# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Named a Best Book of 2020 by Bustle, BBC, and Time
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020

"In prose that is clean, crisp, and cutting, Kendall reveals how feminism has both failed to take into account populations too often excluded from the banner of feminism and failed to consider the breadth of issues affecting the daily lives of millions of women. . . . Throughout, Kendall thoughtfully and deliberately takes mainstream feminism to task . . . [but] if Hood Feminism is a searing indictment of mainstream feminism, it is also an invitation. For every case in which Kendall highlights problematic practices, she offers guidance for how we can all do better."
-NPR
"With poise and clarity, Kendall lays out the case for why feminists need to fight not just for career advancement but also for basic needs and issues that often plague women of color, including food security, educational access, a living wage and safety from gun violence. In expertly tying the racial justice and feminist movements together, Kendall's is one of the most important books of the current moment."
-Time, "100 Must-Read Books of 2020"

" Hood Feminism paints a brutally candid and unobstructed portrait of mainstream white feminism: a narrow movement that disregards the needs of the overwhelming majority of women. In the storied tradition of Black feminism stretching back to Maria Stewart, Kendall persuasively contends that women's basic needs are feminist issues. The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers a feminism rooted in the livelihood of everyday women."
-Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, in The Atlantic

"Beautifully centers on the experience of women who face an actual battle on the front lines while mainstream feminists clamor for access to the officers' club."
-The Washington Post

"A searing indictment of . . . the modern feminist movement's failure to support marginalized women and to integrate issues of race, class and sexual orientation."
-USA Today

"This book is an act of fierce love and advocacy, and it is urgently necessary."
-Samantha Irby, author of Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life

"Mikki's book is a rousing call to action for today's feminists. It should be required reading for everyone."
-Gabrielle Union, author of We're Going to Need More Wine

"Cutting, critical, and consequential, Hood Feminism is required reading for anyone who calls himself or herself a feminist, an urgent piece of feminist discourse. It's a tough read-especially if you've been giving yourself woke feminist gold stars-but that makes it all the more necessary."

"My wish is that every white woman who calls herself a feminist (as I do) will read this book in a state of hushed and humble respect. Mikki Kendall is calling out white feminists here-and it's long overdue that we drop our defenses, listen to her arguments carefully, and then change our entire way of thinking and behaving. As Kendall explains in eloquent and searing simplicity, any feminism that focuses on inequality between men and women without addressing the inequalities BETWEEN women is not only useless, but actually harmful. In the growing public conversation about race, class, status, privilege, and power, this text is essential reading."
-"Elicits action by effectively calling out privilege . . . This can be a tough read, even for the most woke and intersectional feminist, and that's exactly how it should be."
"Hood Feminism is a critical feminist text that interrogates the failings of the mainstream feminist movement and gives us the necessary expertise of Black women. Kendall skillfully illuminates the many intersections of identity and shows us the beauty and power of anger."
-Erika L. Sánchez, author of Lessons on Expulsion and I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

"Kendall is a highly knowledgeable and inspiring guide, and she effectively builds on the work of black women who have, for ages, been working to better the lives of themselves and their communities. . . . A much-needed addition to feminist discourse."
"In this forceful and eloquent series of essays, [Kendall] takes on the feminist myopia that ignores the daily existential struggles of women of color and encourages a broader support of society's most vulnerable citizens. If such support is forthcoming and awareness expanded, then not only will those outside the feminist establishment be empowered, those within the current movement will also be enlightened as to their cause's true universal potential.""A frank account of who and what is still missing from mainstream feminism that will appeal to readers of women's and African American studies, and readers seeking a better grasp on history."
"An energizing critique of the feminist movement's preference for white women."

"Mikki Kendall tells it like it is, and this is why she has long been a must-read writer for me: incisive, clear-eyed, and rightly willing to challenge readers when necessary. Her exploration of how feminists' fight for liberation has too often left poor people, Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color behind is critical reading for anyone who is or wants to be involved in work addressing complex and longstanding inequalities."
-Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

"Mikki has been writing for years about protection, 'problem children,' the limits and the usefulness of different kinds of anger, and the way sisterhood can be wielded as a demand. She's here for her community, and this book has everything to do with expanding access to it."
-Daniel Mallory Ortberg, author of The Merry Spinster and Texts from Jane Eyre

"Mikki Kendall has established herself as an important voice in current feminist discourse, and Hood Feminism cements that place. With a compelling, forceful piece, Kendall has written the missive that feminists-especially white feminists-need to remember the racist history of who we are as a movement and to move forward with an intersectional and deliberately anti-racist focus."
-Dianna Anderson, author of Problematic

"Every white lady should have this book assigned to them before they can talk about feminism in the same way that every human should have to work in the service industry for a year before they can talk about the economy. Ain't nothing but truth in these words."
-Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

Get the latest updates about Mikki Kendall

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

Become a Member

Start earning points for buying books! Just for joining you'll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

Success!

Your account has been created. Upload book purchases, access your personalized book recommendations, and more from here. GOT IT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall: 9780525560562 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From Slave Cabins to the White House

Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

African American mothers and wives navigating double standards

Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."

Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.

Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.

"This project on homemade citizenship will reframe the conversation around anti-blackness by mapping how black women intellectuals, activists and artists continually respond – and with great success – to attacks and infringements upon their collective creative efforts. This work is a needed subtlety, as it approaches categories like 'achievement' and 'success' from the fabric of black cultural production, rather than the font of white supremacy's violent response to black existence. From Slave Cabins to the White House encourages us to ask new questions, one of which is certainly how did we/do we make a home and sustain it creatively in the midst of ongoing hostilities?"--Sharon Patricia Holland, author of The Erotic Life of Racism

Koritha Mitchell is an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University and the author of Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930.

To order online:
//www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/38edn5wf9780252043321.html

To order by phone:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture African American mothers and wives navigating double standards Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Subjects
African American Studies and Black Diaspora, American Studies, Gender and Sexuality

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello;s blackface; a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family; and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.

"In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder enriches our understanding of the cultural landscape of the long nineteenth century. Demonstrating boldness, analytical clarity, and scholarly creativity, Fielder gives us language for the processes of racialization that clearly shape American realities but that we have often failed to name because we lacked a theoretical framework." - Koritha Mitchell, author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

"Brigitte Fielder makes the bold claim that racialization entails neither the annihilation of kin ties nor the simple linearity of descent. Instead, 'race,' and blackness in particular, travels unpredictably, transferred from skin to skin, from child to mother, across literary genres, through adoption, via residency, and through sibling relations. In essence, Fielder retheorizes race as the making and breaking of kin ties. After Relative Races, we will not be able to think about race and racialization, kinship, and queer theories of temporality separately again." - Elizabeth Freeman, author of Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century

Related links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Subjects African American Studies and Black Diaspora, American Studies, Gender and Sexuality In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis: 9780394713519 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This revised and enlarged edition of the leading anthology provides the essential writings of Marx and Engels--those works necessary for an introduction to Marxist thought and ideology., The Marx-Engels Reader, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Robert C Tucker, 9780393090406

# data[].attributes.body
I'm getting lazy adding books so feel free to check out this list as well. Thanks!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dawn's 'currently-reading' books on Goodreads (38 books)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dawn has 38 books on her currently-reading shelf: The Impostor Phenomenon: Overcoming The Fear That Haunts Your Success by Pauline Rose Clance, The Sabba...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On the podcast The Politics Guys, listen to Mary Hirschfeld discuss why the field of economics isn't as value-neutral as commonly believed-and what theology can bring to it:

Economists and theologians usually inhabit different intellectual worlds. Economists investigate the workings of markets and tend to set ethical questions aside. Theologians, anxious to take up concerns raised by market outcomes, often dismiss economics and lose insights into the influence of market incentives on individual behavior. Mary L. Hirschfeld, who was a professor of economics for fifteen years before training as a theologian, seeks to bridge these two fields in this innovative work about economics and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.

According to Hirschfeld, an economics rooted in Thomistic thought integrates many of the insights of economists with a larger view of the good life, and gives us critical purchase on the ethical shortcomings of modern capitalism. In a Thomistic approach, she writes, ethics and economics cannot be reconciled if we begin with narrow questions about fair wages or the acceptability of usury. Rather, we must begin with an understanding of how economic life serves human happiness. The key point is that material wealth is an instrumental good, valuable only to the extent that it allows people to flourish. Hirschfeld uses that insight to develop an account of a genuinely humane economy in which pragmatic and material concerns matter but the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is not the ultimate goal.

The Thomistic economics that Hirschfeld outlines is thus capable of dealing with our culture as it is, while still offering direction about how we might make the economy better serve the human good.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
aquinas and the market: toward a humane economy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Aquinas and the Market - Mary L. Hirschfeld

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Economists investigate the workings of markets and tend to set ethical questions aside. Theologians often dismiss economics, losing insights into the influence of market incentives on individual behavior. Mary L. Hirschfeld bridges this gap by showing how a humane economy can lead to the good life as outlined in the thought of St.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.

After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hammer and Hoe | Robin D. G. Kelley | University of North Carolina Press

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency in 2016, which placed control of the government in the hands of the most racially homogenous, far-right political party in the Western world, produced shock and disbelief for liberals, progressives, and leftists globally. Yet most of the immediate analysis neglects longer-term accounting of how the United States arrived here. Race and America's Long War examines the relationship between war, politics, police power, and the changing contours of race and racism in the contemporary United States. Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the United States' pursuit of war since the September 11 terrorist attacks has reanimated a longer history of imperial statecraft that segregated and eliminated enemies both within and overseas. America's territorial expansion and Indian removals, settler in-migration and nativist restriction, and African slavery and its afterlives were formative social and political processes that drove the rise of the United States as a capitalist world power long before the onset of globalization. Spanning the course of U.S. history, these crucial essays show how the return of racism and war as seemingly permanent features of American public and political life is at the heart of our present crisis and collective disorientation.

Nikhil Pal Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and the founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Education Program. Singh is the editor of Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell and the author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, winner of the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Long War
1. Race, War, Police
2. From War Capitalism to Race War
3. The Afterlife of Fascism
4. Racial Formation and Permanent War
5. The Present Crisis
Epilogue: The Two Americas

Notes
Index

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency in 2016, which placed control of the government in the hands of the most racially homogenous, far-right political party in the Western world, produced shock and disbelief for liberals, progressives, and leftists globally. Yet most of the immediate analysis neglects longer-term accounting of how the United States arrived here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"An impassioned and well-reported case for change.... Chomsky ably lays out just how brutal life can be for the undocumented."
- New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Undocumented adds smart, new, and provocative scholarship to the immigration debate."
- Los Angeles Review of Books

"From the first page to the last, Undocumented is to immigrant rights movement what We Charge Genocide was to the African American movement-a dossier that sets aside quibbles about whether immigrants contribute to the US economy or not, whether immigrants speak English or not and gives flesh to the slogan, 'Immigrant rights are human rights.' A clear-headed and smart book that locates the struggles of immigrants squarely in the struggles for human rights. Nothing less is to be accommodated, and much more is to be imagined."
-Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

"Professional in her scholarship, Chomsky has written a book that will be relevant to those who do not share her position as well as to those who do."
- Publishers Weekly

"Dares to call the [immigration] problem 'manufactured,' one that could be solved with the stroke of a pen."
- Ms. Magazine

Contents

PREFACE ix
INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1
Where Did Illegality Come From? 23

CHAPTER 2
Choosing to Be Undocumented 40

CHAPTER 3
Becoming Illegal 71

CHAPTER 4
What Part of "Illegal" Do You Understand? 87

CHAPTER 5
Working (Part 1) 113

CHAPTER 6
Working (Part 2) 130

CHAPTER 7
Children and Families 152

CHAPTER 8
Solutions 181

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 209
NOTES 210
INDEX 238

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Undocumented by Aviva Chomsky: 9780807001677 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"An impassioned and well-reported case for change.... Chomsky ably lays out just how brutal life can be for the undocumented."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S."

Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On CNN's GPS, watch Kathleen Belew explain to Fareed Zakaria how disparate groups of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and Klansmen came together to form the twenty-first-century White Power Movement:
"A gripping study of white power... Explosive."-The New York Times "Belew's book helps explain how we got to today's alt right."-Terry Gross, Fresh Air
The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.

Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.

Belew's disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
bring the war home: the white power movement and paramilitary america

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political science: political ideologies: conservatism & liberalism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
social science: discrimination & race relations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The white power movement has declared war against the United States and has carried out -- with military precision -- an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Kathleen Belew gives the first full history of a movement that consolidated around a sense of betrayal over Vietnam and made tragic headlines with the Oklahoma City bombing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On the Jacobin podcast The Dig, listen to Quinn Slobodian discuss neoliberalism's Geneva School-including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke-and their vision for a new imperial order establishing rules to protect the market from political interference:

Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.

Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions-the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law-to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice.

Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless change, and social injustice that accompanied it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
globalists: the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political science: public policy: economic policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do neoliberals hate the state? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows neoliberal thinkers from the Habsburg Empire's fall to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to deploy them globally to protect capitalism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.

In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Capitalism and Slavery | Eric Williams | University of North Carolina Press

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"I can say, without a trace of hyperbole, that this book changed my life. . . . Combining political theory, history, philosophy, cultural analysis, and biography, among other things, Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilization in which it was born or mass movements outside Europe. . . . Black Marxism remains as fresh and insightful as it was when it was first composed, still productively engaged with the central questions posed by histories of the African Diaspora."--Robin D. G. Kelley, from the Foreword

"Robinson demonstrates very clearly . . . the ability of the black tradition to transcend national boundaries and accommodate cultural, religious and 'racial' differences. Indeed, he shows that, in a sense, it has emerged out of the transformation of these differences."-- Race and Class

"A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of black radical thought."--Cornel West, Monthly Review

"Reflective and thought-provoking, a welcome contribution to the African/Afro-American studies discipline."-- Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism

"For those interested in pursuing political and ideological alternatives to capitalistic exploitation and underdevelopment of African peoples in the Americas and Africa, Black Marxism provides a well-documented foundation upon which to build ideological and mass social movements."-- Phylon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Marxism | Cedric J. Robinson | University of North Carolina Press

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I can say, without a trace of hyperbole, that this book changed my life. . . .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Capital could not just abolish the gains of the postwar period. It was necessary to preserve social peace. The "trick" in the 1970s consisted of using inflation to defuse the emerging conflict between labour and capital over redistribution. The money machine was used to compensate for the loss of income which resulted from the reduction in capital's contribution to the welfare state... Evidently, that could not last. So from the late 1970s inflation was replaced with public debt, and states borrowed (rather than tax) in order to be able to keep up the level of services. Then, in the 1990s, when states began to worry about the growing weight of debt servicing as part of their budgets, and reduced their spending (and thus social services) we took recourse to private debt. In other words, we made it easier than ever for households to take on debt so that they could preserve their purchasing power, which was being cut back by these budget consolidation measures. And that led us to the 2008 catastrophe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Capital could not just abolish the gains of the postwar period. It was necessary to preserve social peace. The "trick" in the 1970s consisted of using inflation to defuse the emerging conflict between labour and capital over redistribution. The money machine was used to compensate for the loss of income which resulted from the reduction in capital's contribution to the welfare state...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series

By Jackie Wang

Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.

Distributed for Semiotext(e)

Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism is arguably one of the most wide-ranging, critical, and theoretically nuanced examinations of the political economy of the carceral state in the USA to date.

Socialist Project

Overview Author(s) Praise

Summary

Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.

What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?-from Carceral Capitalism

In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, "Against Innocence," as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.

Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

Paperback

$14.95 T | £11.99 ISBN: 9781635900026 360 pp. | 4.5 in x 7 in

Authors

Jackie Wang

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD student at Harvard University. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb.

Reviews

Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism is arguably one of the most wide-ranging, critical, and theoretically nuanced examinations of the political economy of the carceral state in the USA to date.

Socialist Project

Jackie Wang's sharp and deeply felt account of US capitalism's reliance on predatory extraction from its poorest communities was partly inspired by her brother's incarceration, and is one of the most convincing attempts to thread together the multiple analytical strands of race, class, and finance capitalism I've read.

Hannah Black

Bookforum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing. What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred fourteenth Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, GA, on January 5, 2018.

Capitalism has always been deeply entangled with racial oppression. That proposition clearly holds for the slave-based plantation capitalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But it is equally true of the Jim Crow industrialized capitalism of the twentieth century. Nor can anyone reasonably doubt that racial oppression persists in the deindustrializing, sub-prime, mass-incarceration capitalism of the present era. Despite the clear differences between them, none of these forms of "really existing" capitalism was nonracial. In all of its forms to date, capitalist society has been entangled with racial oppression.

What is the nature of this entanglement? Is it contingent or structural? Did the capitalism/racism nexus arise by chance, and could matters have in principle been otherwise? Or was capitalism primed from the get-go to divide populations by "race"? And what about today? Is racism hardwired in the deep structure of contemporary capitalism? Or is a nonracial capitalism finally possible now, in the twenty-first century?

These questions are by no means new. They form the heart of a profound but under-appreciated stream of critical theorizing, known as Black Marxism. This tradition, which flourished from the 1930s through the 1980s, includes such towering figures as C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Stuart Hall, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Barbara Fields, Robin D. G. Kelley, Cedric Robinson, and Cornel West. ¹ Although their approaches diverged in specifics, each of these thinkers grappled deeply with the capitalism/ racism nexus. At least through the 1980s, their reflections were at the forefront of what we now call "critical race theory."

Subsequently, however, the question of capitalism's entanglement with race dropped off the critical-theoretical agenda. With the waning of New Left radicalism and the collapse of really existing Communism, capitalism ceased to be viewed as a topic of serious interrogation in many quarters, while Marxism was increasingly rejected as dépassé. As a result, questions of race and racism were effectively ceded to thinkers working in the liberal and poststructuralist paradigms. Although those thinkers made some impressive contributions to mainstream and critical race theory, they did not attempt to clarify the relation between capitalism and racial oppression.

Today, however, a new generation of critical racist theorists is reinvigorating that problematic. Comprising thinkers like Michael Dawson, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Cedric Johnson, Barbara Ransby, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, this generation is reconsidering the capitalism/ racism nexus anew, in light of twenty-first-century developments. ² The reasons are not hard to discern. The conjoint rise of a new generation of militant antiracist activists, on the one hand, and of an aggressively ethnonationalist and alt-right, white-supremacist populism, on the other hand, has dramatically raised the stakes of critical race theory. Many now appreciate, too, that the broader context for both those developments is a deepening crisis of contemporary capitalist society, a crisis that is simultaneously exacerbating, and rendering more visible, its characteristic forms of racial oppression. Finally, capitalism is no longer a taboo term, and Marxism is enjoying a revival. In this situation, the central questions of Black Marxism have again become pressing: Is capitalism necessarily racist? Can racial oppression be overcome within capitalist society?

Aiming to advance this problematic, I opted to use the occasion of my presidential address to revisit those venerable questions. The approach I propose scrambles the usual, sharp oppositions between structure and history, necessity and chance, which obscure the complexities of the capitalism/racism nexus. Contra the proponents of contingency, I shall maintain that there does exist a structural basis for capitalism's persistent entanglement with racial oppression. That basis resides, as I shall explain, in the system's reliance on two analytically distinct but inter-imbricated processes of capital accumulation, exploitation and expropriation. It is the separation of these two "exes," and their assignment to two different populations, that underpins racial oppression in capitalist society. Contra proponents of necessity, however, I shall argue that capitalism's exploitation/expropriation nexus is not set in stone. Rather, it mutates historically in the course of capitalist development, which can be viewed as a sequence of qualitatively different regimes of racialized accumulation. In each phase, a historically specific configuration of the two exes underpins a distinctive landscape of racialization. When we follow the sequence down to the present, we encounter something new: a form of capitalism that blurs the historic separation of exploitation from expropriation. No longer assigning them to two sharply demarcated populations, this form appears to be dissolving the structural basis for racial oppression that inhered in capitalist society for four hundred years. Yet racial oppression persists, I shall claim, in forms that are neither strictly necessary nor merely contingent. The result is new set of puzzles for Black Marxist theory and anti-racist activism in the twentyfirst century.

In what follows, I develop this argument in three steps. First, I defend the thesis that capitalism harbors a structural basis for racial oppression given that it relies on expropriation as a necessary condition for exploitation. Then, in a second step, I historicize that structure by sketching the shifting configurations of those two exes in the principal phases of capitalism's history. In my third step, finally, I consider the prospects for overcoming racial oppression in a new form of capitalist society that still rests on exploitation and expropriation but does not assign them to two sharply demarcated populations.
1.1. THREE PERSPECTIVES ON CAPITALISM: EXCHANGE, EXPLOITATION, EXPROPRIATION
Is capitalism necessarily racist? Everything depends on what exactly is meant by capitalism-and on the perspective from which we conceive it. Three such perspectives are worth exploring. A first approach, taught in economics courses, assumed in business, and enshrined in common sense, views capitalism through the lens of market exchange. A second, familiar to socialists, trade unionists, and other protagonists of labor struggles, locates the crux of capitalism at a deeper level, in the exploitation of wage labor in commodity production. A third perspective, developed by critics of imperialism, puts the spotlight instead on capital's expropriation of conquered peoples. Here, I suggest that by combining the second and third perspectives we gain access to what is missed by each of the three approaches considered alone: a structural basis in capitalist society for racial oppression.

Consider, first, the perspective of exchange. From this perspective, capitalism appears as an economic system simpliciter. Organized to maximize growth and efficiency, it is centered on the institution of the market, where self-interested, arms-length transactors exchange equivalents. Seen this way, capitalism can only be indifferent to color. Absent interference and left to follow its own economizing logic, the system would dissolve any pre-existing racial hierarchies and avoid generating any new ones. From the standpoint of exchange, the link between racism and capitalism is wholly contingent.

Much could be said about this view, but what is important for my present purposes is this: it delinks capitalism from racism by definitional fiat. By defining capitalism narrowly, as an inherently colorblind, utility-maximizing logic, the exchange-centered view relegates any racializing impulses to forces external to the market, which distort the latter's operation. The culprit is, therefore, not (what it understands as) capitalism, but the larger society that surrounds it. Racism comes from history, politics, and culture, all of which are viewed as external to capitalism and as only contingently connected to it. The effect is to formalize capitalism, reducing it to a means/end economizing logic and stripping away its historical and political contents. In this way, the market-centered view obscures a crucial point that will be central to my argument here: for structural reasons, capitalist economies require "non-economic" preconditions and inputs, including some that generate racial oppression. Failing to reckon with that dependence, this view obfuscates the system's distinctive mechanisms of accumulation and domination.

Some of those mechanisms are disclosed, by contrast, by our second perspective. Broader, less formal, and far less rosy, this view was originated by Karl Marx, who reconceived capitalism as a system of exploitation. Famously, he penetrated beneath the standard perspective of market exchange to the more fundamental level of commodity production. There he claimed to discover the secret of accumulation in capital's exploitation of wage laborers. For Marx, importantly, capitalism's workers are neither serfs nor slaves, but unencumbered individuals, free to enter the labor market and sell their "labor power." In reality, of course, they have little actual choice in the matter; deprived of any direct access to the means of production, they can only secure the means of subsistence by contracting to work for a capitalist in exchange for wages. Nor does the transaction redound principally to their benefit. What from the first perspective is an exchange of equivalents is, in Marx's, view a sleight of hand. Recompensed only for the average socially necessary cost of their own reproduction, capitalism's workers have no claim on the surplus value their labor generates, which accrues instead to the capitalist. And that is precisely the point. The crux of the system, for Marx, is exploitation, viewed as a relation between two classes: on the one hand, the capitalists who own the society's means of production and appropriate its surplus; on the other, the free but propertyless producers who must sell their labor power piecemeal in order to live. Capitalism, on Marx's view, is no mere economy, but a social system of class domination, centered on the exploitation of free labor by capital in commodity production.

Marx's perspective has many virtues, at least one of which is incontestable. By viewing capitalism through the lens of exploitation, it makes visible what the exchange perspective obscured: the structural basis in capitalist society for working-class domination. Yet this focus fails to disclose any comparable structural basis for racial oppression. On this point, at least, the exploitation perspective sits uncomfortably close to that of exchange. While demonstrating that capital is accumulated off the back of free waged labor, it sheds little if any light on how race figures in the system and why it plays such an outsized role in capitalism's history. Failing to address that issue, it can only convey the impression that the system's entanglement with racial oppression is contingent.

That conclusion is too hasty, however. The trouble is that in focusing so tightly on the process by which capital exploits wage labor, Marx failed to give systematic consideration to some equally fundamental processes that are bound up with that one. I have in mind two such processes that could, when probed, reveal deep-seated links to racial oppression. The first is the crucial role played in capital accumulation by unfree, dependent, and unwaged labor-by which I mean labor that is expropriated, as opposed to exploited, subject to domination unmediated by a wage contract. The second concerns the role of political orders in conferring the status of free individuals and citizens on "workers," while constituting others as lesser beings-for example, as chattel slaves, indentured servants, colonized subjects, "native" members of "domestic dependent nations," debt peons, and felons. ³

Both these matters-dependent labor and political subjection-come into view, however, when we take up the standpoint of expropriation. Developed by theorists of imperialism, this way of thinking about capitalism broadens the frame beyond "the metropole" to encompass the conquest and looting of peoples in "the periphery." Adopting a global perspective, its practitioners disclose a hidden barbaric underside of capitalist modernity: beneath surface niceties of consent and contract lie brute violence and overt theft. The effect is to cast a new light on exchange and exploitation, which now appear as the tip of a larger, more sinister iceberg.

The expropriation perspective is revelatory, to be sure. What is not so clear, however, is whether imperial expansion is structurally integral to capitalism, and if so, how the expropriation of dependent, subjugated peoples relates to the exploitation of "free workers." Nor do we get a systematic account of what, if anything, this third ex has to do with "race."

My claim is that expropriation is indeed integral to capitalist society- and to its entanglement with "race." In a nutshell, as I shall explain, the subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits. Absent an account of the first, we cannot fully understand the second. Nor can we glimpse the structural basis of capitalism's historic entanglement with racial oppression.

To develop this claim, I shall utilize an expanded conception of capitalism, which combines elements of the last two perspectives canvassed here. Penetrating beneath the familiar level of exchange, I shall combine Marx's "hidden abode" of exploitation with the even more obfuscated moment of expropriation. By theorizing the relation between those two exes, I shall identify a structural basis of capitalism's deep-seated entanglement with racial oppression.
1.2. EXPROPRIATION AS A MODE OF ACCUMULATION: AN ECONOMIC ARGUMENT
Let me begin by defining expropriation. Distinct from Marxian exploitation, expropriation is accumulation by other means. Dispensing with the contractual relation through which capital purchases "labor power" in exchange for wages, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into the circuits of capital expansion. The confiscation may be blatant and violent, as in New World slavery- or it may be veiled by a cloak of commerce, as in the predatory loans and debt foreclosures of the present era. The expropriated subjects may be rural or indigenous communities in the capitalist periphery- or members of subject or subordinated groups in the capitalist core. Once expropriated, they may end up as exploited proletarians, if they're lucky-or, if not, as paupers, slum-dwellers, sharecroppers, "natives," or slaves, subjects of ongoing expropriation outside the wage nexus. The confiscated assets may be labor, land, animals, tools, mineral or energy deposits-but also human beings, their sexual and reproductive capacities, their children and bodily organs. What is essential, however, is that the commandeered capacities get incorporated into the valueexpanding process that defines capital. Simple theft is not enough. Unlike the sort of pillaging that long predated the rise of capitalism, expropriation in the sense I intend here is confiscation-cum-conscriptioninto-accumulation.

Expropriation in this sense covers a multitude of sins, most of which correlate strongly with racial oppression. The association is clear in practices widely associated with capitalism's early history but still ongoing, such as territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, coerced labor, child abduction, and systematic rape. But expropriation also assumes more "modern" forms-such as prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt, which are also linked with racial oppression-and, as we shall see, with contemporary imperialism.

But the connection is not just historical and contingent. On the contrary, there are structural reasons for capital's ongoing recourse to racialized expropriation. By definition, a system devoted to the limitless expansion and private appropriation of surplus value gives the owners of capital a deep-seated interest in confiscating labor and means of production from subject populations. Expropriation raises their profits by lowering costs of production in two ways: on the one hand, by supplying cheap inputs, such as energy and raw materials; on the other, by providing low-cost means of subsistence, such as food and textiles, which permit them to pay lower wages. Thus, by confiscating resources and capacities from unfree or dependent subjects, capitalists can more profitably exploit "free workers." And so, the two "exes" are intertwined. Behind Manchester stands Mississippi. ⁴

Advantageous even in "normal" times, expropriation becomes especially appealing in periods of economic crisis, when it serves as a critical, if temporary, fix for restoring declining profitability. The same is true for political crises, which can sometimes be defused or averted by transferring value confiscated from populations that appear not to threaten capital to those that do-another distinction that often correlates with "race." ⁵

In general, then, expropriation is a structural feature of capitalism-and a disavowed enabling condition for exploitation. Far from representing separate and parallel processes, those two exes are systemically imbricated-deeply intertwined aspects of a single capitalist world system. And the division between them correlates roughly but unmistakably with what Du Bois called "the color line." All told, the expropriation of racialized "others" constitutes a necessary background condition for the exploitation of "workers."

Let me clarify this idea by contrasting it with Marx's account of "primitive" or "original accumulation," ⁶ from which it differs in two respects. First, primitive accumulation denotes the blood-soaked process by which capital was initially stockpiled at the system's beginnings. ⁷ Expropriation, in contrast, designates an ongoing confiscatory process essential for sustaining accumulation in a crisis-prone system. Second, Marx introduces primitive accumulation to explain the historical genesis of the class division between propertyless workers and capitalist owners of the means of production. Expropriation explains that as well, but it also brings into view another social division, equally deep-seated and consequential, but not systematically theorized by Marx. I mean the social division between "free workers" whom capital exploits in wage labor and the unfree or dependent subjects whom it cannibalizes by other means.

This second division is central to the present inquiry. My thesis is that the racializing dynamics of capitalist society are crystalized in the structurally grounded "mark" that distinguishes free subjects of exploitation from dependent subjects of expropriation. But to make this case requires a shift in focus-from "the economic" to "the political." It is only by thematizing the political orders of capitalist society that we can grasp the constitution of that distinction-and with it, the fabrication of "race."
1.3. EXPROPRIATION AS A MODE OF SUBJECTION: A POLITICAL ARGUMENT
The distinction between expropriation and exploitation is simultaneously economic and political. Viewed economically, these terms name mechanisms of capital accumulation, analytically distinct yet intertwined ways of expanding value. Viewed politically, they have to do with modes of domination-especially with status hierarchies that distinguish rightsbearing individuals and citizens from subject peoples, unfree chattel, and dependent members of families and subordinated groups. In capitalist society, as Marx insisted, exploited workers have the legal status of free individuals, authorized to sell their labor power in return for wages. Once separated from the means of production and proletarianized, they are protected, at least in theory, from (further) expropriation. In this respect, their status differs sharply from those whose labor, property, and/or persons are still subject to confiscation on the part of capital. Far from enjoying protection, the latter populations are defenseless, fair game for expropriation-again and again. Constituted as inherently violable, their condition is one of exposure. Deprived of political protection, they lack the means to set limits to what others can do to them.

In general, then, the distinction between the two exes is a function not only of accumulation but also of domination. It is political agencies- above all, states-that afford or deny protection in capitalist society. And it is largely states, too, that codify and enforce the status hierarchies that distinguish citizens from subjects, nationals from aliens, entitled workers from dependent scroungers. Constructing exploitable and expropriable subjects, while distinguishing the one from the other, state practices of political subjectivation supply an indispensable precondition for capital's "self"-expansion. ⁸

Nevertheless, states do not act alone in this regard. Geopolitical arrangements are implicated as well. What enables political subjectivation at the national level is an international system that "recognizes" states and authorizes the border controls that distinguish lawful residents from "illegal aliens." We need only think of current conflicts surrounding migrants and refugees to see how easily these geopolitically enabled hierarchies of political status become racially coded.

The same is true of another set of status hierarchies, which is rooted in capitalism's imperialist geography. That geography divides the world into "core" and "periphery." Historically, the core has appeared to be the emblematic heartland of exploitation, while the periphery was cast as the iconic site of expropriation. That division was explicitly racialized from the get-go, as were the status hierarchies associated with it: metropolitan citizens versus colonial subjects, free individuals versus slaves, "Europeans" versus "natives," "whites" versus "blacks." These hierarchies, too, serve to distinguish populations and regions suitable for exploitation from those destined instead for expropriation.

To see how, let us look more closely at political subjectivation-especially at the processes that mark off free exploitable citizen-workers from dependent expropriable subjects. Both these statuses were politically constituted, but in different ways. In the capitalist core, dispossessed artisans, farmers, and tenants became exploitable citizen-workers through historic processes of class compromise, which channeled their struggles for emancipation onto paths convergent with the interests of capital, within the liberal legal frameworks of national states. By contrast, those who became ever-expropriable subjects, whether in periphery or core, found no such accommodation, as their uprisings were more often crushed by force of arms. If the domination of the first was shrouded in consent and legality, that of the second rested unabashedly on naked repression.

Often, moreover, the two statuses were mutually constituted, effectively co-defining one another. In the United States, the status of the citizen worker acquired much of the aura of freedom that legitimates exploitation by contrast to the dependent, degraded condition of chattel slaves and indigenous peoples, whose persons and lands could be repeatedly confiscated with impunity. ⁹ In codifying the subject status of the second, the US state simultaneously constructed the normative status of the first.

As noted, however, the political fabrication of dependent subjects within capitalism has always exceeded state borders. For systemic reasons, rooted in the intertwined logics of geopolitical rivalry and economic expansionism, powerful states moved to constitute expropriable subjects further afield, in peripheral zones of the capitalist world system. Plundering the furthest reaches of the globe, European colonial powers, followed by a US imperial state, turned billions of people into such subjects-shorn of political protection, ripe and ready for confiscation. The number of expropriable subjects those states created far exceeds the number of citizen-workers they "emancipated" for exploitation. Nor did the process cease with the liberation of subject peoples from colonial rule. On the contrary, masses of new expropriable subjects are created daily, even now, by the joint operations of postcolonial states, their ex-colonial masters, and the trans-state powers that grease the machinery of accumulation, including the global financial institutions that promote dispossession by debt.

The common thread here, once again, is political exposure: the incapacity to set limits and invoke protections. Exposure is the deepest meaning of expropriability, the thing that sets it apart from exploitability. And it is expropriability, the condition of being defenseless and liable to violation, that constitutes the core of racial oppression. What distinguishes free subjects of exploitation from dependent subjects of expropriation is the mark of "race" as a sign of violability.

This concludes the first step of my argument. My claim, to this point, is that capitalism harbors a structural basis for racial oppression. That basis is obscured when we view the system too narrowly, whether from the standpoint of market exchange or from that of the exploitation of free waged labor. The culprit appears, however, when the frame is broadened to include the third ex of expropriation, understood as a necessary condition for exploitation, distinct from, but entwined with, the latter. Adopting that enlarged perspective on capitalism, which encompasses "politics" as well as "economics," we gain access to the system's noncontingent reliance on a stratum of unfree or subjugated people, racially marked as inherently violable. There, in capitalism's constitutive separation of exploitation from expropriation, lies the structural basis for its persistent entanglement with racial oppression.
2.1 HISTORICIZING THE EX/EX STRUCTURE: REGIMES OF RACIALIZED ACCUMULATION
Nevertheless, the structure I have described is susceptible to variation. Far from being given once and for all at capitalism's beginnings, it has undergone several major shifts in the course of capitalist development. In some phases, exploitation and expropriation were clearly separated from one another, with exploitation centered in the European core and reserved for the (white male) "labor aristocracy," while expropriation was sited chiefly in the periphery and imposed on people of color. In other phases, by contrast, those separations blurred. Such shifts have periodically reshaped the dynamics of racial oppression in capitalist society, which cannot be understood in abstraction from them. In this sense, the capitalism/racism nexus is not only structural but also historical.

To clarify this double condition, I turn now to the second step of my argument. Here, I sketch an account of capitalism's history as a sequence of regimes of racialized accumulation. This account foregrounds the historically specific relations between expropriation and exploitation within each principal phase of capitalist development. For each regime, I specify the geography and demography of the two exes: the extent to which they are separated from one another, sited in different regions, and assigned to distinct population. For each regime, too, I note the relative weight of the two exes and the distinctive ways in which they are inter-imbricated. Finally, I identify the forms of political subjectivation that characterize every phase.

I begin with the commercial or mercantile capitalism of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This was the era that Marx had in mind when he coined the phrase "primitive accumulation." With that phrase, he was signaling that the principal driver of accumulation in this phase of capitalism was not exploitation, but expropriation. Confiscation was the name of the game, manifested both in the land enclosures of the core and in the conquest, plunder, and "hunting of black skins" throughout the periphery, ¹⁰ both of which long preceded the rise of modern industry. Prior to large-scale exploitation of factory workers came massive expropriation of bodies, labor, land, and mineral wealth, in Europe and-especially-in the "New World." Expropriation literally dwarfed exploitation in commercial capitalism-and that had major implications for status hierarchy.

Certainly, this regime generated precursors of the racializing subjectivations that became so consequential in later phases: "Europeans" versus "natives," free individuals versus chattel, "whites" versus "blacks." But these distinctions were far less sharp in an era when virtually all nonpropertied people had the status of subjects, not that of rights-bearing citizens. In this period, virtually all lacked political protection from expropriation, and the majority condition was not freedom but dependency. As a result, that status did not carry the special stigma it acquired in subsequent phases of capitalism, when majority ethnicity male workers in the core won liberal rights through political struggle. It was only later, with the democratization of metropolitan states and the rise of large-scale factory-based exploitation of free wage labor, that the contrast between "free and subject races" sharpened, giving rise to the full-blown white-supremacist status order we associate with modern capitalism. ¹¹

That is precisely what happened when mercantile capitalism gave way in the nineteenth century to what is misleadingly called "liberal" or "laissez-faire capitalism." In this new regime, the two exes became more balanced and interconnected. Certainly, the confiscation of land and labor continued apace, as European states consolidated colonial rule, while the US perpetuated its "internal colony," first, through the extension of racialized slavery and then, after abolition, by transforming freedmen into debt peons through the sharecropping system. Now, however, ongoing expropriation in the periphery entwined with highly profitable exploitation in the core. What was new was the rise of large-scale factorybased manufacturing, which forged the proletariat imagined by Marx, upending traditional life forms and sparking class conflict. Eventually, struggles to democratize metropolitan states delivered a systemconforming version of citizenship to exploited workers. At the same time, however, brutal repression of anticolonial struggles ensured continuing subjection in the periphery. Thus, the contrast between dependency and freedom was sharpened and increasingly racialized, mapped onto two categorically different "races" of human beings. In this way, the free "white" exploitable citizen-worker emerged as the antithetical flip side of its own abjected enabling condition: the dependent racialized expropriable subject. And modern racism found a durable anchor in the deep structure of capitalist society.

Racialization was further strengthened by the apparent separation of expropriation and exploitation in "liberal" capitalism. In this regime, the two exes appeared to be sited in different regions and assigned to different populations-one enslaved or colonized, the other "free." In fact, however, the division was never so cut and dried, as some extractive industries employed colonial subjects in wage labor, and only a minority of exploited workers in the capitalist core succeeded in escaping ongoing expropriation altogether. Despite their appearance as separate, moreover, the two exes were systemically imbricated: it was the expropriation of populations in the periphery (including in the periphery within the core) that supplied the cheap food, textiles, mineral ore and energy without which the exploitation of metropolitan industrial workers would not have been profitable. In the "liberal" era, therefore, the two exes were distinct but mutually calibrated engines of accumulation within a single world capitalist system.

The nexus of expropriation and exploitation mutated again in the following era. Begun in the interwar period, and consolidated following the Second World War, the new regime of "state-managed capitalism" softened the separation of the two exes without abolishing it. In this era, expropriation no longer precluded exploitation but combined directly with it-as in the segmented labor markets of capitalist core. In those contexts, capital exacted a confiscatory premium from racialized workers, paying them less than "whites"-and less than the socially necessary costs of their reproduction. Here, accordingly, expropriation articulated directly with exploitation, entering into the internal constitution of wage labor.

African Americans are a case in point. Displaced by agricultural mechanization and flocking to northern cities, many joined the industrial proletariat, but chiefly as second-class workers, consigned to the dirtiest, most menial jobs. In this era, their exploitation was overlaid by expropriation, as capital failed to pay the full costs of their reproduction. What undergirded that arrangement was their continuing political subjection under Jim Crow. Throughout the era of state-managed capitalism, Black Americans were deprived of political protection, as segregation, disfranchisement, and countless other institutionalized humiliations continued to deny them full citizenship. Even when employed in northern factories, they were still constituted as more or less expropriable, not as fully free bearers of rights. They were expropriated and exploited simultaneously. ¹²

Even as it muddied the line between those two exes, the state-capitalist regime heightened the status differential associated with them. Newly created welfare states in the capitalist core loaned additional symbolic and material value to the status of the citizen-worker, as they expanded protections and benefits for those who could claim it. Instituting labor rights, corporatist bargaining, and social insurance, they not only stabilized accumulation to capital's benefit but also politically incorporated those "workers" who were "merely" exploited. The effect, however, was to intensify the invidious comparison with those excluded from that designation, further stigmatizing racialized "others." Conspicuously anomalous and lived as unjust, the latter's continuing vulnerability to violation became the target of sustained militant protest in the 1960s, as civil rights and Black Power activists took to the streets.

In the periphery, meanwhile, struggles for decolonization exploded, giving rise in due course to a different amalgamation of the two exes. Independence promised to raise the status of ex-colonials from dependent subjects to rights-bearing citizens. In the event, some working-class strata did manage to achieve that elevation, but precariously and on inferior terms. In a global economy premised on "unequal exchange," their exploitation, too, was suffused with expropriation, as trade regimes tilted against them siphoned value away to the core, notwithstanding the overthrow of colonial rule. Moreover, the limited advances enjoyed by some were denied to the vast majority, who remained outside the wage nexus and subject to overt confiscation. Now, however, the expropriators were not only foreign governments and transnational firms but also postcolonial states. Centered largely on import substitution industrialization, the latter's "development" strategies often entailed expropriation of "their own" indigenous populations. And even those developmental states that made serious efforts to improve the condition of peasants and workers could not fully succeed. The combination of straitened state resources, neo-imperial regimes of investment and trade, and ongoing land dispossession ensured that the line between the two exes would remain fuzzy in the postcolony.

In state-managed capitalism, therefore, exploitation no longer appeared so separate from expropriation. Rather, the two exes became internally articulated in racialized industrial labor, on the one hand, and in compromised postcolonial citizenship, on the other. Nevertheless, the distinction between the two exes did not disappear, as "pure" variants of each persisted in core and periphery. Substantial populations were still expropriated pure and simple; and they were almost invariably people of color. Others were "merely" exploited; and they were more likely to be European and "white." What was new, however, was the emergence of hybrid cases in which some people were subject simultaneously to both expropriation and exploitation. Such people remained a minority under state-managed capitalism, but they were the heralds of a world to come.

When we turn to the present regime, we see a vast expansion of the expropriation/exploitation hybrid. This phase, which I call "financialized capitalism," rests on a novel and distinctive nexus. On the one hand, there has been a dramatic shift in the geography and demography of the two exes. Much large-scale industrial exploitation now occurs outside the historic core, in the BRICS countries of the semi-periphery. At the same time, expropriation is on the rise-so much so, in fact, that it threatens to outpace exploitation once again as a source of value. These developments are closely connected. As industry migrates and finance metastasizes, expropriation is becoming universalized, afflicting not only its traditional subjects but also those who were previously shielded by their status as citizen-workers and free individuals.

Debt is a major culprit here, as global financial institutions pressure states to collude with investors in extracting value from defenseless populations. It is largely by means of debt that peasants are dispossessed and corporate land grabs are intensified in the capitalist periphery. But they are not the only victims. Virtually all nonpropertied postcolonials are expropriated via sovereign debt, as postcolonial states in hock to international lenders and caught in the vise of "structural adjustment" are forced to abandon developmentalism in favor of liberalizing policies, which transfer wealth to corporate capital and global finance. Far from reducing debt, moreover, the restructuring only compounds it, sending the ratio of debt service to GNP soaring skyward and condemning countless generations to expropriation, some long before they are born, and regardless of whether or not they are also subject to exploitation.

It is increasingly by expropriation, too, that accumulation proceeds in the historic core. As low-waged precarious service work replaces unionized industrial labor, wages fall below the socially necessary costs of reproduction. Workers who used to be "merely" exploited are now expropriated too. That doubled condition, previously reserved for minorities but becoming generalized, is compounded by the assault on the welfare state. The social wage declines, as tax revenues previously dedicated to public infrastructure and social entitlements are diverted to debt service and "deficit reduction" in hopes of placating "the markets." Even as real wages plummet, services that used to be provided publicly are offloaded onto families and communities-which is to say, chiefly onto women, who are meanwhile employed in precarious wage work-hence exploited and expropriated coming and going. In the core, moreover, as in the periphery, a race to the bottom drives down corporate taxes, further depleting state coffers and apparently justifying more "austerity"-in effect, completing the vicious circle. Additional corporate giveaways eviscerate hard-won labor rights, setting up onceprotected workers for violation. Yet they, like others, are expected to buy cheap stuff made elsewhere. In these conditions, continued consumer spending requires expanded consumer debt, which fattens investors while expropriating citizen-workers of every color, but especially racialized borrowers, who are steered to hyper-expropriative sub-prime and payday loans. At every level and in every region, therefore, debt is the engine driving major new waves of expropriation in financialized capitalism.

In the present regime, then, we encounter a new entwinement of exploitation and expropriation-and a new logic of political subjectivation. In place of the earlier, sharp divide between dependent expropriable subjects and free exploitable workers, there appears a continuum. At one end lies the growing mass of defenseless expropriable subjects; at the other, the dwindling ranks of protected citizen-workers, subject "only" to exploitation. At the center sits a new figure, formally free, but acutely vulnerable: the expropriated-and-exploited citizen-worker. No longer restricted to peripheral populations and racial minorities, this new figure is becoming the norm.

Nevertheless, the expropriation/exploitation continuum remains racialized. People of color are still disproportionately represented at the expropriative end of the spectrum, as we see in the United States. Black and brown Americans who had long been denied credit, confined to inferior segregated housing, and paid too little to accumulate savings, were systematically targeted by purveyors of sub-prime loans and consequently experienced the highest rates of home foreclosures in the country. Likewise, minority towns and neighborhoods that had long been starved of public resources are hit especially hard by plant closings, which cost them not only jobs but also tax revenues-hence, funds for schools, hospitals, and basic infrastructure maintenance, leading eventually to debacles like Flint and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Finally, black men long subject to differential sentencing and harsh imprisonment, coerced labor and socially tolerated violence, including at the hands of police, are massively conscripted into a "prison-industrial complex," kept full to capacity by a "war on drugs," which targets possession of small amounts of crack cocaine, and by disproportionately high rates of unemployment. Despite the shift in the ex/ex nexus, racism is alive and well in financialized capitalism.
2.2 THE CAPITALISM/RACISM NEXUS REVISITED IN LIGHT OF ITS HISTORY
The preceding narrative constitutes the second step of my argument. But it casts the previous step in a different light. No mere chronological exercise, the recounting of capitalist development as a sequence of racial regimes has a conceptual payoff. It alters our view of the structure that underpins racial oppression in capitalist society.

My thesis can now be restated as follows: For structural reasons, capital accumulation always requires both exploitation and expropriation. But precisely how the system constructs its human subjects and assigns them to those two processes varies historically. The history narrated here records a range of different possibilities. The colonial capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries installed a clear-cut division. Free, rights-bearing citizen-workers, subject "only" to exploitation, were sharply marked off from politically defenseless racialized subject peoples, made available for expropriation. By contrast, the financialized capitalism of the twenty-first century dispenses with that sharp division. Far from neatly separating the expropriated from the exploited, it subjects propertyless people of every hue to both exes simultaneously.

What follows for the theory and practice of anti-racism? Does the present softening of the ex/ex division mean that the structure that underpinned five hundred years of capitalist racial oppression is finally dissolving? Is capitalism no longer necessarily racist? And if so, is the power of racism to divide populations dissolving as well?

The analysis presented here suggests the crumbling, if not the full demise, of racism's structural basis in capitalist society. From its origins to the present, capitalism has always required both expropriation and exploitation. In the past, however, it also required their mutual separation and assignment to two distinct populations, divided by the color line. Today, by contrast, that second requirement no longer holds. On the contrary, the present regime conscripts nearly all nonpropertied adults into wage labor, but pays the overwhelming majority less than the socially necessary costs of their reproduction. Reducing the "social wage" by dismantling public provision, it entangles the bulk of the nonpropertied population in the tentacles of debt. Universalizing precarity, financialized capitalism exploits and expropriates nearly everyone coming and going.

Nevertheless, racial oppression lives on in this phase of capitalism. People of color remain racialized and far more likely than others to be poor, unemployed, homeless, hungry, and sick; to be victimized by crime and predatory loans; to be incarcerated and sentenced to death; to be harassed and murdered by police; to be used as cannon fodder or sex slaves and turned into refugees or "collateral damage" in endless wars; to be dispossessed and forced to flee violence, poverty, and climatechange-induced disasters, only to be confined in cages at borders or left to drown at sea.

Taken together, these developments present a puzzle. On the one hand, financialized capitalism is dissolving the political-economic structure that underpinned racial oppression in previous regimes. On the other hand, it still harbors racial disparities and foments racial antagonisms. The question is, why? Why does racism outlive the disappearance of the sharp separation of the two exes? Why do those who now share the objective condition of exploitation-cum-expropriation not see themselves as fellow travelers in the same (leaky, unseaworthy) boat? Why do they not join together to oppose financialized capitalism's fuzzier nexus of expropriation and exploitation, which harms them all?

That such alliances did not appear earlier in capitalism's history is not surprising. Previously, the racialized separation of the two exes encouraged the "free workers" of the capitalist core to dissociate their interests and aims from those of dependent subjects in the periphery- including the periphery within the core. As a result, what was understood as class struggle was all too easily disconnected from struggles against slavery, imperialism, and racism-when not posed directly against them. And the converse was sometimes true. Movements aimed at overcoming racial oppression at times despaired of alliances with (waged) "labor" and on occasion even disdained them. The effect throughout capitalism's history was to weaken the forces of emancipation.

But that was then. What are the prospects for such alliances today, when racial oppression in capitalist society is no longer strictly "necessary"? The perspective outlined here suggests a mixed prognosis. Objectively, financialized capitalism has softened the mutual separation of the two exes, which underpinned racism in the past. Subjectively, however, the new configuration may actually aggravate racial antagonism-at least in the short run. When centuries of stigma and violation meet capital's voracious need for subjects to exploit and expropriate, the result is intense insecurity and paranoia-hence, a desperate scramble for safety-and exacerbated racism.

Certainly, those who were previously shielded from (much) predation are less than eager to share its burdens now-and not simply because they are racists, although some of them are. It is also that they, too, have legitimate grievances, which come out in one way or another-as well they should. In the absence of a cross-racial movement to abolish a social system that imposes near-universal expropriation, their grievances find expression in the growing ranks of right-wing authoritarian populism. Those movements flourish today in virtually every country of capitalism's historic core-as well as in quite a few in the former periphery. They represent the entirely predictable response to the "progressive neoliberalism" of our times. The elites who embody that perspective cynically appeal to "fairness" while extending expropriation-asking those who were once protected from the worst by their standing as "whites" or "Europeans" to give up that favored status, embrace their growing precarity, and surrender to violation, all while funneling their assets to investors and offering them nothing in return but moral approval. ¹³

In this context, the political prospects for a post-racial society are not so rosy, notwithstanding the possibility of a structural opening. Cross-racial alliances do not emerge spontaneously from the new, more blurred configuration of the two exes. On the contrary, in the viciously predatory world of financialized capitalism, racial antagonisms are on the rise. Today, when a nonracial capitalism might be possible in principle, it appears to be barred in practice, thanks to a toxic combination of sedimented dispositions, exacerbated anxieties, and cynical manipulations.

Before we bemoan that fact, however, we should ask what exactly non-racial capitalism could mean under current conditions. On one interpretation, it would be a regime in which people of color were proportionately represented at the commanding heights of global finance and political might, on the one hand, and among the latter's expropriated-cum-exploited victims, on the other. Contemplation of this possibility-call it "nonracial financialized capitalism"-should not provide much comfort to antiracists, as it would mean continued worsening of the life conditions of the vast majority of people of color, among others. Oriented to parity within ballooning inequality, nonracial financialized capitalism would lead at best to equal-opportunity domination amidst rising racial animosity.

The analysis developed here suggests the pressing need for more radical transformation. Contra progressive neoliberalism, racism cannot be defeated by equal-opportunity domination-nor, contra ordinary liberalism, by legal reform. By the same token, and pace black nationalism, the antidote does not reside in enterprise zones, community control, or self-determination. Nor, contra socialism, as traditionally understood, can an exclusive focus on exploitation emancipate racialized people- nor, indeed, working people of any color; it is also necessary to target expropriation to which exploitation is, in any case, tied. What is needed, in fact, is to overcome capitalism's stubborn nexus of expropriation and exploitation, to transform the overall matrix, to eradicate both of capitalism's exes by abolishing the larger system that generates their symbiosis.

Overcoming racism today requires cross-racial alliances aimed at achieving that transformation. Although such alliances do not emerge automatically as a result of structural change, they may be constructed through sustained political effort. The sine qua non is a perspective that stresses the symbiosis of exploitation and expropriation in financialized capitalism. By disclosing their mutual imbrication, such a perspective suggests that neither ex can be overcome on its own. Their fate is tied together, as is that of the populations who were once so sharply divided and are now so uncomfortably close. Today, when the exploited are also the expropriated and vice versa, it might be possible, finally, to envision an alliance among them. Perhaps in blurring the line between the two exes, financialized capitalism is creating the material basis for their joint abolition. But it's nevertheless up to us to seize the day and turn a historical possibility into real historical force for emancipation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Robin Blackburn, Sharad Chari, Rahel Jaeggi, and Eli Zaretsky for helpful comments; to Daniel Boscov-Ellen for research assistance; and, especially, to Michael Dawson for inspiration and stimulation.
NOTES

L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Penguin Books, 1938); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study of Social Dynamics (Monthly Review Press, 1948); Stuart Hall, "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance," Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, 1980): 305-45; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981); Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (London: The Women's Press, 1982); Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Brooklyn: South End Press, 1983); Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review I/181 (May-June 1990): 95-118; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990) and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, NY: Free Press, 1996); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Cornel West, "The Indispensability Yet Insufficiency of Marxist Theory" and "Race and Social Theory," both in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 213-30 and 251-67.

1. Michael C. Dawson, Blacks In and Out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2017); Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2018); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2016).

2. It would be false to say that Marx did not consider these processes at all. On the contrary, he wrote in Capital, for example, about slavery, colonialism, the expulsion of the Irish, and the "reserve army of labor." But with the exception of the last, these discussions were not systematically elaborated. Nor did they generate categories that play an integral, structural role in his conception of capitalism. See Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976): 781-802; 854-70; 914-26; and 931-40. By contrast, a long line of subsequent thinkers has sought to incorporate the analysis of racial oppression into Marxism. See notes 1 and 2 above. My own effort builds upon theirs, even as it also develops a distinctive conceptual argument.

3. This formulation echoes a thought of Jason Moore, who notes capital's ongoing reliance on the expropriation of unpaid work (from nature as well as from people) as a condition for the possibility of profitable production. He writes: "Productivity-maximizing technologies revive system-wide accumulation when they set in motion a vast appropriation of uncapitalized nature. For every Amsterdam there is a Vistula Basin. For every Manchester, a Mississippi Delta." Jason W. Moore, "The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy," The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 1080/03066150.2016.1272587 (2017).

4. As I shall explain in the following section, such divide-and-rule tactics mobilize racially coded status hierarchies that distinguish citizens from subjects, nationals from aliens, free individuals from slaves, "Europeans" from "natives," "whites" from "blacks," entitled "workers" from dependent "scroungers."

5. Marx, Capital I, 873-76.

6. For another account that extends the concept of primitive accumulation beyond initial stockpiling, see the chapter on "Extended Primitive Accumulation" in Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (Verso, 2010).

7. The dependence of accumulation on subjectivation is a special case of a larger phenomenon. In other respects, too, capitalism's "economic subsystem" depends for its very existence on conditions external to it, including some that can only be assured by political powers. Evidently, accumulation requires a legal framework to guarantee property rights, enforce contracts, and adjudicate disputes. Equally necessary are repressive forces, which suppress rebellions, maintain order, and manage dissent. Then, too, political initiatives aimed at managing crisis have proved indispensable at various points in capitalism's history, as has public provision of infrastructure, social welfare, and, of course, money. I discuss those indispensable political functions in "Behind Marx's Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism," New Left Review 86 (2014): 55-72, and in "Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism," Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 1-33. I focus here, by contrast, on the equally necessary function of political subjectivation.

8. Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1998).

1. Marx, Capital I, 915.

2. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, "A Genealogy of 'Dependency': Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 309-36. Reprinted in Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso Books, 2013).

3. I am suggesting that the situation of racialized labor in state-managed capitalism combined elements of expropriation with elements of exploitation. On the one hand, workers of color in the US core were paid a wage, but one that was less than the average socially necessary costs of their reproduction. On the other hand, they had the formal status of free persons and US citizens, but they could not call on public powers to vindicate their rights; on the contrary, those who were supposed to protect them from violence were often perpetrators of it. Thus, their status amalgamated both political and economic aspects of the two exes. It is better understood in this way, as an amalgam or hybrid of exploitation and expropriation, than via the more familiar concept of "super-exploitation." Although that term is undeniably evocative, it focuses exclusively on the economics of the racial wage gap, while ignoring the status differential. My approach, in contrast, aims to disclose the entwinement of economic predation with political subjection. For super-exploitation, see, e.g., Ruy Mauro Marini, Dialéctica de la Dependencia (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1973).

4. For progressive neoliberalism, see Nancy Fraser, "The End of Progressive Neoliberalism," Dissent (Spring 2017) and online at https://www. org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary populism-nancy-fraser. Also, "From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump-and Beyond," American Affairs I, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 46-64, and online at https:// americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/.

Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She works on social and political theory, feminist theory, and contemporary French and German thought. A recipient of the American Philosophical Association's 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize and of the Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of Cordoba (Argentina), Professor Fraser held a "Blaise Pascal International Research Chair" at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in 2008-2010. She has also received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bunting Institute, the ACLS, the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California-Irvine, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Wissenchaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the American Academy in Berlin. She has taught at Northwestern University, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt Germany, the University of Paris, the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), and University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist? - Politics/Letters Quarterly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred fourteenth Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, GA, on January 5, 2018. Capitalism has always been deeply entangled with racial oppression. That proposition clearly holds for the slave-based plantation capitalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Foreword Tracy B. Strong
Introduction George Schwab
Preface to the Second Edition (1934)
1. Definition of Sovereignty
2. The Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision
3. Political Theology
4. On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State (de Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés)
Index

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice-even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives-such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction-has led to a decrease in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

" The End of Policing combines the best in academic research with rhetorical urgency to explain why the ordinary array of police reforms will be ineffective in reducing abusive policing. Alex Vitale shows that we must move beyond conceptualizing public safety as interdiction, exclusion, and arrest if we hope to achieve racial and economic justice."

" The End of Policing's great strength lies in demonstrating that if the shape of American policing is historical, it is also contingent. We could have made different choices regarding how we set about securing the public against the array of threats that confront it, and - refreshingly, at this moment of general despair - Vitale believes we still can."

"Deeply researched, but also vibrantly and accessibly written, The End of Policing is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the dire state of policing today. Alex Vitale shows compellingly that as long as we ask the police to shore up a fundamentally unequal and dysfunctional social order, superficial 'reforms' won't do much to help. And he offers concrete alternatives aimed at restoring communities and getting police out of the business of trying to contain social problems that they cannot-and should not-control."

"An extremely vital book on policing. Should be assigned at all police academies. If only the Philando Castile jurors had read this."

"Challenging standard accounts of how to reform policing, Alex Vitale argues that true safety demands directing resources away from police and prisons and towards economic development, education, and drug treatment. Urgent, provocative, and timely, The End of Policing will make you question most of what you have been taught to believe about crime and how to solve it."

"Unfortunately, neither increased diversity in police forces nor body cameras nor better training make any seeming difference. We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively."

"Vitale's amassing of trenchant facts into an enticing intellectual framework makes The End of Policing a must-read for anyone interesting in waging and winning the fight for economic and social justice."

" The End of Policing is that holiday argument book, the relatively brief stack of facts you can hand to a relative who still talks about those nice guys who helped out with the flat tire and doesn't see why any lives have to matter more than they already do. A thorough rinsing of the American criminal justice system."

"Suggests a radical alternative that, on the one hand, abolishes corrupt and lethal police policies designed to contain the racialised poor and, on the other, develops and sustains safer communities."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

On Sale Now

An epic and riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster-and an anatomy of the politics of austerity that continues to shape the world today
When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible: how could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? And yet the city was billions of dollars in the red. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that New York's famous social liberalism was doomed to failure-and promised apocalyptic scenarios if the city didn't fire thousands of workers, freeze wages, and slash social services.

In this vivid, gripping account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city, transforming the largest metropolis in the United States and reshaping ideas about government throughout the country. In doing so, she brings to life a radically different New York, the legendarily decrepit city of the 1970s. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources as well as interviews with key players in the crisis, Phillips-Fein guides us through the hairpin turns and sudden reversals that brought New York City to the edge of bankruptcy-and kept it from going over.

At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in the city's past, a colorful portrait of the unwieldy mechanics of municipal government, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.

Praise & Reviews

is one of Kirkus Review's Best American History Books for 2017 Fear City is an Amazon Best History Book for 2017is one of Publisher's Weekly's top ten books for 2017 is a Publishers Weekly pick of the month
was named one of Amazon's top ten best nonfiction books for April 2017!
Fear City excerpt in New Republic
is aPublishers Weekly Staff Pick
is one of the top 10 books featured on the radio program This Is Hell!
Feature in the Christian Science Monitor: When New York City stood on the brink

"A refreshingly counterintuitive point of view...this is a book that deserves an audience beyond New York City history buffs, and all the more so because of its relevance to our political moment."
-New York Times Book Review

"President Gerald Ford's reaction to New York City's fiscal crisis in the 1970s was encapsulated by the classic Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." This analysis of the city's precipitous slide toward bankruptcy focuses on the unique mix of Wall Street's financial power and New York's liberalism, factors that combined both to drive debt ever higher and to alienate great swaths of the country. Phillips- Fein, a professor of history at NYU, isolates the cost of vastly increased public services and the devices (mainly loans) used by multiple mayors (Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, even Abe Beame) to extricate the city from massive debt as being the keys to the economic drama. Austerity efforts did not solve the problems by themselves, nor, as the author points out, did the banks or the labor unions. The author is to be commended for turning a very complex economic subject into a readable text and for giving space to the many citizens affected by the cutbacks...this book offers a grim reminder of what happens when shortsightedness from left and right drive public policy."
- Mark Levine, Booklist

"Phillips-Fein is excellent in her grasp of details...Especially worthwhile is the detailed portrait of Mayor Abe Beame, who is often eclipsed by the much bigger, flashier personalities of his predecessor Lindsay, and Lindsay's tormentor, four-term New York governor Nelson D. Rockefeller...But what is truly original here is Phillips-Fein's conclusion, which is that the city committed civic suicide by turning away from the social safety-net programs championed by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and beloved by generations of middle-class New Yorkers."
-

"Sobering, smart reading with many pointed lessons for activists."
-Kirkus (Starred Review)

The book should be required reading for all those interested in the past, present, and future of democratic politics.
-Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Carefully researched and pointedly critical study...Like a good documentary filmmaker, Phillips-Fein tells a compelling story that combines portraits of key people involved in the crisis with a wider view of the social context in which the crisis took place. The suffering that gripped New York in the 1970s now strangles Greece and Puerto Rico. Phillips-Fein's Fear City is an excellent primer as to the complexity-and human consequences-of such crises.
-New York Journal of Books

"Phillips-Fein's excellent new book, Fear City, vividly depicts a period when New York was seen - not always positively - as an archetypal example of urban liberalism. Much of the emergency that defined New York's mid-1970s character revolved around debt, accounting practices, and municipal bonds, but in Phillips-Fein's hands it is not only exciting but extremely relevant, too."
-Barnes & Noble Review

" Fear City details how austerity politics tightened the grip of the invisible hand on the throats of the weakest in society in the 1970s. But Phillips-Fein reminds us this outcome was not inevitable at the time. And it need not be today."
-LitHub

"In Fear City, Kim Phillips-Fein adds her voice...she contends that the crisis of the 'seventies has been exploited by foes of social justice to the present day. Citing debt crises in Greece, Puerto Rico and Detroit, she notes that they argue that austerity is "the only option" to avoid municipal default. To Phillips-Fein, theirs is "a political choice," not an economic. Vividly described, well-written...this account of the crisis adds depth and authority to the many accounts already available."
-History News Network

"Phillips-Fein lays out the battles for the soul of New York, with unions and ordinary citizens fighting against the cuts that elites desired. She details all the last-minute machinations and backroom deals that solved the fiscal crisis...The interesting thing about the timing of this book is New York is in danger of losing federal funding for various reasons. Could it lead to another fiscal crisis and will it have ripple effect across the country?"
-brooklynfans.com

"Phillips-Fein, a historian teaching at New York University, challenges the conventional view that most New Yorkers were united in "repudiate[ing] an older tradition of irresponsible altruism" and "accepted the need for austerity and chipped in.""
-prospect.org

"Phillips-Fein, an associate professor at New York University, has crafted one of the best history books of the year out of one of the ugliest periods in New York City history. Aspects of this story reverberate into present dilemmas - on the local, state and national levels - as austerity measures take center stage as possible solutions to deficits and shortfalls."
-Bowery Boys History

" Fear City is the best account of the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s and, more than that, an indispensable contribution to understanding the rise of austerity economics and the long decline of the public sector. Kim Phillips-Fein shows how New York became the testing ground for market-based responses to urban problems. This is a history with huge implications for the remaking of American politics and economics in our time."
-Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Origins of the Urban Crisis

"Fair, thorough, incisive, and stylish, this is the best book to read not just on New York's fiscal crisis of the 1970s, but about how bankers became our unacknowledged legislators ever since."
-Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge

"The remaking of New York City under cover of crisis was a prelude to what would become a global economic tidal wave. In zeroing in on this little-understood chapter of urban history, Fear City helps sheds much-needed light on a range of contemporary crises, from the starvation of public services amidst enormous private wealth to the rise of Donald Trump. Kim Phillips-Fein is a historian of the first order."
-Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything

"A tour de force. If you want to find the roots of modern conservatism, don't look in Louisiana, Arizona, or rural Wisconsin. Look in New York, and read Kim Phillips-Fein's superb Fear City. New York in the 1970s, as Phillips-Fein compellingly shows, was the first sustained victory in the New Right's long war against the New Deal. Extremely well written and impressively researched, Fear City is essential reading to understand how finance capital, real estate speculation, austerity budgeting, and punitive policing first came together to create the toxic politics of today."
-Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia and Kissinger's Shadow

" Fear City provides the definitive account of the moment when New York City liberalism ran out of momentum and money, and the conservative reaction that has culminated in Donald Trump began. Phillips-Fein chronicles not only the tense dance with municipal bankruptcy but the largely forgotten efforts by ordinary New Yorkers to stop the legal coup by local and national elites. Lucid, elegantly written, full of new information, it belongs on the shelf of key books about the city, alongside The Power Broker, Gotham, and their like."
-Joshua B. Freeman, author of American Empire and Working-Class New York

"This revealing narrative of New York's transformation from working-class social democracy to the glittering home of fancy finance reminds us that behind the mask of austerity there always lurks a bitter politics of class."
-James K. Galbraith, author of The Predator State and Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice

"The story of New York's financial crisis in the seventies is really a story about the role of cities in America today.​ ​New Yorkers pride themselves on being cosmopolitan, on welcoming immigrants, on being willing to spend money on education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Kim Philips-Fein convincingly explains why that caused problems for the city in the past and why now we need New York values more than ever."
-Joseph E. Stiglitz, author of Globalization and Its Discontents and The Price of Inequality

"Before there was Reagan, before there was Thatcher, there was New York City's fiscal crisis. Here we can see the blueprint for what has since been done to the entire world. This is the story of how the gears were shifted and the age of liberalism put into reverse, told with all the engrossing details, all the forgotten characters, and a memorable style."
-Tom Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics An epic and riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster-and an anatomy of the politics of austerity that continues to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible: how could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.

In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California's economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results-a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law-pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state's commitment to prison expansion.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States.

Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Prologue: The Bus
1. Introduction
2. The California Political Economy
3. The Prison Fix
4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism
5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children
6. What Is to Be Done?
Epilogue: Another Bus

Notes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.

In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance-and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.

Stuart Schrader is Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship and Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 * Rethinking Race and Policing in Imperial Perspective
2 * Byron Engle and the Rise of Overseas Police Assistance
3 * How Counterinsurgency Became Policing
4 * Bringing Police Assistance Home
5 * Policing and Social Regulation
6 * Riot School
7 * The Imperial Circuit of Tear Gas
8 * Order Maintenance and the Genealogy of SWAT
9 * "The Discriminate Art of Indiscriminate Counter-revolution"

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Matthew Horace doesn't pull punches, and as a black man and a cop, he's seen it all.... In The Black and the Blue, his powerful, probing, unvarnished assessment of racial injustice in law enforcement today, he comes out as a "champion of wholesale police reform in the United States," unafraid to offer prescriptive advice on how to address the racism, prejudices, biases and the lethal "cops don't tell on cops" tradition ingrained in police culture. Using in-depth interviews and his own experiences, Horace presents the vivid on-the-ground actuality of police brutality, misconduct, malfeasance and the needless, heedless shootings that capture headlines and snuff out lives all over America. Horace narrates like a pro with both passion and control."- Bookpage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Matthew Horace doesn't pull punches, and as a black man and a cop, he's seen it all.... In The Black and the Blue, his powerful, probing, unvarnished assessment of racial injustice in law enforcement today, he comes out as a "champion of wholesale police reform in the United States," unafraid to offer prescriptive advice on how to address the racism, prejudices, biases and the lethal "cops don't tell on cops" tradition ingrained in police culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible: It is 2064. A reparations initiative that allows victims of police brutality to regenerate organs is well underway. A major new component of the initiative will be unveiled for the fiftieth anniversary of the Ferguson uprising, but the largest biobank in the country has been repeatedly hit by raiders intent on selling stem cells on the white market. Aiyana and her team of Risers have to find a way to secure the cell depository and revitalize the movement. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with speculative methods, challenge ever-present narratives of inevitability, anticipate new racial formations, and test different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible: It is 2064.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Asma Abbas offers a complex critique of the way liberal thought has shaped the understanding of human suffering and, inspired by Marx and Nietzsche, she articulates alternative ways to think about suffering. Her argument is radical in the etymological sense of this word - it goes to the root of our political life by asking questions about what constitutes us as subjects and binds us to others. The book is intellectually exciting and morally challenging." - David Adams, Associate Professor, Department of English, Ohio State University

"Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering develops a deep and bracing critique of liberal conceptions of justice. With unusual drive and wit, Abbas shows that justice in the liberal state requires theatrical displays of the suffering it claims to redress. In the ways it forces suffering to work for redress, liberal justice transforms suffering into the familiar and fetishistic forms of harm and injury which function as unthreatening calls for a rebalancing of the scales. Abbas's withering analysis of the calculative aesthetics of liberal justice demonstrates with mounting power how liberalism works not to address suffering but to cancel its political force. Far, then, from naming a regime of political justice, liberalism, we are driven by Abbas to conclude, is a regime that guarantees that suffering will never be experienced, heard, rallied to, as a cry for a new form of political life. Since, by contrast, real justice demands concrete transformations of our current social relations, we must find ways to overcome liberal practices of justice.

In peeling back the layers of injury that liberalism has added to the insults of human history, Abbas offers us the opportunity to think differently about the alternative forms of life that suffering makes possible. Her philosophical touchstones for this project are Marx and Nietzsche. Indeed, the second half of Abbas's book, in its passionate refusal to submit to the fear of the endlessness of human suffering, represents the first fresh interpretation of Marx's theory of the world-making force of human needs since Marcuse and Adorno. In other words, Abbas rightly sees that the unavailability of justice in any of its liberal forms demands and portends an alliance between wounds that have never ceased to seek their proper forms of overcoming and the hope for more life. Abbas's scholarly and interpretive achievements are remarkable in their own right, but they never become for her ends in themselves. In other words, at no point does Abbas lose sight of the utter timeliness of her critical work. Indeed, Abbas's probing and poetic account of Tony Kushner's Angels in America locates Liberalism and Human Suffering firmly in the most urgent political crises of our time, when radical politics seems incapable of sustaining the conviction that a better world is within our imaginative ken. Our politics is sorely in need of ways of critiquing the fetishes of injury, harm and victimhood in order to renaturalize and repoliticize suffering. Abbas makes a major contribution to that project.

Any recommendation of Liberalism and Human Suffering would be incomplete without reference to the sparkle and verve and sheer hopefulness of Abbas's prose. By turns dialectical and lyrical, philosophical and allusive, dark and illuminating, Liberalism and Human Suffering argues for a world in which thinking ceases to fear its most far-reaching capacities. But beyond this, it is, in its way, an emissary from that world. In Liberalism and Human Suffering, Abbas is inventing a unique form of critique that is evenly suspended between sober materialism and speculative generosity, between unflinching confrontations with human misery and the just life that can grow only in such contaminated soil." - Gregg Horowitz, Chair of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

"Abbas's work offers extended analyses of literary and theatrical texts, such as Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes... Although neither Abbas nor Weheliye use vocabularies of disability studies in their queer of color explications, there is much of importance here to the field...[Abbas] generously offer[s] a compelling theory of disability as entry into racialized experiences...[and] allow[s] concepts of impairment to function as opportunities for minority survival in worlds not of their making." (David Mitchell, Professor of English, George Washington University, USA)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Liberalism and Human Suffering - Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics | A. Abbas | Palgrave Macmillan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A materialist critique of the politics, poetics and economics of suffering in liberalism that argues for attention to the labour of suffering of the victim in many well-meaning but flawed politics of redress, and imagines forms of representation, solidarity and justice that better honour the...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Please join us for our annual fundraiser for TGI Justice Project and the official Trans March After Party this June 27th.

TGIJP & Black Futures Labhave come together to present Bustin Out 2020: Virtual Edition. June 27, 2020 at 5PM PST/8PM EST . We will be showing two amazing films by two phenomenal Black trans filmmakers, Ahya Simone and Tourmaline. Click their names to find out more about their fascinating work. After the screening there will be a Q&A with Ahya Simone and Bre Rivera, hosted byJanet Mock.

For 16 years, TGIJP has provided legal services for transgender and gender variant/non-conforming people in California prisons, jails and detention centers. As we continue to fight the abuses TGI people face inside and outside of prisons, we invite you to join us for a night of celebration and trans resilience. Can you help us raise $60,000 to support Black trans abolitionist organizing?

While we are sad we can't join our usual hosts at El Rio, Virgil's Sea Room, and The Knockout, we will be joined by Black Futures Lab to raise money for currently and formerly incarcerated TGI people. Every year, Bustin Out brings together hundreds of transgender, gender non-conforming, intersex people and our allies to celebrate the incredible resistance of transgender people in San Francisco. This year we had to switch it up and still hope to gather hundreds to celebrate the fight for Black trans freedom virtually -- Register to join us for Bustin Out: Party Against The Prison Industrial Complex NOW!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Please join us for our annual fundraiser for TGI Justice Project and the official Trans March After Party this June 27th. TGIJP & Black Futures Labhave come together to present Bustin Out 2020: Virtual Edition. June 27, 2020 at 5PM PST/8PM EST .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On a melancholy Saturday this past February, Shalon Irving's "village" - the friends and family she had assembled to support her as a single mother - gathered at a funeral home in a prosperous black neighborhood in southwest Atlanta to say goodbye and send her home. The afternoon light was gray but bright, flooding through tall arched windows and pouring past white columns, illuminating the flag that covered her casket. Sprays of callas and roses dotted the room like giant corsages, flanking photos from happier times: Shalon in a slinky maternity dress, sprawled across her couch with her puppy; Shalon, sleepy-eyed and cradling the tiny head of her newborn daughter, Soleil. In one portrait Shalon wore a vibrant smile and the crisp uniform of the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, where she had been a lieutenant commander. Many of the mourners were similarly attired. Shalon's father, Samuel, surveyed the rows of somber faces from the lectern. "I've never been in a room with so many doctors," he marveled. "... I've never seen so many Ph.D.s."

At 36, Shalon had been part of their elite ranks - an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the preeminent public health institution in the U.S. There she had focused on trying to understand how structural inequality, trauma and violence made people sick. "She wanted to expose how peoples' limited health options were leading to poor health outcomes. To kind of uncover and undo the victim blaming that sometimes happens where it's like, 'Poor people don't care about their health,'" said Rashid Njai, her mentor at the agency. Her Twitter bio declared: "I see inequity wherever it exists, call it by name, and work to eliminate it."

Much of Shalon's research had focused on how childhood experiences affect health over a lifetime. Her discovery in mid-2016 that she was pregnant with her first child had been unexpected and thrilling.

Then the unthinkable had happened. Three weeks after giving birth, Shalon had collapsed and died.

The sadness in the chapel was crushing. Shalon's long-divorced parents had already buried both their sons; she had been their last remaining child. Wanda Irving had been especially close to her daughter -role model, traveling companion, emotional touchstone. She sat in the front row in a black suit and veiled hat, her face a portrait of unfathomable grief. Sometimes she held Soleil, fussing with her pink blanket. Sometimes Samuel held her, or one of Shalon's friends.

A few of Shalon's villagers rose to pay tribute; others sat quietly, poring through their funeral programs. Daniel Sellers, Shalon's cousin from Ohio and the baby's godfather, spoke for all of them when he promised Wanda that she would not have to raise her only grandchild alone. "People say to me, 'She won't know her mother.' That's not true," Sellers said. "Her mother is in each and every one of you, each and every one of us. ... This child is a gift to us. When you remember this child, you remember the love that God has pushed down through her for all of us. Soleil is our gift."

Underneath the numb despair was a profound sense of failure - and an acute understanding of what Shalon's death represented. The researcher working to eradicate disparities in health access and outcomes had become a symbol of one of the most troublesome health disparities facing black women in the U.S. today, disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality. The main federal agency seeking to understand why so many American women - especially black women - die and nearly die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth had lost one of its own. Even Shalon's many advantages - her B.A. in sociology, her two master's degrees and dual-subject Ph.D., her gold-plated insurance and rock-solid support system - had not been enough to ensure her survival. If a village this powerful hadn't been able to protect her, was any black woman safe?

The memorial service drew to a close, the bugle strains of "Taps" as plaintive as a howl. Two members of the U.S. Honor Guard removed the flag from Shalon's coffin and held it aloft. Then they folded it into a precise triangle small enough for Wanda and Samuel to hold next to their hearts.

In recent years, as high rates of maternal mortality in the U.S. have alarmed researchers, one statistic has been especially concerning. According to the CDC, black mothers in the U.S. die at three to four times the rate of white mothers, one of the widest of all racial disparities in women's health. Put another way, a black woman is 22 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, 71 percent more likely to perish from cervical cancer, but 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes. In a national study of five medical complications that are common causes of maternal death and injury, black women were two to three times more likely to die than white women who had the same condition.

That imbalance has persisted for decades, and in some places, it continues to grow. In New York City, for example, black mothers are 12 times more likely to die than white mothers, according to the most recent data; from 2001 to 2005, their risk of death was seven times higher. Researchers say that widening gap reflects a dramatic improvement for white women but not for blacks.

The disproportionate toll on African Americans is the main reason the U.S. maternal mortality rate is so much higher than that of other affluent countries. Black expectant and new mothers in the U.S. die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan, the World Health Organization estimates.

What's more, even relatively well-off black women like Shalon Irving die or nearly die at higher rates than whites. Again, New York City offers a startling example: A 2016 analysis of five years of data found that black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.

The fact that someone with Shalon's social and economic advantages is at higher risk highlights how profound the inequities really are, said Raegan McDonald-Mosley, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who met her in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and was one of her closest friends. "It tells you that you can't educate your way out of this problem. You can't health-care-access your way out of this problem. There's something inherently wrong with the system that's not valuing the lives of black women equally to white women."

For much of American history, these types of disparities were largely blamed on blacks' supposed innate susceptibility to illness - their "mass of imperfections," as one doctor wrote in 1903 - and their own behavior. But now many social scientists and medical researchers agree, the problem isn't race but racism.

The systemic problems start with the type of social inequities that Shalon studied - differential access to healthy food and clean drinking water, safe neighborhoods and good schools, decent jobs and reliable transportation. Black women are more likely to be uninsured outside of pregnancy, when Medicaid kicks in, and thus more likely to start prenatal care later and to lose coverage in the postpartum period. They are more likely to have chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension that make having a baby more dangerous. The hospitals where they give birth are often the products of historical segregation, lower in quality than those where white mothers deliver, with significantly higher rates of life-threatening complications.

Those problems are amplified by unconscious biases that are embedded throughout the medical system, affecting quality of care in stark and subtle ways. In the more than 200 stories of African-American mothers that ProPublica and NPR have collected over the past year, the feeling of being devalued and disrespected by medical providers was a constant theme. The young Florida mother-to-be whose breathing problems were blamed on obesity when in fact her lungs were filling with fluid and her heart was failing. The Arizona mother whose anesthesiologist assumed she smoked marijuana because of the way she did her hair. The Chicago-area businesswoman with a high-risk pregnancy who was so upset at her doctor's attitude that she changed OB-GYNs in her seventh month, only to suffer a fatal postpartum stroke.

Over and over, black women told of medical providers who equated being African American with being poor, uneducated, noncompliant and unworthy. "Sometimes you just know in your bones when someone feels contempt for you based on your race," said one Brooklyn woman who took to bringing her white husband or in-laws to every prenatal visit.

Hakima Tafunzi Payne, a mother of nine in Kansas City, Missouri, who used to be a labor-and-delivery nurse and still attends births as a student midwife, has seen this cultural divide as both patient and caregiver. "The nursing culture is white, middle-class, and female, so is largely built around that identity. Anything that doesn't fit that identity is suspect," she said. Payne, who is also a nurse educator lecturing on unconscious bias for professional organizations, recalled "the conversations that took place behind the nurse's station that just made assumptions - a lot of victim blaming, 'If those people would only do blah, blah, blah, things would be different.'"

Black expectant and new mothers frequently told us that doctors and nurses didn't take their pain seriously - a phenomenon borne out by numerous studies that show pain is often undertreated in black patients for conditions from appendicitis to cancer. When Patrisse Cullors, a cofounder of the Black Lives Matters movement who has become an activist to improve black maternal care, had an emergency C-section in Los Angeles in March 2016, the surgeon "never explained what he was doing to me," she said. The pain medication didn't work: "My mother basically had to scream at the doctors to give me the proper pain meds." When white people advocate for themselves or their family members, she said, providers "think they're acting reasonably. When black people are advocating for our family members, we're complaining, we're being uppity, we don't know what we're talking about, we're exaggerating."

Limited diversity in the medical profession contributes to the black mothers' sense of alienation. Blacks make up 6 percent of doctors (though 11 percent of OB-GYNs), 3 percent of medical school faculty and less than 2 percent of National Institutes of Health-funded principal investigators. "That's a real problem that across the spectrum that [black women] are not feeling listened to and respected-that's a structural problem," said Monica McLemore, a nursing professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who has conducted focus groups with dozens of mothers as part of a $50 million initiative to reduce preterm births. "The health sector doesn't want to admit how much of this is about us."

But it's the discrimination that black women experience in the rest of their lives - the double-whammy of race and gender - that may ultimately be the most significant factor in poor maternal outcomes. An expanding field of research shows that the stress of being a black woman in American society can take a significant physical toll during pregnancy and childbirth.

Watch the Video

The U.S. medical system is still haunted by slavery.

"It's chronic stress that just happens all the time - there is never a period where there's rest from it, it's everywhere, it's in the air, it's just affecting everything," said Fleda Mask Jackson, an Atlanta researcher and member of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance who studies disparities in birth outcomes.

It's a type of stress from which education and class provide no protection. "When you interview these doctors and lawyers and business executives, when you interview African-American college graduates, it's not like their lives have been a walk in the park," said Michael Lu, a longtime disparities researcher and former head of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau of the Health Resources and Services Administration, the main federal agency funding programs for mothers and infants. "It's the experience of having to work harder than anybody else just to get equal pay and equal respect. It's being followed around when you're shopping at a nice store, or being stopped by the police when you're driving in a nice neighborhood."

Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, coined the term "weathering" for how this continuous stress wears away at the body. Weathering "causes a lot of different health vulnerabilities and increases susceptibility to infection," she said, "but also early onset of chronic diseases, in particular, hypertension and diabetes" - conditions that disproportionately affect blacks at much younger ages than whites. It accelerates aging at the cellular level; in a 2010 study, Geronimus and colleagues found that the telomeres (chromosomal markers of aging) of black women in their 40s and 50s appeared 7 1/2 years older on average than those of whites.

Weathering can have particularly serious repercussions in pregnancy and childbirth, the most physiologically complex time in a woman's life. Stress has been linked to one of the most common and consequential pregnancy complications, preterm birth. Black women are 49 percent more likely than whites to deliver prematurely (and, closely related, black infants are twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday). Here again, income and education aren't protective.

The effects on the mother's health may also be far-reaching. Maternal age is an important risk factor for many severe pregnancy-related complications, as well as for chronic diseases that can affect pregnancy, like hypertension. "As women get older, birth outcomes get worse," Lu said. "If that happens in the 40s for white women, it actually starts to happen for African-American women in their 30s."

This means that for black women, the risks for pregnancy likely start at an earlier age than many clinicians - and women- realize, and the effects on their bodies may be much greater than for white women. This doesn't mean that pregnancy should be thought of as inherently scary or dangerous for black women (or anyone). It does mean, in Geronimus' view, that "a black woman of any social class, as early as her mid-20s, should be attended to differently" - with greater awareness of the potential challenges ahead.

That's a paradigm shift that professional organizations and providers have barely begun to wrap their heads around. "There may be individual doctors or hospitals that are doing it [accounting for the higher risk of black women], but ... there's not much of that going on," Lu said. Should doctors and clinicians be taking into consideration this added layer of vulnerability?

"Yeah," Lu said. "I truly think they should."

Shalon Irving's history is almost a textbook example of the kinds of strains and stresses that make high-achieving black women vulnerable. The child of two Dartmouth graduates, she grew up in Portland, Oregon, where her father's father was pastor of a black church. Even in its current liberal incarnation, Portland is one of the whitest large cities in the U.S.

Thirty years ago, Portland was a much more uncomfortable place to be black. African-American life there was often characterized by social isolation, which Geronimus' research suggests can be especially stressful. Samuel Irving spent years working as a railroad engineer; he got a law degree and later ran a city agency, but felt his prospects were still constrained by his race. Wanda held various jobs in marketing and communications, including at the U.S. Forest Service. In elementary school, Shalon was sometimes the only African-American kid in her class. "There were many mornings where she would stand outside banging on the door wanting to come back into the house because she didn't want to go to school," her mother recently recalled.

Shalon's strategy for fitting in was to be smarter than everyone else. She read voraciously, wrote a column for a black-owned weekly newspaper and skipped a grade. Books and writing helped her cope with trauma and sorrow - first the death of her 20-month-old brother Simone in a car accident when she was six, then the fracturing of her parents' marriage, then the diagnosis of her beloved older brother, Sam III, with a virulent form of early-onset multiple sclerosis when he was 17. Amid all the family troubles, Shalon was funny and driven, with a fierce sense of loyalty and "a moral compass that was amazing," her mother said. She was also overweight and often anxious, given to daydreaming (as she later put it) about "alternative realities where people hadn't died and things had not been lost." When it came time to go away to college, she chose the historically black Hampton University in Virginia. "She wanted to feel that nurturing environment," Wanda said. "She had had enough."

By then, Shalon had noticed that many of her relatives - her mother's mother, her aunts, her far-flung cousins - died in their 30s and 40s. Her brother, Sam III, sardonically joked that the family had a "death gene," but Shalon didn't think that was funny. "She didn't understand why there was such a disparity with other families that had all these long lives," Wanda said. Shalon nagged her father to stop smoking and her mother to lose weight. She set an example, shedding nearly 100 pounds while managing to graduate summa cum laude. At the start of graduate school at Purdue University, she was a svelte 138 pounds, "very classy and elegant, a lot like her mom," said Bianca Pryor, a master's student in consumer behavior who became one of what Shalon called her cherished circle of "sister friends."

They were all bearing the same burden. "There's this feeling that we're carrying the expectations of generations, the first ones trying to climb the corporate ladder, trying to climb in academe," said Pryor, now a marketing executive in New York City. "There is this idea that we have to work twice as hard as everyone else. But there's also, 'I'm first-generation, I don't know the ropes, I don't how to use my social capital.' There's a bit of shame in that ... this constant checking in with yourself - am I doing this right?"

Shalon set the bar especially high: She was pursuing a double Ph.D. in sociology and gerontology, focusing on themes she would return to often - the long-term effects of early childhood trauma and maltreatment, the impact of the parent-child relationship on lifelong health. She finished in under five years, once again with top honors - "one of the best writers I've had in my academic career," her adviser, sociologist Kenneth Ferraro, said.

She tried teaching, then decided to pursue a second master's degree, this time from Johns Hopkins. She was also juggling family responsibilities. Wanda had followed Shalon around the country, earning her own master's degree and working in nonprofit management. "They were like the 'Gilmore Girls,'" Pryor said. In 2008, Sam III joined them in Baltimore to take part in a study on an experimental MS therapy. With his family's support, he'd managed to finish college and run a poetry-slam nonprofit for kids. His next goal was to walk across the stage to receive his diploma instead of using his wheelchair. In February 2009, while he was doing physical rehab to regain strength in his legs, a blood clot traveled to his lung, killing him at the age of 32. Afterward, Wanda and Shalon clung to each other more tightly than ever.

In 2011 came what Ferraro called Shalon's "change-the-world opportunity" - a consulting gig at the CDC with Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" initiative. Soon she joined the agency's prestigious Epidemic Intelligence Service, a training program in applied epidemiology - in her case, with a focus on community health - whose members served as first responders in health emergencies. As part of the uniformed ranks of the U.S. Public Health Service, she could eventually discharge her student debt - more than $165,000 for Hopkins alone - travel, buy a house. "The permanence was very appealing," Pryor said.

What Shalon wasn't prepared for was how unfulfilled she was. After Johns Hopkins, she had worked on the frontlines helping at-risk infants, teenage girls and mothers with HIV/AIDS. She was passionate about improving food and housing security to reduce people's risk for high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems, but felt like much of her CDC research ended up sitting on a shelf. It bothered her that she rarely met the people behind the data she was analyzing. "She might see the numbers, but I don't think she actually saw that little girl or little boy have a healthier lunch," Pryor said.

The stress and frustration triggered the old corrosive self-doubts. But gradually, Shalon saw a way out of the box. She joined the CDC's Division of Violence Prevention, refocusing on issues around trauma and domestic abuse- a mission she saw as "liberating" for African-American women, Wanda said. She started a coaching business called Inclusivity Standard to advise young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who wanted to get into college or grad school, as well as organizations seeking to become more diverse. She enlisted her mother, now working as a consultant, and Pryor to join her team. And she decided to write a self-help book, on the theory that many people in the communities she cared about couldn't afford psychotherapy or didn't trust it. "She was one of those people - one thing is just not enough," said her coauthor Habiba Tran, a therapist and life coach with a multicultural clientele. "One modality is just not enough. One way of [reaching people] is just not enough."

Shalon couldn't remember a time when she didn't want to be a mother. But her romantic life had been a "20-year dating debacle," she admitted in the manuscript of her self-help book, in part because "I am deathly scared of heartbreak and disappointment, and letting people in comes with the very real risk of both."

In 2014, when Shalon was 34, medical problems forced the issue. For years she'd been suffering from uterine fibroids - non-malignant tumors that affect up to 80 percent of black women, leading to heavy menstrual bleeding, anemia and pelvic pain. No one knows what causes fibroids or why blacks are so susceptible. What is known is that the tumors can interfere with fertility - indeed, black women are nearly twice as likely to have infertility problems as whites, and when they undergo treatment, there's much less likelihood that the treatments will succeed. Surgery bought her a little time, but her OB-GYN urged her not to delay getting pregnant much longer.

Shalon had spent her adult years defying stereotypes about black women; now she wrestled with the reality that by embracing single motherhood, she could become one. The financial risk was substantial - she'd just purchased a town house in the quiet Sandy Springs area north of Atlanta, and her CDC insurance only covered artificial insemination for wives using their husbands' sperm. In Portland, no one would have blinked an eye at an unmarried professional woman having a child on her own, but in Atlanta, "there is very much a vibe there that things should happen in a certain order," Pryor said. "And Shalon was not having that at all. She was like, 'Nope, this is what it is.'"

The gamble - funded with her parents' help - ended in a series of devastating failures. In September 2015, in the midst of one unsuccessful insemination treatment, Shalon was alarmed to discover that her right arm had become swollen and hard. Doctors found a blood clot and diagnosed her with Factor V Leiden, a genetic mutation that makes blood prone to abnormal clumping. Suddenly a part of the family's medical mystery was solved. Wanda's mother had died of a pulmonary embolism, so had Sam III, so had other members of their extended family. But no one had been tested for the mutation, which is primarily associated with European ancestry. Had they known they carried it, maybe Sam's deadly blood clot could have been prevented. It was a what-if too painful to dwell on.

By April 2016, Shalon had given up. She had a new boyfriend and she was on her way to Puerto Rico to help with the CDC'S Zika response, working to prevent the spread of the virus to expectant mothers and their unborn babies. There she discovered she'd gotten pregnant by accident. Her excitement was tempered by fear that the baby might have contracted Zika, which can cause microcephaly and other birth defects. But a barrage of medical tests confirmed all was well.

More good news: A few weeks later Pryor learned she was pregnant, too. "All right," she told Shalon, "let's finally go after our rainbows and unicorns! Because for so long it was just dark clouds and rain."

In reality, Shalon's many risk factors - including her clotting disorder, her fibroid surgery, the 36 years of wear and tear on her telomeres, her weight - boded a challenging nine months. She also had a history of high blood pressure, though it was now under control without medication. "If I was the doctor taking care of her, I'd be like, 'Oh, this is going to be a tough one,'" her OB-GYN friend Raegan McDonald-Mosley said.

Shalon got though the physical challenges surprisingly well. Her team at Emory University, one of the premier health systems in the South, had no trouble managing her clotting disorder with the blood thinner Lovenox. They worried that scarring from the fibroid surgery could result in a rupture if her uterus stretched too much, so they scheduled a C-section at 37 weeks. At several points, Shalon's blood pressure did spike, Wanda said, but doctors ruled out preeclampsia (pregnancy-induced hypertension) and the numbers always fell back to normal.

Wanda blamed stress. There was the painful end to Shalon's romance with her baby's father and her dashed hopes of raising their child together. There were worries about money and panic attacks about the difficulties of being a black single mother in the South in the era of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. Shalon told everyone she was hoping for a girl.

Steeped in research about how social support could buffer against stress and adversity, Shalon joined online groups for single moms and assembled a stalwart community she could quickly deploy for help. "She was all about the village," Rashid Njai said. "She'd say, 'I'm making sure that when I have my baby, the village is activated and ready to go.'"

She poured more of her anxious energy into finishing the first draft of the book. She sent Tran the manuscript on Jan. 2, the day before the planned C-section, then typed one last note to her child. Boy or girl, its nickname would be Sunny, in honor of her brother Sam, her "sunshine."

"You will always be my most important accomplishment," she wrote. "No words have been created to adequately capture the fear and love and excitement that I feel right now."

Until recently, much of the discussion about maternal mortality has focused on pregnancy and childbirth. But according to the most recent CDC data, more than half of maternal deaths occur in the postpartum period, and one-third happen seven or more days after delivery. For American women in general, postpartum care can be dangerously inadequate - often no more than a single appointment four to six weeks after going home. "If you've had a cesarean delivery, if you've had preeclampsia, if you've had gestational diabetes or diabetes, if you go home on an anticoagulant - all those women need to be seen significantly sooner than six weeks," said Haywood Brown, a professor at Duke University medical school. Brown has made reforming postpartum care one of his main initiatives as president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

The dangers of sporadic postpartum care may be particularly great for black mothers. African Americans have higher rates of C-section and are more than twice as likely to be readmitted to the hospital in the month following the surgery. They have disproportionate rates of preeclampsia and peripartum cardiomyopathy (a type of heart failure), two leading killers in the days and weeks after delivery. They're twice as likely as white women to have postpartum depression, which contributes to poor outcomes, but they are much less likely to receive mental health treatment. If they experience discrimination or disrespect during pregnancy or childbirth, they may be more likely to skip postpartum visits to check on their own health (they do keep pediatrician appointments for their babies). Lack of paid maternity leave and childcare can create additional hurdles. In one study published earlier this year, two-thirds of low-income black women never made it to their doctor visit.

Meanwhile, many providers wrongly assume that the risks end when the baby is born - and that women who came through pregnancy and delivery without problems will stay healthy. In the case of black women, providers may not understand their true biological risks or evaluate those risks in a big-picture way. "The maternal experience isn't over right at delivery. All of the due diligence that gets applied during the prenatal period needs to continue into the postpartum period," said Eleni Tsigas, executive director of the Preeclampsia Foundation.

It's not just doctors and nurses who need to think differently. Like a lot of expectant mothers, Shalon had an elaborate plan for how she wanted to give birth, even including what she wanted her surgical team to talk about (nothing political) and who would announce the baby's gender (her mother, not a doctor or nurse). But like most pregnant women, she didn't have a postpartum care plan for herself. "It was just trusting in the system that things were gonna go okay," Wanda said. "And that if something came up, she'd be able to handle it."

The birth was "a beautiful time," Wanda said. Shalon did so well that she convinced her doctor to let her and Soleil - French for "sun" - leave the hospital after two nights (three or four nights are more typical). Then at home, "things got real," Pryor said. "It was Shalon and her mom trying to figure things out, and the late nights, and trying to get baby on schedule. Shalon was very honest. She told me, 'Friend, this is hard.'"

C-sections have much higher complication rates than vaginal births. In Shalon's case, the trouble - a painful lump on her incision - emerged a few days after she went home. The first doctor she saw, on Jan. 12, said it was nothing, but as she and her mother were leaving his office, they ran into her longtime OB-GYN, Elizabeth Collins. Collins took a look and diagnosed a hematoma - blood trapped in layers of healing skin, something that happens in about 1 percent of C-sections. The OB-GYN drained the "fluctuant mass" (as her notes described it), and "copious bloody non-purulent material" poured out from the one-inch incision. Collins also arranged for a visiting nurse to come by the house every other day to change the dressing. Collins didn't respond to a request for comment.

Over the next two weeks, Shalon's records show three more visits to Emory and two nursing visits at home. She feared that the incision wasn't healing fast enough, perhaps because the blood thinners she was taking to prevent an embolism -another C-section risk - were hampering coagulation. But a wound specialist said everything looked OK. Shalon was worried about Soleil, too: Breastfeeding was harder than expected, and she'd stopped taking narcotic painkillers because she thought they were making the baby groggy. But less powerful painkillers weren't working; between the pain and the anxiety, she was hardly sleeping. "Patient has poor endurance," the visiting nurse noted on Jan. 16. "Leaving the home is a TAXING and CONSIDERABLE effort."

What troubled the nurse most, though, was Shalon's blood pressure. On Jan. 16 it was 158/100, high enough to raise concerns about postpartum preeclampsia, which can lead to seizures and stroke. But Shalon didn't have other symptoms, such as headache or blurred vision. She made an appointment to see the OB-GYN for the next day, then ended up being too overwhelmed to go, the visiting nurse noted on Jan. 18. In that same record, the nurse wrote that Shalon had to change the dressing on her wound "sometimes several times a day due to large amounts of red drainage. This is adding to her stress as a new mom." Her pain was 5 on a scale of 10, preventing her from "sleeping/relaxing." Overall, Shalon told the nurse, "it just doesn't feel right." When the nurse measured her blood pressure on the cuff Shalon kept at home, the reading was 158/112. On the nurse's equipment, the reading was 174/118.

"We provide caring and compassionate care to all of our patients," the Visiting Nurse Health System said in an email. "She was in our care for less than four days but we gave the very best care we could."

Under current ACOG guidelines, blood pressure readings that high should trigger more aggressive action, such as an immediate trip to the doctor for further evaluation, possibly medication and more careful monitoring. A history of hypertension and multiple other risks should raise more red flags, Tsigas said. "We need to look holistically at the risk factors irrespective of whether or not she had a diagnosis of preeclampsia," she said. "If somebody has a whole plateful of risk factors, how are you treating them differently?" High blood pressure in the postpartum period should always be considered an emergency, she said.

"It would have made sense to admit her to the hospital for a complete work-up, including chest xray, an echocardiogram to evaluate for heart failure, and titration of her medication (both pain meds and hypertension meds) to sort out what she needed to feel OK and get [her] blood pressure out of the severe range," wrote one doctor, a leading expert on postpartum care, who agreed to look at Shalon's records at ProPublica's request, but asked not to be identified. "Education on signs / symptoms of stroke seems insufficient - we don't want to wait until someone is having a stroke to get their BP treated. A next-day follow-up for a BP of 174/118 seems questionable for a postpartum woman. Same-day assessment in her provider's office, or in the ER, would have been very much within the bounds of common practice."

Instead, Shalon was given an appointment for the following day, Jan. 19, with an OB-GYN at Women's Center at Emory St. Joseph's, which handled her primary care. By then, Shalon's blood pressure had fallen, and there were "no symptoms concerning for postpartum [preeclampsia]," the doctor wrote in his notes. He wrote that Shalon was healing "appropriately" and thought her jumps in blood pressure were likely related to "poor pain control." Wanda and Shalon left feeling more frustrated than ever.

At home over the next couple of days, Wanda noticed that one of Shalon's legs was larger than the other. "She said, 'Yeah, I know, Mom, and my knee hurts, I can't bend it."

When McDonald-Mosley looked over the voluminous medical records a few months later, what jumped out at her was the sense that Shalon's caregivers didn't seem to think of her as a patient who needed a heightened level of attention, despite the complexity of her pregnancy.

"She had all these risk factors. If you're gonna pick someone who's going to have a problem, it's gonna be her. ... She needs to be treated with caution." The fact that her symptoms defied easy categorization was all the more reason to be vigilant, McDonald-Mosley said. "There were all these opportunities to identify that something was going wrong. To act on them sooner and they were missed. At multiple levels. At multiple parts of the health care system. They were missed."

Shalon's other friends were growing uneasy, too. Back in New York, Bianca Pryor had her own pregnancy emergency - her son was born very prematurely, at 24 weeks - so she couldn't be in Atlanta. But she and Shalon talked often by phone. "She knew so much about her body one would think she was an M.D. and not a Ph.D. To hear her be concerned about her legs - that worried me." Pryor encouraged her, "'Friend, are you getting out of the house? Are you going for your walks? She told me, 'No, I'm on my chaise lounge, and that's about as much as I can do.'"

Habiba Tran was so upset at Shalon's condition that she took her frustrations out on her friend. "I was cussing her out. 'Go to the f- ing doctor.' She's like, 'I called them. I talked to them. I went to see them. Get off my back.'"

On the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 24, Shalon took a selfie with her father, who'd been visiting for a week, then sent him to the airport to catch a flight back to Portland. Towards noon, she and Wanda and the baby drove to the Emory Women's Center one more time. This time, Shalon saw a nurse practitioner. "We said, 'Look, there's something wrong here, she's not feeling well,'" Wanda recalled. "'One leg is larger than the other, she's still gaining weight'- nine pounds in 10 days - 'the blood pressure is still up, there's gotta be something wrong."

The nurse's records confirmed Shalon had swelling in both legs, with more swelling in the right one. She noted that Shalon had complained of "some mild headaches" and her blood pressure was back up to 163/99, but she didn't have other preeclampsia signs, like blurred vision. She checked the incision - "warm dry no [sign/symptom] of infection" - and noted Shalon's mental state ("cooperative, appropriate mood & affect, normal judgment"). She ordered an ultrasound to check the legs for blood clots, as well as preeclampsia screening.

Both tests came back negative. As Wanda remembers it, Shalon was insistent: "There is something wrong, I know my body. I don't feel well, my legs are swollen, I'm gaining weight. I'm not voiding. I'm drinking a lot of water, but I'm retaining the water." Before sending Shalon home, the nurse gave her a prescription for the blood pressure medication nifedipine, which is often used to treat pregnancy-related hypertension.

Emory Healthcare "is dedicated to the highest quality patient care," it said in an email. It declined to answer questions about Shalon's care, citing patient confidentiality.

Shalon and Wanda stopped at the pharmacy, then decided to go out to dinner with the baby. While they ate, they talked about a trip Shalon had planned for the three of them to take in just a few weeks. Ever since Sam III had died, Wanda and Shalon made a point of traveling someplace special on painful anniversaries. To mark his 40th birthday and the eighth anniversary of his death, Shalon had gotten the idea of going to Dubai. ("It's cheap," Shalon had told Wanda. "The money is worth so much more there. It's supposed to be beautiful.") She had long ago purchased their tickets and ordered the baby's passport. Now Wanda was worried - would she be feeling well enough to make such a big trip with an infant? Shalon wasn't willing to give up hope just yet. Wanda recalls her saying, "I'll be fine, I'll be fine."

They got home and sat in Shalon's bedroom for a while, laughing and playing with the baby. Around 8:30 p.m., Shalon suddenly declared, "I just don't know, Mom, I just don't feel well." She took one of the blood pressure pills. An hour later, while she and Wanda were chatting, Shalon clutched her heart, gasped and passed out.

Paramedics arrived to find Shalon on the floor near the foot of her bed "pulseless and not breathing..." They tried to stabilize her, then rushed her to Atlanta's Northside Hospital, just a couple of miles from her home. In the emergency room, doctors discovered that the breathing tube had been "incorrectly placed," according to the ambulance service report - into her esophagus instead of her lungs. She never regained consciousness. Four days later, on Jan. 28, Wanda and Samuel withdrew life support and she died.

The news spread quickly among her colleagues at the CDC. William Callaghan, chief of the maternal and infant health branch, recalled in March that his boss, who had visited Shalon at the hospital, called to let him know. "It was a chilling phone call," said Callaghan, one of the nation's leading researchers on maternal mortality. "It certainly takes, in that moment, what I do, it made it very, very, very concrete. ... This was not about data, this was not about whether it was going up or it was going down. It was about this tragic event that happened to this woman, her family."

Northside declined to do an autopsy, telling Wanda and Samuel that none was required, they recalled. (The hospital declined to comment.) So Wanda paid $4,500 for an autopsy by the medical examiners in neighboring DeKalb County. The report came back three months later. Noting that Shalon's heart showed signs of damage consistent with hypertension, it attributed her death to complications of high blood pressure.

Wanda always knew she would be spending a lot of time caring for her granddaughter. She and Shalon loved the idea of the three of them making their way in the world together, trying to change it for the better.

Instead, Wanda has had to find a way to go on without her daughter and best friend. She took a break from her consultant work and moved into Shalon's cozy townhouse, now crowded with baby books and gear, to assume her new role. Soleil was colicky, prone to gastric problems that kept both of them up all night. Shalon's villagers stopped by often to help, but much of the time Wanda was on her own. Her grief was most acute at nights, but she couldn't let it interfere with her duties to Soleil.

Eventually the colic went away and Soleil thrived. In June, Wanda and her five-month-old granddaughter went to Chattanooga for the annual meeting of U.S. Public Health Service scientists. A new honor - the Shalon Irving Memorial (Junior) Scientist Officer of the Year Award - had been created to celebrate Shalon's legacy, and Wanda had been asked to say a few words. She handed the baby to one of Shalon's CDC colleagues and took the small stage.

"Striving for excellence is a choice," she told the audience through barely suppressed tears. "It is a commitment. ... It's a struggle to become the person you want to be. It's harder than you want. It takes longer than you want. And it takes more out of you than you expected it should."

Shalon personified excellence, Wanda said. "I don't know if Shalon became the woman that she ultimately wanted to be. But I do know that she wanted to be the woman she was."

She also knew how Shalon wanted to raise her daughter, and she was determined to do the same: reading to her, traveling with her, taking her to gymnastic and music classes. "She wanted Soleil to go to Montessori school, so I'm looking for a Montessori school for her," Wanda said. "She wanted her to be christened, we got her christened." Wanda and Soleil have developed a routine: Every morning they say hello to the photos of Shalon on the living room walls. Every evening they say goodnight. Sometimes Wanda shows Soleil the flag from her mother's casket, now encased in a wooden frame. She set aside other mementos for later - the academic writings, the certificates and awards, the manuscript of her book with Tran. If all goes according to plan, it will be published early next year.

One Saturday afternoon in October, Wanda received another book, this one compiled by Shalon's friends from the Epidemic Intelligence Service and entitled "Letters to Soleil." She put the baby on her lap and said, "I'm gonna read you some letters about your mom." One thing Wanda has tried never to do is cry in front of Soleil. But as she began reading aloud, she was sobbing. "And Soleil just kept looking at me - she couldn't understand what was going on. And about a minute later she took my glasses off with her hands and put them down and then laid her head right on my chest and started patting me. Which made me cry all the more."

Shalon was a letter-writer too. One day not long after the funeral, Wanda found a note that her daughter had written to her two years earlier, around the sixth anniversary of Sam III's death. Shalon had left it among the other important items in her computer, trusting that if something ever happened to her, Wanda would find it. The letter reads like a premonition of her own death: Shalon wasn't afraid for herself, but agonized over how it would affect her mother.

>I am sorry that I have left you. On the particular day that I am writing this I have no idea how that may have occurred but know that I would never choose to leave.

I know it seems impossible right now, but please do not let this break you. I want you to be happy and smile. I want you to know that I am being watched after by my brothers and grandma and that we are all watching you. Please try not to cry. Use your energy instead to feel my love through time and space. Nothing can break the bond we have and you will forever be my mommy and I your baby girl!

Now 11 months old, Soleil has her mother's precociousness, energy and headstrong yet sweet disposition. Like the sun she was named for, "she just lights up a room when she smiles," Wanda said. She comes into Wanda's bed every night and wakes her early to play. "She'll bite my nose and kick me - 'Nana, time to get up! Time to get up!'" And so Wanda does.

Nina Martin
Nina Martin is a reporter covering sex and gender issues. She joined ProPublica in 2013 and is based in Berkeley, California.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On a melancholy Saturday this past February, Shalon Irving's "village" - the friends and family she had assembled to support her as a single mother - gathered at a funeral home in a prosperous black neighborhood in southwest Atlanta to say goodbye and send her home.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In an unusually vigorous interrogation of philosophy and the social sciences, Lisa Guenther addresses one of humanity's greatest inhumanities and its perversely long, extensive history in America. Guenther offers a compelling critique of solitary confinement, in the course of which she pushes phenomenology beyond its classical limits, revealing our inherent inter-subjectivity, our need for both interaction and anonymity, and the moral imperative that America end this cruel and barbaric form of punishment. An urgently needed, powerfully argued study of one of the nation's gravest moral and socio-political failings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In an unusually vigorous interrogation of philosophy and the social sciences, Lisa Guenther addresses one of humanity's greatest inhumanities and its perversely long, extensive history in America. Guenther offers a compelling critique of solitary confinement, in the course of which she pushes phenomenology beyond its classical limits, revealing our inherent inter-subjectivity, our need for both interaction and anonymity, and the moral imperative that America end this cruel and barbaric form of punishment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index

Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists' Internet Archive

International Socialism, Autumn 1968

John Berger

From International Socialism (1st series), No.34, Autumn 1968, pp.11-12.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O'Callaghan for ETOL.

This article originally appeared in New Society, 23 May 1968. We think it important enough to deserve reconsideration. It is reprinted with the kind permission of New Society's editor.

Seventy years ago (on 6 May 1898) there was a massive demonstration of workers, men and women, in the centre of Milan. The events which led up to it involve too long a history to treat with here. The demonstration was attacked and broken up by the army under the command of General Beccaris. At noon the cavalry charged the crowd: the unarmed workers tried to make barricades: martial law was declared and for three days the army fought against the unarmed.

The official casualty figures were 100 workers killed and 450 wounded. One policeman was killed accidentally by a soldier. There were no army casualties. (Two years later Umberto I was assassinated because after the massacre he publicly congratulated General Beccaris, the 'butcher of Milan.')

I have been trying to understand certain aspects of the demonstration in the Corso Venezia on 6 May because of a story I am writing. In the process I came to a few conclusions about demonstrations which may perhaps be more widely applicable.

Mass demonstrations should be distinguished from riots or revolutionary uprisings although, under certain (now rare) circumstances, they may develop into either of the latter. The aims of a riot are usually immediate (the immediacy matching the desperation they express): the seizing of food, the release of prisoners, the destruction of property. The aims of a revolutionary uprising are long-term and comprehensive: they culminate in the taking over of State power. The aims of a demonstration, however, are symbolic: it demonstrates a force that is scarcely used.

A large number of people assemble together in an obvious and already announced public place. They are more or less unarmed. (On 6 May 1898, entirely unarmed.) They present themselves as a target to the forces of repression serving the State authority against whose policies they are protesting.

Theoretically demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist.

If the State authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat. (A demonstration in support of an already established alternative State authority - as when Garibaldi entered Naples in 1860 - is a special case and may be immediately effective.)

Demonstrations took place before the principle of democracy was even nominally admitted. The massive early Chartist demonstrations were part of the struggle to obtain such an admission. The crowds who gathered to present their petition to the Tsar in St Petersburg in 1905 were appealing - and presenting themselves as a target - to the ruthless power of an absolute monarchy. In the event - as on so many hundreds of other occasions all over Europe - they were shot down.

It would seem that the true function of demonstrations is not to convince the existing State authority to any significant degree. Such an aim is only a convenient rationalisation.

The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality - the intensity of rehearsed awareness - may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.

A demonstration, however much spontaneity it may contain, is a created event which arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its artificiality, for therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities.

A mass demonstration distinguishes itself from other mass crowds because it congregates in public to create its function, instead of forming in response to one: in this, it differs from any assembly of workers within their place of work - even when strike action is involved - or from any crowd of spectators. It is an assembly which challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together.

State authorities usually lie about the number of demonstrators involved. The lie, however, makes little difference. (It would only make a significant difference if demonstrations really were an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State.) The importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them the numbers cease to be numbers and become the evidence of their senses, the conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for their total collective strength.

I say metaphor because the strength thus grasped transcends the potential strength of those present, and certainly their actual strength as deployed in a demonstration. The more people there are there, the more forcibly they represent to each other and to themselves those who are absent. In this way a mass demonstration simultaneously extends and gives body to an abstraction. Those who take part become more positively aware of how they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity. They begin to recognise that the function of their class need no longer be limited: that it, too, like the demonstrations itself, can create its own function.

Revolutionary awareness is rehearsed in another way by the choice and effect of location. Demonstrations are essentially urban in character, and they are usually planned to take place as near as possible to some symbolic centre, either civic or national. Their 'targets' are seldom the strategic ones - railway stations, barracks, radio stations, airports. A mass demonstration can be interpreted as the symbolic capturing of a city or capital. Again, the symbolism or metaphor is for the benefit of the participants.

The demonstration, an irregular event created by the demonstrators, nevertheless takes place near the city centre, intended for very different uses. The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They 'cut off these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatise the power they still lack.

The demonstrators' view of the city surrounding their stage also changes. By demonstrating, they manifest a greater freedom and independence - a greater creativity, even although the product is only symbolic - than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances.

This creativity may be desperate in origin, and the price to be paid for it high, but it temporarily changes their outlook. They become corporately aware that it is they or those whom they represent who have built the city and who maintain it. They see it through different eyes. They see it as their product, confirming their potential instead of reducing it.

Finally, there is another way in which revolutionary awareness is rehearsed. The demonstrators present themselves as a target to the so-called forces of law and order. Yet the larger the target they present, the stronger they feel. This cannot be explained by the banal principle of 'strength in numbers,' any more than by vulgar theories of crowd psychology. The contradiction between their actual vulnerability and their sense of invincibility corresponds to the dilemma which they force upon the State authority.

Either authority must abdicate and allow the crowd to do as it wishes: in which case the symbolic suddenly becomes real, and, even if the crowd's lack of organisation and preparedness prevents it from consolidating its victory, the event demonstrates the weakness of authority. Or else authority must constrain and disperse the crowd with violence: in which case the undemocratic character of such authority is publicly displayed. The imposed dilemma is between displayed weakness and displayed authoritarianism. (The officially approved and controlled demonstration does not impose the same dilemma: its symbolism is censored: which is why I term it a mere public spectacle.) Almost invariably, authority chooses to use force. The extent of its violence depends upon many factors, but scarcely ever upon the scale of the physical threat offered by the demonstrators. This threat is essentially symbolic. But by attacking the demonstration authority ensures that the symbolic event becomes an historical one: an event to be remembered, to be learnt from, to be avenged.

It is in the nature of a demonstration to provoke violence upon itself. Its provocation may also be violent. But in the end it is bound to suffer more than it inflicts. This is a tactical truth and an historical one. The historical role of demonstrations is to show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality of the existing State authority. Demonstrations are protests of innocence.

But the innocence is of two kinds, which can only be treated as though they were one at a symbolic level. For the purposes of political analysis and the planning of revolutionary action, they must be separated. There is an innocence to be defended and an innocence which must finally be lost: an innocence which derives from justice, and an innocence which is the consequence of a lack of experience.

Demonstrations express political ambitions before the political means necessary to realise them have been created. Demonstrations predict the realisation of their own ambitions and thus may contribute to that realisation, but they cannot themselves achieve them.

The question which revolutionaries must decide in any given historical situation is whether or not further symbolic rehearsals are necessary. The next stage is training in tactics and strategy for the performance itself.

ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index

Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists' Internet Archive

Last updated on 5.2.2008

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists' Internet Archive International Socialism, Autumn 1968 From International Socialism (1st series), No.34, Autumn 1968, pp.11-12. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O'Callaghan for ETOL. This article originally appeared in New Society, 23 May 1968. We think it important enough to deserve reconsideration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

Activist, teacher, author and icon of the Black Power movement Angela Davis talks Ferguson, Palestine, and prison abolition.

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.

Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."

Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

One of America's most provocative public intellectuals, Dr. Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz. The New York Times has praised his "ferocious moral vision." His many books include Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud.

Frank Barat is a human rights activist and author. He was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is now the president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. His books include Gaza in Crisis and Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation.

"Angela Davis new book made me think of what Dear Nelson Mandela kept reminding us, that we must be willing to embrace that long walk to freedom. Understanding what it takes to really be free, to have no fear, is the first and most important step one has to make before undertaking this journey. Angela is the living proof that this arduous challenge can also be an exhilarating and beautiful one." —Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"Whether you've grown up with the courage and conscience of Angela Davis, or are discovering her for the first time, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is a small book that will be a huge help in daily life and action, from exposing the "prison industrial complex" that she named long ago to understanding that leaders are only leaders if they empower others. She herself exposes facts and makes connections, but also leads in the most important way–by example." —Gloria Steinem

"This is vintage Angela: insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant, asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century." —Mumia Abu-Jamal

"Here is someone worthy of the Ancestors who delivered her. Angela Davis has stood her ground on every issue important to the health of our people and the planet. It is impossible to read her words or hear her voice and not be moved to comprehension and gratitude for our incredible luck in having her with us." —Alice Walker

"Angela Davis once again offers us an incisive, urgent, and comprehensive understanding of systematic racism, the grounds for intersectional analysis and solidarity, and the importance of working together as equals to unmask and depose systems of injustice. This wide-ranging and brilliant set of essays includes a trenchant analysis of police violence against people of color, of the systematic incarceration of black people in America, the grounds of Palestinian solidarity for the Left, the affirmation of transgender inclusion, and the necessity of opposing the G4S corporation and its high-profit empire dedicated to the institutionalization of racism in the name of security. These essays take us back in history to the founders of revolutionary and anti-racist struggle, but they also take us toward the possibility of ongoing intersectional solidarity and struggle. Angela Davis gathers in her lucid words our luminous history and the most promising future of freedom." —Judith Butler

"She has eyes in the back of our head. With her we can survive and resist." —John Berger

"In this latest text of her magisterial corpus, Angela Davis puts forward her brilliant analyses and resilient witness here and abroad. In a clear and concise manner, she embodies and enacts "intersectionality" – a structural intellectual and political response to the dynamics of violence, White Supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperial policies." —Dr. Cornel West, from the Foreword

Watch the full video of our event with Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition, hosted by Naomi Murakawa. Gilmore's new Haymarket book Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, will be released in February, 2021.
Continue Reading

Take 50% OFF all Haymarket Books through Tuesday, January 2nd! Get a FREE Ebook bundled with every book purchase! Get FREE Shipping on orders over $25 inside the US.
Continue Reading

Other books by Angela Y. Davis

Abolition. Feminism. Now

An urgent, vital manifesto of intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism, from leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.

On Palestine

Chomsky and Pappé discuss the past and future of Palestine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement Activist, teacher, author and icon of the Black Power movement Angela Davis talks Ferguson, Palestine, and prison abolition. In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Intercepted Podcast: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The movement to defund the police in the United States is gaining unprecedented momentum as protests continue across the globe. This week on Intercepted: Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, hosts a special two-part discussion. Kumanyika is co-host of the podcasts "Uncivil" and "Scene on Radio."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
" reframes surveillance studies in a way that will spark interrogations regarding the historical, racialized origins of surveillance theory and practice, while presenting a robust entryway to the field's current debates for new readers. Dark Matters offers a model of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship for media scholars invested in critical race inquiry, visual analysis, and archival study. At a moment when surveillance practices permeate livelihood, Browne's contribution here is an invaluable resource for examining the contemporary moment of #BlackLivesMatter, police brutality, and strategies for future resistance." - Racquel M. Gonzales, Feminist Media Studies

" Dark Matters provides an invaluable perspective on surveillance and reminds us that the history of the surveillance of blackness has a unique and important roll to play in our understanding and analysis of contemporary surveillance." - Jeramie D. Scott, Epic.org

"The book offers scholars in a range of fields several exciting new theoretical vocabularies with which to rethink one of the most important concepts of our time: surveillance." - Brittany Meché, Antipode

"With Dark Matters, Simone Browne delivers a theoretical tour de force to the field of Surveillance Studies by bringing blackness, black life, and the black subject- dark matter-into focus. . . . Browne's work is a must-read for those interested in examining the complexities of surveillance and attendant ongoing, embodied, political struggles." - Megan M. Wood, Surveillance & Society

" Dark Matters is a text that will serve as a valuable, though at times analytically digressive, contribution to black cultural studies, surveillance studies and black visual studies." - Jeramy DeCristo, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"Through her analyses of maps, newspaper articles, fugitive slave advertisements, slave narratives, personal correspondence, government documents, memoirs, and treaties, Brown exposes how blackness was shaped and produced through surveillance practices during slavery." - Brandi Thompson Summers, Public Books

" Dark Matters is a powerful book, which stems partly from the subject matter and partly from Browne's simultaneously lucid and forceful writing. It is also a book that feels increasingly necessary, helping us to ask not only about the policies, processes and technologies that govern civil liberties, but also about whose bodies and freedoms are most controlled and curtailed." - Jessa Lingel, Catalyst

"Each chapter of Dark Matters presents a different archive of racializing surveillance paired with reflections on black cultural production Browne reads as dark sousveillance. At each turn, Browne encourages us to see in slavery and its afterlife new modes of control, old ways of studying them, and potential paths of resistance." - Daniel Greene, boundary 2

" Dark Matters is an invaluable study that showcases how surveillance, historically and contemporarily, is rooted in anti-Blackness. Through utilizing a Black feminist methodology and centering the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the genealogy of surveillance, Browne demonstrates how the workings and technologies of domination, surveillance and governance utilized during slavery pre-figure and haunt the historical present. While the specific technologies have become far more advanced, the brutal fact of anti-Blackness remains the bedrock of surveillance practices to date." - Tyrone S. Palmer, Souls

" Dark Matters is nothing if not timely. Given the accounts of recorded and circulated racialized violence...Browne is right when she argues for the necessity of reconsidering surveillance's shadowy life." - Autumn Womack, American Literary History

" Dark Matters is of great importance not just because it illuminates historical and contemporary surveillance technologies of (anti)blackness, but equally because it opens up a series of questions around geography, race, power, and surveillance." - Hidefumi Nishiyama, Theory & Event

"Browne's Dark Matters is a groundbreaking and field-changing study important for cultural criticism broadly and surveillance studies in particular. Moreover, it is especially timely given the ways the issues she raises intersect with debates about police violence and mass surveillance, among others." - Shaka McGlotten, American Journal of Sociology

"Browne effectively reorganizes the temporality of modern surveillance by bringing it into dialogue with the archive of transatlantic slavery, whose enduring presence lives with us long after chattel slavery's formal defeat. Through its illuminating theorization of slavery's afterlife, Dark Matters identifies transatlantic slavery as the antecedent to our contemporary surveillance society." - Fiona Jeffries, Briarpatch Magazine

"What Simone Browne's book does, if we read and engage and digest it properly, is open us up to consider the myriad ways in which Black bodies and images of blackness are displayed and circulated in our culture, often for the purposes of containment and control, and how deeply rooted this is in our institutions and history. . . . Dark Matters can help us understand how this has come to be in a nation that purports to be just and colorblind." - Douglas Hartmann, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

" Dark Matters reminds us about the invisible ordering, prioritizing, and privileging structures that govern us and that discipline us as differently gendered and racialized, often in unrecognized ways that we forget." - Kalle Westerling, TDR: The Drama Review

"What does Blackness have to do within the modern surveillance state? Beautiful and theoretical, Simone Browne details how Black life from slavery to the present has been subjugated by the constancy of being watched and how Black people have resisted." - Zora, 100 greatest books ever written by African American women

"With flair, creativity, and intellectual breadth Simone Browne illuminates the historical and contemporary surveillance ordering of (presumed) biologically based racial identities. With an expansive interdisciplinary reach and drawing on helpful concepts such as racializing surveillance, dark sousveillance, epidermalization, and bordering, the book is a welcome contribution to an emerging field." - Gary T. Marx, author of Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society

"Simone Browne paints a devastating portrait of the compounding work of racial surveillance-a process in which profiling serves as both the justification for information gathering and a defense of the heightened, disproportionate scrutiny this information is said to warrant. From the branding of flesh as stigmata of captivity to biometric markers as gatekeepers, Dark Matters transports us across space and time, illuminating how the sorting, counting, and surveilling of human beings was as central to the dawn of industrialization as it is to the information society. Browne's incisive, wide-ranging, and multidisciplinary meditation shows us the scale and persistence of surveillance culture, and especially its urgent stakes for communities of color. Her deft history of the present moment reveals how data becomes us." - Alondra Nelson, author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
" reframes surveillance studies in a way that will spark interrogations regarding the historical, racialized origins of surveillance theory and practice, while presenting a robust entryway to the field's current debates for new readers. Dark Matters offers a model of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship for media scholars invested in critical race inquiry, visual analysis, and archival study.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it-individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank-decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one "species" of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless. We could go on to portray the rise of a new nation, the establishment of a new state, its diplomatic relations and its economic and political orientation. But instead we have decided to describe the kind of tabula rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization. What is singularly important is that it starts from the very first day with the basic claims of the colonized. In actual fact, proof of success lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out. This change is extraordinarily important because it is desired, clamored for, and demanded.

The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colons, the colonists.

* * *

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder. But it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman's agreement. Decolonization, we know, is an historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance. Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation. Their first confrontation was colored by violence and their cohabitation-or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer-continued at the point of the bayonet and under cannon fire. The colonist and the colonized are old acquaintances. And consequently, the colonist is right when he says he "knows" them. It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject. The colonist derives his validity, i.e., his wealth, from the colonial system.

Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History. It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The "thing" colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation.

Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation. Its definition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: "The last shall be first." Decolonization is verification of this. At a descriptive level, therefore, any decolonization is a success.

* * *

In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence.

You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered. The colonized, who have made up their mind to make such an agenda into a driving force, have been prepared for violence from time immemorial. As soon as they are born it is obvious to them that their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence.

The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of "native" towns and European towns, of schools for "natives" and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet if we penetrate inside this compartmentalization we shall at least bring to light some of its key aspects. By penetrating its geographical configuration and classification we shall be able to delineate the backbone on which the decolonized society is reorganized.

The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier. In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of workers decorated after fifty years of loyal and faithful service, the fostering of love for harmony and wisdom, those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order. In capitalist countries a multitude of sermonizers, counselors, and "confusion-mongers" intervene between the exploited and the authorities. In colonial regions, however, the proximity and frequent, direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm. We have seen how the government's agent uses a language of pure violence. The agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.

The "native" sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous. The colonist's sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It's a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonist's feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth, without a pothole, without a stone. The colonist's sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. The colonist's sector is a white folks' sector, a sector of foreigners.

The colonized's sector, or at least the "native" quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It's a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized's sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The colonized's sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate. It's a sector of niggers, a sector of towelheads. The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession: of sitting at the colonist's table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man. The colonist is aware of this as he catches the furtive glance, and constantly on his guard, realizes bitterly that: "They want to take our place." And it's true there is not one colonized subject who at least once a day does not dream of taking the place of the colonist.

This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species. The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never manage to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue. It is not just the concept of the pre-capitalist society, so effectively studied by Marx, which needs to be reexamined here. The serf is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is needed to justify this difference in status. In the colonies the foreigner imposed himself using his cannons and machines. Despite the success of his pacification, in spite of his appropriation, the colonist always remains a foreigner. It is not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the "ruling class." The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, "the others."

The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country's economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress, this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities. To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject. To dislocate the colonial world does not mean that once the borders have been eliminated there will be a right of way between the two sectors. To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist's sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.

Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. The colonial world is a Manichaean world. The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents of law and order. As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil. Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values. The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil. A corrosive element, destroying everything within his reach, a corrupting element, distorting everything which involves aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces. And Monsieur Meyer could say in all seriousness in the French National Assembly that we should not let the Republic be defiled by the penetration of the Algerian people. Values are, in fact, irreversibly poisoned and infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized. The customs of the colonized, their traditions, their myths, especially their myths, are the very mark of this indigence and innate depravity. This is why we should place DDT, which destroys parasites, carriers of disease, on the same level as Christianity, which roots out heresy, natural impulses, and evil. The decline of yellow fever and the advances made by evangelizing form part of the same balance sheet. But triumphant reports by the missions in fact tell us how deep the seeds of alienation have been sown among the colonized. I am talking of Christianity and this should come as no surprise to anybody. The Church in the colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor. And as we know, in this story many are called but few are chosen.

Sometimes this Manichaeanism reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonized subject. In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal. And consequently, when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms. Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the "native" quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething, and the gesticulations. In his endeavors at description and finding the right word, the colonist refers constantly to the bestiary. The European seldom has a problem with figures of speech. But the colonized, who immediately grasp the intention of the colonist and the exact case being made against them, know instantly what he is thinking. This explosive population growth, those hysterical masses, those blank faces, those shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort, these children who seem not to belong to anyone, this indolence sprawling under the sun, this vegetating existence, all this is part of the colonial vocabulary. General de Gaulle speaks of "yellow multitudes," and Monsieur Mauriac of the black, brown, and yellow hordes that will soon invade our shores. The colonized know all that and roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory.

As soon as the colonized begin to strain at the leash and to pose a threat to the colonist, they are assigned a series of good souls who in the "Symposiums on Culture" spell out the specificity and richness of Western values. But every time the issue of Western values crops up, the colonized grow tense and their muscles seize up. During the period of decolonization the colonized are called upon to be reasonable. They are offered rock-solid values, they are told in great detail that decolonization should not mean regression, and that they must rely on values which have proved to be reliable and worthwhile. Now it so happens that when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with such violence, the victorious confrontation of these values with the lifestyle and beliefs of the colonized is so impregnated with aggressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized rightly make a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned. In the colonial context the colonist only quits undermining the colonized once the latter have proclaimed loud and clear that white values reign supreme. In the period of decolonization the colonized masses thumb their noses at these very values, shower them with insults and vomit them up.

Such an occurrence normally goes unseen because, during decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have established a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country. During this period the indigenous population is seen as a blurred mass. The few "native" personalities whom the colonialist bourgeois have chanced to encounter have had insufficient impact to alter their current perception and nuance their thinking. During the period of liberation, however, the colonialist bourgeoisie frantically seeks contact with the colonized "elite." It is with this elite that the famous dialogue on values is established. When the colonialist bourgeoisie realizes it is impossible to maintain its domination over the colonies it decides to wage a rearguard campaign in the fields of culture, values, and technology, etc. But what we should never forget is that the immense majority of colonized peoples are impervious to such issues. For a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with "human" dignity. The colonized subject has never heard of such an ideal. All he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity; and no sermonizer on morals, no priest has ever stepped in to bear the blows in his place or share his bread. For the colonized, to be a moralist quite plainly means silencing the arrogance of the colonist, breaking his spiral of violence, in a word ejecting him outright from the picture. The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist. Taking it a step further, he is determined to fight to be more than the colonist. In fact, he has already decided to take his place. As we have seen, it is the collapse of an entire moral and material universe. The intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world. But what he does not see, because precisely colonialism and all its modes of thought have seeped into him, is that the colonist is no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared. It is no coincidence that, even before any negotiation between the Algerian government and the French government, the so-called "liberal" European minority has already made its position clear: it is clamoring for dual citizenship, nothing less. By sticking to the abstract the colonist is being forced to make a very substantial leap into the unknown. Let us be honest, the colonist knows perfectly well that no jargon is a substitute for reality.

The colonized subject thus discovers that his life, his breathing and his heartbeats are the same as the colonist's. He discovers that the skin of a colonist is not worth more than the "native's." In other words, his world receives a fundamental jolt. The colonized's revolutionary new assurance stems from this. If, in fact, my life is worth as much as the colonist's, his look can no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but I am already preparing to waylay him in such a way that soon he will have no other solution but to flee.

The colonial context, as we have said, is characterized by the dichotomy it inflicts on the world. Decolonization unifies this world by a radical decision to remove its heterogeneity, by unifying it on the grounds of nation and sometimes race. To quote the biting words of Senegalese patriots on the maneuvers of their president, Senghor: "We asked for the Africanization of the top jobs and all Senghor does is Africanize the Europeans." Meaning that the colonized can see right away if decolonization is taking place or not: The minimum demand is that the last become the first.

But the colonized intellectual introduces a variation on this demand and in fact, there seems to be no lack of motivation to fill senior positions as administrators, technicians, and experts. The colonized, however, equate this nepotism with acts of sabotage and it is not unusual to hear them declare: "What is the point of being independent then . . .?"

Wherever an authentic liberation struggle has been fought, wherever the blood of the people has been shed and the armed phase has lasted long enough to encourage the intellectuals to withdraw to their rank and file base, there is an effective eradication of the superstructure borrowed by these intellectuals from the colonialist bourgeois circles. In its narcissistic monologue the colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized that the essential values-meaning Western values-remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man. The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal. But during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized intellectual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to smithereens. All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words. Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged.

And first among them is individualism. The colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. The colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought. But the colonized intellectual who is lucky enough to bunker down with the people during the liberation struggle, will soon discover the falsity of this theory. Involvement in the organization of the struggle will already introduce him to a different vocabulary. "Brother," "sister," "comrade" are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie because in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my scheming. In a kind of auto-da-fé, the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word. This colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people's commissions and the extraordinary productiveness of neighborhood and section committee meetings. Personal interests are now the collective interest because in reality everyone will be discovered by the French legionnaires and consequently massacred or else everyone will be saved. In such a context, the "every man for himself" concept, the atheist's form of salvation, is prohibited.

Self-criticism has been much talked about recently, but few realize that it was first of all an African institution. Whether it be in the djemaas of North Africa or the palavers of West Africa, tradition has it that disputes which break out in a village are worked out in public. By this I mean collective self-criticism with a touch of humor because everyone is relaxed, because in the end we all want the same thing. The intellectual sheds all that calculating, all those strange silences, those ulterior motives, that devious thinking and secrecy as he gradually plunges deeper among the people. In this respect then we can genuinely say that the community has already triumphed and exudes its own light, its own reason.

But when decolonization occurs in regions where the liberation struggle has not yet made its impact sufficiently felt, here are the same smart alecks, the sly, shrewd intellectuals whose behavior and ways of thinking, picked up from their rubbing shoulders with the colonialist bourgeoisie, have remained intact. Spoiled children of yesterday's colonialism and today's governing powers, they oversee the looting of the few national resources. Ruthless in their scheming and legal pilfering they use the poverty, now nationwide, to work their way to the top through import-export holdings, limited companies, playing the stock market, and nepotism. They insist on the nationalization of business transactions, i.e., reserving contracts and business deals for nationals. Their doctrine is to proclaim the absolute need for nationalizing the theft of the nation. In this barren, national phase, in this so-called period of austerity, their success at plundering the nation swiftly sparks anger and violence from the people. In the present international and African context, the poverty-stricken and independent population achieves a social consciousness at a rapidly accelerating pace. This, the petty individualists will soon find out for themselves.

In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has had to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being.

During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle-the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution.

Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective working model.

The question of truth must also be taken into consideration. For the people, only fellow nationals are ever owed the truth. No absolute truth, no discourse on the transparency of the soul can erode this position. In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie. Behavior toward fellow nationalists is open and honest, but strained and indecipherable toward the colonists. Truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime, what fosters the emergence of the nation. Truth is what protects the "natives' and undoes the foreigners. In the colonial context there is no truthful behavior. And good is quite simply what hurts them most.

We have seen therefore that the Manichaeanism that first governed colonial society is maintained intact during the period of decolonization. In fact the colonist never ceases to be the enemy, the antagonist, in plain words public enemy number 1. The oppressor, ensconced in his sector, creates the spiral, the spiral of domination, exploitation and looting. In the other sector, the colonized subject lies coiled and robbed, and fuels as best he can the spiral which moves seamlessly from the shores of the colony to the palaces and docks of the metropolis. In this petrified zone, not a ripple on the surface, the palm trees sway against the clouds, the waves of the sea lap against the shore, the raw materials come and go, legitimating the colonist's presence, while more dead than alive the colonized subject crouches for ever in the same old dream. The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning: "We made this land." He is the guarantor for its existence: "If we leave, all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages." Opposite him, listless beings wasted away by fevers and consumed by "ancestral customs" compose a virtually petrified background to the innovative dynamism of colonial mercantilism.

The colonist makes history and he knows it. And because he refers constantly to the history of his metropolis, he plainly indicates that here he is the extension of this metropolis. The history he writes is therefore not the history of the country he is despoiling, but the history of his own nation's looting, raping, and starving to death. The immobility to which the colonized subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonization and the history of despoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization.

A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip. That is the colonial world. The colonial subject is a man penned in; apartheid is but one method of compartmentalizing the colonial world. The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing. I dream I burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning.

The colonized subject will first train this aggressiveness sedimented in his muscles against his own people. This is the period when black turns on black, and police officers and magistrates don't know which way to turn when faced with the surprising surge of North African criminality. We shall see later what should be made of this phenomenon.2 Confronted with the colonial order the colonized subject is in a permanent state of tension. The colonist's world is a hostile world, a world which excludes yet at the same time incites envy. We have seen how the colonized always dream of taking the colonist's place. Not of becoming a colonist, but of replacing him. This hostile, oppressive and aggressive world, bulldozing the colonized masses, represents not only the hell they would like to escape as quickly as possible but a paradise within arm's reach guarded by ferocious watchdogs.

The colonized subject is constantly on his guard: Confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles. But deep down the colonized subject acknowledges no authority. He is dominated but not domesticated. He is made to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of his inferiority. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and then jumps on him. The muscles of the colonized are always tensed. It is not that he is anxious or terrorized, but he is always ready to change his role as game for that of hunter. The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor. The symbols of society such as the police force, bugle calls in the barracks, military parades, and the flag flying aloft, serve not only as inhibitors but also as stimulants. They do not signify: "Stay where you are." But rather "Get ready to do the right thing." And in fact if ever the colonized subject begins to doze off or forget, the colonist's arrogance and preoccupation with testing the solidity of the colonial system will remind him on so many occasions that the great showdown cannot be postponed indefinitely. This impulse to take the colonist's place maintains a constant muscular tonus. It is a known fact that under certain emotional circumstances an obstacle actually escalates action.

The relationship between colonist and colonized is one of physical mass. Against the greater number the colonist pits his force. The colonist is an exhibitionist. His safety concerns lead him to remind the colonized out loud: "Here I am the master." The colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over. The colonized are caught in the tightly knit web of colonialism. But we have seen how on the inside the colonist achieves only a pseudo-petrification. The muscular tension of the colonized periodically erupts into bloody fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals.

At the individual level we witness a genuine negation of common sense. Whereas the colonist or police officer can beat the colonized subject day in and day out, insult him and shove him to his knees, it is not uncommon to see the colonized subject draw his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from another colonized subject. For the colonized subject's last resort is to defend his personality against his fellow countryman. Internecine feuds merely perpetuate age-old grudges entrenched in memory. By throwing himself muscle and soul into his blood feuds, the colonized subject endeavors to convince himself that colonialism has never existed, that everything is as it used to be and history marches on. Here we grasp the full significance of the all too familiar "head-in-the-sand" behavior at a collective level, as if this collective immersion in a fratricidal bloodbath suffices to mask the obstacle and postpone the inevitable alternative, the inevitable emergence of the armed struggle against colonialism. So one of the ways the colonized subject releases his muscular tension is through the very real collective self-destruction of these internecine feuds. Such behavior represents a death wish in the face of danger, a suicidal conduct which reinforces the colonist's existence and domination and reassures him that such men are not rational. The colonized subject also manages to lose sight of the colonist through religion. Fatalism relieves the oppressor of all responsibility since the cause of wrong-doing, poverty, and the inevitable can be attributed to God. The individual thus accepts the devastation decreed by God, grovels in front of the colonist, bows to the hand of fate, and mentally readjusts to acquire the serenity of stone.

In the meantime, however, life goes on and the colonized subject draws on the terrifying myths that are so prolific in underdeveloped societies as inhibitions for his aggressiveness: malevolent spirits who emerge every time you put one foot wrong, leopard men, snake men, six-legged dogs, zombies, a whole never-ending gamut of animalcules or giants that encircle the colonized with a realm of taboos, barriers, and inhibitions far more terrifying than the colonialist world. This magical superstructure that permeates the indigenous society has a very precise function in the way the libido works. One of the characteristics, in fact, of underdeveloped societies is that the libido is primarily a matter for the group and family. Anthropologists have amply described societies where the man who dreams he has sexual intercourse with a woman other than his own must publicly confess his dream and pay the penalty in kind or in several days' work to the husband or the injured family party-which proves, by the way, that so-called prehistorical societies attach great importance to the unconscious.

In scaring me, the atmosphere of myths and magic operates like an undeniable reality. In terrifying me, it incorporates me into the traditions and history of my land and ethnic group, but at the same time I am reassured and granted a civil status, an identification. The secret sphere in underdeveloped countries is a collective sphere that falls exclusively within the realm of magic. By entangling me in this inextricable web where gestures are repeated with a secular limpidity, my very own world, our very own world, thus perpetuates itself. Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists. And the problem now is not whether to fall in line with the armor-plated world of colonialism, but to think twice before urinating, spitting, or going out in the dark.

The magical, supernatural powers prove to be surprisingly ego boosting. The colonist's powers are infinitely shrunk, stamped by foreignness. There is no real reason to fight them because what really matters is that the mythical structures contain far more terrifying adversaries. It is evident that everything is reduced to a permanent confrontation at the level of phantasy.

In the liberation struggle, however, this people who were once relegated to the realm of the imagination, victims of unspeakable terrors, but content to lose themselves in hallucinatory dreams, are thrown into disarray, re-form, and amid blood and tears give birth to very real and urgent issues. Giving food to the mujahideen, stationing lookouts, helping deprived families and taking over from the slain or imprisoned husband-such are the practical tasks the people are asked to undertake in the liberation struggle.

In the colonial world, the colonized's affectivity is kept on edge like a running sore flinching from a caustic agent. And the psyche retracts, is obliterated, and finds an outlet through muscular spasms that have caused many an expert to classify the colonized as hysterical. This overexcited affectivity, spied on by invisible guardians who constantly communicate with the core of the personality, takes an erotic delight in the muscular deflation of the crisis.

Another aspect of the colonized's affectivity can be seen when it is drained of energy by the ecstasy of dance. Any study of the colonial world therefore must include an understanding of the phenomena of dance and possession. The colonized's way of relaxing is precisely this muscular orgy during which the most brutal aggressiveness and impulsive violence are channeled, transformed, and spirited away. The dance circle is a permissive circle. It protects and empowers. At a fixed time and a fixed date men and women assemble in a given place, and under the solemn gaze of the tribe launch themselves into a seemingly disarticulated, but in fact extremely ritualized, pantomime where the exorcism, liberation, and expression of a community are grandiosely and spontaneously played out through shaking of the head, and back and forward thrusts of the body. Everything is permitted in the dance circle. The hillock, which has been climbed as if to get closer to the moon, the river bank, which has been descended whenever the dance symbolizes ablution, washing, and purification, are sacred places. Everything is permitted, for in fact the sole purpose of the gathering is to let the supercharged libido and the stifled aggressiveness spew out volcanically. Symbolic killings, figurative cavalcades, and imagined multiple murders, everything has to come out. The ill humors seep out, tumultuous as lava flows.

One step further and we find ourselves in deep possession. In actual fact, these are organized seances of possession and dispossession: vampirism, possession by djinns, by zombies, and by Legba, the illustrious god of voodoo. Such a disintegration, dissolution or splitting of the personality, plays a key regulating role in ensuring the stability of the colonized world. On the way there these men and women were stamping impatiently, their nerves "on edge." On the way back, the village returns to serenity, peace, and stillness.

During the struggle for liberation there is a singular loss of interest in these rituals. With his back to the wall, the knife at his throat, or to be more exact the electrode on his genitals, the colonized subject is bound to stop telling stories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Wretched of the Earth | Grove Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chapter One
The Black Man and Language

We attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man's dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.

The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking. Nobody dreams of challenging the fact that its principal inspiration is nurtured by the core of theories which represent the black man as the missing link in the slow evolution from ape to man. These are objective facts that state reality.

But once we have taken note of the situation, once we have understood it, we consider the job done. How can we possibly not hear that voice again tumbling down the steps of History: "It's no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it."

This question is terribly present in our lives.

To speak means being able to use a certain syntax and possessing the morphology of such and such a language, but it means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization.

Since the situation is not one-sided, the study should reflect this. We would very much like to be given credit for certain points that, however unacceptable they may appear early on, will prove to be factually accurate.

The problem we shall tackle in this chapter is as follows: the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets-i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being. We are fully aware that this is one of man's attitudes faced with Being. A man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language. You can see what we are driving at: there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language. Paul Val"ry knew this, and described language as "The god gone astray in the flesh."

In a work in progress we propose to study this phenomenon. For the time being we would like to demonstrate why the black Antillean, whoever he is, always has to justify his stance in relation to language. Going one step farther, we shall enlarge the scope of our description to include every colonized subject.

All colonized people-in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave-position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become. In the colonial army, and particularly in the regiments of Senegalese soldiers, the "native" officers are mainly interpreters. They serve to convey to their fellow soldiers the master's orders, and they themselves enjoy a certain status.

There is the town, there is the country. There is the capital, there are the provinces. Apparently, the problem is the same. Take an inhabitant of Lyon in Paris. He will boast of how calm his city is, how bewitchingly beautiful are the banks of the Rhône, how magnificent are the plane trees, and so many other things that people with nothing to do like to go on about. If you meet him on his return from Paris, and especially if you've never been to the capital, he'll never stop singing its praises: Paris, City of Light; the Seine; the riverside dance cafés; see Paris and die.

The same process repeats itself in the case of the Martinican. First, there is his island: Basse Pointe, Marigot, Gros Morne, in opposition to the imposing city of Fort-de-France. Then-and this is the essential point-there is what lies beyond his island. The black man who has been to the métropole is a demigod. On this subject I shall indicate a fact that must have struck my fellow islanders. After a fairly long stay in the métropole, many Antilleans return home to be deified. The native islander who has never left his hole, the country bumpkin, adopts a most eloquent form of ambivalence toward them. The black man who has lived in France for a certain time returns home radically transformed. Genetically speaking, his phenotype undergoes an absolute, definitive mutation. Even before he leaves one senses from his almost aerial way of walking that new forces have been set in motion. When he meets a friend or colleague, gone is the expansive bear hug; instead our "future" candidate bows discreetly. The usually raucous voice gives way to a hushed murmur. For he knows that over there in France he will be stuck with a stereotype in Le Havre or Marseille: "I'm fwom Matinique; this is my vewy furst visit to Fwance"; he knows that what the poets call "divine cooing" (meaning Creole) is but a term midway between Creole and French. In the French Antilles the bourgeoisie does not use Creole, except when speaking to servants. At school the young Martinican is taught to treat the dialect with contempt. Avoid Creolisms. Some families forbid speaking Creole at home, and mothers call their children little ragamuffins for using it.

My mother wanted a memorandum sonIf you don't learn your history lessonYou'll not go to Sunday massIn your Sunday bestThis child will be the shame of usThis child will be our God damn itShut up I told you you have to speak FrenchThe French from FranceThe Frenchman's FrenchFrench French.

Yes I must watch my diction because that's how they'll judge me. He can't even speak French properly, they'll say with the utmost contempt.

Among a group of young Antilleans, he who can express himself, who masters the language, is the one to look out for: be wary of him; he's almost white. In France they say "to speak like a book." In Martinique they say "to speak like a white man."

The black man entering France reacts against the myth of the Martinican who swallows his r's. He'll go to work on it and enter into open conflict with it. He will make every effort not only to roll his r's, but also to make them stand out. On the lookout for the slightest reaction of others, listening to himself speak and not trusting his own tongue, an unfortunately lazy organ, he will lock himself in his room and read for hours-desperately working on his diction.

Recently, a friend told us this story. On arrival in Le Havre a Martinican goes into a café and calls out with great assurance: "Waiterrrr? Bwing me a dwink of beerrrr!" This is a case of genuine intoxication. Anxious not to correspond to the black man who swallows his r's, he makes use of a great many of them but doesn't know how to divide them out.

There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in believing the world will open up as borders are broken down. The black Antillean, prisoner on his island, lost in an atmosphere without the slightest prospect, feels the call of Europe like a breath of fresh air. For we must admit that Césaire was overly generous in his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. The city of Fort-de-France is truly lackluster and shipwrecked. Over there on the slopes of the sun is "the city-flat, sprawled, tripped up by its common sense, inert, winded under the geometric weight of its eternally renewed cross, at odds with its fate, mute, baffled, unable to circulate the pith of this ground, embarrassed, lopped, reduced, cut off from fauna and flora."

Césaire's description has nothing poetical about it. It is easy to understand therefore why the black man, on the announcement of his entry into France (as is said of someone entering "high society"), is overjoyed and decides to change. Moreover, there is nothing thematic about this change that is structural and independent of any introspection. In the United States, Pearce and Williamson have conducted an experiment called the Peckham experiment. The authors have proved that there is a biochemical modification in a married couple, and apparently they have detected in the husband certain hormones of his pregnant wife. It would be interesting (and there will always be somebody willing) to make a study of the black man's humoral mutation on entering France. Or simply study his psyche before he leaves and then one month after settling in France.

There is a dramatic conflict in what is commonly called the human sciences. Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections, or should we not rather make a constant, solid endeavor to understand man in an ever-changing light?

When we read that a man loses his affective faculties starting at the age of twenty-nine and he has to wait until he is forty-nine to regain them, we feel the ground give way beneath our feet. Our only hope of getting out of the situation is to pose the problem correctly, for all these findings and all this research have a single aim: to get man to admit he is nothing, absolutely nothing-and get him to eradicate this narcissism whereby he thinks he is different from the other "animals."

This is nothing more nor less than the capitulation of man.

All in all, I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I reject the vileness of those who want to turn man into a machine. If the debate cannot be opened up on a philosophical level-i.e., the fundamental demands of human reality-I agree to place it on a psychoanalytical level: in other words, the "misfires," just as we talk about an engine misfiring.

The black man entering France changes because for him the métropole is the holy of holies; he changes not only because that's where his knowledge of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire comes from, but also because that's where his doctors, his departmental superiors, and innumerable little potentates come from-from the staff sergeant "fifteen years on the job" to the gendarme from Panissiéres. There is a kind of spell cast from afar, and the black man who leaves in one week for the métropole creates an aura of magic around him where the words Paris, Marseille, the Sorbonne, and Pigalle represent the high points. On departure, the amputation of his being vanishes as the ocean liner comes into view. He can read the authority and mutation he has acquired in the eyes of those accompanying him to the ship: "Adieu madras, adieu foulard."

Now that we have accompanied him to the port, let him sail away, and we'll come back to him later on. Let us now go and meet one of those who have returned home. The new returnee, as soon as he sets foot on the island, asserts himself; he answers only in French and often no longer understands Creole. A folktale provides us with an illustration of this. After having spent several months in France a young farmer returns home. On seeing a plow, he asks his father, an old don't-pull-that-kind-of-thing-on-me peasant: "What's that thing called?" By way of an answer his father drops the plow on his foot, and his amnesia vanishes. Awesome therapy.

So here is our new returnee. He can no longer understand Creole; he talks of the Opera House, which he has probably seen only from a distance; but most of all he assumes a critical attitude toward his fellow islanders. He reacts differently at the slightest pretext. He knows everything. He proves himself through his language. On the Savanna in Fort-de-France, a meeting place for young people, the new returnee is given the floor for a purpose.

As soon as school's out, they all gather on the Savanna. Imagine a square 600 feet long and 120 feet wide, lined by worm-eaten tamarind trees down each side; at the top the huge war memorial, acknowledging the mother country's gratitude to her children; and at the bottom the Central Hotel-a square twisted with uneven paving stones and gravel that crunches underfoot, and walking up and down in it 300 or 400 young people, greeting one another, making contact, no, never making contact, then walking on.

"Hi, how's it going?"

"Hi, how's it going?"

"Hi, how's it going?"

And that's been going on for fifty years. Yes, this town is a lamentable shipwreck. This life too.

They meet and talk. And the new returnee is quickly given the floor because they are waiting for him. First of all regarding form: the slightest mistake is seized upon, scrutinized, and in less than forty-eight hours it will be all over Fort-de-France. There is no forgiving the Martinican flaunting his superiority for failing his duty. Let him say, for instance: "I did not have the good fortune, when in France, of seeing gendarmes on horses' backs," and he is lost. His only choice is either to get rid of his Parisian affectation or to die of ridicule. For people will never forget; once married, his wife will realize she has married a joke, and his children will have to deal with and live down the tale.

Where does this change of personality come from? What can this new way of being be ascribed to? Any idiom is a way of thinking, Damourette and Pichon said. And the fact that the newly returned Martinican adopts a language different from that of the community in which he was born is evidence of a shift and a split. Professor Westermann writes in The African Today that the feeling of inferiority by Blacks is especially evident in the educated black man who is constantly trying to overcome it. The method used, Westermann adds, is often naive: "The wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style; using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning the native language with European expressions; using bombastic phrases in speaking or writing a European language; all these contribute to a feeling of equality with the European and his achievements."

By referring to other research and our personal observations, we would like to try to show why the black man posits himself in such a characteristic way with regard to European languages. We recall once again that our findings are valid for the French Antilles; we are well aware, however, that this same behavior can be found in any race subjected to colonization.

We have known, and unfortunately still know, comrades from Dahomey or the Congo who say they are Antillean; we have known, and still know, Antilleans who get annoyed at being taken for Senegalese. It's because the Antillean is more "évolué" than the African-meaning he is closer to the white man-and this difference exists not only on the street or along the boulevard, but also in the administration and the army. Any Antillean who has done military service in a colonial regiment of infantry is familiar with this distressing situation: on one side, the Europeans and the French Antilleans; and on the other, the Africans. I can remember once when in the heat of action a nest of enemy machine guns had to be wiped out. Three times the Senegalese were ordered out and three times they were forced back. Then one of the Senegalese asked why the toubabs didn't go. In such moments we no longer knew whether we were toubabs or "natives." For many Antilleans, however, the situation was by no mean distressing, but on the contrary quite normal. That would be the last straw, to put us with the niggers! The European despises the African, and the Antillean lords it as uncontested master over this black rabble. An extreme example, but nevertheless amusing, is the following: I was recently talking with a Martinican who was incensed that certain Guadeloupeans were passing for Martinican. But, he added, the mistake was rapidly detected; they are more savage than we are-meaning once again that they are farther removed from the white man. It is said that the black man likes to palaver, and whenever I pronounce the word "palaver" I see a group of boisterous children raucously and blandly calling out to the world: children at play insofar as playing can be seen as an initiation to life. The black man likes to palaver, and it is only a short step to a new theory that the black man is just a child. Psychoanalysts have a field day, and the word "orality" is soon pronounced.

But we have to look further. We cannot hope to cover the fundamental question of language here in its entirety. The remarkable research by Piaget has taught us to distinguish stages in its emergence, and the studies by Gelb and Goldstein have demonstrated that the function of language operates by steps and degrees. Here we are interested in the black man confronted by the French language. We would like to understand why the Antillean is so fond of speaking good French.

In his introduction to the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache Jean-Paul Sartre tells us that the black poet will turn against the French language, but this will not be the case for the Antilleans. In this respect I agree, moreover, with Michel Leiris, who recently wrote on the subject of Creole: "Still very much a popular language which everyone can speak more or less, except for the illiterate who speak it exclusively, Creole seems destined sooner or later to become a relic of the past, once education (however slow its progress, delayed by the too few schools, the shortage of public libraries, and the very low standard of living) is widely accessible to the underprivileged sectors of the population." And, adds the author: "For the poets I'm talking about here it's not a question of their turning themselves into "Antilleans"-along the lines of the picturesque Provençal model-by borrowing a language that, moreover, is devoid of any external influence, whatever might be its intrinsic qualities, but a question of asserting their personal integrity faced with Whites who are steeped in the worst racial prejudice and whose arrogance clearly proves to be unfounded."

There may be one Gilbert Gratiant writing in Creole, but admittedly he is a rare case. Besides, the poetic worth of such writing leaves much to be desired. On the other hand, great works have been translated from the Wolof and Fulani, and we have been reading Cheikh Anta Diop's linguistic research with great interest.

There is nothing comparable in the French Antilles. The official language is French; elementary-school teachers keep a close eye on their pupils to make sure they are not speaking Creole. We will not go into the reasons why. The problem perhaps lies in the fact that in the Antilles, as in Brittany, there is a dialect and there is the French language. But that can't be right, because the Bretons do not consider themselves inferior to the French. The Bretons were never civilized by the Whites.

By refusing to multiply elements we run the risk of not staying in focus. It is important, however, to tell the black man that an attitude of open rupture has never saved anybody; and although it is true that I must free myself from my strangler because I cannot breathe, nevertheless it is unhealthy to graft a psychological element (the impossibility of expanding) onto a physiological base (the physical difficulty of breathing).

What does this mean? Quite simply this: when an Antillean with a degree in philosophy says he is not sitting for the agrégation because of his color, my response is that philosophy never saved anybody. When another desperately tries to prove to me that the black man is as intelligent as any white man, my response is that neither did intelligence save anybody, for if equality among men is proclaimed in the name of intelligence and philosophy, it is also true that these concepts have been used to justify the extermination of man.

Before continuing I believe it necessary to say one or two things. I am speaking here on the one hand of alienated (mystified) Blacks, and on the other of no less alienated (mystifying and mystified) Whites. Although only Sartre and Cardinal Verdier have said that the scandal of the black question has gone on far too long, we must conclude that their attitude is right. We too could give multiple references and quotations showing that "color prejudice" is indeed an idiocy and an iniquity that must be eradicated.

Sartre begins his Black Orpheus thus: "What would you expect to find when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed? That they would thunder your praise? When these heads that our fathers have forced to the very ground are risen, do you expect to read adoration in their eyes?" All I know is that anyone who tries to read in my eyes anything but a perpetual questioning won't see a thing-neither gratitude nor hatred. And if I utter a great shout, it won't be black. No, from the point of view adopted here, there is no black problem. Or at least if there is one, the Whites are only accidentally interested. Our history takes place in obscurity and the sun I carry with me must lighten every corner.

Dr. H. L. Gordon, physician at the Mathari psychiatric hospital in Nairobi, writes in an article in the East African Medical Journal: "A highly technical skilled examination of a series of 100 brains of normal natives has found naked eye and microscopic facts indicative of inherent new brain inferiority."

"Quantitatively," he adds, "the inferiority amounts to 14.8 percent."

We have said that the black man was the missing link between the ape and man-the white man, of course-and only on page 108 of his book does Sir Alan Burns come to the conclusion, "We are unable to accept as scientifically proven the theory that the black man is inherently inferior to the white, or that he comes from a different stock." Let us add it would be easy to prove the absurdity of such statements as: "The Bible says that the black and white races shall be separated in Heaven as they are on earth, and the natives admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven will find themselves separated to certain of our Father's mansions mentioned in the New Testament." Or else: "We are the chosen people; look at the color of our skin; others are black or yellow because of their sins."

By appealing, therefore, to our humanity-to our feelings of dignity, love, and charity-it would be easy to prove and have acknowledged that the black man is equal to the white man. But that is not our purpose. What we are striving for is to liberate the black man from the arsenal of complexes that germinated in a colonial situation. Monsieur Achille, a teacher at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, cited a personal experience during his lecture. It is a universally familiar experience. Few black people living in France have not experienced it. As a Roman Catholic, he took part in a pilgrimage. Seeing a black face among his flock, the priest asked him: "Why you left big savanna and why you come with us?" Achille answered most politely, and in this story it wasn't the young deserter of the savanna who was the most embarrassed. Everyone laughed at the exchange and the pilgrimage continued. But if we stop to reflect, we realize that the priest's usage of pidgin calls for several remarks.

1. "I know black people; you have to talk to them kindly, talk to them about their country; knowing how to talk to them, that's the key. Now here's what you have to do . . ." This is no exaggeration. A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and coddling. It's not just one white person we have observed, but hundreds; and our observations were not limited to one category; insisting on a fundamentally objective attitude, we studied such behavior in physicians, police officers, and foremen on work sites. People will tell us, forgetting our aim, that we could have focused our attention elsewhere, and that there are Whites who do not fit our description.

Our answer to these objections is that here we are picking holes with the mystified, the mystifiers, or the alienated, and that if there are Whites who interact sanely with Blacks, those are precisely the cases that will not be taken into account. It's not because my patient's liver is functioning normally that his kidneys are healthy. Since his liver is found to be working normally, it's only normal for me to leave it at that and turn my attention to the kidneys. In other words, alongside normal people behaving rationally according to human psychology, there are those who behave pathologically according to an inhuman psychology. And it so happens that the existence of such a type of person has determined a number of realities that we would like to help eliminate in this study.

Speaking to black people in this way is an attempt to reach down to them, to make them feel at ease, to make oneself understood and reassure them.

Consulting physicians know this. Twenty European patients come and go: "Please have a seat. Now what's the trouble? What can I do for you today?"

In comes a black man or an Arab: "Sit down, old fellow. Not feeling well? Where's it hurting?" When it's not: "You not good?"

2. To speak gobbledygook to a black man is insulting, for it means he is the gook. Yet, we'll be told, there is no intention to willfully give offense. OK, but it is precisely this absence of will-this offhand manner; this casualness; and the ease with which they classify him, imprison him at an uncivilized and primitive level-that is insulting.

If the person who speaks to a man of color or an Arab in pidgin does not see that there is a flaw or a defect in his behavior, then he has never paused to reflect. At a personal level, during certain consultations, I have felt myself lapsing.

In the company of this seventy-three-year-old peasant afflicted with senile dementia I suddenly feel I am losing my touch. The very fact of adopting a language suitable for dementia and the mentally retarded, the fact of "leaning over" to address this poor seventy-three-year-old woman, the fact of my reaching down to her for a diagnosis are the signs of a weakening in my relations with other people.

He's an idealist, they'll say. Not at all; it's the others who are the scumbags. I always make a point of speaking to the "towelheads" in correct French and I have always been understood. They answer as best they can, but I refuse to indulge in any form of paternalism.

"Hey, no feel good? Show me! Belly pain? Heart hurting?" Said in that accent that the hospital interns know all too well.

They have a clear conscience when the answer comes back along the same lines. "You see, I told you so. That's how they are."

In the opposite case, you need to retract your pseudopodia and behave like a man. The entire foundation collapses. A black man who says: "I object, sir, to you calling me 'my old fellow.'" Now there's something new.

But we can go even lower. You're sitting in a café in Rouen or Strasbourg and you have the misfortune to be spotted by an old drunk. He makes a beeline for your table: "You African? Dakar, Rufisque, whorehouse, women, coffee, mangoes, bananas . . ." You get up and leave; you are greeted with a hail of insults: "You didn't play big shot like that in your jungle, filthy nigger!"

Mr. Mannoni has described what he calls the Prospero complex. We shall return later to these findings that will allow us to understand the psychology of colonialism. But it is already safe to say that to speak pidgin means: "You, stay where you are."

When I meet a German or a Russian speaking bad French I try to indicate through gestures the information he is asking for, but in doing so I am careful not to forget that he has a language of his own, a country, and that perhaps he is a lawyer or an engineer back home. Whatever the case, he is a foreigner with different standards.

There is nothing comparable when it comes to the black man. He has no culture, no civilization, and no "long historical past."

Perhaps that is why today's Blacks want desperately to prove to the white world the existence of a black civilization.

Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him. Look at children's comic books: all the Blacks are mouthing the ritual "Yes, boss." In films the situation is even more acute. Most of the American films dubbed in French reproduce the grinning stereotype Y a bon Banania. In one of these recent films, Steel Sharks, there is a black guy on a submarine speaking the most downright classic dialect imaginable. Furthermore, he is a true nigger, walking behind the quartermaster, trembling at the latter's slightest fit of anger, and is killed in the end. I am convinced, however, that in the original version he did not have this way of expressing himself. And even if he did I can't see why in a democratic France, where 60 million citizens are colored, anyone would dub the same idiocies from America. The reason is that the black man has to be portrayed in a certain way, and the same stereotype can be found from the black man in Sans pitié-"Me work hard, me never lie, me never steal"-to the servant in Duel in the Sun.

All they ask of the black man is to be a good nigger; the rest will follow on its own. Making him speak pidgin is tying him to an image, snaring him, imprisoning him as the eternal victim of his own essence, of a visible appearance for which he is not responsible. And of course, just as the Jew who is lavish with his money is suspect, so the black man who quotes Montesquieu must be watched. Let me make myself clear: "watched" insofar as he might start something. I do not contend that the black student is suspect to his peers or his professors. But outside university circles there is an army of fools. It is a question not of educating them but of teaching the black man not to be a slave of their archetypes.

Granted, these fools are the product of a psychological-economic structure. But that does not get us anywhere.

When a black man speaks of Marx, the first reaction is the following: "We educated you and now you are turning against your benefactors. Ungrateful wretches! You'll always be a disappointment." And then there's that sledgehammer argument from the plantation owners in Africa: our enemy is the elementary-school teacher.

The fact is that the European has a set idea of the black man, and there is nothing more exasperating than to hear: "How long have you lived in France? You speak such good French."

It could be argued that this is due to the fact that a lot of black people speak pidgin. But that would be too easy. You're traveling by train and ask:

"Excuse me, could you please tell me where the restaurant car is?"

"Yes, sonny boy, you go corridor, you go straight, go one car, go two car, go three car, you there."

Let's be serious. Speaking pidgin means imprisoning the black man and perpetuating a conflictual situation where the white man infects the black man with extremely toxic foreign bodies. There is nothing more sensational than a black man speaking correctly, for he is appropriating the white world. I often have conversations with foreign students. They speak French badly. Little Robinson Crusoe, alias Prospero, is in his element. He explains, informs, comments, and helps them with their studies. But with the black man, he is utterly stupefied; the black man has put himself on an equal footing; the game is no longer possible; he's a pure replica of the white man, who has to surrender to the facts.

After everything that has just been said, it is easy to understand why the first reaction of the black man is to say no to those who endeavor to define him. It is understandable that the black man's first action is a reaction, and since he is assessed with regard to his degree of assimilation, it is understandable too why the returning Antillean speaks only French: because he is striving to underscore the rift that has occurred. He embodies a new type of man whom he imposes on his colleagues and family. His old mother no longer understands when he speaks of her pj's, her ramshackle dump, and her lousy joint. All that embellished with the appropriate accent.

In every country in the world there are social climbers, those who think they've arrived. And opposite them there are those who keep the notion of their origins. The Antillean returning from the métropole speaks in Creole if he wants to signify that nothing has changed. It can be sensed on the docks where friends and relatives are waiting for him-waiting for him not only in the literal sense, but in the sense of waiting to catch him out. They need only one minute to make their diagnosis. If he says: "I am so happy to be back among you. Good Lord, it's so hot in this place; I'm not sure I can put up with it for long," they have been forewarned-it's a European who's come back.

In a different respect, when a group of Antillean students meet in Paris they have two options:

Either support the white world-i.e., the real world-and with the help of French be able to address certain issues and aim at a certain degree of universalism in their conclusions.

Or reject Europe, "Yo," and come together thanks to Creole by settling comfortably in what we'll call the Martinican Umwelt. By this we mean-and this goes especially for our Antillean brothers-that when one of our comrades in Paris or another university town attempts to address a problem in all seriousness he is accused of putting on airs, and the best way of disarming him is to brandish the Antilles and shift into Creole. This is one of the reasons why so many friendships fall through after a few months of life in Europe.

Since our argument is the disalienation of Blacks, we would like them to realize that every time there is a break-down in understanding among themselves faced with the white world, there is a lack of judgment.

A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for an Antillean is a case of alienation.

The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment.

As we have seen, we are not mistaken in thinking that a study of the Antillean's language can reveal several characteristics of his world. As we said at the beginning, there are mutual supports between language and the community.

To speak a language is to appropriate its world and culture. The Antillean who wants to be white will succeed, since he will have adopted the cultural tool of language. I can remember just over a year ago in Lyon, following a lecture where I had drawn a parallel between black and European poetry, a French comrade telling me enthusiastically: "Basically, you're a white man." The fact I had studied such an interesting question in the white man's language gave me my credentials.

It should be understood that historically the black man wants to speak French, since it is the key to open doors which only fifty years ago still remained closed to him. The Antillean who falls within our description goes out of his way to seek the subtleties and rarities of the language-a way of proving to himself that he is culturally adequate.11 It has been said that the Antillean orator has a power of expression which leaves the Europeans gasping. In 1945, during an electoral campaign, Aimé Césaire, who was running for parliament, was speaking at a boys' school in Fort-de-France in front of a packed auditorium. In the middle of his talk a woman fainted. The next day a colleague describing the event commented: "His French was so dynamite the woman fell to the floor and started ketching malkadi." The power of language.

A few other facts deserve closer attention-for instance, M. Charles-André Julien introducing Aimé Césaire as a "black poet with a university agrégation" or else quite simply the expression "a great black poet."

These ready-made phrases that seem to be commonsense-after all Aimé Césaire is black and a poet-contain a hidden nuance, a persisting crux. I know nothing about Jean Paulhan except that he writes interesting books. I have no idea how old Roger Caillois is; the only evidence I have of him is when his presence streaks across the sky from time to time. And let no one accuse me of affective anaphylaxis. What I mean to say is that there is no reason why Monsieur Breton should say of Césaire: "Here is a black man who handles the French language unlike any white man today."

And even if Monsieur Breton were telling the truth, I don't see where the paradox lies; I don't see why there should be any emphasis, because after all Aimé Césaire is Martinican with a university agrégation.

Let us return to Michel Leiris:

If in the Antillean writer there is a desire to break with the literary forms associated with official education, such a desire, striving toward a freer future, would not assume the appearance of folklore. Seeking above all in literature to formulate a message that is their very own and, in the case of some of them at least, to be the spokesmen of a real race with unrecognized potential, they scorn the artifice which for them, whose intellectual education has been almost exclusively French, would represent recourse to a language they could only use as a second language they have learned.

But, Blacks will retort, we should be honored that a white man such as Breton writes such things about us.

Let us move on. . . .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Skin, White Masks | Grove Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chapter One The Black Man and Language We attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man's dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe carefully and incisively models an intersectional approach to abolition grounded in feminist, queer, and crip of color critique. Moving beyond demands for inclusion and critiques of overrepresentation, Ben-Moshe makes a powerful and persuasive case for a disability studies that recognizes state violence as central to its work and the carceral industrial complex as a site for queer coalitions for racial and disability justice. In so doing, she paves the way for thinking not only disability and disability studies differently, but also liberation itself.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe carefully and incisively models an intersectional approach to abolition grounded in feminist, queer, and crip of color critique. Moving beyond demands for inclusion and critiques of overrepresentation, Ben-Moshe makes a powerful and persuasive case for a disability studies that recognizes state violence as central to its work and the carceral industrial complex as a site for queer coalitions for racial and disability justice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Camouflage from face-detection

Project page: cvdazzle.com

CV Dazzle is a type of camouflage from computer vision. It uses bold patterning to break apart the expected features targeted by computer vision algorithms.

The following is an overview of the project concepts, background, and initial tests. More technical information about reverse engineering and visualizing the vulnerabilities in computer vision algorithms will be continue to be published here.

How It Works

CV Dazzle works by altering the expected dark and light areas of a face (or object) according to the vulnerabilities of a specific computer vision algorithm. In the image above (Look #5), the design targets the Viola-Jones face detection algorithm, a popular and open source face detector that is included with the OpenCV computer vision framework.

CV Dazzle aims to introduce low-cost methods for breaking computer vision algorithms. Here, the design are created using only hair styling, makeup, and fashion accessories, which could be customized to any wearer's style.

Because computer vision is always based on probabilistic thresholds, these can be exploited by altering the key visual features to appear one step below the threshold of detection.

And since face detection is the first step in any automated facial recognition system, blocking the detection stage also blocks any subsequent facial analysis including recognition and emotional analysis. Therefore, CV Dazzle could be used to block facial recognition by blocking face detection using only hair styling and makeup.

Look Book

The first design (Look #1) was created in 2010 as a proof of concept for my masters thesis at ITP NYU. The subsequent 5 looks were created in collaboration with DIS Magazine (Looks 2-4) and for a commission for the New York Times (Looks 5-6). The goal of of these test looks was to investigate the potential for a style that was functional but still within the margins of conceptual fashion.

Evaluation

To verify the results below, the images can be tested against each of the OpenCV haarcascade profiles to demonstrate their effectiveness. Use the code below to verify the results in the table.

import cv2 as cv
im = cv . imread ( filepath )
im_gray = cv . cvtColor ( im , cv . COLOR_BGR2GRAY )
cascade = cv . data + "haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml"
classifier = cv . CascadeClassifier ( cascade )

faces = classifier . detectMultiScale (
    im_gray ,
    scaleFactor = 1.05 ,
    minNeighbors = 3 ,
    minSize = ( 50 , 50 )
)

print ( "Found {} face candidates" . format ( len ( faces ))

# Draw rectangles over faces
for ( x , y , w , h ) in faces :
    cv . rectangle ( im , ( x , y ), ( x + w , y + h ), ( 0 , 255 , 0 ), 3 )

cv . imshow ( "Result" , im )
cv . waitKey ( 0 )
cv . destroyAllWindows ()

Results for haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml, haarcascade_frontalface_alt.xml, haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml, and haarcascade_frontalface_profileface.xml:

Look #

Frontal

Alt

Alt2

Profile

Another way to visualize the effectiveness is to use a saliency (heat) map to show which areas of the facial region are missed or activated by the face detection algorithm.

The results illustrate that hair and makeup alone can be used to lower the wearer's probability below the threshold of detection for most of the OpenCV Haarcascade detection profiles. However, there are important limitations to keep in mind.

First, these looks were designed to work against the Viola-Jones Haarcascade face detector in 2D still-images in the visible light spectrum with the pretrained Haarcascade detection profiles. Other face detection algorithms including Lineary Binary Pattern (LBP), Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Covolutional Neural Networks (CNN), multi-camera 3D-based systems, and multi-spectral imaging systems would require a different strategy. These looks are solely based on the Viola-Jones Haarcacade classifiers.

Second, lighting conditions will cause the results to vary. The pose and illumination in these photos is similar to a biometric enrollment (passport style) photo. Overhead or more direct lighting will change the intensity and location of shadows which will change the detection outcome.

For the best performance a CV Dazzle look is highly specific to the situation, unique to the wearer, and never replicated.

Style Tips

1. Makeup Avoid enhancers. They amplify key facial features. This makes your face easier to detect. Instead apply makeup that contrasts with your skin tone in unusual tones and directions: light colors on dark skin, dark colors on light skin.

2. Nose Bridge Partially obscure the nose-bridge area. The region where the nose, eyes, and forehead intersect is a key facial feature. This is especially effective against OpenCV's face detection algorithm.

3. Eyes Partially obscure one or both of the ocular regions. The symmetrical position and darkness of eyes is a key facial feature.

4. Masks Avoid wearing masks as they are illegal in some cities. Instead of concealing your face, modify the contrast, tonal gradients, and spatial relationship of dark and light areas using hair, makeup, and/or unique fashion accessories.

5. Head Research from Ranran Feng and Balakrishnan Prabhakaran at University of Texas, shows that obscuring the elliptical shape of a head can also improve your ability to block face detection. Link: Facilitating fashion camouflage art. Use hair, turtlenecks, or fashion accessories to alter the expected elliptical shape.

6. Asymmetry Face detection algorithms expect symmetry between the left and right sides of the face. By developing an asymmetrical look, you can decrease your probability of being detected.

These tips apply only to the Viola-Jones haarcascade method for face detection.

Commissions

In December 2013 the New York Times commissioned a new look (Look #5) for an Op-Art feature about facial recognition.

Background

This project began in 2010 as my masters thesis at NYU ITP as a challenge to the growing power asymmetries in computer vision and, in particular, widespread facial recognition technology.

The name of the project was inspired by WWI ship camouflage called Dazzle that used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual continuity of a battleship in order to conceal its orientation and size. Similarily, CV Dazzle, short for Computer Vision Dazzle, uses bold, graphic designs that break apart the visual continuity of a face. While the end result is still visible to human observers, CV Dazzle degrades the visual comprehension of computer vision systems.

This ongoing project is motivated by a need to reclaim privacy in a world of increased visual surveillance and data collection. Computer vision poses new challenges that otherwise do not exist in human observation; it is low-cost, scalable, passive, remote, networked, and superhuman in its capabilities to recognize and understand faces, emotions, social relationships, health indicators, indentity, socio-economic status (by analyzing clothing), and even intent.

Ideally, there would be a way to appear visible to human observers but less visible to computer vision surveillance systems. This is the goal of CV Dazzle; to mitigate the risks of remote and computational visual information capture and analsyis under the guise of fashion. Since beginning this project in 2010, the concerns of a widespread facial recognition have only become more urgent and apparent and hopefully this project will continue to develop.

Last updated: 2018-03-01

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Camouflage from face-detection Project page: cvdazzle.com CV Dazzle is a type of camouflage from computer vision. It uses bold patterning to break apart the expected features targeted by computer vision algorithms. The following is an overview of the project concepts, background, and initial tests.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kimberle Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible: It is 2064. A reparations initiative that allows victims of police brutality to regenerate organs is well underway. A major new component of the initiative will be unveiled for the fiftieth anniversary of the Ferguson uprising, but the largest biobank in the country has been repeatedly hit by raiders intent on selling stem cells on the white market. Aiyana and her team of Risers have to find a way to secure the cell depository and revitalize the movement. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with speculative methods, challenge ever-present narratives of inevitability, anticipate new racial formations, and test different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible: It is 2064.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault: 9780679752554 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Civil War in the United States - International Publishers NYC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Home / All Authors / Engels, Frederick / The Civil War in the United States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Nabil Hassein

Researchers have documented the frequent inability of facial recognition software to detect Black people's faces due to programmers' use of unrepresentative data to train machine learning models. 1 This issue is not unique, but systemic; in a related example, automated passport photo validation has registered Asian people's open eyes as being closed. 2 Such technological biases have precedents in mediums older than software. For example, color photography was initially optimized for lighter skin tones at the expense of people with darker skin, a bias corrected mainly due to the efforts and funding of furniture manufacturers and chocolate sellers to render darker tones more easily visible in photographs - the better to sell their products. 3 Groups such as the Algorithmic Justice League have made it their mission to "highlight algorithmic bias" and "develop practices for accountability during the design, development, and deployment of coded systems". 4 I support all of those goals abstractly, but at a concrete level, I question whose interests would truly be served by the deployment of automated systems capable of reliably identifying Black people.

As a longtime programmer, I know first-hand that software can be an unwelcoming medium for Black folks, not only because of racism among programmers, but also because of biases built into code, which programmers can hardly avoid as no other foundations exist to build on. It's easy for me to understand a desire to rid software of these biases. Just last month, I wrote up a sketch of a proposal to decolonize the Pronouncing software library 5 I used in a simple art project to generate rhymes modeled on those of my favorite rapper. 6 So I empathized when I heard Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League speak on wearing a white mask to get her own highly imaginative "Aspire Mirror" project involving facial recognition to perceive her existence. 7 Modern technology has rendered literal Frantz Fanon's metaphor of "Black Skin, White Masks". 8

Facial recognition has diverse applications, but as a police and prison abolitionist, the enhancement of state-controlled surveillance cameras (including police body cameras) to automatically identify people looms much larger in my mind than any other use. 9 Researchers at Georgetown University found that fully half of American adults, or over 100 million people, are registered in one or another law enforcement facial recognition database, drawing from sources such as driver's license photos. 10 Baltimore Police used the technology to identify participants in the uprising following the murder of Freddie Gray. 11 The US government plans to use facial recognition to identify every airline passenger exiting the United States. 12 Machine learning researchers have even reinvented the racist pseudoscience of physiognomy, in a study claiming to identify criminals with approximately 90% accuracy based on their faces alone - using data provided by police. 13

I consider it obvious that most if not all data collected by police to serve their inherently racist mission will be severely biased. It is equally clear to me that no technology under police control will be used to hold police accountable or to benefit Black folks or other oppressed people. Even restricting our attention to machine learning in the so-called "justice" system, examples abound of technology used to harm us, such as racist predictive models used by the courts to determine bail and sentencing decisions - matters of freedom and captivity, life and death. 14 Accordingly, I have no reason to support the development or deployment of technology which makes it easier for the state to recognize and surveil members of my community. Just the opposite: by refusing to don white masks, we may be able to gain some temporary advantages by partially obscuring ourselves from the eyes of the white supremacist state. The reality for the foreseeable future is that the people who control and deploy facial recognition technology at any consequential scale will predominantly be our oppressors. Why should we desire our faces to be legible for efficient automated processing by systems of their design? We could demand instead that police be forbidden to use such unreliable surveillance technologies. Anti-racist technologists could engage in high-tech direct action by using the limited resources at our disposal to further develop extant techniques for tricking machine learning models into misclassifications, 15 or distributing anti-surveillance hardware such as glasses designed to obscure the wearer's face from cameras. 16

This analysis clearly contradicts advocacy of "diversity and inclusion" as the universal or even typical response to bias. Among the political class, "Black faces in high places" have utterly failed to produce gains for the Black masses. 17 Similarly, Black cops have shown themselves just as likely as white cops to engage in racist brutality and murder. 18 Why should the inclusion of Black folks in facial recognition, or for that matter, the racist technology industry be different? Systemic oppression cannot be addressed by a change in the complexion of the oppressor, as though a rainbow 1% and more white people crowding the prisons would mean justice. That's not the world I want to live in. We must imagine and build a future of real freedom.

All of the arguments I've presented could be (and have been) applied to many domains beyond facial recognition. I continue to grapple with what that means for my own work as a technologist and a political organizer, but I am firm already in at least two conclusions. The first is that despite every disadvantage, we must reappropriate oppressive technology for emancipatory purposes. The second is that the liberation of Black folks and all oppressed peoples will never be achieved by inclusion in systems controlled by a capitalist elite which benefits from the perpetuation of racism and related oppressions. It can only be achieved by the destruction of those systems, and the construction of new technologies designed, developed, and deployed by our own communities for our own benefit. The struggle for liberation is not a struggle for diversity and inclusion - it is a struggle for decolonization, reparations, and self-determination. We can realize those aspirations only in a socialist world.
Nabil Hassein is a software developer and organizer based in Brooklyn, NY.

1. https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/google-apologizes-for-misidentifying-a-black-couple-as-gorillas-in-photos-app/ ; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/28/joy-buolamwini-when-algorithms-are-racist-facial-recognition-bias ↩

2. Frantz Fanon: "Black Skin, White Masks".↩

3. https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-networks-think-a-panda-is-a-vulture ; https://cvdazzle.com/ ↩

4. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: "From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation", Chapter 3, "Black Faces in High Places".↩

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Against Black Inclusion in Facial Recognition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Nabil Hassein Researchers have documented the frequent inability of facial recognition software to detect Black people's faces due to programmers' use of unrepresentative data to train machine learning models.1 This issue is not unique, but systemic; in a related example, automated passport photo validation has registered Asian people's open eyes as being closed.2 Such...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"[A] provocative and superbly written account which lies within the intersection of medical and labour history. It has much of interest within it for the social historian of medicine and adds to a vibrant genre of research in the occupational and environmental health history field which is growing on both sides of the Atlantic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Publisher: Seven Stories
Binding: pb
Pages: 128
Released: January 4, 2003
ISBN-13: 9781583225813

DUE TO HIGH DEMAND, THIS BOOK IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. WE HAVE IT ON ORDER, SO IF YOU CHOOSE TO ORDER FROM US WE WILL BILL/SHIP AS IT BECOMES AVAILABLE. ASAP. #FTP
A short, impassioned, argument for abolition. Davis eloquently points out that mass incarceration has had little or no effect on crime, how disproportionate numbers of the poor and minorities end up in prison, and the obscene profits the system generates. Who needs it!
"In this extraordinary book, Angela Davis challenges us to confront the human rights catastrophe in our jails and prisons. As she so convincingly argues, the contemporary US practice of super-incarceration is closer to new age slavery that to any recognizable system of 'criminal justice'..." -Mike Davis

Join the Friends of AK Press and
automatically receive every new book
we publish!

Join Today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A short, impassioned, argument for abolition. Davis eloquently points out that mass incarceration has had little or no effect on crime, how disproportionate numbers of the poor and minorities end up in prison, and the obscene profits the system generates. Who needs it!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Franz Neumann's classic account of the governmental workings of Nazi Germany, first published in 1942, is reprinted in a new paperback edition with an introduction by the distinguished historian Peter Hayes. Neumann was one of the only early Frankfurt School thinkers to examine seriously the problem of political institutions. After the rise of the Nazis to power, his emphasis shifted to an analysis of economic power, and then after the war to political psychology. But his contributions in Behemoth were groundbreaking: that the Nazi organization of society involved the collapse of traditional ideas of the state, of ideology, of law, and even of any underlying rationality. The book must be studied, not simply read, Raul Hilberg wrote. The most experienced researchers will tell us that the scarcest commodity in academic life is an original idea. If someone has two or three, he is rich. Franz Neumann was a rich man. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Franz Neumann's classic account of the governmental workings of Nazi Germany, first published in 1942, is reprinted in a new paperback edition with an introduction by the distinguished historian Peter Hayes. Neumann was one of the only early Frankfurt School thinkers to examine seriously the problem of political institutions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2009

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates.

Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.
Translations
"Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History packs a powerful punch. Its strength lies in the development of a specific claim in the history of philosophy into a general theme concerning universality and politics."
-

"Susan Buck-Morss provides a decisive reframing of Hegel in this wonderful book. The supposed idealist becomes a hard-headed realist whose concepts are formed while reading the morning newspapers. The idea of emancipation from slavery is itself emancipated from a model of noblesse oblige to one of struggle, risk, and sacrifice on the part of the slave. This is a thoroughly brilliant scholarly work that turns Hegel upside down in a new way, revealing this time that he was always already standing on his head."
-W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago

"Few books ... contain as much fascinating material, new interpretations, intriguing possibilities and intellectual stimulation."
-Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

"A revelation, on both scholarly and performative levels... . Among the most innovative and stimulating critical assessments of the Haitian Revolution."
-New West Indian Guide
Documents and Further Reading Conclusion: The Project of Universal History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2009 In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.

In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California's economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results-a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law-pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state's commitment to prison expansion.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States.

Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Prologue: The Bus
1. Introduction
2. The California Political Economy
3. The Prison Fix
4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism
5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children
6. What Is to Be Done?
Epilogue: Another Bus

Notes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A provocative argument for the elimination of white power in the United States. The Abolition of White Democracy presents a clearly written, well-documented, history-based argument for altering the meaning of democracy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A provocative argument for the elimination of white power in the United States. The Abolition of White Democracy presents a clearly written, well-documented, history-based argument for altering the meaning of democracy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the Apple Special Event this September, CEO Tim Cook announced the company's latest device, the Apple Watch 4, to a crowd of industry insiders and reporters. Hailing it as a way to "stay connected, be more active, and live a healthier day," Cook characterized the Watch 4 as Apple's latest attempt to create technologies that are "more personal." With cell service, built in fitness trackers, and a newly added heart-rate monitor, the watch had become "an intelligent guardian for your health." Its sensors can now follow your every move (at least, anywhere that matters, anywhere with cell service) at anytime (until the 18-hour battery fails) while doing any activity (except deep-sea diving).

Unlike most recent Apple device announcements, this one hooked me. Since August, I had already been tracking my every move, calorie, cramp, and sickness using another self-tracking app, under the vague impression that tracking myself would speed along the process of becoming that most overdetermined kind of cyborg, a pregnant woman. I even had a file on my cloud drive called "Notes on Pregnancy." I intended to use it to capture the thoughts, sensations, and encounters with fertility-enhancing technologies that could not be easily tracked through the app. But my enthusiasm had already begun to wane by the time the Apple event came around.

As I watched video of the event, I wondered if the Watch could salvage and redeem my self-tracking ambitions, somehow facilitate my admittance to the cult of motherhood. Could it help me better discipline my sex life in line with my fertility? Wrangle my BMI closer to an ideal level for a woman moving briskly toward the age threshold of geriatric pregnancy? Could a wise digital guardian help me and my potential children become stronger, prettier, and healthier? Could it help me transcend the unseemly limits of my earthly flesh, to pass through a trial-by-data and come out renewed and rejuvenated on the other side?

The temptation of transcendence through technology - the possibility to overcome weaknesses of body and willpower that seem to be part of the ordinary human experience - pervades digital life. Self-tracking speaks directly to this enculturated desire for transcendence. We hope to be able to change ourselves through knowing the numbers, so we seek out more and more information about ourselves to change our futures.

But there are risks that come with seeking to exceed the embodied self through data. It requires relinquishing a great degree of control over our private activities and motivations. Complex desires and activities get broken down into fragments as they are captured and stored as data. The pieces of us can be tracked in minute detail by whoever is granted access under terms-of-service contracts. The clouds of data gathered about us by our technological add-ons quickly escape our control. Instead, they become the means by which we can be controlled.

The potential risks are especially acute for people seeking to bear children and for their offspring. Pregnancy intensifies already dense networks of surveillance. Pregnant women and new mothers are expected to adhere to a strict regimen of doctor's appointments, diet, and exercise. In the United States, they are seen as an especially prime target for advertising. As sociologist Janet Vertesi discovered in 2014, avoiding the gaze of marketers involves extensive planning for even mundane purchases and an evasiveness that can make one look like a criminal in the process. More frighteningly, the everyday surveillance of the internet has outed at least one woman's pregnancy without her consent.

The imperative to do more and be better is not only a question of the well-being of the person carrying the child. At stake (so we are told!) are concerns that are bigger than us and yet seem to depend on us: the future of the national economy and the health of the species. When pregnant people fall short, they fail not only themselves but the imagined heirs, nations, and biological kin by whom they could have done better.

So while digital self-tracking might seem to be the answer to someone like me who seeks to become a parent, using it to record evidence of all the ways that the parent might set the child up for failure could make it easier to revisit the sins of the mother upon the child. To safeguard future generations, it may be more important to guard against self-tracking's intrusion into our lives than to reap its benefits. Is the Apple Watch truly a guardian, caring for our well-being - or is it a warden, watching and waiting for us to make a misstep?

These reservations about self-tracking were on my mind as I walked into the Apple Store in downtown Brooklyn. The store juts out from one side of a new luxury high-rise, sharing the ground floor with a 365 Market, the new, budget-friendly version of Amazon-Whole Foods, and a simulation of a neighborhood food court populated by stores selling $5 loaves of bread and $10 cups of green juice. Glass walls rise to a height of several stories, bending gradually toward each other like the prow of a ship. This vessel for the future is aimed down Flatbush Avenue, the next step in central Brooklyn's gentrified future.

The store is not just a place to buy Apple products. It is also where individuals are meant to come learn how to remake themselves - their bodies, their minds, their design portfolios - for a better future, powered by Apple technology. It is an outcropping of the Californian ideology that preaches liberation through technology, transcendence through market choice, and becoming cyborg mainly as a way of becoming a better consuming citizen. We are invited in to be seduced by promises of freedom from the everyday, the material, the now. We are invited to live in the future, closer to the world of our descendants.

But what is good for the disembodied, future-oriented cyborg may not be good for the fleshy person - especially the reproducing one. While it may seem necessary and prudent to track the self to ensure good outcomes in the future, the real risk may be in handing over extensive, real-time data about oneself to a third party. The promise of transcendence relies on the faith that the outside party truly has an individual's best interests at heart. To be a responsible user of self-tracking technologies and to get the most out of them (as I have learned in my fits and starts at being a self-tracker), one must relinquish a great deal of privacy. To get the most accurate estimate of energy exerted during a run or a walk, for example, I need to allow the FitBit app on my iPhone to keep track of where I go. It knows where I live and work. I tell it how much I weigh and what I eat. I even tell it where I shop when I scan bar codes from store-brand foods to automatically look up nutritional content. While this is risky in the best of times, the potential effects of data misuse is even higher when the life of a future child is in the picture.

While Apple advertises the Watch as a caretaker, its effects are more likely in line with an overseer. Digital self-tracking tools are the latest wave of disciplinary technologies, imprisoning their users in a cage of data. This makes digital self-tracking consistent with modernity's signature strategy of social control as theorized by Michel Foucault: discipline. Foucault famously argued that a fundamental break happened in how the state approached crimes and moral transgressions beginning in the 17th century. While earlier forms of punishment relied on spectacular episodes of violent force - up to and including public executions - dealt out in the name of the sovereign king, the modern "gentle way" in social control aligned individuals to social norms not by doling out painful or deadly bodily harm as deterrents but by monitoring them.

Modern disciplinary techniques urge penitence and reform. The disciplinary state collects data about its citizens to both identify mathematical norms for society and to improve those numbers within the population as a whole through education and enforced compliance. In Foucault's reference point of mid-century France, this involved state institutions like the military, the school, the hospital, and the prison. When individuals fall short of the norms, these institutions delivered exhortations to shape up, receive more training, and work through one's deficiencies toward a better, future self.

We face similar injunctions from the contemporary equivalents of these institutions - not only schools, hospitals, and prisons but increasingly from our health insurance companies, public service agencies, and workplaces as well. While Foucault's 18th and 19th century disciplinary institutions were controlled by the state, the disciplinary apparatus has now extended into private industry and local government as well. Over time, we internalize the message of these institutions, and their demands for a better self morphs into a personal commitment to progress, a genuine desire to submit to a responsible overseer who can guide and train us.

Social scientists have imported this framework into conversations about digital self-tracking technologies. Rather than inducing submission to a nation-state, contemporary self-tracking technologies prompt compliance with the norms and assumptions built into them by medical and technical professionals: advice about how many steps to take per day, how many calories to eat, and when a person might be at the peak of fertility. The apps and devices themselves become the warden of an individual's opt-in confinement, with the data stored and owned by the company that makes them. This data is largely exempt from oversight by elected officials, and can move quickly from device and app manufacturers through third parties to marketers and advertisers. Popular business models for self-tracking tools scratch the individual's itch for self-knowledge while also providing useful data for future marketing campaigns, as digital sociologist Deborah Lupton explains.

More disturbingly, personal data is being centralized in the public sector to police, predict, and punish across generations. As Virginia Eubanks documents in Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, new technologies are being used to make predictions about the behavior of future generations based on the actions of current ones. Designers of such systems are thereby instantiating the most dystopian and literal version of social reproduction.

It seems only a matter of time before medical data from self-tracking tools becomes part of the determinative matrix in both the public and private sectors. Fitbit, for example, now has an entire division devoted to selling tracking-centric wellness programs to large employers as a way to find savings on "annual health care spend." The expansion of digital surveillance combined with the expanded use of automated decision-making tools is creating new threats to privacy and liberty for everyone. If these two regimes become fully interdigitated, a wide array of behaviors, interactions, and motivations captured in data in the past will shape the futures of individuals and communities, leaving little room for self-determination in the future.

As digital surveillance becomes embedded in our lives, we come to identify the possibility of future well-being with tracking and tinkering with our measurable behavior in the present. But the effects and affects this monitoring produces are unevenly distributed. They reinforce medical discipline for those of us who are already disproportionately surveilled, like pregnant people, as well as people of color, immigrants, women, and disabled people. They reinscribe punishment before any harm has been done for the children of people who are disproportionately intervened upon by criminal justice institutions. It seems only a matter of time before self-tracking can be used to set up future people as consumers before they are even old enough to pay for their own lunch or sign up for a credit card. By reducing behavior to numerical data, the platforms and cloud technologies behind consumer self-tracking tools provide powerful ways to link the many domains in which minute-by-minute data about what we do can be turned into data, money, and control.

In the end, I did not buy the Apple Watch, despite the initial stirrings of desire. I remembered that tracking the self is still work - of attention, of caring about the metrics, the outcomes, the future risks one is creating in the present. Buying a Watch could get more expensive than it seems, as the first purchase opens the floodgates for more invitations to buy technological consumer goods. One device could spawn the need for more devices (connected thermometers, connected scales, connected water bottles). And the data collected would most likely be crunched into new appeals to buy more and be more both for me and for my potential future children.

Although the Watch could possibly help me bring my body in line as I prepare my womb, I would rather not intensify the inevitable onslaught of baby-related advertising through sharing daily data about my activity, diet, and health status with companies who seek to monetize it in creative ways. But most important, I cannot bear to think that what I give that device today would be held against me and my lineage in the future. If I don't eat right, if I weigh too much, if I drank wine after conception, or if I don't meet prescribed quotas of daily physical activity, could such data be used by a pediatrician to place the blame of perceived deficiencies in my child back on me? Would it be a reason for a company to withhold affordable health insurance from my family? Will schools crunch my prenatal health data to track my toddler into the appropriate pre-school classroom? If the social services benefits used by a parent can already determine the relationship between a child and local welfare agencies, it seems only a matter of time before biological data is also enlisted into multigenerational systems of discipline.

In a different arrangement of society, I would be comfortable, or even excited, about tracking and storing data about my health at this (so the world tells me) critical biological juncture. If I could be confident that the sins of the mother would not and could not be visited upon the child, then perhaps. If my possible missteps today meant extra care and regard for future generations, then gladly. In a world where children were not tracked into future careers from toddlerhood, where disability was not seen as an individual failing and blamed on the poor choices of mothers, where social benefits flowed freely to those who needed them, and where the slightest deviance from bodily or social norms did not result in swift and harsh financial retribution from employers, criminal justice systems, and public agencies, then the questions I find myself asking in this essay would be entirely moot. I wish I lived in that world. But for now, this earthbound cyborg's wrist remains conspicuously bare.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the Apple Special Event this September, CEO Tim Cook announced the company's latest device, the Apple Watch 4, to a crowd of industry insiders and reporters. Hailing it as a way to "stay connected, be more active, and live a healthier day," Cook characterized the Watch 4 as Apple's latest attempt to create technologies that are "more personal."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Foreword: Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt, by Tracy B. Strong
Translator's Note to the 1996 Edition and Acknowledgments
Introduction, by George Schwab
Translator's Note to the 1976 Edition
The Concept of the Political, by Carl Schmitt
"The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations" (1929), by Carl Schmitt
Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, by Leo Strauss
Index of Names

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism's basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state-a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ISBN: 9780231171519

240 Pages

Format: Paperback

List Price: $27.00 £22.00

ISBN: 9780231171502

240 Pages

Format: Hardcover

List Price: $55.00 £46.00

ISBN: 9780231538732

240 Pages

Format: E-book

List Price: $26.99 £22.00

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being acknowledged. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice.

Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed.

Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world.

Ethical Loneliness names and explores a dynamic of loneliness that forms the experience of being a citizen for many. It's an essential frame for understanding feelings of abandonment. Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric

A timely book-rarely has the fecundity of the Continental approach to ethics been so clearly and persuasively on display. Robert Bernasconi, Penn State University

To read Ethical Loneliness is to undergo the page-turning yet profoundly uncomfortable experience of struggling to hear the fractured stories told by survivors. Jill Stauffer's voice leads us carefully and thoughtfully through an unsettling hell of testimonies, showing us how difficult it is for us to linger in the discomfort of hearing about violent injustice without rushing through the ugly parts, forgetting the hard parts, dismissing the odd parts, straightening out the chronology, watering down the anger, denying the complicity, enforcing forgiveness or victimhood, whitewashing the ending, and missing what is not said and what cannot be put into words. This book, or rather, this experience of listening, is destined to become, like Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, a classic text in the field. It is really that good. Linda Meyer, Quinnipiac University

Stauffer's book breaks through legalistic approaches to mass violence and oppression to uncover the conditions of the repair of lives and worlds in human interdependence. Her bold claims for widely diffused reparative responsibilities are built on close discussions of how together we author-or destroy-selves and worlds. Her impressive blending of contemporary events and philosophical reflection reveals the wide scope of responsibility that implicates us in the repair of others' suffering in ways we are usually glad to ignore or resist. Margaret Urban Walker, Marquette University

Our relationship to our past is shifting, multiple, and emotive. In Ethical Loneliness, Stauffer builds on this dialogic conception of the self over time to develop a communicative theory of justice as a 'reparative' mode of giving the past its due. Lucid, attentive, and nuanced, this scintillating and surprising work installs a finely filigreed protocol of listening, a duty of hearing, in the heart of law. Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law

Stauffer involves us in ways of being and of being-together that are imperative yet elusive. And while a ready resolution is neither offered nor possible, the book itself is an absorbing vade mecum. Peter Fitzpatrick, Birkbeck, University of London

Stauffer offers a profound way to think about ethics, not the ethics we want to have, that is, some above-the-fray determination of good and evil in all situations, but something far more human. Hers is an ethics based on the shared fact that the world is not safe and we do not have the assurances that we often turn to ethical systems for in the first place. Perspectives on Politics

Stauffer practices and models philosophical listening, through her leveling of traditional philosophical authority, her embrace of specialists and nonspecialists alike, her critical attention to the particular echoes of ignorance in various discourses, her embrace and reinvigoration of a wide range of philosophical sources (from literary criticism to existential phenomenology), and ultimately, her attempts to listen to victims, perpetrators, and adjudicators of harm without presupposition. Philosophy in Review

To deflate the power of law by pointing out how we have fetishized our relation to criminal justice, hoping that it could work as a magic bullet for the problem of harm, is perhaps the most important contribution of this book. . . . Repair is a collective effort which is to be renewed constantly and while the law can and should support this process, it cannot replace it. Feminist Legal Studies

A small book with immense breadth and insight into the difficulties of and harms incurred through the process of political reconciliation in the aftermath of atrocity. APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Stauffer's voice is singular, her style disarmingly direct. The text studiously refuses disciplinary conventions and idioms in order to appeal to the widest interdisciplinary audience. Law, Culture and the Humanities

A superb book. The lessons it offers on how we fail to hear others' stories of suffering are vivid and wise. No Foundations

Stauffer's argument for the fundamental importance of listening is as much about today as it is about the past. This is a must read for oral historians and everyone who thinks attentive listening matters deeply. In Context Journal

One of the most interesting philosophical works that I have read in a long time. Ethical Loneliness positions itself in the literature on justice and demands that attention be paid to those who are abandoned in and through experiences of violence, oppression, and power. Hypatia

The great contribution of Ethical Loneliness is that it challenges what it means to listen. Doing Theory

Ethical Loneliness is a book well worth the read for those interested in transitional justice, violence, memory, and theories of non-sovereign subjectivity. Stauffer is a magnificently clear and thoughtful writer with a very strong authorial voice - a rare skill that is always a pleasure to come across. Social and Legal Studies

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Ethical Loneliness
2. Repair
3. Hearing
4. Revision
5. Desert
Epilogue
Notes
Index

About the Author

Jill Stauffer is associate professor of philosophy and director of the concentration in peace, justice, and human rights at Haverford College. She is the coeditor with Bettina Bergo of Nietzsche and Levinas: "After the Death of a Certain God" (Columbia, 2008) and has published widely on issues of responsibility within and beyond legality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ethical Loneliness | Columbia University Press

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ISBN: 9780231171519 240 Pages Format: Paperback List Price: $27.00 £22.00 ISBN: 9780231171502 240 Pages Format: Hardcover List Price: $55.00 £46.00 ISBN: 9780231538732 240 Pages Format: E-book List Price: $26.99 £22.00 Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being acknowledged.

# data[].attributes.body
#blackfeminism #lgbtq

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Description

How can uncomfortable feelings that seem to prevent us from engaging in political discussion actually aid the cause of resistance to injustice and violence?

Unhappy Silences offers a strikingly innovative answer: thoughtful consideration of reactions such as shame, confusion and loneliness can liberate our voices and deepen decision-making. Set in the context of feminist, antiracist, disability rights, LGBT and similar movements of the past sixty years, Berenice Malka Fisher weaves together her distinctive analysis, insights from a wide range of thinkers, and stories based on her own and other women's activist experiences.

Unhappy Silences urges us not only to make our progressive movements more inclusive of diverse people but also-by listening to our silences-to make our discussions more inclusive of different ideas and options for action.

Author

Berenice Malka Fisher, professor emerita at New York University, was born in Chicago during the Great Depression. Her educational background includes an MA in Philosophy, a PhD in Education and research informed by sociology and history. With this interdisciplinary background and her commitment from the 1950s on to making a life as "an independent woman," she was well primed to teach and publish in the emerging field of women's studies.

In the early 1970s, she encountered the growing feminist movement, which provided an enduring context for her activism. Her popular and academic feminist writing prepared the ground for her award-winning book, No Angel in the Classroom: Teaching Through Feminist Discourse. In addition to participating in various peace and justice causes, she has demonstrated with the peace group Women in Black-Union Square for about fifteen years and performed with a lesbian theater ensemble, Shock of Grey, for almost twenty.

Reviews

"[B]oth a memoir-through-essays and a critical analysis of the ways negative emotions play a role in activism. ... Reflecting on her own four decades of activist work as well as the writing of noted activists and scholars, Fisher empathetically offers ways for readers to listen to their emotions and work with, rather than against, them."
-Women's Review of Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Unhappy Silences: Activist Feelings, Feminist Thinking, Resisting Injustice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How can uncomfortable feelings that seem to prevent us from engaging in political discussion actually aid the cause of resistance to injustice and violence? Unhappy Silences offers a strikingly innovative answer: thoughtful consideration of reactions such as shame, confusion and loneliness can liberate our voices and deepen decision-making.