is a bearer of the duty of sharing. This
is, for Agamben, the ancient slave, but for Moten this is the position of that being whose being is
withdrawn in the act of her condemnation to a state of producing sharing to be extracted by and for
capital. ‘It’s black women who have to do this sharing. And you can’t separate the sharing from the
extraction. What [Saidiya Hartman] does […] is to figure out a way to not retrieve sharing from
extraction, but to imagine and let us get some sense of these practices of sharing’. Sharing is a
practice that exists within the logic of capital, of those juridical spaces of the
concentration camp, and it is not the task of Black study to withdraw it. This is a
fundamental difference in the respective ways in which a poetics of inoperativity can be thought by
Agamben and by Moten. For Agamben, the practice of inoperativity is taken from within
and moved; it is replaced, reformed . For Moten (and Harney), the practice of
initiating the constitutive sociality of the body’s use happens within the space of the
camp . It is not a beyond, an outside, an otherwise. It is, to limit it somewhat to a spatial
coding, under . And that is to say, before. It is practised before the extractive power of modernity
both in its temporal and spatial meanings: antecedent to, and in the face of.
For Moten, it is an ethical imperative to constantly recognize and actively think this mutual death
in the life of the extraction of sharing. ‘We do so’, he says, ‘in the interests of the revival and the
renewal of our habits of sharing, which are our habits of assembly, and in the recognition of the necessity
to socialize outside of any bullshit notion of gender opposition and any restrictive notion of sexual
difference, to socialize the practice of sharing, which […] [Harney and I] always want to acknowledge as
a fundamentally maternal operation. But the socialization of that maternal operation is not a retrenchment
of sexual difference and gender difference along traditional lines, but an obliteration of that shit’ (2020a:
40–41”). The maternality of this operation is an interesting addition. Against the patriarchal practice of
extraction that imposes the injunction of constant labour for the maintenance of the regime, the
maternal operation of sharing brings people into assembly before and during the
extraction of their sharing practice . The sharing is happening — emanating from the
maternal embrace that gathers in a caring gesture, in the outreach of the politics of care — while
the extraction of that sharing continues . Feminized reproductive labour, that is to say, is
simultaneously producing the polity and the individual. The maternal labour of social
reproduction is the creation of the social mode that is extracted for the bourgeois,
liberal individual as the single full subject of modernity. Blackness is the sociality that
precedes that dual production, and that exists out from its outside, that moves always in the
underneath. Before the radical modality of Agamben, there is a sociality, a commonality, that had to be
pounded in to the ground for this world to emerge; and then it had to be excavated, archeologically dug
and re-dug-up for the constant performance of Man’s self-discovery, his imposition of thingliness onto
the stone and the assertion of his own self- recognition as ‘you’, his subjectivity binaries. Before that,
Edwards/Franklin was alone with Aretha, in front of ten thousand people all excavating themselves in the
work station of ontology’s pre-ontological racialization. Somehow, somewhere, ‘Blackness, which is to
say black social life, is an undiscovered country’ (Moten, 2008b: 202). Black sociality is on the
map but unmappable. It is alive but unusable in a modal ontology because it’s always already
shared; it has always been extracted, always shared, and that is how it gains its aloneness in full
view of the crowd who self-constitute through this performance.
What we arrive at here is a mad and beautiful scene in which Hortense Spillers emerges out of Moten in
order to topple Heidegger from the landscape of Agamben, which gives Agamben fully to Moten, at
which point Moten shares his own pseudo-Agambenified sociality with Spillers and we have a fugitive
poetics of sharing in the warm nest beneath inoperativity.
Harney brings Spillers into the discussion as soon as Moten stops talking. ‘Sharing is not an interpersonal
relationship […] One doesn’t share. One is shared. Now, the great moment, as Fred says, [of] feeling the
combination of horror and possibility in this is in Hortense Spillers’s work. [What she is] emphasizing for
us is this utter access, an access so deep that it undoes gender, that it undoes patriarchy […] Somehow
that access has to stay open for that type of sharing to take place’ (2020a: 41–45”). Now the nest opens
up. This is what we want, what I’ve been looking for throughout these words, in the months of sweating
above them, pointing out the figures who look nothing like me, then shouting ‘Hey, you!’ as they dodge,
again, fugitively away, into a sociality that precedes, exceeds and pleases me. ‘The kind of sharing we’re
talking about is about being accessed, and it is such because we’re already shared”’.
That kind of sharing is the anti-statist anti-univers(al)ity; the local act of love; it is
Edwards singing to Franklin, saying ‘Ooh!’ when he’s too old to sing, and then becoming,
posthumously, Franklin in Moten’s study; it is the shocking beauty that Agamben never speaks about; it is
the threat to thinking that Arendt denounced Black studies for (1970); it is, as Moten and Harney say in
their latest collaborative essay, the ‘anti- and ante-natal undercommonality’ (2020b: 3) that is Blackness.
That Blackness, that act of sharing, the constant ethical imperative that is the thing
I’ll never know called Black sociality, is the obliteration of the divide between public
and private . And what that obliteration does, once we get this far into it, is suspend the activity of
archaeology. Agamben, you can stop digging now. The job has been cancelled and they have closed the
institution, or at least from this point in the burnt-out corpse of the (European Being’s) landscape, we
cannot see the policies they stamp into our skin; we cannot hear the duplicity of the institution’s happy
consumption of its internal criticism. Archaeology is over, above. What we were digging up is the
reason for our digging. But, really, it is sharing, and it is already shared.
For Agamben, sharing is a public act (2016: Prologue). It is the public counterpart to the almost shameful
‘clandestinity of private life’ (2016: xvii). To share, as he elaborates in his short essay ‘The Friend,’ is
‘purely existential, a con- division that […] lacks an object’ (Agamben, 2009: 36); friends ‘do not share
something (birth, law, place, taste): they are shared by the experience of friendship’ (2009: 36). It is
sharing that is the lived experience of friends. Sharing as a spatial practice, as an ethical imperative
conducting certain beings into a life that is non- being, however, is for Agamben, after Aristotle, the
practice of the animal. ‘In this sense, we say that humans live together, unlike cattle who share the pasture
together’ (Aristotle in Agamben, 2009: 36). The animal beneath is unseen in the public act of sharing;
there is an already stolen — but fugitively capacious and beautiful — sharing going on that is neither
private nor public, that is under the landscape of Man and his endless emergence. ‘To bring to light’,
Agamben neatly states, ‘the intimate interweaving of being and living: this is today certainly the task of
thought (and of politics)’ (2016: xix), but in the sharing of the pasture, in the ethical imperative of sharing
before and inside any ontology, there is something that is too dark to bring to light, and against whose
darkness the lightness knows its light. For Moten and Harney, in opposition to Agamben, sharing is
inherently internal; it is the constitutive poetics of sociality that constitutes the being. And exactly its
purpose is to share the pasture; to enact an inherent resistance to property within the property of Man’s
light. Brought to the light already, sharing is the ethics of darkness in the pasture before Man, in the
flesh.
For Agamben, the correct path away from modernity’s brutal juridical space of inter(n)ment is the use of
one’s own body, in the sense of sōmatos chrēsthai, of experiencing one’s potential without making it
actual, of living in and by and for the community. This is the radical magic of The Use of Bodies, its care
of inoperative internalization, of seeing oneself as oneself within oneself in order to create the non-
teleological, non-productive potentiality of others as constituent and constituted (which in this moment of
performative chrēsthai become difficult to distinguish) sociality. It renders Denise Ferreira da Silva’s
‘affectability’ (da Silva, 2007: xv) optimistic, in the weirdest Motenian way; it turns the affective capacity
and wound of being created by nature into the inoperative potentiality of the coming politics. The
problem, however, that I keep tripping up on every time I jump with joy at the sound of this beautiful
inoperativity, is that Dennis Edwards (as plural; as we that rhymes with me that rhymes with you, badly;
as Black sociality) is alone, having been watched by tens of thousands, and it is only in the act of his
disappearance from the sociality that constitutes him that he can produce the thing that summarily sings
his own constitution in/as a poetics of inoperativity. Edwards was made by the crowd. He was made by
The Temptations. But in the moment of being able to be alone and to sing, for you, for his love, to
constitute and be mutually constituted by his potentiality as song, he disappears. The disappearance is
surely the result of inoperativity’s divergent spatiality; it attempts to make and place bodies elsewhere, in
Aristotle’s inoperative landscape or Heidegger’s constituting Lichtung.
What comes out of this immobile tide washing into the shoals of Edwards and Agamben is Moten on the
radio saying, ‘You are everything except you’. While the juridical regime extracts sharing from the
shared beings in the given ontology of modernity, Agamben’s inoperativity removes the beings into
a deconcentrated, decamped space of sōmatos chrēsthai and non-teleological use beyond the activation
of potentiality. However, in the fugitive undercommons of Black sociality, something else is happening,
and, beyond what I’ve already said above, I don’t know what that something is.

Black inoperability removes whiteness’ ability to overdetermine blackness – black

negativity is about disrupting how blackness is represented within the symbolic; the
aff gestures toward destituent power, in that it finds another blacker way out - we
divest trust from those monopolies that comprise policy debate as well as those
technologies that reproduce the logisticality of antiblack violence
Elliot C. Mason 20 [Elliot C. Mason is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, researching the
intersection of Black studies and contemporary architectural theory. His first monograph, Building Black:
Towards an Antiracist Architecture, will be published in 2021. “Thing: a fugitive in( )operation”, Journal
of Italian Philosophy Volume 3 (2020)]//comradeken

Flesh

THE THING IS FLESH, A WOUND THAT CHARACTERISES THE WHOLE

OF HISTORY AND YET STANDS OUTSIDE OF IT
Moten notes that the “black body” is a misnomer that misconceives the history of Blackness (Moten,
2018a: 90), regarding its construction within the prescribed boundaries of self-labelled serious
European philosophy and its property- possessive logics, rather than as an insistent previousness of
flesh antecedent to the body, beginning as an object of European Being in the Middle
Passage but preceding it. What we have been referring to as “thing” comes out in this
moment as flesh.
Flesh, as C. Riley Snorton knows, is not some innocent form of life antecedent to modernity . Here we
speak, in our own riff on Moten and Marx and Agamben, of the insistent previousness of flesh in order to work
fugitive loopholes into destituent power and find a/nother/Blacker way out , but flesh is, as Hortense
Spillers (1987) affirms, fundamentally a racializing and a (de)gendering possibility, marked by
fungibility, by a loose interchangeability outside the prescribed logic of semantics . Snorton seeks a way out
of modernity’s racializing force by spatializing the fungibility of the (Black) non-body’s insistent previousness, pursuing ‘flesh as a capacitating
structure for alternative modes of being by tracing the various ways black figures made use of fungibility for fugitive movement, such that flesh
became their instrument to engender interstitial spaces of reprieve’ (Snorton, 2017: 53). Snorton seeks to bring the flesh back out of its
entanglement with race, since, as Spillers notes, the ‘severe disjunctures’ of the ‘hieroglyphs of the flesh’ come ‘to be hidden to the cultural
seeing by skin colour’ (Spillers, 1987: 67). What is marked in the non-body of Black being is the linguistic difference that codes ‘that zero degree
of social conceptualization’ (Spillers, 1987:67) as forever disjunctive. Here is the inheritance of the whip, passing down through structured
signifiers of the slave-driver’s lash.
The problem set up here is that for Agamben the being is spoken into Being as a body. Agamben takes this, again, from Heidegger. The
command to exist — the originary command that calls beings into Being — is premised on the emergence of a body, of the being-as-body.
For Heidegger, the person is necessarily not a Thing and is constituted by the performance of intentional acts; it is his unity of body, soul and
spirit as ‘phenomenal domains’ that allows Being to belong to the person who performs the task of intentional acts (Heidegger, 2001: 48–49). The
slave enters into this as resistance to use, as ‘not the being-at- work (energeia) of the soul according to the logos but something for which
Aristotle can find no other determination that “the use of the body”’ (Agamben, 2016: 5). Through this disruption of duty, Aristotle and Agamben
recognize a non- productive form of being that puts the slave into a relation with herself, into a modal ontology based on a relation with herself,
but what this overlooks is the non-corporeality of the slave. In the act of enslavement, the body is
stolen. Enslavement is another name for the whiplash scar of stealing bodies. The Atlantic and the
disruptive fungibility of its ontology is the name of that act in modernity , but for Aristotle the definition still
stood; for Aristotle the slave still existed as the stolenness of that body that cannot be a Thing because it bears the mode of Being that is
intentionality. Now, that ‘diasporic plight marked a theft of the body — a willful and violent […] severing of the captive body from its motive
will’ (Spillers, 1987: 67). The intentionality of the stolen body is that which is pocketed by the possessor, and in that movement the corporeality
of the body is deprived of Being: the slave of Spillers, the stolen life of Moten, dodges the
understanding (the grasp) of Agamben, Aristotle and Heidegger.
Here arises the ‘central [distinction] between captive and liberated subject-positions. ’ That is, body and
flesh: ‘before the “body” there is “flesh”, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of
discourse’ (Spillers, 1987: 67). This is flesh that is crucially designated as coming before the act of stealing, as a divergent ontological mode
seemingly imposed on the body as an after-effect of theft, but which rather reveals the existent viscosity in the code now borne by the captive-
being released from Being: Blackness. The captive subject-position is constructed as the impossibility of
proper gender performance. ‘Under these conditions … the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and
political manoeuvre, not at all gender-related, gender-specific […]: at the same time — in stunning contradiction — the captive body reduces to a
thing, becoming being for the captor (Spillers, 1987: 67). Heidegger’s elision of the possibility of m/Man-as-Thing is correct, of course.
Proper Man as full subject of modernity, bearing that liberated subject-position, could never be a
Thing. A Thing is what life becomes once it is stolen; a Thing is life post-stolenness, in the
celebration of a homelessness that is always giving away home. The slave’s non-productivity is
employed by Agamben in the poetics of inoperativity as if the slave were a non-productive body.
Agamben will reach for the slave to emancipate her, but his hands will grip nothing. The absence of
value will slip from his anarchic fingers and their beautiful pursuit. The slave is not a body,
necessarily.
Adding a brilliant new turn to this discussion in his 2014 book Habeas Viscus, Alexander Weheliye accesses the complex history of flesh and its
future anterior being in the routine brutality of the world of Man:
If the body represents legal personhood qua self-possession, then the flesh designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working
together of depravation and deprivation. In order for this cruel ruse to succeed, however, subjects must be transformed into flesh before being
granted the illusion of possessing a body. What Spillers refers to as the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” created by these instruments is transmitted to
the succeeding generations of black subjects who have been “liberated” and granted body in the aftermath of de jure enslavement. The
hieroglyphics of the flesh do not vanish once affixed to proper personhood (the body); rather they endure as a pesky potential vital to the
manoeuverings of “cultural seeing by skin color” […]. Racializing assemblages translate the lacerations left on the captive body by apparatuses
of political violence to a domain rooted in the visual truth-value accorded to quasi-biological distinctions between different human groupings.
Thus, rather than entering a clearing zone of indistinction, we are thrown into the vortex of hierarchical indicators: racializing assemblages.
(Weheliye, 2014: 39–40, citing Spillers, 1987)
The racializing assemblages place beings in three categories, and they are: human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman. These categories are not
palimpsests of the Heideggerian triptych of categories used by Agamben; they access something more obscure, something darker, Blacker, and
render irrelevant the thing/animal/human triptych of being, or at least reveal their position as entirely limited to world. What the categories of
Weheliye/Spillers develop beyond Agamben/Heidegger is the condition placed upon beings at the moment of individuation. For
Heidegger, the ‘clearing zone’ allows for ‘indistinction’ because of that inherent performative
agency we found above, but Weheliye shows us that this is only a ‘vortex of hierarchical indicators’: beings
are prepared for individuation by the ontological referent that is race . The otherwise being is prepared
categorically — as Moten says it best — for ‘admission to the zone of abstract equivalent citizenship and subjectivity, whose instantiations so far
have been nothing but a set of pseudo-individuated aftereffects of conquest and conquest denial, a power trip to some fucked-up place in the
burnt-out sun’ (Moten, 2018a: 136). The
mutual constitution of the polity and the individual also necessitates
the denial of their mutual constitution. Move on, nothing to see here, the police for protecting
individuals say.
Revealed in this theorization of the flesh by Weheliye and Spillers, which takes us beyond our previous understanding of Blackness as a “thing”
or “stone”, is its resistance to ‘the legal idiom of personhood as property’ (Weheliye, 2014: 44). The flesh is the appropriable
substance in the individuating relation of production, the waste that clogs the machine, that is made
but is not made into property and is therefore nothing, and always becoming-nothing . For Agamben,
world ‘is the inoperativity of the animal environment’ (Agamben, 2019: 49); world is created for and by the human by recognizing his inherent
non-openness, to which the animal is blind (2019: 48). The landscape, however, is the ‘ulterior stage’, the deactivation of the world and its
perception ‘as a whole in a new dimension’: ‘No longer animal or human, the one who contemplates the landscape is only landscape’ (2019: 49).

In the production machine of world that produces property , the contemplation of

the landscape is then the subject’s conversion into property itself . The ontological
totality of landscape that undoes the particular production mechanisms of world and conceives
them anew as a singular otherness is the extension of property to everything , including its own perception and
perceiver; the subsumption of subject and/as property, to put it Motenly . The flesh that resists
property is at this moment, or in the moment of this realization, distinguished from the stone and seen in spatial relation to it. World is
constructed out of the separation of animal and Man, as Agamben says. The negativity of the animal environment contains a(n) (im)potentiality
created by exclusion in the moment of (world) creation. The constitution of the seeing subject — the subject/property
who sees world as itself and defines the negative in relation to its own positive becoming as the
abstract equivalent — is premised on denial; such is its constitutively internal repression, its
manifestation as capital . The animal world is all the same; a different name conditioned by the same law. Before that — in
front of it and antecedent to it — is the marking of the thing in world as flesh.
For Agamben and Heidegger, then, the being cannot be a thing or an object because the being bears a body, the being is born(e) into a body by
the ontological command that is Being, and through that command Being belongs to the individual body. For Snorton, after Spillers,

though, and for Moten too, the peculiar condition of Black sociality is to be precisely
unbodied, to exist in the precorporeal community of Blackness; to be, that is, a being that is
conceived (of) as intra-racially homogeneous, the same as all Blacks, as non-existent as all slaves, as objectish as any old thing. ‘There’s no such
thing’, as Stefano Harney says, with Moten beside him, ‘as a “white community” […] Whiteness is the destruction of
community’ (Moten and Harney, 2020a: 31–34’’) because Whiteness has that agential language of the
command that speaks beings into Being. For the being who is not a being insofar as it cannot speak itself into Being
because the command functions as an exclusionary force demarcating the boundaries of emergence
in the clearing, in full ontic capacity, there is only the possibility of being missed out of the process of
corporealization — left in the communal form of being, retroactively defined in the bourgeois individual
subjectivity of modernity as primitive, as a primordial relic antecedent and anathema to contemporaneity; instead existing as
degendered thing, simultaneously excessive and reductive, too colourful and colourless, ‘the manifestation of absence turned to the excessive’
(Moten, 2008b: 191): that is, as flesh. FLESH IS NOT A BEING, AS SUCH. IT IS LIFE BARRED FROM BEING. AND THAT IS WHY THE
FLESH, OR THE STONE AS IT IS APPEARS, AS IT EMERGES HERE AND THERE, IS SO PERSISTENTLY ANTECEDENT .

Racial capitalism posits respectability as the antidote for anti-blackness, but black
buy-in is weaponized against blackness as a whole; respectability fails to confront
the ways in which racial capitalism traps and captures black people. This is proven
by the tokenization of black debaters when they read plan-based affirmatives as
proof of TVAs and the gold standard. The only effect is the pacification of militancy
in effort to integrate the Black bourgeoisie into the capitalist state.
Sheldom 20 [“The Rise of Black Counter-Insurgency,” non.copyriot.com, Aug. 2, 2020,
https://non.copyriot.com/the-rise-of-black-counter-insurgency//ak47]
From May 26 to June 1, 2020, a Black led multi-racial proletarian rebellion burned down police
stations, destroyed cop cars, attacked police, redistributed goods, and took revenge for the murder
of countless Black and non-Black people by the police. By the first week of June, everything seemed
to have changed, everyone seemed to have forgotten that any of this happened, and instead we
became good protestors, we became non-violent, and we became reformists. Instead of attacking
police, we endured countless marches with no point other than to continue marching. From
revolutionary abolitionists, we became reformist abolitionists. What happened? There are many
easy answers, all of them incorrect. One potential answer would point to the police repression of the movement, which resulted in over 14,000 people being arrested. Another

would point to the white people who joined the movement . Finally, the most , and who brought with them all their liberal politics and strategies

ridiculous answer of all maintains that the militant phase of the rebellion was never a real
movement of Black and non-Black proletarians to begin with, but was in fact a product of outside
agitators. In reality, something much more dangerous and sinister took place,
something organic to racial capitalism, and with roots extending back to the
African slave trade and the Haitian Revolution. A counter-insurgency campaign
has fundamentally altered the course of the movement. While the retreat and defeat of
the movement that it induced may turn out to be temporary, such campaigns present significant
obstacles to further radicalization, and therefore must be addressed. This counter-insurgency
campaign on the ground was spearheaded by the Black middle class, Black
politicians , Black radical academics, and Black NGOs. This may come as a shock to people whose impulse is to think of Black people as a monolithic political group. This conception is false. This was not a local phenomenon in one or two cities, but a dynamic

that has taken place across the United States. A widespread rebellion demanded a widespread counter-insurgency. And while there is no doubt that behind the Black-led counter-
insurgency lie billion-dollar philanthropies, universities, the state, and the white middle class, the
uncomfortable truth is that a Black-led rebellion could only be crushed by a Black-
led counter-insurgency program. None of this could have taken place if there were
not a significant layer of Black counter-insurgents across the United States. The rise
of the Black middle class is an organic development of class stratification under racial capitalism . It
is the starting point for understanding the counter-insurgency that is presently strangling the
George Floyd Rebellion. The latter has its social basis in the Black middle class, who seek at most a
narrow reform of the system, namely, the transformation of racial capitalism into simple
capitalism. In the long run, the Black middle class is the enemy of the Black
proletariat: the unemployed, waged workers, sex workers, etc. The true partners
or accomplices of the Black proletariat are the Latinx and white proletarians,
Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and the international proletariat. So far, few in this country seem to have figured

this out, let alone what political and strategic implications follow from it. Although none of these problems are new, it is worth returning to them once again. The Black Middle Class There has always been a tension in
the struggle for Black liberation over the question of the Black middle class: doctors, lawyers ,
professors, managers, and business owners. Not over its existence, but over its political role and
behavior in the struggle against white supremacy. In many ways, the Black middle class is no
different from other middle classes. At their core, all middle class politics are electoral, legislative,
and reformist. Their strategies are about respectability, the protection of private
property, and ultimately about following the law. Middle classes have always felt entitled
to speak for and represent their respective proletariats. They advocate for multi-racial unity amongst their class peers, at the same time as they use racial

All middle class analysis sees the proletariat as its threat or victim ; none
loyalty to advance their own positions under racial capitalism.

see the proletariat as a revolutionary class. Those few middle class people who see the proletariat as
revolutionary either work to repress the latter, or else wind up joining them in
struggle. In 1931, W.E.B. Du Bois argued that so long as Jim Crow limited the Black middle
class’s opportunities, the Black proletariat and the Black middle class needed to fight together
against white supremacy. By the 1960’s, however, the Black Panther Party and the League of
Revolutionary Black Workers were already convinced that the Black middle class and Black
proletariat had parted company. With the defeat of Jim Crow in the 1960s, middle class Black
people found a path to success, resulting in vast differences between themselves and their
dispossessed neighbors. The movement to defeat Jim Crow did not destroy racial capitalism or anti-
Blackness; rather, while it opened up new avenues for a small handful of Black people, their victory
at the same time become a devastating defeat for the masses of Black proletarians
who remain stuck in their miserable conditions , with the sole difference that their
workplaces and neighborhoods are now managed and policed by the ‘victorious’ Black middle
class. In this respect, the Black middle class is not entirely lying when it casts itself as the
culmination of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power. These contradictions existed prior to
the movements of the 1960’s, and they have never been clarified on a mass level ever since. The
Black middle class has been, and remains to this day, the contradiction of the Black
Liberation Movement. The essential difference between the Black middle class and the white
middle class is strategic: the Black middle class uses Black proletarian struggles to advance its own
cause. Since it is not strong enough to advance its cause on its own, it leverages the fear of riots and
street protests to push its own agenda. The Black middle class cannot completely dissociate itself
from the militant phase of the rebellion because it needs to wield riots and violence as a potential
threat over the rest of society. At the same time, the Black middle class cannot identify
itself with the riot, because to do so would contradict its own desire to be
integrated into the capitalist state , whose laws and order secure the existence of private
property. The result is a confused and contradictory relation marked by a triple
dynamic: (i) the Black middle class strives to achieve the wealth and power of the
white middle class, (ii) yet this requires it be willing to discipline the Black
proletariat, (iii) with whom it nonetheless shares a sense of linked fate driven by the
police’s and other white people’s inability to distinguish poor Black people from
the hood from their suburban counterparts. This threefold dynamic finds expression in the
general thrust of mainstream Black Lives Matter protests, whose middle class activists advocate
simultaneously (i) for police to stop confusing the Black middle class with Black people from the
hood, (ii) for the state to spend more money on social reproduction in the hopes of catapulting more
Black people into the Black middle class, and (iii) to create more positions for the Black middle
class in universities, corporate board rooms, etc. All of Black middle class society is poised to gain from the efforts of Black proletarians. In the coming months, the victories won from the rebellion
will come in the form of the new and worthless ‘diversity’ positions, pointless academic conferences and articles, and pitiful salary bumps. For now, the current protests must maintain their parasitic relationship with the initial George Floyd Rebellion. Following the militant phase of the
rebellion, protests have gone into a zombie-like phase of endless marches, often through already empty streets and highways. It is as if police stations were never sieged, smashed, and burned down. Protest after protest happens, without a meaningful reflection upon what took place that first

Instead, the advances made in

week. Whereas 2014 introduced highway blockades to the tactical repertoire of anti-police struggle, we might have thought “burnt precincts” would be remembered as Minneapolis’ contribution.

Minneapolis are being buried under the street marches across the country, as Black leadership
reinforces reactionary divisions between peaceful and good protestors.
The actual history of Standard Oil and anti-monopoly law is a case in point – anti-
monopolization is a antiblack settlerist enterprise that is itself – the dream of a “fair
and free space of competition” drove the Dawes Commission policy of genocide and
land dispossession through allotment, and required Jim Crow racial terror and
Tulsa Oklahoma Massacre. The logic of self-possession that subtends anti-trust
policy figures Black and Native communal sociality as an “outer” monopoly in need
of eradication – the logic of common-as-competition requires racial terror.
Boxell 21 [Mark, received his PhD in history from the University of Oklahoma. His current book
project is tentatively titled Red Soil, White Oil: Petroleum and White Supremacy in the Progressive-Era
United States, “From Native Sovereignty to an Oilman’s State: Land, Race, and Petroleum in Indian
Territory and Oklahoma,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2021), 20, 216–233,
doi:10.1017/S1537781420000808//ak47]
In 1907, two geology professors, G.E. Condra and Charles N. Gould , published an informational tract in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society

lamented
touting Indian Territory’s prospects as a destination for industrious white settlers. Included in “Opening of the Indian Territory” was a narrative on the territory’s burgeoning petroleum industry, which Condra and Gould predicted would continue to grow. They

how the collective system of land tenure practiced by the territory’s Indigenous nations and
“Government control” (a reference to federal restrictions) had retarded oil prospecting. However, in the authors’ eyes the
allotment of Indian land into individual properties was quickly solving that problem; indeed, on the verge of statehood, Indian Territory contained thousands of oil wells and a “nearly continuous line of derricks,” seventy-five miles in length, that extended from southern Kansas to Tulsa.

The two white authors

Condra and Gould’s interest in oil was perhaps predictable given their backgrounds in the infant science of geology. But their guide to Indian Territory was just as invested in explaining the region’s racial makeup.

noted the differences they saw between “full-blood,” “mixedblood,” and “quarter-breed” Indians;
indicated that Cherokees had for years readily mixed with whites, while Creeks tended to marry
into Black families; and insisted that white civilization was bound to overtake this mixed-race
world. “The white man is to rule,” they stated, It had been the “destiny” of “and the problem of the Indian is largely solved in his amalgamation.”

Indigenous people to “give [their] blood and a few strong traits” to white society, but to otherwise
disappear. Meanwhile, “The negro is to remain a problem in social, educational, and industrial
matters.” It was from this “cosmopolitan body” that the “crucible of civilization is to reduce a
citizenship” in Indian Territory. 1

Over the following two decades, establishing the white man’s citizenry that Condra and Gould
envisioned turned out to be heavily rooted in funneling the streams of wealth that flowed from
petroleum into the hands and pockets of whites, despite Indian Territory and Oklahoma’s status as
a region of widespread Indigenous, African Indian, and African American landownership. The
practices that allowed white people to remove oil wealth from Native and Black pockets were the
product of a racialized mineral regime founded upon the settler principle that non-
whites were especially incapable of self-governance in a world of petroleum abundance.
This principle was baked into the settler-colonial policy of allotting collectively held tribal land into
privately owned homesteads. As part of this process, white lawmakers and officials prevented
newly-minted Indian landowners from alienating their allotments and mandated that white
guardians oversee the leasing of land for oil production. Likewise, the State of Oklahoma required
that white guardians oversee oil-rich allotments owned by Black citizens of the state’s Indian
nations. While such rules ostensibly “protected” Indigenous and Black Indigenous landowners from losing their property, they provided a legal path through
which white settlers seized Native property, squandered Black and Indigenous wealth, and forced
Indians and other peoples of color off of the most desirable pieces of oil land. 2
Allotment was a federally backed scheme to educate Natives in the traditions of
economic individualism and cultural liberalism, to force Indigenous peoples to, as
one historian puts it, learn the “whitening culture of capitalism.” However, the potential of great mineral wealth

oil abundance
in Indian Territory destabilized this social-engineering project, which was built on the assumption that large swaths of land of relatively equal value could be easily divided among tribal citizens. Contrary to this, offered a handful of “full-blood”

undermined white reformers’ goals of transforming Native

Indians and African Natives unimaginable riches through the tapping of dormant petroleum resources, which

people into yeoman farmers and wage workers. For lawmakers, federal agents, and local officials 3
and business owners, this threat to the reformative ethos of allotment helped justify white control of
Natives’ oil inheritance. Oil booms threatened to equip people of color with social and economic
power just as whites worked to define and instill a racial hierarchy that achieved the opposite. It
became imperative for whites to closely manage Indigenous and Black petroleum property, not only
as a means of expanding the former’s material possessions, but also as an avenue through which
social difference could be more broadly policed and white sovereignty achieved. Despite this, Indigenous and African Indigenous
individuals used settler institutions, such as state and county courts, to defend their right to oil-rich property and to leverage the racialized property regime that assumed their incompetence to their advantage.4

White settlers claimed hydrocarbons for themselves not only by appealing to racialized notions of
“competence” rooted in the assumption that non-whites could not grasp the value of fossil-fuel
energy. They also drew upon fears that white enterprises were constantly under the
threat of domination by “outside” monopolies to argue that petroleum and the
lands it resided beneath must be controlled by “local” whites. In both instances, white
settlers struggled to reckon with how petroleum altered distributions of wealth and property. Oil
booms enriched non-white individuals while leaving many white people in possession of worthless
land and under the economic thumb of monopolistic oil corporations. This only further encouraged
the development of an oil-field culture that dismissed non-white communities as rightful claimants
to “black gold” while elevating the righteousness of small-scale, settler-owned enterprises. Borrowing from the

In Indian
historian Timothy Mitchell, the conflicts over racial identity, property rights, and distributions of wealth that rankled white people’s claims over Indian- and Black-owned oil land amounted to the “engineering [of] political relations out of flows of energy.”5

Territory and Oklahoma, this energy politics often resulted in carbon despotism , as petroleum
abundance encouraged undercapitalized white oilmen to embrace a politics that fused white
supremacy and anti-monopolism and drove broad resistance to nonwhite wealth
and sovereignty. resulted in myriad individual attacks on people of color, but
The latter not only , as we will see in the conclusion,

also contributed to one of the United States’ worst race massacres on record. 6

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crude

Native Sovereignty, the Politics of Monopoly, and the Discovery of Oil in Indian Territory

oil’s place in the economy, ecology, and culture of Indian Territory transitioned from the low-
impact use of petroleum as a health product, to the Anglo-American-led establishment of high
intensity drilling ventures aimed at securing one of nature’s densest forms of energy. The earliest
petroleum-centric enterprises in Indian Territory had been tribally-owned health resorts that
marketed oil springs as rehabilitative. In 1853, a federal Indian agent stationed in the Choctaw
Nation reported on such a spring, writing, “[t]he oil springs in this region are attracting
considerable attention, as they are said to be a remedy for all chronic diseases … The fact is that it
cures anything that has been tried.” Gardner Tubby, an African Choctaw man, worked at a
tribally owned health resort where he labored among springs black with oil and collected
petroleum-laden sands that guests used as a salve to treat “boils, cuts, bruises and other afflictions
of the human body.” The business thrived for ten or fifteen years, beginning in 1881, and Tubby recalled that “[t]he sick and afflicted would come from far and near, camp and drink and bathe in the water from these springs.” Native people and settlers

Skimmed from water sources by human hands and

across North America had long utilized oil seeps and other naturally-occurring petroleum springs for medicinal purposes.

applied to the body, this method of use in many ways contradicted the industrial extraction of
petroleum that white Americans developed beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Thus, oil’s centrality to energy systems was only one chapter in its history as a utilitarian substance. Nevertheless, the geologic circumstances that brought oil to the surface in the form of springs also beckoned those whose interest lay in petroleum’s combustibility.7
The first discoveries of extractable deposits of oil in Indian Territory vexed Native governments, federal officials, and oil companies, as the rights of non-Native prospectors and enterprises in Indian Territory remained ill-defined. In 1859, Lewis Ross, the brother of Cherokee Chief John
Ross, accidentally discovered a small oil pool near Grand Saline in the Cherokee Nation while mining for salt. Ross’s find occurred the same year that drillers in western Pennsylvania sank the first profitable oil wells in the United States. In the years following the Cherokee man’s discovery,

a handful of white oil drillers traveled to Indian Territory to sink exploratory “wildcat” wells.
These oilmen met formidable obstacles in their efforts to create a viable petroleum industry. For one, Indian
Territory remained geographically isolated from petroleum markets and largely bereft of the industrial materiel and concentrated capital that successful drilling ventures required. Furthermore, in the late nineteenth century, it remained unclear to oil prospectors and Indian nations alike just

The Five “Civilized” Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and
how federal policy would govern mineral extraction.

Seminole Nations) barred white people from citizenship and restricted landownership to
intermarried whites, but retained little power when it came to negotiating leases with outside
companies. When white prospectors did enter Indian Territory, federal officials tended to insist that these U.S. citizens cease operations and leave the Native nations.8

By the end of the nineteenth century, the conflicts that arose around the leasing of land for oil
production conjoined with the politics of allotment, which combined race-based defenses of
 private property and anti-monopolism in calling for the dissolution of communal
tribal land bases. In the eyes of allotment’s supporters, Native nations ultimately could not be
incorporated into the United States because they were uncommitted to the establishment of private-
property relations. In short, as the anthropologist and historian Patrick Wolfe writes, in the eyes of
many white Americans, “Indians were the first communist menace.” the Dawes Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts chaired

Commission in 1893 , which was established to lead negotiations with the Five Tribes and achieve the transformation of their communally held lands into individually owned homesteads. Dawes and other white “Indian theorists” of the time

demanded allotment based upon a moral and ethical defense of individually-held private property.
Dawes described Native people’s communal land regimes as “Henry George’s system,”
understanding common property not as a long-standing tenet of Indigenous culture and
nationhood, but in Euro-American terms that equated communalism with single taxers, Marxists,
and other radical leftists. The Dawes Commission
He lamented that, with Indigenous property relations, “There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”

and its supporters also viewed allotment as a means to fight monopoly. Allotment
would, in theory, redistribute land controlled by a consolidated minority of “mixed bloods,” or
those Natives considered “whiter” than others—usually by a combination of white familial ties and
a commitment to market relations—to the majority “full bloods,” those individuals considered
furthest from racial and cultural whiteness. In hopes of socially reengineering “full bloods” into
whiter subjects, the commission placed restrictions on the sale of individual Indians’ allotments
based on blood quantum, which was established through often unreliable surveys. The more Native
“blood” the state deemed an individual to have, the longer that Indigenous person was required to
hold onto their land and, in the process, absorb the nuances of white yeoman culture and the rules
of private property. 9
Indian Territory’s Indigenous nations proved especially opposed to allotment. In the early nineteenth century the Five Tribes had been exemplars of self-directed adaptation to white civilization, adopting Anglo-American-style governmental institutions prior to their forced march westward

by the late nineteenth century

from the southeastern United States to Indian Territory. However, White officials grew , these nations represented allotment’s strongest detractors.

convinced that the tribal nations in Indian Territory would never voluntarily give up their
communal land base. When Congress passed the 1898 Curtis Bill, which created the final framework for the Five Tribes’ allotment, a Cherokee man voiced misgivings that other Indigenous peoples shared, sardonically writing, “there will be oil leases,
asphalt leases, gold leases, stone leases, marble leases, granite leases, air leases, and possibly the very blessed light of the sun (should it prove capitalizable) may be captured and monopolized by some shrewd speculator under one of Charlie Curtis’ wonderful lease-traps.” While Native
opposition was often fierce, the leadership among the Five Tribes begrudgingly accepted allotment, understanding that recalcitrance would end with the forced breakup of their collective land bases at the hands of the United States.10

Principle Chief Pleasant Porter of

Indian leaders tasked with navigating allotment and the ongoing prospecting and leasing of their land looked to petroleum resources as a means to maintaining a semblance of collectivism.

the Creek Nation regretted the discovery of oil on Creek land made by white and “mixed-blood”
drillers in the summer of 1901. Porter feared that the oil finds, which occurred near a tiny cattle
town called Tulsa, would complicate the allotment process, making land that was previously
worthless from an agricultural standpoint suddenly desired by whites and Indians alike. He believed that allottees should seek out a home and livelihood on
tracts that had a “normal use as agricultural lands,” while oil land should be declared surplus and proceeds from it distributed for the benefit of “every citizen of the [Creek] Nation.” Such a regime was not unheard of. The Osage Nation retained collective mineral rights and distributed

Porter’s call for the nationalization of petroleum would not be realized among
royalties from oil production through such a system. However,

the Five Tribes. Indian allottees, through the oversight of local, state, and federal officials, would
sign leases and earn royalties from oil as individual landowners. These conditions not only met the
Dawes Commission’s conception of allotment as a mediated introduction of Indians
to white people’s market economy, but also fit the notion that Indians’ communal
holdings were in fact monopolies controlled by nefarious outsiders , and that the
preservation of any collectivist property relations would disintegrate into the same. 11

The idea that only white-settler enterprising could thwart monopoly power also painted
demands for more liberalized leasing and oil-production rules on Native-owned land. Seymour Riddle, a white attorney
representing the United Commercial Clubs of the Indian Territory before a Senate committee in 1906, ridiculed federal rules that barred oilmen from selling their leases for profit and required lessees to prove that they held enough cash to develop a lease. “No individual or corporation without

“corporations of
a vast amount of money can comply with these rules and the result is that only the very wealthy individuals and corporations of unlimited means have been able to secure the approval of very many oil and gas leases.” Riddle’s allusion to

unlimited means” was a veiled reference to Standard Oil, which smaller wildcat prospectors
assumed was ever poised to dominate Indian Territory’s emerging petroleum fields. Riddle and other oil and gas developers
hinged their arguments against federal rules on what often appeared esoteric, such as the requirement that drillers secure a bond that would insure their lease in case of a failed operation. However, such questions struck at the core of allotment, white settlement, and oil development: How

should property be administered, and to whose ultimate interest? For Riddle and many other white oilmen—especially small independents—
restrictions on the alienation of Indian property were “wrong on principle” and
violated “business rule,” and thus must be eradicated, lest Standard and other
monopolists prey on supposedly naïve Indigenous property holders and dominate
markets in land and oil to the detriment of white settlers and their families. 12

For these independent oilmen, Only a property regime established on the race, minerals, and land were intertwined.

basis of small-scale white enterprise could thwart the wasteful monopolism of land
and minerals by way of both large “outside” oil companies and federally protected,
backward Indigenous landowners. “Colonel” J.W. Zevely, a white man who Before the same Senate hearing,

represented the Muskogee Commercial Club, lambasted not only federal restrictions, but also the
risk that Indians represented to the proper commercial use of oil and gas. Zevely objected to federal rules that required oil producers to pay Creek and
Cherokee allottees $50 annually for unutilized gas wells. Race played into Zevely’s concerns. If a white oil producer abandoned a gas well, then control of the well reverted to the Indigenous allottee, “and he may not exercise the care that the lessee must preserve not to waste it.” Zevely was

Zevely lamented the

further angered when he could not obtain signatures on leasing papers without paying exorbitant bonuses to the individual Indian in question. And as prospecting for oil increased, so did the cost of bonuses.

annoyance and out-of-pocket expenses this brought about and complained that “[a]n Indian may
not know the value of his land, but just try to get a lease from him on some of his land, and you will
see that he has a pretty good idea of what its value is— generally an inflated idea, though.”
Ultimately, what angered Zevely most was that, in his view, the Department of the Interior
unilaterally established the rules that governed how oilmen obtained access to Native land and
minerals. He did not believe the federal government could exercise such close oversight of private enterprise. Zevely ended his statement by asserting that Congress “can’t pass laws that will protect a man against himself,” regardless of race.13

Zevely and other white oilmen insisted that Indians could not grasp
Ignoring men such as Pleasant Porter and the bonus demands of their own Indigenous lessors,

the value of petroleum nor conjure the capital and labor needed to pull it from the earth. If these
and other white settlers understood the need for some mediation between settlers, the government,
and Indigenous individuals in the realm of landownership, they rejected similar oversight of the
subterranean world, despite the fact that the two were inextricably linked. Ultimately, what
Zevely and many of his white contemporaries in Indian Territory desired was their
own state , which would offer white businessmen the opportunity to form their own government
that could set the rules of the oil game and achieve the expansion and
intensification of white sovereignty. White men realized that dream in 1907 when Indian
Territory and Oklahoma Territory were fused to form the State of Oklahoma, just as the largest oil
booms yet seen in the region—booms that disproportionately occurred on Native allotments—
commenced.
In 1905, drillers again struck oil near
Mixed-Race Oil Fields in a White Man’s State The allotment of tribal land and the discovery of new oil fields accelerated during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Tulsa, opening the Glenn Pool field, the first large oil find in Indian Territory. The Texas Company
(Texaco), Gulf Oil, and others built pipelines connecting the oil-producing area to refineries in
Texas, Kansas, and the Chicago area. Tulsa quickly grew into a regional hub for the oil industry,
becoming the home base for numerous banks, refineries, and oil-field service companies. The Glenn Pool field’s success
meant the dreams and efforts of capitalists centered in New York City; skilled workers from the oil fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia; and farm families from across the beleaguered cotton and wheat fields of the South and West fixed upon the region’s oil prospects. Wildcatters
continued to open modestly producing fields until 1912, when another massive oil find was made fifty miles west of Tulsa, near the town of Cushing in Creek and Payne counties. Cushing quickly grew into one of the world’s most prodigious oil fields. The crude that drilling companies
extracted from the lands of the Creek Nation was of especially high grade, perfect for refinement into gasoline, the demand for which had exploded with rises in automobile use and continued to expand as World War I kicked off in Western Europe. Production in the field peaked in April of
1915 at over three hundred thousand barrels a day, which at the time represented more than two-thirds of the high-grade crude oil produced in the Western Hemisphere. Oil companies extracted more than forty-nine million barrels (2.6 billion gallons) in 1915, with drilling centered on an area
only ten miles long and three miles wide. Thirty refineries operated in the town of Cushing throughout the boom period. The field was home to the largest complex of petroleum-storage tanks in the world, covering 160 acres and containing four hundred 55,000-barrel tanks, which altogether
could hold up to sixty million barrels of crude.14

Not only was the Cushing field a prolific producer, it also was built on a mosaic of racially diverse
leases made up of white, Black, Indigenous, and immigrant landowners. Native royalty owners were
especially prevalent in the field—upwards of 40 percent of the oil leases in Cushing faced federal
restrictions based on the Indigenous “blood” of the leasing landowner. Before oil was discovered
around Cushing, federal officials had allotted much of the land to “full-blood” and African Creeks,
who were more likely than “mixed bloods” to oppose allotment and less likely to request a specific
tract of land during allotment proceedings. The Dawes Commission arbitrarily assigned 160 acres
to each of these Creeks—land that was often the least desirable from an agricultural standpoint.
Many of these allottees were “conservative” Creeks who demanded the reinstitution of the original
treaties that ceded Indian Territory to the Five Tribes in perpetuity. These Creeks and other “full-
blood” factions formed the intertribal Four Mothers Society, which in 1906 petitioned Congress to
restore past treaties that guaranteed sovereignty and lands in common. These Natives not only
demanded the end of allotment, but, like Pleasant Porter, also called for the communal sharing of oil and gas.
African American and African Indigenous landowners were also common in the field, with many of
the latter being citizens of the Creek Nation. Finally, a number of Syrian immigrants obtained oil fortunes on land they originally purchased due to the deception of white
promoters, who purposefully misrepresented its agricultural value.15
While conservative Natives had no interest in recognizing the authority of white governments in the former Indian Territory, many Indigenous land and royalty owners in the Cushing field demanded rights as citizens based on their identities as lessors.16 During court proceedings, white

oil booms raised vexing questions about the rights of Native

officials, oilmen, and Native individuals labored to construct race as a legal and rhetorical concept, revealing how

property holders to participate in the petroleum economy. The story of Thomas Gilcrease, one of a number of tribal citizens who became successful oilmen, reflected this process
of race-making in the oil fields. Gilcrease was the son of a white man and a Creek woman, and as such, was assigned an allotment not far from Tulsa. Drillers sank forty-nine wells on Gilcrease’s land beginning in 1906, when he was still a minor, and these wells produced upwards of twenty-
five thousand barrels per month. When the original lease was due to end in 1911, the twenty-one-year-old entered into a partnership with several investors in order to keep the rigs on his land running. However, Gilcrease eventually took his partners to court, likely either because he was in
debt to one of the partners or because he had received better offers from other investors. In court, Gilcrease claimed that he was in fact incompetent, uneducated, and inexperienced in matters of business, and that as a result, the partnership should be dissolved. The defendants in the case
argued that Gilcrease was in fact of “more than average intelligence,” and of “at least three years active successful experience in business.” They insisted that Gilcrease understood the oil industry—the costs and risks of drilling, as well as the laws that governed extraction. At a more
fundamental level, they were proclaiming that Gilcrease was white. In effect, Gilcrease’s partners argued that the “mixed-blood” Creek man’s experience in the oil business established his identity as a white man, and thus he should not be subject to the paternalistic state and federal laws that
limited the property rights of Native citizens. Gilcrease attempted to wield the legal precept of incompetency to his advantage, a strategy that “mixed-bloods” could use to obtain power within Oklahoma’s racial caste system.17
In other cases, individual Indians argued against their declared incompetency, which prevented them from direct access to the money that their oil wells produced. Martha Jackson was a “full-blood” Creek who, alongside dozens of Native and non-Native parties, claimed ownership of a
Cushing-field allotment inherited from a late relative. The disputed piece of land was originally titled to Barney Thlocco, a “full-blood” Creek man who, along with numerous members of his immediate and extended family, died of an unclarified infectious-disease outbreak in January of
1899. The large number of sudden deaths within one family, and the lack of clarity over the order in which the Thloccos succumbed to the disease, made inheritance a murky question. Subsequently, there were at least 147 claimants to Thlocco’s estate, including Martha Jackson, who was

many Creeks and other members of the Five Tribes

Barney Thlocco’s stepdaughter and likely his nearest living relative. While many of these claims were fraudulent,

maintained kin ties that could not be easily squared with Anglo-American legal tenets, which tied
inheritance to nuclear families and direct “blood” relatives, which whites understood through the
lens of race and skin color. The desire of white officials to manage Native land on terms acceptable
to such property laws made conflicts over oil and inheritance that much more frequent and
fraught. 18
In 1914, an African Creek lawyer named J. Coody Johnson represented Martha, who was still a minor at the time, and her father, Saber Jackson, in court regarding the inherited allotment. In exchange for representation, Saber—who was still Martha’s legal guardian in 1914—agreed to lease
part of the allotment to Johnson for the purpose of oil and gas drilling, and in collaboration with a handful of white partners, Johnson formed the Black Panther Oil and Gas Company. The Black Panther’s first well on the Thlocco allotment produced twelve thousand barrels per day, a colossal
amount of oil, the daily value of which at the time was upwards of $10,000. Indeed, the Thlocco tract quickly became one of the country’s most valuable petroleum properties. Johnson used profits from the Black Panther to settle hundreds of competing claims for the allotment, allegedly
paying out a total of $300,000 to Indian claimants. Subsequently, Martha and Saber Jackson accused Johnson of using his clout as a well-known lawyer and his “great influence” among the Creeks to declare Saber unfit to act as guardian of Martha’s now-wealthy estate. The Jacksons claimed
that Johnson implored a judge to assign one of the Black Panther partners, a white man named R.W. Parmenter, to oversee Martha’s oil royalties. Johnson accused Saber Jackson of “drunkenness” and of “flirting and scheming” with regard to the allotment, and that such behavior made him
unfit to manage his daughter’s affairs.19
Unlike Thomas Gilcrease, Jackson and her lawyers fought back against the notion that Martha and Saber were incompetent and incapable of administrating the oil estate. Before the supreme court of Oklahoma, Jackson’s lawyers
contended that “designing and artful persons” desired to “cheat, defraud and rob” Martha of her estate and inheritance by making false claims before county judges regarding her “competence.” Martha Jackson further alleged that the
Black Panther owners had defrauded her of $1.2 million over a span of four-plus years. The Jacksons’ efforts partially prevailed, but not before Martha suffered a typical form of settler-colonial violence. In May of 1919, just days

Oil companies
before her eighteenth birthday and a subsequent court hearing on her competency, unknown assailants kidnapped Jackson from the Dwight Indian Training School in Seminole County.

operating in Oklahoma frequently kidnapped Indian lessors, especially minors, in hopes of forcibly
securing a signature from the allottee. Thomas Gilcrease himself was alleged to have whisked a Creek boy on the verge of gaining his majority as far as London in hopes of garnering
a lease. Such kidnappings represented a violent form of Indian removal that white officials did little to stop. Despite the kidnapping and Jackson’s subsequent absence from court, the county judge still declared her incompetent,
arguing that Martha was well known to him and that the court had “full knowledge of [Jackson’s] mental capacity.” Martha Jackson survived her ordeal and eventually won $300,000 from Black Panther. However, this represented
only a quarter of what she claimed to have lost.20

Black Panther’s Thlocco lease became further implicated in the problems of racial property when questions about oil monopolies and resource conservation arose around its production efforts. The protection of white
petroleum businesses and the regulation of market-destroying flows of oil combined here to form a
white-supremacist oil-field politics that elevated independents as the most-worthy white men in the oil game. During the early twentieth century, crises of overproduction and oil waste frequently gripped

the Southwest’s petroleum region, as scores of individual producers raced to capture as much oil from flush fields as quickly as possible. The result was momentous amounts of wasted crude, which ran freely down creeks, rivers, gullies, and streets, plus the collapse of oil prices due to the
glut of supply. The Cushing field buckled under such conditions by early 1915. Oil slicks frequently accumulated on the Cimarron River, a tributary of the Arkansas, which flowed adjacent to the Thlocco allotment. These slicks routinely caught fire, charring and blackening the river’s
wooded shoreline. Economic problems accompanied the ecological fallout. Due to oversaturated markets, prices had plummeted from over a dollar a barrel to around forty cents in less than a year. At the same time, Black Panther’s Thlocco lease was considered by many to be the most
productive oil land in the state, valued at $2 million, and a major contributor to the overproduction crisis. As a result, Johnson’s lease became the object of scrutiny for white oilmen and public officials.

Whenever overproduction gripped a field, small producing companies bristled at the power of
larger companies and alleged monopolies, such as Standard’s subsidiary Prairie Oil and Gas. These
latter companies often controlled pipelines that connected smaller producers to refining markets
and their large-scale capitalization allowed them to weather periods of low prices when
independent producers could not. When the Oklahoma Corporation Commission attempted to
protect smaller companies in the Cushing field by arbitrarily inflating the price of oil, the Standard
subsidiary cited Black Panther as a company that willingly sold oil at basement prices and
therefore stood as proof that there was no need to artificially raise rates. Cushing’s independents
criticized Black Panther as “the recreant Cushing price cutter” and urged producers and oil-field
workers to support the corporation commission’s restrictions on sales. These oilmen believed that
the corporation commission was the only bulwark preventing “one man from ruining the business
of a thousand” and wanted to prove to Black Panther’s African Creek owner that he “cannot
monkey with the bread and butter of an entire industry without getting thrashed for it.” 21
Beyond this kind of thinly-veiled racist language lobbed at the Black Panther company, it is difficult to say just how J. Coody Johnson’s status as a Black oilman may have played into the controversies surrounding the Thlocco lease. The oil tract was so productive that it was bound to draw

just as anti-monopolism had been invoked to

the attention of the region’s oilmen and lawmakers regardless of the identity of the leasing company. However,

support the dissolution of Native nations, the anti-monopolists who opposed Black
Panther also often participated in early Oklahoma’s anti-Black white-supremacist
movements. The white men who owned small oil-producing outfits in Oklahoma tended to be
members of the local upper classes, formally detached from distant sources of consolidated capital
but still considerably wealthy in their own right. Many had been among the early white settlers in
Indian Territory and insisted upon their worthiness as property owners and as social and political
leaders vis-à-vis not only “outside” corporations but also non-white peoples, whether Indigenous,
Black, or mixed race. This class of propertied white men had not only championed allotment, but
had also led the establishment of Oklahoma as a Jim Crow state. 22

The combined interests of white nativism and oil-field anti-monopolism were perhaps
best reflected by Wash Hudson, a Tulsan and a member of the Oklahoma House of
Representatives. Amid the problem of collapsing prices, monopolistic pipelines, and overproduction
in the Cushing field in 1915, Hudson coauthored a landmark oil conservation bill that bolstered the
corporation commission’s power to set oil prices, strengthened common-carrier and common-
purchaser laws in the state, and, in his words, represented “the only measure that has ever been
proposed in any legislature that will have the effect of putting Standard Oil, the octopus of this
country, on its knees to us.” Hudson’s bill passed, garnering support from numerous independent producers whose provincial, proprietary businesses he hoped to protect from outside corporate
interests. Hudson was also a founding member of the Tulsa branch of the Ku Klux Klan.
Alongside an oil-industry lawyer and a petroleum engineer, he was one of five original trustees of
the Tulsa Benevolent Association (TBA), a corporation established in 1922 in the wake of the Tulsa
race massacre that acted as a front for the newly-formed local chapter of the Klan. By 1923, the TBA had erected a three
Hudson’s advocacy for both
thousand-seat Klan headquarters known as “Be-No Hall,” as in “Be No Ni____s, Jews, Catholics or Immigrants.”

antimonopoly in the oil fields and white supremacy in Tulsa reflected the desire of
white men to use local avenues of influence to distribute capitalist power and
extractive wealth on their own terms, through means both legal and extralegal. Part
of this strategy entailed mitigating the geological uncertainties of petroleum production by
regulating drilling on independents’ terms, preventing flush oil-boom markets from destroying
small-scale white enterprises. Of course, doing so meant contradicting the anti-regulatory rhetoric
the same oilmen had used when eastern Oklahoma was Indian Territory. However, Hudson’s law was oil
regulation enacted through the all-white, “local” state legislature that independents had always
desired. White politicians such as Wash Hudson understood that regulating the flows of energy and
money that coursed through the oil region was necessary for protecting the power of
independent oilmen, a project that fit nicely into a larger settler-colonial regime
that sought the creation of white property through the control of both Indigenous-
and Black-owned land and labor. 23

The confluences of race and oil extended to the leasing of land

“The Richest Colored Girl in the World”: Oil (Mis)fortune on Sarah Rector’s Creek Nation Allotment

owned by African Creeks, where the legal oversight of Indigenous citizens and Jim Crow-era
whites’ assumptions about Blackness collided. Formerly-enslaved Black Creeks had been granted full citizenship in the Creek Nation as part of the tribe’s treaty with the U.S. government following the
Civil War. As full tribal citizens, African Creeks received 160-acre allotments and were included on the tribal rolls, but because Black Creeks were defined as “freedmen” and not “Indians by blood,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) did not claim jurisdiction over their allotments. However,
county and state courts as well as the Creek Nation’s lawyers took a keen interest in how the allotments of Black Creeks were handled by the many oil companies vying for leases in the Cushing field. The most famous of these African Creek allottees was Sarah Rector, who was 10 years old
when the Cushing boom commenced and whose oil-rich allotment quickly garnered her international fame as “The Richest Colored Girl in the World.” As a minor and, in the eyes of whites, a racially ambiguous lessor, she and her allotment came under special scrutiny.24
Controversy surrounding Sarah Rector’s land and oil wealth blew up in 1913 as the oil boom in Cushing grew, eliciting a series of investigations into Rector’s white guardian, the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, and the Rector family itself, all of which hinged on how race, property, and the
vicissitudes of oil extraction interacted. Sarah and her mother (Rose), father (Joe), and five siblings lived in a small house with a single bed located near the all-Black town of Taft, situated along the Arkansas River southeast of Tulsa. Like many Creeks, Rector did not live on her allotment,
which was located sixty miles to the west of Taft, just northeast of the boomtown of Oilton. Prairie Oil and Gas drilled fortynine producing wells on Rector’s allotment and during a five-month period in 1913 and 1914, the company paid Rector $46,000 in royalties. In addition to drilling for
crude, Prairie extracted natural gas from the property. Sarah’s father, Joe, had been the legal guardian of his children’s estates, but the great wealth that Sarah accrued from oil royalties prompted a county judge to assign a white man, J.T. Porter, to oversee the girl’s finances. Joe Rector was
seemingly stripped of his guardianship for no reason other than the color of his skin. Furthermore, the voices of Sarah and her family members remain largely absent from the testimony and litigation surrounding her estate. However, a handful of reports from probate lawyers and court rooms
reveal how the Rectors navigated their circumscribed wealth and maintained a semblance of control over Sarah’s estate amid the oil boom.
Joe Rector, who was a farmer, testified before a Muskogee County court that he wanted his daughter’s guardians to purchase a nearby tract of Arkansas River bottom land known as the Fish property. Rector had known the land his entire life and, due to his firsthand knowledge, was confident
that the property was capable of producing a bale of cotton per acre, fifty bushels of corn, and two tons of alfalfa each growing season. He was already renting a portion of the property and at work cultivating parts of it and ensured that he would look after the land, make improvements, seek
out tenants, and maintain connections with nearby markets. Joe Rector’s request can be viewed as not only an attempt to profit from his daughter’s oil royalties, but also a strategy for sinking stronger roots into the soil in the area surrounding his familial home. At the same time, Joe and
Sarah’s guardian both insisted that offering portions of the land to sharecroppers would likely accrue twice as much income for Sarah’s estate as renting it for straight cash. Diversifying oil royalties into other forms of capital placed the Rectors on the winning end of the sharecropping system,

White guardians also used oil wealth to instruct and include Black and
one of the Southwest’s most insidious farm-labor regimes.

Indigenous individuals in webs of debt and to “modernize” their Indigenous and Black Indigenous
wards. Sarah could support family members using her royalties, but only in the form of loans
entirely controlled by her white guardian. Rector’s estate had accrued $54,000 by mid-1914, of which $46,000 came from oil production. Sarah’s guardian J.T. Porter loaned $42,000 of this total to various
parties, including to members of his family and members of the Rector family, at an 8 percent interest rate. A new lease negotiated with Prairie in 1918 garnered the Rector estate another $300,000, which Porter used to loan out mortgages, purchase a 452-acre farm on the Verdigris River near
Tulsa, and invest $50,000 in government bonds.25
White officials designed the guardian system in ways that quelled fears that the considerably large
payouts that oil leases offered Native landowners would allow kin groups and neighbors to
maintain a semblance of communal subsistence, which undermined the ultimate goals of allotment.
For instance, Thomas Leahy, a county judge, wrote to the Secretary of the Interior and defended the fact that Sarah obtained only $600 in 1913–1914, arguing that “other members of the family and neighbors” benefited from any cash paid out directly to Sarah more so than she did personally.
Leahy’s rationale for limiting payments to Sarah confirmed allotment’s Anglo-American commitment to turning individuals into isolated economic subjects, undermining the Rectors’ ability to support larger networks of kin through Sarah’s oil wealth. Joe and Rose Rector allegedly objected
to this norm. In 1914, a probate attorney in Muskogee wrote to Judge R.C. Allen in Washington, D.C., ensuring that Rector’s parents were “of fair intelligence and apparently hard-working, industrious people.” However, while Rose and Joe Rector realized that Sarah’s estate was of
“considerable value and that it is a growing estate,” they did not fully embrace the idea that “the estate of their child is to be used wholly for [Sarah’s] personal comfort and advantage.”26

The management of Rector’s estate by white authorities went beyond controlling oil royalties and
dictating investments. Guardians and BIA officials also used oil money to transform the daily lives
of the Rector family and to physically remove Sarah from her home and eventually from the Creek
Nation altogether. With the discovery of oil, Leahy and the guardian “agreed upon certain changes looking toward the betterment of conditions for Sarah and the entire family.” For Leahy, this meant purchasing new furniture and convincing Sarah’s mother

Eventually, Sarah’s oil wealth proved great enough that white officials,
to purchase land that would become the site of a new five-room cottage.

both local and federal, sought out an elite boarding school for her to attend, laying the groundwork
for her semipermanent separation from her family and their land. Indeed, she soon matriculated at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Leahy
stated that her parents “strenuously objected to her leaving home at that time, she being but ten years of age.” Sarah used some of her allowance to purchase a phonograph; beyond this, there’s no indication that she purchased any additional personal items or gifts of her own accord.27
Sarah Rector’s wealth resulted in considerable fame in both the white and Black presses. Her background as a person of both African and Indigenous heritage grew increasingly obscured, as both non-Indigenous African Americans and white Americans claimed ownership of her story and her
future. In 1913, the Black newspaper Chicago Defender reported that white people “have become so alarmed at the enormous wealth of this young girl” that some wanted to “enamel” her or devise other methods that would allow Rector to pass as white. The paper clearly demonstrated the
malleability of race amid the oil booms when it reported that the Oklahoma legislature desired to pass a law declaring Rector a white person. “It’s the same old idea of the white man,” the paper continued, “that whenever a Negro achieves any distinction …some white men want to declare

in March of 1911, William

them white.” The Black press took a keen interest in Rector’s personal safety given her growing fame and fortune. Their interest was well warranted given the fate of other oil-rich Black children. For instance,

Irvin, a prominent white Muskogee landowner, dynamited the home of a Black family in Sarah’s
hometown of Taft, intentionally killing two children, Castella and Herbert Sells. Irvin organized the
murder of the Sells children in order to gain title to their oil-rich Glenn Pool allotments. Seven men were indicted for the
murders, but only Irvin and a Black accomplice who laid the dynamite were convicted.28
While the Black press positioned Sarah as an African American (but not Indigenous) child worthy of protection, the white press situated her as racially unfit to possess such a hydrocarbon inheritance. In 1914, the Kansas City Star
described Sarah’s wealth and the oil riches of other Black Creeks with animosity and factual inaccuracies that served to paint Rector as especially backward, placing her beyond the boundaries of social acceptability and declaring her
and her race unfit to possess oil wealth. The paper alleged that Sarah and her sister Mannie had become rich through the possession of land inherited from their deceased parents. Sarah’s parents were perfectly alive at the time, but the
paper insisted otherwise, painting Sarah as “an orphan, rude, black and uneducated” and “as oblivious to the events of the world as an Eskimo.” This was part of a larger exposé on nonwhites who lucked upon wealth in the oil fields.
The paper concluded, “[white] Oklahomans … don’t even stop to wonder at the selections Fortune makes when she picks out little darkies and immigrants on which to shower her wealth.” Oilmen and other white settlers did not
consider such money to be “lost,” because non-white owners of oil land “will die, or someone will take it away from them and things will go back just like they were. And probably that is the correct solution of Fortune’s strange

In the eyes of the white press, Native American and Black wealth was an absurd, unjust
caprices.”

coincidence of the oil fields, where immeasurable riches literally gushed from the earth. Many
whites believed that the prodigious wealth that modern energy sources beckoned would inevitably
and rightfully flow to the top of the racial hierarchy, regardless of the means. 29
Conclusion: Oil, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the Klan Unlike many other “full-blood” and African Creek individuals, Sarah Rector managed to live a life of relative comfort buoyed by her oil royalties. There is reason to believe that
this was largely due to her fame, which brought her personal story to the attention of powerful African American activists, including Washington and W.E.B DuBois, who revealed her plight under Oklahoma’s guardian system to a
national audience of civil rights proponents. She and her family moved to Kansas City in 1917 where she remained throughout most of her adulthood. Rector owned real estate in the city, continued to earn royalties from oil
production, and operated a car dealership. She owned a “stable of Cadillacs and Lincolns” and was reportedly a fan of joyriding around the city, especially in large, gas-guzzling automobiles. In this way, petroleum both financed

cultures of racism and a

Rector’s wealth and fueled the freedoms that she practiced through that wealth. For so many others in Rector’s position, the fact remained that both

color-bounded regime of property administered by whites resulted in alienation,

dispossession, and violent death. The violence surrounding petroleum and non-
white people’s property culminated in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. While historians
have revealed how the destruction of the Black neighborhood of Greenwood—known as “Black
Wall Street”—at the hands of white rioters unfolded, few have made more than tangential
connections between the massacre and Tulsa’s status as the so-called Oil Capital of the World. 30
the problems of oil wealth’s caprices
The attack on Greenwood commenced on May 31, following dubious accusations made by a young white woman that a Black elevator operator had assaulted her. However,

simmered beneath the surface as white mobs gathered on the late-spring day. Tulsa, a major center
of refining and oil-industry finance, was suffering from an oil depression at the time. A fall in prices
following the end of World War I, a lack of new petroleum discoveries in Oklahoma, and the steady
exhaustion of once-fecund oil tracts such as the Thlocco and Rector leases all plagued the city and
surrounding rural areas. The relative economic
The lack of oil production further harmed landowners, who would have welcomed mineral royalties amid the growing postwar agricultural downturn.

prosperity of some Black residents only heightened the possibility of white resentment and violence.
In the aftermath of the massacre, journalists and activists sympathetic to the cause of Black civil
rights pointed to African American successes within the oil industry as a primary spark in initiating
the white attack on Black Tulsa. James Weldon Johnson, the executive secretary of the NAACP in
1921, argued that oil fueled racial animosities in the runup to the massacre. He cited instances of
Black landowners around Tulsa discovering rich oil reserves on their properties and, “because no
white man would bore for them,” being forced to sell their land “at the white man’s price.” John
Haynes Holmes, a white man who helped found both the NAACP and the ACLU, relayed the story
of a Black family from Clearview, a community outside of Tulsa, who refused to sell their oil-rich
farm despite the demands of their white neighbors. Soon after, the family of five was killed when an
unknown arsonist burned down their home. For many Black Americans and their white supporters
eager to assess the causes of the massacre, it was clear: if petroleum had precipitated these acts of
violence, then it likely played a role in Greenwood’s destruction as well. 31

The efforts of Wash Hudson and white oilmen to establish and strengthen the Ku Klux Klan in the
wake of the Tulsa massacre was echoed across Oklahoma’s petroleum fields, where white-
supremacist mobilizing was especially rampant. Oil towns proved to be ripe territory for migrant,
non-white laborers and union activities, as well as the subsequent perception among many whites of
rampant crime and vice. As a result, white vigilantism flourished in these areas. One white resident of Muskogee County, where Rector
and her family lived, celebrated Klan vigilantism and concluded that white-supremacist action “certainly was born of great necessity in this oil country.” In Oilton, the boomtown adjacent to the Thlocco and Rector allotments, the local Klan built a regional headquarters that became a meeting
place for several klaverns in northeast Oklahoma. One historian estimates that, among the five thousand residents of Oilton’s neighboring town of Quay, upwards of half were Klansmen during the early 1920s.32
This influx of white-supremacist power in the backyards of Indigenous and Black Indigenous allottees represented the aftermath of oil’s tumultuous rise to the top of regional and national imaginaries about race, property, and wealth.

For many whites, vigilante violence was the necessary response to the numerous
threats to their oil inheritance that arose via “outside” monopolies, unfit
Indigenous property owners, and recalcitrant Black people. When white Americans
emphasized the “windfall” that nonwhite peoples received due to oil abundance, they insisted upon
a story of white settlement exempt from the ugly side of colonial dispossession and white-
supremacist violence. Native peoples had been compensated, they suggested, and whatever
happened afterward was simply confirmation of Indigenous people’s unreadiness for “civilization”
and self governance. The story was the same for Black people, who had further provoked white
backlash by flaunting their wealth in cities such as Tulsa. And when white people insisted upon the
transfer of fossil-fuel wealth from “incompetent” Indians and African Indians to white guardians,
they elided questions of power and injustice by invoking the assumed efficacy of law and
bureaucratic oversight. Petroleum’s vexations—its great energy density accompanied by its unpredictable occurrence and habit of falling into seemingly unworthy hands—drove these cultural and
institutional commitments to white supremacy in Indian Territory and Oklahoma.