The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.
Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.
After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.
The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.
When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable. Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.
In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?
At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.
‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).
‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?
The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.
Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash
In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.
As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power.
On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.
In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?
That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.
Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.
References
Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.
Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558
Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.
Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.
Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156
Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.
Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility.
The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals
is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by
police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of
Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization
helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the
fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put
their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.
Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate
that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian
Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them
off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with
the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed
in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has
very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing
levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of
police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading
cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame
2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).
While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do
occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it
is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed
by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is
not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In
Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths
are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600
youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks
against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in
order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.
Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.
In this following, I focus not so much on the
paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such
as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban
ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent
movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is
the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the
highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few
decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police
violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing
attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but
officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of
its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police
praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).
This article should be understood neither as a literature
review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview
see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead,
I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime
of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique
to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg
2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global
antiblackness. Enduring global
colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes
of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police
terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global
north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020;
Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).
How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence
and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If,
as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers]
so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic
process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization
without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What
does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place
of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black
studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream
institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the
antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically
compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of
ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s
critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is
to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing
structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what
the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and
abolishing the police state.
The Myth of Police
Fragility
There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim,
that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date
when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel
Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the
officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself
in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already
sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South,
hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s
story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter
protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me
features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With
fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him,
he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.
One may speculate: What led him to such an
expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps
the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop
the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents? The film and the scene in particular aroused
heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police
violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a
meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers
gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity”
(Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others
blamed it for ‘going too far left in its
implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by
reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law
enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).
The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and
its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United
States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be
read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”.
Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue
lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in
general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020: 654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better
explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the
vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).
By hijacking the
meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms
of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?)
in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements
and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality
(e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell
and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of
works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops
as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation
to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election
of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial
to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure.
Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work
on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.
Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing
(I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work
employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in
which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which
reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering
the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s
‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial
imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015;
Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in
contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as
drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and
Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions
have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters
with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully
portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo
broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see
also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,”
an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally,
there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among
anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the
disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of
corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788).
These and many other works (too many to be listed in a
commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying
this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last
decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s
theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel
patrolling the streets. By making
ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have
provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making,
statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin
2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).
My
intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate
within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what
anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice
and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited
volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian
Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political
stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one
could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over
and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying
police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question
by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend
to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness
embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the
world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police
(2018: 8).
In
this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own
positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues
such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the
normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate
to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually
themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve
and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate
apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically
supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching
themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’
family and Christian values (Alves 2018).
While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work.
My analysis (and that of many of my
colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with
individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror.
Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young
man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a
living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I
was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali,
Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a
local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between
my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the
global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle
class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black
youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.
Thus, my contention here is not so much to
stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of
power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description,
may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the
police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing
tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one
should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails. If we do not want our work to end up fueling
and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity
with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the
police!’ in studies of policing.
Maroon Anthropology
In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)
Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly
with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open
letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this
very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of
respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage
anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more
illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political
lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the
word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police
– and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist
in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again
and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are
the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a
smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What
has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of
the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!
Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured
scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their
work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel
2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a
public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in
performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’,
‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes.
Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of
‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see
Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in
promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of
the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and
scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us”
(Spillers 1987: 68).
If
the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s
(incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police
‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic
policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial
institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may
require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing
required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the
position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political
literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James
and Gordon 208:371).
I am
not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph,
2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s
tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point
for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the
wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the
reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real)
vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately,
those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought
to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as
ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical
of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that
necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend
to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive
to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et
al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by
political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached
to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That
is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are
state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state
sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the
state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say
that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the
military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil
and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe
2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain
of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing. As Siegel and others have shown, one of the
most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police
work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works
under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still,
both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police
operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy
terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska
2007).
This is not a peripheral point. One has only
to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier
and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the
neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the
contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson
2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their
profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring
antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its
paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is
insane.
How might anthropologists challenge the
asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying
black beings? When one officer dies, it
is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in
performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even
in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely
high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to
believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized
forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their
victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in
relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or
even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory
violence by its victims.
There is no equivalence between blue lives
and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in
the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of
anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of
anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that
while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence
as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false
equivalency.
Based on her work with activists in the South
African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility
to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of
historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author
deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing
violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the
oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She
opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective
eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is
positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally
committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see,
how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).
If we consider current waves of demonstrations
against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human
liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been
misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police? Although an insurgent
anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts
where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to
counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my
critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing
violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am
also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and
activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of
state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or
member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed
by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change
the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our
discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.
Thus, f*ck the police! is
not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations
to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation
to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives
Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny
on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice.
It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for
redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting
police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What
does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically
placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and
Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the
answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!
Acknowledgments: This
paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel,
Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from
engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series,
University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University
of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and
Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities
Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb,
Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors
and omissions are of course mine.
Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia. He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com
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Cite as: Alves, Jaime A. 2021. “F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 27 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/27/jaime-a-alves-fck-the-police-murderous-cops-the-myth-of-police-fragility-and-the-case-for-an-insurgent-anthropology/
The purpose of
this work is to examine and elaborate on the relationship between the people of
Native North America and the material and ideological content of
developmentalism as examined within the fields of anthropology and Native American
or Indigenous studies. I observe that Indigenous North American peoples are
frequently excluded from discussions of economic development within
anthropology. I try to reconcile this situation and reinsert native peoples
into the anthropology of development by demonstrating the historical and political
continuities between United States Indian Policy with the exported ‘development
apparatus’. In doing so, I follow Neveling (2017) and others in pushing back
against postdevelopment’s dematerialization of development and its emphasis on
development as discourse. Instead, I argue that a historical materialist or
political economic approach (Rose 2015, 2017, 2018) that conceptualizes
development in the terms of Neveling’s (2017) “political economy machinery”
better explains the situation of Indigenous North American peoples and the
processes that make and unmake their lives.
The
overall point here is that in order to properly understand the political
economic basis and ideological dimensions to the Post-War developmentalism
project it is necessary to understand and examine the history of those
political economic models and the history of those ideological dimensions.
While there likely were developmentalist antecedents in the policies of the
European empires, a major distinctive feature of post-war developmentalism is
that it was rooted in the political economy and hegemonic position of the
United States. As such, it is crucial to understand the local antecedents for
American developmentalist policies, which necessarily brings us to Indigenous peoples
as they were the early laboratories of these policies and political economic
models.
Contextual Disconnect
On
the global level, the sub-discipline of the anthropology of development has
flourished in the last half century, along with the interdisciplinary field of
development studies. In that time, prominent anthropological works have been
produced within the sub-discipline that have had a broad impact within
anthropology and influence beyond their own regional and disciplinary scope.
Some of these classics include the works of Arturo Escobar (1995), James
Ferguson (1990), Akhil Gupta (1998), David Mosse (2005), and Tania Murray Li
(2007). These works describe the transformative effects of ‘development’,
especially on the role of state policies, on the regions formerly grouped
together as the “Third World” (i.e. Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin
America), which are now more conventionally referred to as the global South. The
field of the anthropology of development, along with the interdisciplinary
field of development studies, has remained almost exclusively “Third World”
focused. Chibber (2013) observes that this isolation in the form of the lack of
thorough comparative engagement between capitalist development in Western
Europe and capitalist development in the Third World has led to an inaccurate
and romanticized portrayal of each in postcolonial studies of Third World
development. While I generally agree with Chibber’s critique, I wish to move
into a different context. The anthropological literature on development in the
global South is also disconnected from the anthropological literature on what
would otherwise be called ‘development’ in what was at one time called the “Fourth
World” (i.e. stateless nations), especially in regard to Indigenous peoples in
North America. This disconnect actually goes both ways. Jessica Cattelino’s
(2008) book is likely the most popular anthropological work on Indigenous
economic development in Native North America in the last several decades. Even
though her ethnography on (capitalist) economic development within the Seminole
Nation of Florida was published after the texts of those aforementioned
prominent anthropology of development authors, and deals with many similar
issues around development such as the intricacies and problematics of
sovereignty, governmentality, and possible alternative modernities, she does
not utilize them or the other work from this subfield. Furthermore, Tania Murray
Li’s (2010) comparative discussion of the relationship between capitalism and
dispossession in different regions does not include Native North America despite
the lengthy and ongoing history of dispossession of Indigenous peoples in North
America in relation to both colonial policies of the past as well as
contemporary processes of neoliberal capitalism and state (re)formation in the
United States and Canada. Instead of including Native North America as another
case study alongside Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, she mentions Indigenous
people in the Anglo settler states (i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United
States) or CANZUS countries (Cornell 2015) only once and in passing, and does
so with the effect of driving a further wedge between them by saying that the
processes of class differentiation were different among Indigenous peoples in
those locations. Similarly, David Mosse’s (2013) summary article on the state
of the subfield is telling of its geographic orientation as there is no mention
of Indigenous North America at all and only a passing mention of development in
Europe. The point is that these works are not drawing from and are not in
dialogue with each other. There is a disconnect between anthropological studies
of development in the global South with those on the economics and development
of Indigenous people in the Anglo settler states even though (as I will argue) they
share certain commonalities and histories.
Developmentalism and Native North America
The
general scholarly consensus is that the modern ‘development apparatus’ and the pseudo-utopian
vision that is the modernist-developmentalist paradigm began with the Truman
administration after the Second World War, the emergence of the United States
as a superpower, and actions taken within the context of the Cold War in
needing to make capitalism more appealing for the (newly) former colonies in
comparison to the political economic model of the Soviet Union and then later
China (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995; Cowen and Shenton 1996; Rist 2008; Kiely
2007). As Escobar (1995: 3-4) states:
The Truman doctrine
initiated a new era in the understanding and management of world affairs,
particularly those concerning the less economically accomplished countries of
the world. The intent was quite ambitious: to bring about the conditions
necessary to replicating the world over the features that characterized the
“advanced” societies of the time—high levels of industrialization and
urbanization, technicalization of agriculture, rapid growth of material
production and living standards, and the widespread adoption of modern
education and cultural values.
The
disconnect between the subfields is especially problematic here because while the
Truman administration does mark a shift in global development policy, scholars
of Native North America would observe that the Truman administration also
constituted a dramatic (and infamous) shift in United States Indian Policy. These
two phenomena are not disconnected. When the Truman administration began
exporting this pseudo-utopian vision of the glories of capitalism, technology,
and Western modernity to the world, United States Indian Policy shifted away
from similar policies of bureaucratization, technicalization, and
industrialization for tribal governments. These policies were based around the
creation and support of local/Indigenous bureaucratic institutions that would
in essence aid internally in the development of Native American societies
toward a form of collectively managed capitalism, which was intended to bring
them as societies into the modern world. Although it had antecedents in United
States Indian Policy in the nineteenth century (Miner 1989) stretching back
even to the Jefferson administration’s ‘civilization’ program, this type of
internal developmentalism began in a comprehensive manner with the
administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the early 1930s and crystallized around
the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (Jorgensen 1978). The Act, as the
product of the political economy of the United States of the period, was
therefore in accordance with the interests of the American bourgeoisie
(Littlefield 1991), and brought about the transformation of Native American
societies by formally institutionalizing capitalism within bureaucratic tribal
governments. In many locations, it had the effect of solidifying political
power over Indigenous communities by the emergent Indigenous bourgeoisie (Schröder 2003; Nagata 1987; Ruffing 1979;
Rose 2014).
The Truman administration marked the shift in Indian Policy away from Reorganization and towards Termination (Duthu 2008; Fixico 1986). The Termination period involved a series of policies that sought to formally complete the integration or incorporation of Indigenous peoples into the American mainstream political economy by means of subjecting them to the authority of the States, physically relocating them off reservations and to urban areas, and ending—or terminating—the political and legal standing of Indigenous governments in the eyes of the United States (Duthu 2008). In short, the Termination era represents a shift in the orientation of developmentalism for native peoples: from one where their own local bureaucratic institutions were fostered as the means to bring native people into capitalist modernity, to one where these same institutions were viewed as the impediments to their achievement of modernity. It represents a shift from the policies of internal developmentalism to an external developmentalism.
The
internal developmentalist policies of Indian Reorganization bear a resemblance
to the modernist-developmentalism that the United States exported to the world
during the Truman administration. It is my contention that the development
apparatus and the modernist-developmentalist paradigm are direct successors to
the long history of United States Indian Policy and these efforts. The Truman
administration’s shift to a policy of global scope meant that they were to
export what is in essence the same civilizing project except they did so in the
language of development and modernity. However, by the 1970s, Indian Policy
would shift back toward internal developmentalism in the periphery except this
time under the label of self-determination (Duthu 2008). This represents an
oscillation of developmentalism in the center and in the periphery
corresponding to periods of expansion and contraction of American political
economy (Friedman 1994). For native peoples, internal developmentalism marks a
period of peripheralization as the center contracts, while termination and
assimilation mark a period of external developmentalism and reincorporation
into the center as it expands.
Similarly,
the geographic contexts must be comparatively examined to draw out these
historical parallels to better understand the historical and contemporary
dimensions of capitalist development. For example, at around the same time that
James Ferguson (1990) was famously discussing the “anti-politics machine” and
how development (even ‘failed’ development) is linked not simply to an
expansion of capitalism but to the expansion of state power, Marxist
anthropologist Alice Littlefield (1991: 219) was writing that
Studies and critiques of these major policy shifts [in US Indian Policy] have frequently noted that the assimilation policies often failed to assimilate, and that self-determination policies often failed to provide for meaningful self-determination. Looking beyond the discourse of the reformers who claimed credit for these policy shifts, it can be observed that material interests of various sectors of American capital were often well-served by the workings of particular policies.
While
I recognize and agree with Neveling’s (2017) critiques of the theoretical and
empirical dimensions of Ferguson’s work in his overemphasis on discourse to the
exclusion of political economic context, the crucial point here for me is to
understand that the underlying processes being described are not dissimilar.
These two works are describing a singular process or a singular political
economic machinery, except that it is occurring at different times and in
different places. Ferguson is describing “development” in Lesotho in the middle
to late twentieth century, while Littlefield is describing “civilization”,
“assimilation”, and “self-determination” in the United States as applied to
Native Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Further Research
We do not have the space here to delve into a detailed examination of each of the finer points. Rather, my purpose with this piece was to try to begin to connect these disparate areas and fields of study and put them into dialogue with each other. Further comparative study would better elucidate the parallels and lines of divergence in the operation of capitalist development and the experiences of peoples within this machinery. This would lead to a greater understanding and greater insights into the history and operation of capitalist development as a global project and singular machinery.
Samuel W. Rose is an independent scholar based in Schenectady, NY. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2017. His dissertation was entitled Mohawk Histories and Futures: Traditionalism, Community Development, and Heritage in the Mohawk Valley. His research has focused on the indigenous populations of eastern North America, community and economic development, political economy, and issues of race, identity, and the politics of history. His work has appeared in journals such as Anthropological Theory, Dialectical Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, and the Journal of Historical Sociology.
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(2017). Marxism, Indigenism, and the Anthropology of Native North America:
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(2018). The Historical Political Ecological and Political Economic Context of
Mohawk Efforts at Land Reclamation in the Mohawk Valley. Journal of Historical Sociology 31(3): 253-264.
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Cite as: Rose, Samuel W. 2020. “Disconnected Development Studies: Indigenous North America and the Anthropology of Development.” FocaalBlog, 17 November. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/11/17/samuel-w-rose-disconnected-development-studies-indigenous-north-america-and-the-anthropology-of-development/
Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and the bodies of black people are profoundly interconnected, and the link to challenges to “the punitive turn” and police abuse in the UK by the Black Lives Matter movement protests are all but explicit in her piece. At the same time, other recent FOCAAL blogs have dealt with the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and contemporary global capitalism.
Black enslavement and Covid-19 are intimately intertwined. The insurgency of Black Lives Matter during the months of May-June 2020 has its own dynamics. That said, the wide turning out of protests supporting Black Lives Matter in the streets of European cities and towns (London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Milan, Kraków, Dublin, Manchester, Munich…) demonstrates that the European left has strongly shown its ongoing antiracist solidarity with African-American struggles, seeking to come to terms with Europe’s own troubled imperial history of enslavements, and challenging its current neo-nationalist or fascist resurgence under declining neoliberal capitalism (Kalb 2020).
The links between black enslavement and Covid-19 start – and continue with – the formation of agro-industrial capitalism and its relations to transnational finance capital.
The Lash, Degraded Ecologies, Finance
There is a clear relationship between the emergence of modern enslavement and the history of a full-blown agro-industrial capitalism. The close connections between fully rationalized capitalist agrarian production, finance, and slavery are only recently becoming clear.
New research on the North American southern plantation economies shows just how advanced rationalized capitalist production was under the conditions of slavery (Baptist 2014). Beyond its monocropping ecology, “many of agribusinesses’ key innovations, in both technology and organization, originated in slavery” (Wallace 2016: 261). Slaveholders measured land only against the capacity of slave labor to transform it, setting the cotton production line in terms of “bales per hand,” with enslaved African men being “hands,” nursing mothers “half hands” and children “quarter hands.” The labor process of picking cotton was measured and held to a standard by another unit of measurement – the “lash.”
“Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck” (Baptist 2014: 130). As Baptist further points out, “on the nineteenth century cotton frontier… enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year. . . the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip” (2014: 112). Planters managed a refined rationality based on the application of the whip measured out in lashes to the backs of a slave calculated relative to their infraction – how many pounds of cotton his basket fell short of making a bale, whether or not there were impurities in it, whether one slave helped another pick her quota – in which case the former received extra lashes. Under the circumstances, the rationality of increased “labor productivity” so vaunted by economists depended straightforwardly on graduated torture – with little contribution (the cotton gin aside) from “technological innovation.”
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 culminated the violent displacement of Indian nations from the Mississippi Gulf region and transformation of their territories into “new lands” of thousands of acres ready for slave-based production (Baptist 2014: 228-229). Cotton monoculture quickly exhausted the rich soils of the South, exposed the crops to rust, rot, and worms, while plowing rows of cotton aligned to the day’s sunlight to maximize yield eroded the land and exhausted aquifers within 10 to 15 years after clearing (Wallace 2016: 266).
Due to the lack of food self-sufficiency and the seasonality of cotton harvests, indebtedness by plantation owners to Northern financiers and cotton brokers became increasingly common. By the 1830s, the cotton plantations of Mississippi, Alabama and Eastern Louisiana had adopted new forms of finance and indebtedness, when the Consolidated Association of Planters of Louisiana was established to allow their member planters to mortgage their slaves as collateral for loans from international financiers, led by the Baring Brothers and the Bank of England, that pooled investments from Europe’s finest old and new upper classes to buy the lucrative bonds issued by the Association (Baptist 2014: 245-8).
Monocropping of plants and animals, the simplification and degradation of local and regional ecologies, rapid expansion of logistics over space, reliance on finance capital for loans to expand production, and the use of enslaved degraded labor – these design features of agro-industrial capitalism have remained in effect to the present.
Meat Markets, Neo-Slave Markets
The coerced use of black labor continued after the Civil War in the cotton sharecropping economy until its decline in the 1930s. At the same time, the new agro-industrial complex of livestock production in the U.S. South – again based on the hyper-exploitation of black labor – got underway. By the 1970s, the livestock industries of intensive hog, poultry, and beef production had become thoroughly institutionalized – through vertical integration (Heffernan and Constance 1994; Stiffler 2005), increases in slaughterhouse assembly-line tempos, and incorporation of meat eating as a universal practice within the diets of the U.S. population (Schlosser 2001, 2012; Stiffler 2005). Since the 1990s the meat industries have globalized to penetrate the BRICS economies, a process facilitated by the lubrication of capital provided by hedge funds and investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs’ deal-making in the sale of Smithfield Foods to Shuanghui in China (Wallace 2016: 269-271).
Subjugated and coerced black labor has anchored and offered up surplus value through U.S. agro-industrial cotton and meat production since the end of legal slavery. Since the 1960s, rural poor African-Americans, especially women, have worked in the meat processing plants of the Midwest, Mississippi delta and Carolinas regions experiencing intensified exploitation, sexual harassment and brutalized and unsafe working conditions. By the 1990s, they were joined by immigrant Mexican and Central American workers (Nonini 2003; Stiffler 2005; Stuesse 2016), with whom white plant managers sought to set them in competition.
The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from 1915-1970 from the South to cities in the northern and midwestern U.S. was a form of flight from re-legalized enslavement at the hands of Jim Crow whites. Migration to the Midwest and Northeast placed large numbers of blacks at the factory doors of the Fordist industries of the North. Relegated to secondary labor markets by discrimination from white industrial labor unions during the 1950s-1970s (Cowie 2010: 236-244), black industrial workers by the 1990s, like their white counterparts, were thrown out of work by the globalization of industrial production. The only exceptions were the neo-slavery of hyper-sweated meat processing and related industrial food labor.
“Broken Windows Policing” and the Expropriation of Black Lives
The grown children and grandchildren of these laid-off black industrial workers, with more recent Latinx immigrant workers, now form both the hyper-exploited workers in the food industries (meat processing, fast foods, farm work) and situated in the cities and small towns of the South, Midwest and the Northeast, and those who are chronically unemployed and underemployed, doubly discriminated against due to their poverty (forcing them to leave school before high school graduation), and their race. Those African-Americans who have more or less steady employment also show disproportionate levels of consumer debt – from credit cards, student loans, and medically -related debt. Whether steadily employed or not, a key insight is that by and large both groups draw on the same population of urban African-Americans.
The population of urban African-Americans has the profound misfortune of living in cities recurrently subject to gentrification at the new “urban scale” of globalized real estate and finance-rentier capital (Smith 2008: 239-266). Their residence in spaces made newly desirable by gentrification by the 2000s is the obverse of the fact that up to the 1990s whites fled inner cities in large numbers for segregated suburbs, while African-Americans found themselves only able to afford to live, and only allowed to live within, housing in these redlined inner-city districts.
By the 2000s, however, real estate in these districts had become “hot properties” for global finance capital seeking new sites for safe but extraordinarily profitable rent collection and property speculation in realizing value. This trend by the 1990s was both shaped by and reinforced through the “broken window policing” that targeted unemployed and underemployed African-Americans and Latinx populations (Camp et al. 2016).
What precisely is the role of broken windows policing in the gentrification process? Put non-too-subtly, even one broken window indicates the existence of a “criminal” – an undesirable element in a neighborhood. The role of such policing is the physical removal to jails or prison, or, if that is impossible, the destruction of African-Americans whose very presence threatens the “real estate values” that the finance industry and its local allies hold dear. This goes far to explain the more than 1000 people killed by local police every year in the US, of whom more than one fourth are African-American; the one third of African-American men between ages 19-35 who are “justice involved” – in jail awaiting trial, on bail, undergoing trial, in prison, on probation or parole; and their disproportionate representation in the US’s incarcerated population, the largest per capita in the world.
Nancy Fraser (2016) observes that there is an historical dialectic between the conditions that set out “normal” exploitation of the working force, and the conditions of expropriation of the lives, labor, and property of racialized and vulnerable (e.g. immigrant) populations — as two complementary means through which the accumulation of capital can and does take place under capitalism. Fraser argues that that the new being of neoliberal global capitalism is “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker,” and that “the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits” (Fraser 2016:163).
Image 1: Black Lives Matters Protests in Durham, U.S. (Credit: Durham Workers Assembly Durham, North Carolina, with kind permission)
We can see these two modes of appropriation of surplus value in the tense interconnections between whites and the African-American population in the United States through the latter’s vexed history with respect to agro-industrial and finance capitalism. These interconnections are potentially the point of class differentiation between the increasingly precarious white “middle class” and urban African-Americans, who straddle a black employed working-class subjected to intensified exploitation on one hand, and a lumpen-proletariat subjected to police-impelled expropriation and dispossession, on the other.
Ongoing criminalization and the indebtedness of black people (the latter a tool of finance capital’s domination) are the instruments driving large numbers of urban black workers disproportionately employed in the agro-industrial food sector toward the toxic mix of indebtedness, unemployment (where employers often refuse to hire blacks holding consumer debt), bankruptcy, evictions from shelter, police “stop and frisk” harassment, enforced fines and fees levied (via police and private firms working for straitened municipalities), assault, imprisonment, and death (Wang 2018:99-192).
Don Nonini is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent books are “Getting by”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell, 2015), and The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux, co-edited (Routledge, 2020). His most recent publication in FOCAAL is “Theorizing the Urban Housing Commons” (2017).
References
Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism.
Camp, J. T. and C. Heatherton (2016). Policing the planet : why the policing crisis led to black lives matter.
Cowie, J. (2010). Stayin’ alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class. New York, New Press : Distributed by Perseus Distribution.
Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies3(1): 163-178.
Harvey, D. (2018). Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, Oxford University Press.
Heffernan, W. and D. H. Constance (1994). Transnational corporations and the globalization of the food system. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. A. Bonanno, L. Busch and e. al. Lawrence, KA, University Press of Kansas Press: 29-51.
Nonini, D. M. (2003). American neoliberalism, ‘globalization,’ and violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia. Globalization, The State, and Violence. J. Friedman. Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira Press (Rowman & Littlefield): 163-202.
Schlosser, E. ((2001), 2012). Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal, with a New Afterword. Boston, MA, Mariner books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Smith, N. and D. Harvey (2008). Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. Athens, University of Georgia Press.
Striffler, S. (2005). Chicken : the dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Stuesse, A. Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South.
Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flue: Dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and the nature of science. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Wang, J. (2018). Carceral capitalism. Semiotext(e) Interventions, 21. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).
The second part of this interview with Nicholas De Genova moves into an analysis of the so-called refugee crisis since 2015 and possibilities for militant academic research that challenges the increasingly hard-right consensus in Europe and beyond.
The first part is published here and traces De Genova’s intellectual biography, the question of militant research, his work on migration in the United States, and his recent shift to research in Europe and collaborations with the European, especially Italian, school of autonomy of migration research.
In Turkey, especially after the Syrians’ arrival following 2011, the field of migration studies has more or less confined itself to mainstream discussions such as integration, social cohesion, data collection, and so on. At this point, the work of Nicholas De Genova and the wider literature on the autonomy of migration open up a new horizon for discussing migration. De Genova has had a decisive influence in shaping our approach to migration and borders. We hope that this interview, conducted in Istanbul when Nicholas attended the conference “Migration, Social Transformation and Differential Inclusion in Turkey,” will be read across Turkey and make his work accessible to students, activists, and everyone interested in migration. We had a long conversation on topics ranging from the recent “refugee crisis” and alternative ways to think about migration and politics, activism, and academia in general.
Maddalena Gretel Cammelli interviews Jonathan Friedman on his new book, PC Worlds. A version of this interview has also been published in Italian on Il Lavoro Culturale.
MGC: In your text, you describe “a moral regime” called Political Correctness (PC) that would be characterized by a “moralization” of social relations, and by a diffused “shame culture” that you consider symptomatic as a “mechanism of the protection of identities which does not recognize any rational argumentation.”
The “economic migrant” must leave. From Berlin’s widening of the definition of “safe country” zones and the fast execution of deportation orders, to hunters of economic migrants along the Bulgarian–Turkish border, our memory is persistently being pressed on the idea that the European space is reserved for “genuine refugees” only. Refugees are welcome. Their counterpoint—the economic migrant—is not. In the second post of this series, Manuela Bojadzijev and Sandro Mezzadra write, “One can see … a ‘difference machine’ at work, which discriminates between ‘first-class’ refugees of brutal war (the Syrians) and potential seekers of political asylum (the Iraqis) while branding people from the Balkans as ‘economic migrants.’” We see, however, that this “difference machine” works in a complete oscillation; it moves back and forth from one extreme to the other and it feeds on the contradictions it breeds. It produces unstable categories and where “first class” qualities could be sensed ostensible for a moment, they quickly retreat to previously engendered anxieties. The temporal protection that is currently being distributed to Syrians is precisely this: a temporal protection from being labeled an “economic migrant.” What does it mean, however, to accept one’s refugee-ness but not one’s economic migrant-ness? How does the so-called “refugee crisis” articulate the economy, the labour market, and humanitarianism? Continue reading →
Part 2. Breaking windows and broken windows policing:
“Do we have the same level of outrage when a young black person gets killed as we do when a window gets broken? And if not, then why is that?”
—Alicia Garza, co-founder of #blacklivesmatter
Trader Joe’s In Berkeley, California, on a warm night in mid-December 2014, I stood in stalled traffic and watched as protestors smashed the windows of the Trader Joe’s grocery store on University Avenue—part of the ongoing protests in the aftermath of the NYPD’s murder of Eric Garner and the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Continue reading →
Since the summer of 2014, there have been sustained protests across the United States surrounding issues of police violence, systematic racism, and the devaluation of Black life. What started as protests over the non-indictment of the white police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, respectively, quickly grew into a nationwide uprising that employed highly disruptive direct action tactics. These protests are expressions of collective outrage, anger, and grief that have forced a much needed, nationwide conversation about race, racism, and the value of Black life in America. They have also become important sites of political education and experimentation as people joined together, night after night, in demonstrations of collective power and rage to “shut shit down.” Continue reading →
