Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography

The Professional Geographer

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore

To cite this article: Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography, The Professional Geographer, 54:1, 15-24, DOI: 10.1111/0033-0124.00310 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00310

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Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography

Ruth Wilson Gilmore University of California, Berkeley To study the complexities of race and geography, research and analysis should center on the fatally dynamic coupling of power and difference signiﬁed by racism. The author considers brieﬂy the theoretical and methodological impli- cations of key frameworks geographers used during the past century to account for racialized power differentials. To illustrate the political, economic, and cultural capacities that historical materialist geographical inquiry ought to con- sider, the author outlines the background for a new project—a case study of the U.S. during a period of unusually in- tense state-building in the mid-twentieth century. The article concludes that the political geography of race consists of space, place, and location as shaped simultaneously by gender, class, and scale. Key Words: racism, difference, power, political geography, twentieth-century U.S.

Who Am I? sition to it, during the last two decades of the twentieth century.2 I embarked on Golden Gulag locate my work within the broad areas of so- and pursued it relentlessly because women in a I cial theory, political economy, and labor and grassroots organization whose loved ones are social movements. In my research and writing, in prison asked me to find out: (1) what work I investigate, largely in the U.S. context, over- does prison do? (2) for whom? and (3) to what determinations of race, gender, class, and power. end? Those three initial questions prompted The geographical impulses shaping my analy- a subsequent pair of interrelated questions, ses are deliberately counterintuitive. What I which Golden Gulag asks and answers. How wish to do is disarticulate commonsense cou- does the state-in-crisis discipline surplus workers, plings of sites and struggles and disrupt assump- and how do workers organize against their tions such as the idea that politics happens in abandonment within and across oppositional the milieu of the state, or that value comes from spaces delimited by race, gender, class, region, wage-controlled workplaces. At the same time, and violence? I am not throwing out the historical materialist The second project examines how underde- baby with the well-used bathwaters of three development and environmental racism consti- cades of Marxist geography. tute two sides of a single coin (Pulido 1996), by My goal is to emulate the work of engaged looking specifically at how environmental jus- scholars who try to find in the organizational tice activism can be a sturdy bridge between foundations of social movement-building some- grassroots activists stuck in urban and rural thing other than perpetual recapitulation of landscapes of disaccumulation. As in the case of ongoing place-based struggles that are displaced justice work, I find that women take the lead in but never resolved (Robinson 1983; Sivanandan everyday struggles against toxicities. They join 1983; Pulido 1996; Fernandes 1997; Woods forces not only as petitioners to the state in the 1998; Kim 2000; Gilroy 2000). By “place” I name of injuries sustained but also—and more mean, following Neil Smith’s (1992) typology provocatively—as petitioners to communities of scale, the range of kinds of places—as intimate of similar people in the name of reconstructing as the body, and as abstract, yet distinctive, as a place so that concepts of “safety” and “health” productive region or a nation-state.1 cannot be realized by razor-wire fences or For the past decade, I have focused my schol- magic bullet cures. arly energy on several projects that developed Women’s restless activism sent me down a from ongoing political activism. I am finishing third research path. In this new project, tenta- a book called Golden Gulag, a study of Califor- tively called “Political Geographies of Recog- nia’s remarkable prison growth, and the oppo- nition in the Age of Human Sacrifice,” I will

The Professional Geographer, 54(1) 2002, pages 15–24 © Copyright 2002 by Association of American Geographers. Initial submission, February 2000; revised submission, August 2001; ﬁnal acceptance, August 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

16 Volume 54, Number 1, February 2002 attempt to piece together a geographical gene- of any kind of power differential. There is no alogy of radicalism by tracing the development difference without power, and neither power and movement of several mature women activ- nor difference has an essential moral value ists across territories shaped by state and state- (Foucault 1977). Rather, the application of sanctioned racist terror (Nazi death camp, Mis- violence—the cause of premature deaths— sissippi lynch mob, El Salvador death squads). produces political power in a vicious cycle My observation of the ways that the women (Feldman 1991). What, then, are nonfatal have become materially and discursively able to power-difference couplings? Mutuality for one. recognize each other across many contempo- For another, my undergraduate students always rary divides demands reconsideration of the say “the family”; and while we debate how and historical geography of the present (Pred 2000). why different kinds of contemporary families All projects investigate the present’s lived are structured as they are, and to what extent structural antecendents in the long twentieth patriarchy is still a family rather than state century (Arrighi 1994) toward the end of de- affair (see Brown 1995), and how the concept tailing how that century, which I call the age of of family defines normative sexuality, there’s human sacrifice, also produced subjects whose something in the answer to work with (see, e.g., ideological and material agency moved in Collins 1990; Fortunati 1995; Gilmore 1999b). counterpurpose to “fatal couplings of power Racism is a practice of abstraction, a death- and difference” (Hall 1992, 17). dealing displacement of difference into hierar- The urgency of all three projects begins with chies that organize relations within and be- the crisis of the capitalist (Negri 1988) racial tween the planet’s sovereign political territories. state (Omi and Winant 1986). Such investiga- Racism functions as a limiting force that pushes tion neither derives from nor leads to either a disproportionate costs of participating in an in- monolithic view of the state or an “essentialist”3 creasingly monetized and profit-driven world view of race. Rather, my purpose is to use re- onto those who, due to the frictions of political search techniques to piece together a complex distance, cannot reach the variable levers of (and not necessarily logical) series of abstrac- power that might relieve them of those costs. tions in order at once to analyze and produce Indeed, the process of abstraction that signifies a multiscalar geographical object of analysis.4 racism produces effects at the most intimately States are territorial resolutions of crisis (see, “sovereign” scale, insofar as particular kinds of e.g., Tilly 1985; Mann 1988). Capitalist states bodies, one by one, are materially (if not always displace and contain highly differentiated mo- visibly) configured by racism into a hierarchy ments of class struggle in many ways. As Marx of human and inhuman persons that in sum observed, tax struggle is class struggle. The ab- form the category “human being” (Agamben straction of class conflict from the multiple sites 1999). of production (including sites of reproduction) The violence of abstraction produces all to state milieux does more than produce a free- kinds of fetishes: states, races, normative views floating—or even an interest-group-defined— of how people fit into and make places in the squabble over the appropriate disposition of world. A geographical imperative lies at the heart public resources (see Gilmore 1998b). Indeed, of every struggle for social justice; if justice is the state’s mediation is both constitutive of embodied, it is then therefore always spatial, and constituted by extra-state relations. Chang- which is to say, part of a process of making a ing ideological and material infrastructures— place. For researchers, purpose and method institutions—of actual states widen (or narrow, determine whether one reifies race and state— and sometimes both at once) the distance be- chasing down fetishes—or, rather, discovers tween categories of social actors and their ca- dynamic processes that renovate race and state pacity to realize their own freedom.5 (Gramsci 1971). When I started to work on If race has no essence, racism does. Racism is Golden Gulag, I realized that prisons were a singular because, whatever its place-based par- consequence of state failure; I had yet to learn ticularities, its practitioners exploit and renew that they are a project of state-building. Prisons fatal power-difference couplings. Fatalities— are geographical solutions to social and eco- premature deaths (Greenberg and Schneider nomic crises, politically organized by a racial 1994)—are not simply an objective function state that is itself in crisis. The complex dynam-

Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference 17 ics of politically organized institutional shifts out what (including “who”—i.e., deal with that reconfigure the economic, cultural, and agency in a nonvoluntaristic sense) makes op- reproductive landscapes of everyday life are pressive and liberatory structures work, and what necessarily contradictory. In placing prisons at makes them fall apart. At the most general level the center of a multiscalar analysis of contem- of abstraction, we know that structures change porary crisis, I found it necessary (1) to chart under conditions of power redistribution—i.e., dynamics of change that articulate landscapes during times of crisis. In times of crisis, dynamics of accumulation and disaccumulation (Gilmore are peculiarly apparent, and insofar as we can 1998a, 1998b) and (2) to document how racism catch historical or contemporary shifts on the fly, works even when it is officially “over” (cf. Bali- we might recognize something powerful about bar and Wallerstein 1992). These twinned race and freedom. goals then set into stark relief the ways that relatively powerless social actors—e.g., prisoners’ For Example? mothers and families—renovate and make critical already existing activities, categories, In my newest project, I am trying to sort out and concepts to produce freedom from sur- the ways in which organizing is always con- plused capacities. As a result, starting from race strained by recognition (see also Gilmore and state yields, necessarily rather than addi- 1999b). Women who lived through political tively, an analysis that cannot be complete at terror as youth have, in their mature years, be- any level of abstraction without attending to come political activists seeking to formulate gender, class, and culture in the simultaneous “public policies” for social movements. They processes of abstracting and reconstructing ge- work in the context of the short-lived and weak ographies of liberation. U.S. welfare state’s dismantling and the rise of a punitive postwelfare state that, like its prede- Where Have We Been? cessor, ideologically and materially depends on the legitimacy of militarism or warfare In the long, murderous twentieth century, ge- (Gilmore 1998b). In this political, economic, ographers used three main frameworks to study and cultural geography, premature death is an race: environmental determinism (see Mitchell unfortunate given rather than an intolerable 2000), areal differentiation (see Harvey 1969), failure. What is the historical geography of the and social construction (see, e.g., Jackson and present in which these women’s work pro- Penrose 1993; Gilmore 1999a, 1999b, forth- ceeds? What institutional shapes of twentieth- coming b; Liu 2000). While these three ap- century human sacrifice produced power proaches span an astonishing political spectrum, through killing and terror sufficient to keep from racist eugenics to antiracist multicultural- women, for many years, from living whole ways ism, all (at least implicitly) share two assump- of oppositional life? And why fight now? tions: (1) social formations are structured in The capacities for particular historical blocs dominance within and across scales; and (2) race to secure local, regional, national, or imperial is in some way determinate of sociospatial loca- domination depend in part on the skill and ex- tion. In other words, having marched a long tent to which the blocs socialize the costs of way, geographical inquirers into race perhaps such domination (especially since, as every smart have not gotten as far as we might wish. Con- anticolonialist has pointed out, coercion is tradiction was as fundamental to the earliest as expensive—see Fanon 1961). They reduce their the latest twentieth-century work. own financial and ideological exposure by ex- ternalizing such costs to collective structures— Where Should We Go? i.e., to the state. The benefit to such externality lies not only in tapping the public purse but As I have suggested, race is not only contradic- also in expanding lower-cost consent by devel- tory but also—necessarily—overdetermined as oping the ideological state apparatuses (Althusser well. That is, the recognition that power and [1971] 1996). structure are mutually dependent requires that In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal we understand dynamic distributions of power regime, social welfare apparatuses took shape throughout a structure. The object is to figure as Progressive-era bred reformists used the

18 Volume 54, Number 1, February 2002 state’s power to resolve the Great Depression’s with the building of institutions of social welfare, antagonisms. They did so in order both to re- but rather the extension to the federal scale— store general health to the economy and to dis- through differentiations of protections from arm radical alternatives such as communism calamity and opportunities for advancement— (McWilliams [1939] 1969; Faue 1990; Kelley of the South’s apartheid practices. 1990; Mitchell 1996; Dowd 1997; Woods Although authorized, the New Deal social 1998). The programs spread guaranteed effec- welfare institutional forms were never fully op- tive demand by redistributing wealth, but did erationalized. However, in order to execute the so unevenly, to the point that, while labor World War II buildup, the Department of War achieved a modicum of security against eco- appropriated from the political and institu- nomic disasters, lawmakers and agencies of the tional milieu of social welfare powerful bureau- nascent Keynesian state reworked and made cracies, central planning, and control over critical the very U.S. hierarchies that activists large sums of finance capital (Hunt and Sher- were fighting to deconstruct in radical organiz- man 1972; Hooks 1991; Markusen and Yudken ing. Thus, under the New Deal, white people 1993). Starting in 1938, these formerly un- fared well compared with people of color, most derutilized capacities were transformed into of whom were deliberately excluded from op- the structures of the national security state portunities and protections (Kelley 1990; Mink (Hooks 1991), and the postwar Department of 1995), men received automatically what women Defense became a fortress agency, shielded had to apply for individually (Faue 1990; Amott from public scrutiny (Cook 1962; Melman and Matthaei 1991; Gordon 1994), and norma- 1974; Piven 1992). The wealth produced in tively urban, industrial workers secured rights large part by federal expenditures for the main- denied agricultural field workers even to this tenance and expansion of Pentagon research day (Edid 1994; Woods 1998). and development, equipment, installations, The uneven development of the New Deal’s and personnel—5–15 percent of the annual “creative government” (Baldwin 1968) re- Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—effectively sulted not only from the uneven capitulations underwrote the postwar welfare state; redistri- of capital to a massive social wage, but also— bution of wealth in the golden age was made and perhaps more—from the desperately dense palatable by general prosperity. Meanwhile, in relationships between Southern and Northern the context of the cold war—in other words, as Democrats. The Southerners’ congressional an arm of “defense”—the codification of busi- seniority gave them secure legislative founda- ness unionism in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act tions from which to engineer limits to any narrowed labor’s realm of activism ( James centralized power that would disrupt the re- 1980; Lichtenstein 1982; Davis 1986). Thus, gion’s peculiarly fatal couplings of power and “military Keynesianism” designates the socio- difference. economic “welfare warfare” (O’Connor 1973) Both resident and absent planters (Egerton system practiced in the United States. 1994; Woods 1998), who derived enormous At the same time, the war against racism was fortunes from sharecroppers and tenant farm- also a racist war, in that it renovated the U.S. ers, and regional and carpetbagger capitalists, racial state on several fronts. The U.S. state who funded the South’s competitive mine-and- deliberately, self-consciously, and repeatedly mill-based (steel, cotton, lumber) industrializa- declined to intervene in the extermination of tion, depended on the expansion, consolida- Jews by Nazis; it willfully ignored dispatches tion, and enforcement of Jim Crow rule to detailing what the Nazis were doing to Jews keep labor cheap and disciplined (Lewis 1994; (and, I can only presume, to non-Jews who were Woods 1998). Indeed, securing the capacity communists and homosexuals, to Romani, to to produce power through racist terror— Africans stuck in Europe, and to the other five lynching—symbolized the metaphorical and million or so industrially killed in the camps; material line that separated the South from, Wyman 1984). The racist exclusion of Euro- and thus connected it to, the rest of the United pean Jews from U.S. shores, effected by ob- States. Here, then, we have to understand that stacles one State Department official named the anomaly that emerged in the 1930s was not “paper walls” (Wyman 1968), particularized federal reticence to condemn lynching in contrast the racial front to the East, even as, in the West,

Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference 19 the coast-long “security zone” provided the were determined not to relive the intensified pretext for expropriating Japanese and Japa- lynching that punctuated the end of World nese Americans and deporting them to concen- War I (Ginzburg [1962] 1988). Nevertheless, it tration camps (Weglyn 1976). was a bloody time. However, while radical ten- The evidence shows how the War Depart- dencies persisted until they were crushed by the ment and members of FDR’s administration state during the next quarter century ( Jackson worked diligently to define the security zone so 1970; A. Davis 1981; Donner 1990; Newton that it would maximize capture of the “enemy 1996), they were also displaced by success in race” (as Japanese/Japanese Americans were the struggle for access to social welfare pro- named in one of many memos) and minimize grams and equal educational opportunity. This capture of others (Germans, Italians) with was especially the case in cities outside the whom the U.S. was at war. Death stalked the South to which Black people had migrated dur- West as much as the East and the South. As this ing the century to work in Fordist war and project progresses, I will argue, rather than peacetime industries, if almost always at their merely assert, that the security zone provided margins (Marks 1989; Marable 1991; Sonen- the pretext for FDR’s successor to drop the shein 1993; cf. Stack 1996). The “urban pact” bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The in- was an outcome of reformist struggles charac- ternment camps discursively signified and ma- terized by the formation of political coalitions terially produced civil and quasisocial death, through which Black people achieved access to which then enabled (or perhaps even required) public resources and employments and wielded state terror to obliterate the enemy “over relative electoral power (Marable 1991; Sonen- there” whose racial difference (whether under- shein 1993). stood biologically or understood culturally) The welfare state came under sustained at- could only be dissolved by physical death tack when military—or “bastard” (Turgeon (Yamazaki 1995). 1996)—Keynesianism failed to prevent the In sum, then, by trying to reconstruct the mid-1970s economic crisis that featured both U.S. the activist women moved into and across, high inflation and high unemployment (Shaikh I found that my project became thematically and Tonak 1994). Why the failure? In eco- and empirically concerned with how the U.S. nomic terms, Keynes’ short-run remedy was racial state renovates and makes critical already not up to the challenge of a long-run crisis. existing activities in times of crisis. Through Countercyclical investment and guaranteed ef- forcefully twinned processes of articulation and fective demand were powerless against the key abstraction, lived narratives of difference be- crisis: an apparently secular, rather than cyc- come singularly dramatized as modalities of lical, post-1967 decline in the rate of profit antagonism, whose form of embodied appear- created by excessive capitalist investments in ance is the overdetermined (racialized, gen- productive capacity (Brenner 2001). While dered, nationalized, criminal) enemy. Indeed, military buildup in Vietnam temporarily cured the central point here is best summarized by the 1970 recession, extreme measures taken by Orlando Patterson’s (1982, 44) elegant state- Washington’s rising monetarist elite at the ment summarizing slavery’s commonsense jus- Federal Reserve Bank—manipulation of inter- tifications, which attribute the logic of social est rates, abandonment of the gold standard, death to a mutable object of adversity: “One and devaluation of the dollar (Dickens 1996)— fell because he was the enemy; the other be- worsened conditions for ordinary people in the came the enemy because he had fallen.” U.S. However, it was the welfare state, military The U.S. urban welfare state institutional- Keynesianism’s social face, rather than capital- ized particular gendered dramas of race and ism’s surplus-generated crisis, that bore popu- class. The most radical tendencies of the lar political blame for economic turmoil. In African-American civil rights movement’s “sec- particular, urban dwellers of color who had ond reconstruction” (Marable 1991; cf. Du seized a portion of public resources began to Bois [1935] 1992) coalesced during the World weather the long attack on their right to share War II fight against racism and fascism ( James in the social wage. At about the same time, de- 1980). We have already seen that Black veterans cent individual-wage jobs, especially in labor returning from the front, and their families, market segments disproportionately filled by

20 Volume 54, Number 1, February 2002 modestly educated Black and brown men, be- models behavior for the polity (Archer and gan the late twentieth-century urban outmigra- Gartner 1984). Third, the national exculpatory tion, producing the deindustrialized city cores standard for murder committed in “self-defense” that in turn yield most prisoners today (Grant, is remarkably aggressive. Indeed, in the culmi- Oliver, and James 1996; Gilmore 1998b, 1999a, nation of nearly fifty years of case law involving forthcoming b). white men killing white men, the Supreme Has the delegitimization of Keynesianism Court overturned the murder conviction of a produced a post-Keynesian tendency to do- man who pursued a retreating combatant, with mestic militarism? Why not simply post- Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes explain- Keynesian monetarism or neoliberalism? Is the ing that “[a] man is not born to run away” domestic state really more coercive, or merely (Howe 1953, 335–36; Brown 1991). more neglectful? Let us approach the tendency It is plausible to argue that these three points toward militarism via my attempt to theorize have sedimented weight, not as remnant ideol- the normative aggression of U.S. responses to ogy, but rather as ballast for commonsense no- crisis in terms of the nation’s violent history tions of everyday dangers and alternatives to and habits (Gilmore 1999b). The domestic them. In particular, I believe they help to explain turn of the national security state derives from the promotion and acceptance of expanded a standard of aggression specific, if not peculiar, punishment and the attendant apparatuses of to the U.S. Thus, while the postwar national criminal justice in the contemporary period, security state emerged from crisis conditions according to the following scheme. First, the and absorbed means and methods designed for legitimate domestic U.S. state is the national peaceful purposes in order to build up the most security, or defense, or warfare state. Second, extensive warfare apparatus in the history of the local world is, and has always been, a very the world (Hooks 1991; Markusen and Yudken dangerous place: indeed, at the very moment 1993), the ideological preconditions for the be- when the nation is basking in foreign victory, hemoth post-1945 Pentagon lie in the central- the domestic turns hostile. Finally, the key to ity of state and state-sanctioned violence to the safety is aggression (cf. Foucault 1977; Feld- American national project. man 1991; Bartov 1996). In my view, the founding moments of U.S. But it is more complicated than this. If the nationalism, well rehearsed in mainstream his- legitimate state is the defense or warfare state, tories, are foundational to both state and cul- and domestic militarism is properly deployed ture. First, the U.S. was “conceived in slavery” to intervene between—and thereby define— ( Jones 1992, 292), and christened by genocide wrongdoers and law-abiding citizens, how else (Stannard 1992). These early practices estab- can we characterize these antagonists? I have lished high expectations of state aggression already noted the importance of chattel slavery against enemies of the national purpose—such and the premeditated murder of indigenous as revolutionary slaves and indigenous peoples— peoples as foundational to U.S. economic and and served as the crucible for development of a territorial growth. These twinned legacies, military culture that valorized armed men in plus the colonization of Mexico and Puerto uniform as the nation’s true sacrificial subjects Rico (Barrera 1979) and the differentiation of (DuBois [1935] 1992; Stannard 1992; Engle- both immigrants and nationals according to hardt 1995). Large-scale, coercive institutions— hierarchies of origin and religious belief prisons and reservations—were established to (DuBois [1935] 1992; Stannard 1992; Saxton control freedmen in the postbellum South, and [1971] 1995; Almaguer 1994), are central to the dispossessed Native Americans throughout the production of the U.S. master-race (Roediger country. Second, the high incidence of war 1990; Allen 1994). Justice Holmes’ “man” was waged by the U.S. correlates with high levels of actually and normatively white. And, insofar as violence, particularly homicide, experienced in Holmes’ “man” individualized the nation state the social formation of the U.S. as compared at the scale of his body, he was also the figure of with 114 other nation-states. Every time the the citizen. Thus, while the power of the state U.S. goes to war and wins—as happened in could be, and was, used against white men as 1991—the homicide rate goes up, indicating workers (Roediger 1990), the relatively early that the state, in particular the warfare state, universal extension of suffrage to Euro-American

Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference 21 males established government as their milieu archy through its capacity to wield despotic and state power as their instrument (Katznel- power over certain segments of society—whether son 1985). The development of the U.S. “her- the decree is to promote a Black woman, put renvolk democracy” (Roediger 1990; cf. Saxton her on workfare, or send her to prison for being 1990) or “dictatorship of white men” (Winant a bad, drug-addicted, mother. 1994) both depended on and fostered a con- The contemporary racial state’s aggressively nection between and among masculinity, state punitive stance is made clear in recent revisions power, and national belongingness, with every- to law and jurisprudence, which occurred in one else thus characterized as to some degree spite of a preponderance of evidence that once alien. produced different results. Take the death In other words, the warfare state is also the penalty. During the height of the civil rights gendered racial state (Omi and Winant 1986). movement in the 1960s, when petitioners per- Intranational conflicts around inclusion and suaded the U.S. Supreme Court to review the exclusion require this state to “fix” difference in racist excesses of the various states’ death- order to maintain internal pacification (Mann dealing zeal, probability mattered. “Scientific” 1988). The “fix” follows two general trajecto- approaches could prove (rather than justify) ries. In good times, the state remedies exclu- racism, and policy analysts from the social sci- sion by recognizing the structural nature of ences made a veritable industry of producing racism and institutionalizing means for com- the most highly mathematized representations bating its effects—by, for example, extending showing whom the state kills, when, and why. the vote, banning discrimination in public- Signs mattered. Thus, the evenhanded “objec- sector employment, or constructing the legal tivity” numbers presented to the policymaker apparatuses through which injured persons may consolidated and made actionable anti–state- seek courtroom remedies (Omi and Winant racism struggles waged in other arenas. Thirty 1986). Such racial state remedies were the or- years later, trial, appellate, and supreme courts der of the day for African Americans starting are generally unmoved by the arguments that roughly in 1948, when President Harry S Tru- were so persuasive not very long ago (Zimring man desegregated the military, and diminished 1993).6 Probability does not matter anymore, from the late 1960s onward (Marable 1991). In in legal terms. As the punishment system is bad times, when deepened differentiation paci- currently constituted, the fact that a Black per- fies widespread insecurity among the herren- son is more likely to be arrested, tried, con- volk, the “fix” formalizes inequality. Examples victed, sentenced, imprisoned, and executed of the latter include: the 1882 Chinese Ex- than are others is, in the words of a prominent clusion Act; Jim Crow (U.S. apartheid) laws criminologist emeritus, “inequality, but not in- throughout the early twentieth century; the justice” (van den Haag 1996). Roosevelt White House refusal to attack lynch- The context of fatalities for the women ing, even rhetorically, in the 1930s and 1940s; whom I am studying was a capitalist racial the use of deportation, asset theft, and concen- state-in-crisis that invested in and rewarded tration camps to alienate and control Japanese diligently revised norms of the applied (legal, Americans during World War II; and the exten- medical) disciplines (Bartov 1996). Such work sive criminalization and imprisonment of people had the policy effect of producing the “inhu- of color today (Gilmore 1998b). man” side of the contradictory unity “human The oscillation between reformist and re- being” (Agamben 1999) through processes of pressive “fixes” is not a simple binary move- gendered criminalization and racialization that ment but rather overdetermined at the source. accompany, and indeed ease, the ordinary de- A key aspect of the U.S. state’s “infrastructural structive violences that “appear” to be not coordination” (Mann 1988)—its relational structural—all the sites of premature death in power throughout society, manifested in such the U.S. urban and rural regions that have been social goods as laws, currency, education, roads, abandoned by capital and state in the seismic and so on—is its reliance on racial hierarchy upheavals we call “globalization,” even when (Omi and Winant 1986). That is, toward the the dough and the power are only relocated end of securing or maintaining hegemony down the road. Teetering on the verge of the (Gramsci 1971), the state reproduces racial hier- new millennium, we are ready to fall back into

22 Volume 54, Number 1, February 2002 the end of the nineteenth century—the era of in for a range of subjective and objective categories Jim Crow, of Plessy v. Ferguson. Or else, we leap and concerns. The obsessive dismissal of identity into the future. politics misses the principal mark that schooling in historical materialism should make apparent. One works with what is at hand; the problem is not the What Is the Conclusion? “master’s tools” (Lorde 1984, 110) as objects, but the effective control of those “tools” (Gilmore Geographers should develop a research agenda 1993). One can and should be able to analyze that centers on race as a condition of existence “Black” materially—which is to say, with contin- gent accuracy. Such a claim hardly signifies that and as a category of analysis, because the terri- “Black” then always refers to the same cultural or toriality of power is a key to understanding biological object. Blackness is a spatially and tempo- racism. The political geography of race entails rally differentiated produced, and real, condition of investigating space, place, and location as si- existence and category of analysis. 4 multaneously shaped by gender, class, and Academic disciplines crudely summarize these ab- scale. By centering attention on those most vul- stractions in one direction, by separating objects of study into disciplines with peculiar methods and nerable to the fatal couplings of power and dif- boundaries. At the same time, the levels of general- ference signified by racism, we will develop ity appropriate to different aspects of a single analy- richer analyses of how it is that radical activism sis indicate another way in which abstraction cross- might most productively exploit crisis for liber- cuts the questions we ask. 5 “Freedom” is shorthand for the object of history. atory ends. The usefulness of such an approach 6 enables reconsideration of historical geogra- Such change should not be ascribed to rotation of personnel. Judges can be the same people who phies, radical examination of transitional geog- wrote completely different opinions years earlier. raphies, and the difference between the neutral Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney powerfully ex- fact of unequal power and its fatal exploitation. emplifies such a shift. In 1841, he wrote the deci- Thus, in this view, the focus on race neither sion delivering from bondage the captured Africans fixes its nature nor asserts its primacy. Rather, of the Amistad slave ship, who had killed the crew the focus demands examination of the subjec- that was taking them to be sold. The decision con- curred with their position that they had been tive and objective nature of power and differ- wrongfully enslaved and therefore did not con- ence as articulated and naturalized through stitute property under U.S. law. In 1857, as the racism; one can follow the reasoning, and ad- Court’s Chief Justice, Taney wrote the landmark just the methods, for studying interrelated fa- Dred Scott decision that included the immortal talities. In other words, we must change aspects words: “A [Black] man has no rights that a white of both the forces and the relations of knowl- man is bound to respect” (Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 [1856]). edge production in order to produce new and useful knowledges. Literature Cited Notes Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The remnants of Auschwitz. 1 For example, all nation-states are at the same scale, New York: Zone. though they are highly varied in geometric size, Allen, Theodore. 1994. The invention of the white race. wealth, demographics, military might, urbaniza- New York: Verso. tion, integration by global capital, and so on. Almaguer, Tomás. 1994. Racial fault lines: The histori- 2 For an earlier version of Golden Gulag, see Gilmore cal origins of white supremacy in California. Berkeley: (1998a). University of California Press. 3 Geographers, and social scientists in general, tend Althusser, Louis. [1971] 1996. For Marx. New York: to overblow the threat of “essentialism.” The de- Verso. bates about race that loomed large in the 1980s in cultural theory—especially among Marxists such as Amott, Theresa, and Julie Matthaei. 1991. Race, gen- Stuart Hall (1990), Gayatri Spivak (1988), and A. der, and work. Boston: South End Press. Sivanandan (1983)—have been taken up and awk- Archer, Dane, and Rosemary Gartner. 1984. Violence wardly inserted into geography without much of the and crime in cross-national perspective. New Haven, nuance that informed the earlier debates. The pri- CT: Yale University Press. mary fear seems to be reification, which then leads Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The long twentieth century. to, or deepens, fragmentations along the lines of New York: Verso. “identity politics.” Analytically, those lines can only Baldwin, Sidney. 1968. Poverty and politics. Chapel lead into a cul-de-sac, since identity politics stands Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Wyman, David S. 1984. The abandonment of the Jews. Negri, Antonio. 1988. Revolution retrieved. London: New York: Pantheon. Red Notes. Yamazaki, James N. 1995. Children of the atomic bomb. Newton, Huey P. 1996. The war against the Panthers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. New York: Harlem River Press. Zimring, Franklin E. 1993. Research on the death O’Connor, James. 1973. The fiscal crisis of the state. penalty: On the liberating virtues of irrelevance. New York: St. Martin’s. Law & Society Review 27 (1):9–17. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial formation in the United States. New York: Routledge. RUTH WILSON GILMORE is Assistant Professor Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death. of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, CA Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 94720-4740. Her research interests include race, Piven, Frances Fox. 1992. Reforming the welfare gender, power; labor and social movements; uneven state. Socialist Review 22 (3):69–81. development; urban–rural linkages. She is an activist Pred, Allan. 2000. Even in Sweden. Berkeley and Los with organizations that work against prison expan- Angeles: University of California Press. sion, and for economic and environmental justice.