Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the "Post-Racial" Era

418 Pages·2019·1.475 MB·English

by  Tryon P. Woods

C O
N T E N T S
Blackhood Against
the Police Power
C
O N T E N T S
Blackhood Against
the Police Power
PUNISHMENT AND DISAVOWAL IN THE “POSTRACIAL” ERA Tryon P.
Woods
Michigan State University Press | East Lansing
Copyright © 2019 by Tryon P. Woods i The paper used in this publication meets
the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence
of Paper).
p
Michigan State University Press
East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Woods, Tryon P., author.
Title: Blackhood against the police power : punishment and disavowal in the
“post-racial” era / Tryon P. Woods.
Description: East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2018035321| ISBN 9781611863185 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781609175979 (pdf)
| ISBN 9781628953633 (epub) | ISBN 9781628963649 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH:
Police brutality―United States. | United States—Race relations―Political
aspects.
| African Americans―Social conditions.
Classifi cation: LCC HV8141 .W66 2019 | DDC 363.2/32―dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035321
Book design by Charlie Sharp, Sharp Des!gns, East Lansing, MI Cover design
by Shaun Allshouse, www.shaunallshouse.com G
Michigan State University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative and is
committed to developing and encouraging ecologically responsible publishing
practices. For more information about the Green Press Initiative and the use of
recycled paper in book publishing, please visit www.greenpressinitiative.org.
Visit Michigan State University Press at www.msupress.org
Robert Thomas Bowen Jr., 1968–1991
forever a brother, always a reminder
Thelma Renee Foote, 1956–2007
forever a singular spirit, always an example
In the last quarter, sweetheart, anything can happen.
And will.
Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
C O N T E N T S
Contents
xi Preface
xxi Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
53
Chapter 1. The Time of Blackened Ethics
81
Chapter 2. The Inadmissible Career of Social Death 115
Chapter 3. From Blackland, with Love
143
Chapter 4. All The Things Your Movement Could Be by Now If It Were to
Center Black Self-Determination
185
Chapter 5. On Performance and Position, Erotically 219
Chapter 6. Torture Outside of Pain in the Black Studies Tradition 249 Coda
259 Notes
309 Bibliography
335 Index
Preface
In a global semantic fijield structured by anti-black solidarity, it stands to reason
that the potential energy of a black, or blackened, position holds out a singularly
transformative possibility, an energy generated by virtue of its relation to others
in a fijield of force.
—Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” 2016
This book addresses the punishment of “race” and the disavowal of sexual
violence central to the contemporary “post-racial” culture of politics. It asserts
that the “post-racial” bears an antiblack animus that we should read as desiring
the end of blackness. The book makes the following four interventions into how
we conceptualize our present moment: 1. Redefijine policing as a sociohistorical
process of implementing and reproducing the modern world’s onto-epistemic
structure of antiblackness.
| xi
xii | Preface
2. Redefijine racism, policing’s other name, as an act of sexual violence that
produces the punishment of race.
3. Critique leading antiracist discourse for its complicity with antiblack policing.
4. Account for the way in which the original 1960s conception of black studies
offfers a corrective to the defijiciencies in today’s critical discourse on race and
sex.
Following the se four lines of intervention, I show that the post-racial is more
than simply the latest iteration of antiblackness in which our society has long
been mired. Only a historically grounded study can adequately ascertain the full
meaning of the present; properly contextualized, we see that history does not
repeat itself so much as its relations of force proceed, profoundly contested, but
as yet unvanquished and continuous. Likewise, despite the national mythology
of American exceptionalism and progress, proclaiming that the present period
has shorn itself of the worst violence of the previous era, the contemporary
culture of politics is what it is precisely because the black freedom struggle
continues to lean into the ongoing destruction, mayhem, and atrocity of the
modern world. This book pinpoints the unique manner in which antiblack sexual
violence, constitutive of the modern world since the dawn of racial slavery,
wraps itself in the guise of a new discourse of disavowal.
I wrote this book during the fijirst decade and a half of the twenty-fijirst century:
begun around 2006, it was fijinally completed in 2016. For much of this time, I
used the working title, “‘Post-racial’ is the New Antiblack,” to declare the
specifijic deception o f the “post-racial.” Eventually, the present title, Blackhood
Against the Police Power, emerged as the book’s framework clarifijied. The
presidency of Barack Obama came and went. I have retained “post-racial” in the
book’s subtitle, nonetheless, because although this marker is most closely
associated with the rise of Obama in 2008, I aim to demonstrate how it
pronounces a historical moment in an ongoing culture of politics, and that it does
not primarily spring from nor revolve around the state, changes to the political
economy, or the details of electoral politics. Although the emergence of the
Donald Trump presidency has evoked horror and end-of-times apoplexy from
liberals and the Left, its racism, misogyny (including against Mother Earth),
Preface | xiii
homophobia, and general unabashed elitism and cronyism are not retrograde,
anathema, or the harbinger of fascism—all of those things, and more, have long
been the order of the day. Due especially to its sexual politics, the 2016
presidential contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton was depicted as
evidence that electoral politics have really gotten out of hand. From the
perspective of the black freedom struggle, however, recall that things have been
out of hand, as it were, since at least the time of the fijirst U.S. presidential
election, when the slaveholding class anointed one of its own to oversee the
consolidation of what Gerald Horne argues is properly understood as the
American counterrevolution against the enslaved. Obama and Trump are two
sides of the same coin, two strains of the same mold, two spurs of the same razor
wire.
One of the reasons why new personnel in the White House does not mean a
change in the post-racial culture of politics is that antiblackness is well
entrenched not only in plain sight, as Wahneema Lubiano has taught us, but
moreover, in the very places that present themselves as antiracist and
multicultural.1 Recently, my wife and I met with the director of our youngest
daughter’s school to discuss where she would attend sixth grade the following
year. My wife is black and I am white; our daughters are black. The school
director, a white man, extolled the virtues of the school, emphasizing in
particular its commitment to diversity. The cofffee table around which we sat
prominently displayed a copy of Hamilton: A Revolution, by Lin-Manuel
Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, the libretto and back story to the Broadway hit
show. At one point in the meeting, out of the blue, the director placed his hands
on top of the book and pushed it toward us, telling us how much he loves
Hamilton. As it happens, this gesture of identifijication and desire by the school
director, non sequitur aside, has become commonplace: Hamilton has sent white
people with emotional investments in not being racist over the moon.
They trip over themselves telling each other and their nonwhite friends how they
have memorized the soundtrack; they seem to feel that giving Hamilton as
housewarming and holiday gifts, or showing it offf to the parents of a black child
in the school for which they serve as director, authenticates their commitment to
diversity. These are the “good” whites. Given that Hamilton adds black and
brown faces to a national mythology without altering that narrative in any
substantive manner, this possessive and performative frenzy is telling. Miranda,
xiv | Preface
Hamilton’s creator and star, and his crew portray the most prominent slavehold-
ers and slave traders of the white nation’s fou nding generation beatboxing and
rapping—the counterrevolutionaries against black freedom in a strange type of
blackface. The mystifijication aims to have it both ways: condemn slavery as
evil and then resurrect the people who perpetrated it as “self-made” men and the
social structures based on it as multicultural and inclusive, minus the chattel
condition.2 Slave traders with soul!
The connection between Hamilton’s blackface performance and state practices
of antiblackness is a symbiotic one. Obama’s “state minstrelsy” (to borrow a
term that Lubiano employed to describe Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas’s confijirmation hearings in 1991) was most evident not when he twice
hosted Miranda and the cast of Hamilton at the White House, but in moments
such as his stump speech for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at North
Carolina A&T University in October 2016. It was students from A&T
who launched the sit-in movement in 1960 at the local Greensboro Woolworth’s
lunch counter. By 2016, however, the fijirst black president was pandering to his
audience—journalist Utrice Leid described it as a “carnival barker”
performance, invoking the grotesque and the absurd—at the historically black
university against which he had levied funding cuts larger than any previous
administration, all while he had elsewhere featured education prominently in his
economic stimulus package.3 We have sunk a long way since the days when
students at HBCUs and other campuses around the country rose up against
precisely this kind of historical treachery. As Leid noted, because of what he has
done to black people, the students at A&T should never have permitted Obama
onto campus in the fijirst place. Post-racial aims to distract and deceive; the
deception is ongoing.
In short, things are not as they appear. All writing bears an autobiographical
imprint, no matter how muted or densely layered into the written work. As a
white scholar working in black studies, I confront the ongoing historical violence
of white appropriation of black struggle. I respect the perspective that holds
white people such as me, and our work, at a critical distance: such suspicion is
historically warranted, ethically sound, and ultimately, necessary for self-
defense. I welcome the close scrutiny, not in hopes that a rigorous vetting will
vindicate my credentials, but rather because antiracism cannot
Preface | xv
rest on identity or proprietary claims: who can say and do what about it.4 An
autobiographical dimension of this book is my efffort to blacken my praxis.
This commitment does not entail denying or hiding my whiteness, nor does it
presuppose that I become less white along the way, that there will be a litmus at
which point I have reached a state of sufffijicient blackening. As I elaborate
across the pages of this book, an ethical relationship to the black freedom
struggle requires that racial analysis move away from its preoccupation with the
empirical and the performative and begin to more scrupulously encompass the
structural dimension of the world. My experiences, therefore, are not at issue.
Although white people do not exist in the world uniformly due to dif-ferences in
gender, sexuality, and class, in the least, one of my goals in this book is to
recalibrate the ethics of gender and sex studies to the protocols of antiblackness.
If my experiences alone were the issue, I could certainly tell numerous stories
about how my white maleness has played out advantageously for me, regardless