Black Studies: in the Wake Author(S): Christina Sharpe Source: the Black Scholar, Vol

Black Studies: In the Wake Author(s): Christina Sharpe Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 59-69 Published by: Paradigm Publishers Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0059 . Accessed: 03/10/2014 21:10

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Black Studies the many ways that that work is being done. Black studies in the wake is a renewed call In the Wake for black studies to be at the intellectual work of a continued reckoning the longue Christina Sharpe durée of Atlantic chattel slavery, with black fungibility, antiblackness, and the gratuitous violence that structures black being, How can we marry our thought so that of accounting for the narrative, historical, we can now pose the questions whose an- structural, and other positions black people swers can resolve the plight of the Jobless are forced to occupy.5 Black Studies: In the archipelagoes, the N.H.I. categories, and Wake is both the project that I am currently the environment? working on and a call for, and recognition —Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved”1 of, black studies’ continued imagining of You see, it’s not just an intellectual strug- the unimaginable: its continued theoriz- 6 gle. You could call it a psycho-intellectual ing from the “position of the unthought.” struggle. Then you could understand why To frame this call for a black studies in the in the ’60s it wasn’t just a call for Black wake as a problem for black studies, I take Studies; it was a call for Black Aesthetics, it up M. NourbeSe Philip’s call in Zong! 15 was a call for Black Art(s), it was a call for “to defend the dead.” How do we who are Black Power. It was an understanding that, doing work in black studies tend to, care as Lewis Gordon has been the first to keep insisting, we live in an anti-Black world—a systemically anti-Black world; and, there- Christina Sharpe is associate professor in fore, whites are not [simply] “racists.” They the Department of English and Programs in too live in the same world in which we live. Africana, American, and women, gender, The truth that structures their minds, their and sexuality studies at Tufts University. “consciousness,” structures ours. SO THE Her book, Monstrous Intimacies: Making GREAT BATTLE NOW IS GOING TO BE Post-Slavery Subjects, was published in AGAINST “THE TRUTH.” 2010 by Duke University Press. Her cur- —Sylvia Wynter, Proud/Flesh2 rent book project is titled In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. She has recently Defend the dead. published in American Literary History, the —M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!3 premiere issue of Lateral (the online journal of the Cultural Studies Association), on 4 To call this essay Black Studies: In the Wake the Sound Studies Sounding Out! and the is not to announce that black studies is dead Social Text Blog, and has reviews, articles, or to call for its memorialization. Black and/or chapters forthcoming in The New Studies: In the Wake is, among other things, Inquiry, Black Studies Papers, and in Ethi- a staking out of the need for the rereading, cal Confrontations with Anti-Blackness: Af- reinvigoration, and reengagement with the ricana Studies in the 21st Century. work of black studies and a recognition of

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions for, comfort, and defend the dead, the dy- lives are still imperiled and devalued by a ing, and those living lives consigned, in racial calculus and a political arithmetic aftermath of legal chattel slavery, to death that were entrenched centuries ago. This is that is always-imminent and immanent?7 the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, How might theorizing black studies in the limited access to health and education, pre- wake—and black being in the wake—as mature death, incarceration, and impov- conscious modes of inhabitation of that erishment.”10 A black studies in the wake imminence and immanence (revealed ev- would inhabit this knowledge as the ground ery day in multiple quotidian ways) ground from which we theorize; would work from our work as we map relations between the the positions of knowledge and belief of the past and present, map the ways that the past existence of what Wynter terms “rules which haunts the present? The existence of black govern the ways in which humans can and studies as an object of study does not ame- do know the social reality of which they are liorate the quotidian experiences of terror always already socialized subjects” (Wynter in black lives lived in an anti-black world.8 1994, 68). To do that, I argue that we must be about the work of what I am calling “wake work.” Wakes are processes; through them we think “No Humans Involved” about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to en- We must now undo their narratively con- act grief and memory. Wakes allow those demned status. among the living to mourn the passing of —Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved” the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body In 1992, in the wake of a Simi Valley jury of the deceased from death to burial and the that had no black jurors on it, retuning a accompanying drinking, feasting, and other not guilty verdict for the four white officers observances; a watching practiced as a reli- on trial for the beating of Rodney King, Syl- gious observance. But wakes are also “the via Wynter wrote an open letter to her col- track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the leagues at Stanford University. Published in disturbance caused by a body swimming, or abbreviated form in 1992 and in its entirety one that is moved, in water; the air currents in 1994, “No Humans Involved: An Open behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed Letter to My Colleagues”11 again centers flow; in the line of sight of (an observed ob- Wynter’s unflinching unmasking of “clas- ject); and (something) in the line of recoil sificatory schemas,” the ordering of Euro- of (a gun)”;9 finally, wake also means being Western knowledge, and the “present con- awake and, most importantly, conscious- ception of the human being” as “Man.”12 ness. Living in the wake as people of African “No Humans Involved” issues a renewed descent means living what Saidiya Hartman call that is redoubled by its publication identifies as the both the “time of slavery” alongside her “A Black Studies Manifesto,” and the “afterlife of slavery,” in which “black that the work of black studies requires a full

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions recognition that we live in a “systemically Humans Involved” and “A Black Studies anti-Black world . . . and, therefore, whites Manifesto”? In the anti-black “post-racial” are not [simply] ‘racists.’ They too live in the social reality animated and subtended by a same world in which we live. The truth that black US president, non-humans weaponize structures their minds, their ‘consciousness,’ sidewalks; shoot ourselves while handcuffed structures ours” (Wynter 2006, 7). in the back of police cars; are brutally mur- “Where,” writes Wynter in “No Humans dered while asking for help; incarcerated, Involved,” “did this classification system assaulted, and stopped and frisked for walk- come from?” that produces an acronym ing, driving, and breathing while black.14 N. H. I.,13 one that comes to be “used rou- What will be the work of black studies now tinely” by the Los Angeles Police Depart- to defend those who are subject to such ment and by “public officials of the judicial overwhelming and gratuitous, narrative and system of Los Angeles” to malign young actual, discursive and material death? To do black men, in particular those young, black what I am calling wake work would neces- men [and women] who read as jobless or sitate a turn away from juridical, philosophi- lower class within dominant epistemolo- cal, historical, or other disciplinary solutions gies, with the indicator of non-humanity? to blackness’s ongoing abjection toward a (Wynter 1994, 42). “Why,” she continues, black studies through and in the wake that “should the classifying acronym N. H. I., would activate those multiple meanings of with its reflex anti-Black male behaviour- wake and inhabit them, live them, as black- prescriptions, have been so actively held ened consciousness.15 and deployed by the judicial officers of Los In theorizing the black everyday in the Angeles, and therefore by ‘the brightest and wake of the slave ship and the hold, we the best’ graduates of both the professional would recognize their continued existence; and nonprofessional schools of the univer- recognize “the ways that we are constituted sity system of the United States? By those through and by vulnerability to overwhelm- whom we ourselves would have educated?” ing force though not only known to our- (Wynter 1994, 43). Such death-dealing epis- selves and to each other by that force.”16 To teme continue to be produced in “think occupy the wake in all of its meanings as tanks” and in the university, by teachers, lec- consciousness demands, for example, that turers, researchers, and scholars, and then we know we are positioned in the world reproduced by the students who have been by an order of knowledge that produces educated in the classrooms and institutions and enforces links, discursive and material, where we labor, sometimes in black (or Af- between the womb and the tomb in order ricana) studies departments and programs. to represent black maternity and therefore What is to be the task of black studies in black childhood or youth as condemning the university now in producing knowledge one to a life of violence; condemning one to of our realities as the twenty-first century black life lived in/as proximity to knowledge nears the middle of its second decade— of death. What, for example, is the status of twenty years after the full publication of “No those young black and blackened people

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions swept up and gathered under the sign of “ur- On February 6, 2013, the education sec- ban youth?” Do we understand the phrase tion of the New York Times published an “urban youth” and its constitutive parts to article titled “A Hospital Offers a Grisly Les- be a representational, a geographical, or son on Gun Violence.” The article begins, an ontological category? What additional “In a darkened classroom, 15 eighth grad- forms of disregard are activated through a ers gasped as a photograph appeared on the black embrace of a naming that comes out screen in front of them. It showed a dead of the same anti-black conjuring as “welfare man whose jaw had been destroyed by a queens” and “crack babies”?17 A “condem- shotgun blast, leaving the lower half of his nation of blackness” (to borrow Khalil Gi- face a shapeless, bloody mess.”19 The fifteen bran Muhammed’s apt phrase) taken, now, eighth graders present on this particular day as so much “common sense” and traceable are middle school students, largely black, back to slavery’s law of partus sequitur ven- and they are participants in a program at trem that established that the children of a Temple University Hospital in North Phila- slavewoman inherited the mother’s condi- delphia called “Cradle to Grave.” Do we tion. The mother’s condition (her non/status) understand “cradle to grave” as a command reappears in the present in the ways that all or as a description of black life? Likewise, black people, regardless of sex/gender, but “participant” can be the correct word to especially the young and poor and working describe the children in attendance only if class have become in the United States (and we hear and feel in it Frederick Douglass’s not only in the United States) the symbols description of himself as “witness and par- of the less-than-Human being condemned ticipant” to his Aunt Hester’s beating, his to death. knowledge that that is also his fate, his cer- tainty that his entrance through slavery’s vio- lent “blood-stained gate” is imminent. We “Cradle to Grave”: The Afterlives read that Cradle to Grave “brings in youths of Partus Sequitur Ventrem from across Philadelphia in the hope that an unflinching look at the effects that guns have The function of the curriculum is to struc- in their community will deter young people ture what we call “consciousness,” and from reaching for a gun to settle personal therefore certain behaviors and attitudes. scores, and will help them recognize that Sylvia Wynter, Proud/Flesh gun violence is not the glamorous business Interview with Sylvia Wynter sometimes depicted in television shows and rap music” (Hurdle n. p.). In other words, The researchers concluded that the present Cradle to Grave exposes children, many of work finds that people assume that, rela- tive to whites, blacks feel less pain because whom are already experiencing trauma from they have faced more hardship. . . . Be- material, lived violence, to photos and reen- cause they are believed to be less sensitive actments of graphic violence as a deterrent to pain, black people are forced to endure to more violence. We read, “As the 13- and more pain.18 14-year-olds gathered around a gurney on

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions a recent visit, Mr. Charles told the story of “we lose at least gender difference in the Lamont Adams, 16, who died at the hospital outcome and the female body and the male after being shot 14 times by another boy” body become a territory of cultural and po- (Hurdle, n. p.). Charles, who is the hospital’s litical maneuver not at all gender-related, trauma outreach coordinator, says that in the gender-specific” (Spillers 206). program’s seven-and-a-half-year history, no Reading together the middle passage, parent has ever complained that their child the coffle, and, I argue, the birth canal, we was shown these images. Charles’s state- see how each has functioned separately ment, however, does less to reassure readers and collectively over time to disfigure black of the correctness or appropriateness of the maternity, to turn the womb into a factory program than it does to portray childhood (producing blackness as abjection much while poor and black as abandonment. I like the slave ship’s hold and the prison), would wager that those same doctors and and turning the birth canal into another administrators would not want their early domestic middle passage with black moth- teenaged son or daughter exposed to such ers, after the end of legal hypodescent, still graphic violence. I would wager that they ushering their children into her condition; would not consider it simply an “education” her non-status, her non-being-ness. By way for their children to be positioned facedown of confirming this, we need look no farther on an empty body bag and tagged with or- than our Twitter time lines, the news, or to ange dots to mark each of the twenty-four the series of anti-abortion websites and bill- points of entry and exit for the bullets that board ads by groups like “Life Always” (the struck, and eventually killed, sixteen-year- now defunct thatsabortion.com) that feature old Lamont Adams. images of pregnant black women or black In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slav- children and text that reads, “The most dan- ery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Cen- gerous place for an African American is in tury America, Saidiya Hartman writes that the womb.”21 Despite an alarming lack of “nineteenth-century observers” of a coffle access to prenatal care,22 the most danger- of enslaved people described that coffle (in ous place for an African American (for US its formation and its movement/passage) as blacks and blacks in the United States) is “a domestic middle passage.”20 In “Mama’s not in the womb. The many dangers faced Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar by black people, children or not, increase Book,” Hortense Spillers writes that slavery exponentially once one emerges from that transformed the black woman, she “became passage, once one is birthed by and from a the principal point of passage between the black woman. Womb to tomb all over again. human and the non-human world,” and In December 2013, the New York that Africans packed into the slave hold of Times ran a feature called “Invisible Child: the ship were marked according to Euro- Dasani’s Homeless Life in the Shadows.” As Western definitions not as male and female it stands, the series is as much an exposé of but as differently sized and weighted prop- Dasani Coates’s inheritance of a life of pre- erty. “Under these conditions,” she writes, carity because of the bad choices of a parent

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions (primarily her mother) as it is of the massive martial metaphors like ships, success, strug- and systemic failures of programs set up to gle, sacrifice, and surveillance activate this address poverty and homelessness. The fea- narrative of precarity about Dasani Coates. ture focused on Dasani,23 an eleven- and Hers is also a narrative of instruction. That then twelve-year-old black girl child, and is, not only does the “Invisible Child” series her family (seven siblings and two parents) feature the education of Dasani but it is, it- who live in one of New York City’s family self, featured in the Times education section, shelters.24 In Part 1 of the series, readers as the series becomes part of a larger curric- are introduced to Dasani at home and as ulum as a narrative of individual resilience, she makes her way to the Susan S. McKin- and overcoming. A “Teaching and Learning ney Secondary School of the Arts—a school with the New York Times” subtended by the whose already tight space, we read, may be traumatizing and retraumatizing of black made even tighter with its impending dis- children for the education of others. Cradle placement from its third-floor performance to grave in the hands of the state that needs spaces by an unwanted and contested char- their death over and over again; trauma- ter school. tized children being forced to endure more Once the narrative brings us into the trauma; children in pain being subjected school, we are introduced to Ms. Holmes, to more pain.26 And while we are told that the principal of the McKinney School, who McKinney functions as a ship in the storm is described as a formidable woman. A for Dasani, we must still acknowledge the “towering woman, by turns steely and soft,” ship as the storm. How can the very system Ms. Holmes “wears a Bluetooth like a per- that is designed to unmake and inscribe her manent earring and tends toward power also be the one to save her? suits. She has been at McKinney’s helm for Responding to a new wave of criticism fifteen years and runs the school like a naval (initiated by Elliott’s article) that during his ship, peering down its gleaming hallways three terms as mayor, New York City’s rates as if searching the seas for enemy vessels. of homelessness, particularly among fami- . . . She leaves her office door permanently lies and young people, climbed higher than open, like a giant, unblinking eye” (Elliott they had been in decades, outgoing Mayor n. p.). Both the woman and the school-as- Michael Bloomberg denies that the prob- ship are described as sanctuaries and sites lems are systemic. “This kid [Dasani] was of surveillance.25 Dasani’s homeroom has dealt a bad hand,” Bloomberg said. “I don’t “inspirational words” like, “success does not know quite why. That’s just the way God come without sacrifice” (Elliott n. p.). But works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and who and what are to be sacrificed for such some of us are not.”27 On January 1, 2014, “success[es]” and on whose and what terms? The Guardian published a “Comment is Reading that Ms. Holmes suspends Dasani Free” written by a young black man iden- for a week for fighting, we are to understand tified by a photograph and the first name that for Dasani, “To be suspended is to be William.28 William, who is seventeen and truly homeless” (Elliott n. p.). Maritime and a junior in high school, identifies himself

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions as one of the 22,000 homeless children in in her friend’s shoulder. Lamont died about New York City, and he speaks to the tremen- 15 minutes after arriving at the hospital, . . . dous difficulties he has faced in and out of ’” Following these graphic details, Dr. Gold- school because of the material and psychic berg concludes the lesson with a question. tolls of chronic homeless. Framed as a di- “’Who,” she asks, “do you think has the best rect response to Andrea Elliott’s New York chance of saving your life?” Her answer? Times profile of Dasani and also to Bloom- “You do’” (Hurdle n. p.). This is a narra- berg’s comments, William outlines a series tive condemnation of urban youth; STET a of failures when he writes, “I don’t think I wholesale abandonment of black children to was dealt a bad hand in life, but I think I was their own devices; a making manifest under passed a bad hand from my mother. But it’s the guise of education that the lives of black OK because she also slid an ace down my children (not seen as children) are in their wrist and told me to save it. She is the ace. own hands (not in the hands of those who As long as she’s there, no matter how terrible would protect them) as they face a series my hand is, we make it through” 29 (William, of catastrophes still wholly “unprepared for n. p.). William, like Bloomberg, bypasses a how terrible this would be.”30 At the end of structural critique of poverty and makes use “Invisible Child,” when we read that Dasani of Bloomberg’s language of the bad hand. imagines herself designing her own video But, William insists that this bad hand was game, and if she could, “she would call it not dealt to him directly (or, by extension, ‘Live or Die’ and the protagonist would be to Dasani). In other words, he wasn’t in the an 11-year-old girl fighting for her own sal- game; he didn’t make that choice, the hand vation” (Elliott n. p.), I am returned to the was passed to him by his mother, who also questions of who and what we imagine has slipped him “an ace” (in her continued pres- the best chance of undoing our “narratively ence, her continued support). Put another condemned status”? My answer is Black way, William lays both the fault of needing Studies: In the Wake. knowledge of/for survival and the acquisi- tion of that knowledge for survival squarely at his mother’s feet. Endnotes To return briefly to Philadelphia and Tem- ple University Hospital’s Cradle to Grave 1. Wynter. “‘No Humans Involved,’” p. 65. The program, as the students hear about Lamont inaugural issue was titled “Knowledge on Trial.” 2. “ProudFlesh Inter/Views Sylvia Wynter.” Adams’s horrible death, Mr. Charles says: 3. Philip, Zong!, pp. 25, 26. “The wounds he finds most moving were 4. My current book project is In the Wake: On those in the boy’s hands. ‘He holds up his Blackness and Being. hands and begs the boy to stop shooting, . . . 5. In addition to the contributors to this spe- He [the boy] had not prepared himself for cial issue I would like to point to the work of Joy how terrible this would be.’ As the details of James, João Costa Vargas, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Lamont’s story unfolded, one girl struggled Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Sylvia Wynter, Lewis to keep her composure. Another hid her face Gordon, Hortense Spillers, Jemima Pierre, Dennis

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Childs, Calvin Warren, David Marriott, Rinaldo 9. Oxford English Dictionary online. Walcott, Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Za- 10. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, p. 6. kiyyah Iman Jackson, and Simone Browne. 11. A short version of the open letter was pub- 6. See Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position lished in 1992 in Voices of the Black Diaspora (pp. of the Unthought,” pp. 189–190. Hartman says, 13–16) but was later published in its entirety in “On the one hand, the slave is the foundation of 1994 in Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st the national order, and, on the other, the slave Century, inaugural issue “Knowledge on Trial.” occupies the position of the unthought. So what 12. Wynter writes, “Being human can there- does it mean to try to bring that position into view fore not pre-exist the cultural systems and insti- without making it a locus of positive value, or tutional mechanisms, including the institution of without trying to fill in the void?” knowledge, by means of which we are socialized Additionally, in the acknowledgments of Red, to be human.” Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” White, and Black, Wilderson thanks Hartman and p. 6. calls her a ship mate who “looked unflinchingly 13. The expulsion from the realm of the hu- at the void of our subjectivity, thus helping the man that the negating N. of N.H.I. redoubles with manuscript to stay in the hold of the ship, despite the erasure of that expulsion imposed by the lone my fantasies of flight.” “N” of the “n-word,” as nigger is disappeared See also Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, The from air during the O.J. Simpson trial. The “N- Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black word” takes hold purportedly because of the dis- Study (New York: Minor Composition, 2013). comfort of the news anchors forced both to play 7. When I speak of the immanence of black repeatedly the recordings of Mark Fuhrman on death I mean the ways that black death is built which he can be heard using the word “nigger” into the various systems that demand those more than forty times and to speak repeatedly the deaths to produce something mistaken for and word “nigger” on air. As the news anchors sub- called freedom for others. As Joy James and João stitute the “n-word” for “nigger,” the effect is that Costa Vargas write: “What happens when instead the violence of Fuhrman’s speech and actions of becoming enraged and shocked every time a was muted, as were the anti-black practices of black person is killed in the United States, we the LAPD that authorized it. recognize black death as a predictable and con- 14. I recognize that there have been too many stitutive aspect of this democracy? What will hap- black lives taken to name them all, but I acknowl- pen then if instead of demanding justice we rec- edge by name: Trayvon Martin, Chavis Carter, Re- ognize (or at least consider) that the very notion nisha McBride, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Ramarley of justice . . . produces or requires black death Graham, and Conor and Brendan Moore, ages as normative.” James and Costa Vargas, “Refusing two and four, refused shelter during Hurricane Blackness-as-victimization.” Sandy. 8. In my response to Jared Sexton’s “Ante- 15. Here I draw on Dionne Brand’s formu- Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts,” I phrase this in a lation and theorization of the real and mythic slightly different way. “Will the fact of black stud- “Door of No Return” as the site of black diaspora ies ameliorate the quotidian experiences of terror consciousness. She writes, “The door signifies the in black lives lived in an anti-black world? And, historical moment which colours all moments in if not, what will be the relationship between the the Diaspora. It accounts for the ways we observe two?” Sharpe, “Response to Jared Sexton’s Ante- and are observed as people, whether it’s through Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts.” the lens of social injustice or the lens of human

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions accomplishments. The door exists as an absence. 20. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, p. 32. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a I think here of Richard Wright’s description place we do not know. Yet it exists as the ground of his encounter at age four with the disfiguring we walk. Every gesture our body makes some- coffle (or chain gang) of black male prisoners he how gestures toward this door. What interests me at first sees not as men but as a row of elephants primarily is probing the Door of No Return as chained together: “The strange elephants were a consciousness.” Brand, A Map to the Door of No few feet from me now and I saw their faces were Return, pp. 24–25. like the faces of men!” For Wright these men are I draw, too, on the work of Frank Wilderson, transformed into something else and at first sight especially Red, White, and Black, in which he the only men Richard recognizes as men are the argues that violence against the black is gratu- white men guarding the black men on the gang. itous and not contingent; not violence that oc- Wright, Black Boy, pp. 57–58. curs between subjects at the level of conflict in 21. Other billboards have read, “Black Chil- the world but violence at the level of a structure dren are an Endangered Species” and “Choice that required, indeed invented, the black to be Kills Those Without One.” The websites for Life- the constitutive outside for those who would con- Always.com and ThatsAbortion.com no longer struct themselves as the human. Wilderson, Red, exist. Now toomanyaborted.com and the Radi- White, and Black. ance Foundation seem to be the primary creators 16. Sharpe, “Blackness, Sexuality, and Enter- of this work. tainment.” 22. See the statistics from the Office of Mi- 17. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe.” nority Health: http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/tem- “Sticks and bricks might break our bones, but plates/content.aspx?ID=3021. words will most certainly kill us.” 23. Elliott, “Invisible Child.” While the Times 18. Silverstein, “I Don’t Feel Your Pain.” Silver- profile did not reveal Dasani’s surname, she was stein writes, “The more privilege assumed of the later identified as Dasani Coates when she ap- target, the more pain the participants perceived. peared as a guest at the swearing in of Letitia Conversely, the more hardship assumed, the less James as New York City’s public advocate. pain perceived.” 24. Since the publication of the feature, 19. John Hurdle, “A Hospital Offers a Grisly Dasani, her family, and many of the other fami- Lesson on Gun Violence,” New York Times, Feb- lies have been moved from Auburn and housed ruary 6, 2013; www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us elsewhere; www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/nyre- /07philly.html?_r=0. “On a recent day the eighth gion/new-york-is-removing-over-400-children- graders, students from nearby Kenderton School, from-2-homeless-shelters.html. gathered around Mr. Charles at the start of a two- 25. “If we are to take transatlantic slavery as hour visit. Most said they knew someone who the antecedent of contemporary surveillance had been shot. […] ‘Our goal here isn’t to scare technologies and practices as they concern inven- you straight,’ Mr. Charles told them. ‘We’re just tories of ships’ cargo and the making of ‘scaled trying to give you an education.’” inequalities’ in the Brookes slave ship schematic Despite Mr. Charles’s assurances, it seems that (Spillers 1987, p. 72), biometric identification by the program, like much of US education directed branding the body with hot irons (Browne 2010), at black and blackened peoples, is precisely in slave markets and auction blocks as exercises of the model of Scared Straight’s education in/as synoptic power where the many watched the few, terror. slave passes and patrols, black codes and fugiti ve

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions slave notices, it is to the archives, slave narra- Also, recent articles on a study published in tives and often to black expressive practices and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychol- creative texts that we can look to for moments ogy detail what many of us already know: Black of refusal and critique. What I am arguing here children are not seen as children. “People— is that with certain acts of cultural production Including Cops—See Black Kids as Less Innocent we can find performances of freedom and sug- and Less Young than White Kids”; www.thewire gestions of alternatives to ways of living under a .com/politics/2014/03/people-including-cops- routinized surveillance that was terrifying in its view-black-kids-less-innocent-and-less-young- effects.” Browne, “Everybody’s Got a Little Light white-kids/359026. Under the Sun,” p. 547. 26. See Schulten and Brown, “The Learning Network.” “Once a semester, we choose an im- portant, long-form New York Times article that Bibliography we think young people should read, and we in- vite anyone age 13 to 19 to come to the Learn- Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: ing Network blog and discuss it. We have a few Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Random House, ground rules for this feature, which we call Read- 2001. ing Club, but our main goal is to inspire thought- Browne, Simone. “Everybody’s Got a Little Light ful conversation.” Under the Sun: Black Luminosity and the Vi- 27. See Campbell and Barkan, “Bloomberg sual Culture of Surveillance.” Cultural Studies Defends Homeless Policies While Calling Dasani 26, no. 4 (2012): 542–564. Story ‘Extremely Atypical.’” Campbell, Colin, and Ross Barkan. “Bloomberg 28. William, “I, Too, Am One of the Estimated Defends Homeless Policies While Calling 22,000 Homeless Children in New York,” Com- Dasani Story ‘Extremely Atypical.’” Politicker; ment Is Free, January 1, 2014; www.theguardian politicker.com/2013/12/bloomberg-defends- .com/commentisfree/2014/jan/01/homeless citys-homeless-policies-calling-dasani-story- -student-new-york-city-speaks. extremely-atypical. 29. In an interview with Maya Mavjee about Elliott, Andrea. “Invisible Child: Girl in the Shad- A Map to the Door of No Return, poet, novel- ows: Dasani’s Homeless Life,” New York ist, and activist Dionne Brand activates another Times, December 9, 2013; www.nytimes.com understanding of luck: “In Map I talk about all /projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=1. these interpretations that you walk into unknow- Gordon, Lewis. “Through the Hellish Zone of ingly, almost from birth. If you’re lucky you spend Nonbeing: Thinking Through Fanon, Disas- the rest of your life fighting them, if you’re not, ter, and the Damned of the Earth.” Human you spend your life unquestioningly absorbing.” Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self- Mavjee, “Opening the Door.” Knowledge 5, no. 3 (2007): 5–12. 30. Indeed, in Cradle to Grave’s formulation Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey we are returned to Douglass’s illustration of his Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Far- position as witness and soon-to-be participant rar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. in slavery’s many scenes of subjection. This new ———. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and knowledge does not prevent subjection; it makes Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. one know that one’s subjection is unavoidable. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B. Wilderson III. ———. “Response to Jared Sexton’s Ante-Anti- “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle 13, Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Lateral 1 (Spring no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 183–201. 2012); http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation James, Joy, and João Costa Vargas, “Refusing .org/issue1/content/sharpe.html. Blackness-as-victimization: Trayvon Martin Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: and the Black Cyborgs.” Pursuing Trayvon: An American Grammar Book.” Black, White, Historical Contexts and Contemporary Mani- and in Color: Essays on American Literature festations of Racial Dynamics, ed. George and Culture, ed. Hortense Spillers. Chicago: Yancy and Janine Jones. Latham, MD: Lexing- University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 203– ton Books, 2012, pp. 193–205. 229. Mavjee, Maya. “Opening the Door: An Interview Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White, and Black: with Dionne Brand.” Read Magazine, 2001. Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antago- Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Middletown, CT: nisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Wesleyan University Press, 2008, pp. 25, 26. 2010. Schulten, Katherine, and Amanda Christy Brown. Wright, Richard. Black Boy: A Record of Child- “The Learning Network: Teaching and Learn- hood and Youth. New York: Harper Perennial ing with the New York Times,” Reading Club, Modern Classics, 2007. “Invisible Child.” http://learning.blogs.nytimes Wynter, Sylvia. “ProudFlesh Inter/Views Sylvia .com/2013/12/12/reading-club-invisible- Wynter,” PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan child. Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness 4 Sexton, Jared. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: After- (2006): 1–36. thoughts,” Lateral 1 (Spring 2012); http://lateral ———. “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter .culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue1/content to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge /sexton.html. for the 21st Century, in N.H.I. Forum: Knowl- Silverstein, Jason. “I Don’t Feel Your Pain.” Slate; edge for the 21st Century’s inaugural issue www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/ “Knowledge on Trial.” 1, no. 1 (1994): 42–73. science/2013/06/racial_empathy_gap_people ———. “A Black Studies Manifesto.” Forum _don_t_perceive_pain_in_other_races.html. N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, in Sharpe, Christina. “Blackness, Sexuality, and En- N.H.I. Forum: Knowledge for the 21st Cen- tertainment.” American Literary History 24, no. tury’s inaugural issue “Knowledge on Trial. 1, 4 (December 1, 2012): 827–841. no. 1 (1994): 3–11.

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