...till the very end it was a really big long day. I also want to formally thank
Elisa and Raz for putting on such an extraordinary conference. Al and I are
gonna bring it back very specifically to the question of genocide but we are
going to be referencing papers and statements that were made all day that
we've been dying to weigh in on, give an hour (new work together) where we are
shifting the theoretical paradigm for how we even understand genocide from
some sort of event (which we think has never adequately characterized any
genocide ever) to a pathology of socio-political economic practices that
undermined the social vitality of very specific communities. To get back to
something that Al said last night after the opening talk, I really don't
want to forget that genocide is a legal category and yet signifies violence that
exceeds legality. So, in our imaginary genocide is a critical word in our
imaginary. It actually represents the very worst crime that can be done for
which there is no possible justification because it is an attack on a people or
community as such, which lends the notion of genocide that
is the very worst crime. It's really clear...it's important for Alan and I to
emphasize that genocide is not a tragedy which means it is not inevitable.
It is not natural, right? If you think about death as a tragedy or broken heart
as a tragedy and genocide is not random or spontaneous, it is an organized effort
to destroy an entire population marked by race, class, gender, religion, or ability
so in this sense genocide is also not exceptional, but instead realized through
everyday practices that seek (again) to undermine the social vitality of an
entire community. So the reason judgment that we have all developed over the
course of this entire day (that we all have right now), the reason judgment that
we can, in fact, understand state sanctioned violence against black and
brown bodies in the United States as genocide. We all
have that. Reason judgment does not stand up against the collective belief that it
is not genocide and that's what Raz is really upset about right, no matter how
many fantastic analyses we do to show that obviously even using the UN
conventions definition of genocide and as undergrad rappers have literally been
saying for over thirty years, it is very clear that the United States was founded
on genocide and has perpetuated genocide against black and brown bodies through
different kinds of policies. The reason judgment is
rejected by more general belief about genocide in our imaginary, we need to
actually start our work with how we imagine genocide and how the way
that we have imagined genocide in the popular and political imaginary has been
constructed in a very specific way to exclude American racism. So I'll say
a bit about my approach. I think Dr. Skitolsky was framing the
approach that we're taking. Again, thank you for thank everyone for hanging out
with us and allowing philosophers to go at the end. I don't know if you know
what you've gotten yourself into.
So I think one of the things that we're that, we're interested in doing here,
is to not necessarily add to the economy of information but philosophers tend to
ask questions and so everything that we're saying here is to drag out a more
specific set of questions that can be posed against how we think about
genocide, how we think about black lives and anti black violence. My area is in
aesthetics particularly and what we might call something like critical
aesthetics. I mean I think that what's problematic is how the aesthetic
has been left out so in general, we might talk about the aesthetics as being
concerned with questions of beauty, questions of art, et cetera but that's not
exactly what I'm concerned with. I'm concerned with how something appears and
how something fails to appear. how is it that something is made to appear, what
are the conditions under which something is made to appear and allowed to appear,
and what are the conditions under which something is made to disappear. That's
what I mean by critical aesthetics and that's really the sort of the
methodological underpinning of this, is that there's a question about
not just what appears but what's made to appear. There's a question about what's
not just what is left out but what's made to be left out and I'm
particularly interested in the way in which things some things have
become produced as moments of making something appear, and yet they actually
are then produced there are at the same time that they're making something
appear. They're also producing a type of disappearance, for example,
the narrative that would suggest that the history
of anti-black violence in the United States is one monolithic thing
that you can trace from slavery to Jim Crowe to the Civil Rights and then,
popcorn right. There is a sense that that history is a
continuous history of always getting better. Well, as philosophers we have to
say something like, "possibly, possibly but I disagree"
so the violence... because what gets left out of that nice,
neat narrative? The violence of slavery produces the African-American produces
the black experience in one mode as slave but that's not the same as the
violence of Jim Crowe. That's not the same as the violence of post-civil rights and
we have to acknowledge that as we come up against some similar things, as
we come up against residual violence, whose benefit is it to
produce this narrative that tells a nice history of progress when
what we're confronted with is the return of that
same traumatic violence and yet it claims us in very different ways, so
our attention to the aesthetic here is not to trivialize or to
take a luxurious journey through questions that don't frame
exactly what we are allowing ourselves to ask and what we allow ourselves to
challenge. I would just say turn that over to back over to...and as
philosophers is on how discourse (which a lot of other people have referenced
today), discourse does not represent the world. Discourse shapes our worlds so if
you want to change our world, we need to be really critical about the
discourse we use to describe and talk about violence and the main thesis of
Al's very recent book, which I'll be mentioning, is that the way that we
discursively talk about anti-black racism and violence, the way we talk
about the history of civil rights, and the way we memorialize past moments or
racist practices, actually becomes part of what perpetuates genocide in the
United States. There's not a little at stake: there's everything at stake in
examining the discourse we use to talk about racism and violence.
When the Civil Rights Congress (this has been mentioned for two days)...
when the Civil Rights Congress presented their petition against the United States
to the United Nations in 1951, they became the first group ever to attempt
to file a legal charge of genocide after the adoption of the UN Convention
against genocide in 1948. So, this happened. Someone needs to
bring this to the you and this happened in 1951, the very first group ever that
made use of the brand-new United Nations Convention used it to try to sue the
United States for being guilty of genocide against African Americans.
Members of the Civil Rights Congress presented the petition called "We charge
genocide: the crime of government against the Negro people."In UN offices in New
York and Paris, their petition was completely ignored. This is an example of
what philosophers now refer to as an epistemic
injustice or the refusal to grant certain testimonies and/or perspectives,
any epistemic value whatsoever. Further, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term
genocide and lobbied for the UN Convention, wrote a scathing rejection of
this petition put forward by the Civil Rights Congress in an op-ed in The New
York Times that did not at all refer to the central argument in the text itself.
There has been no substantial concern with this document presented by the
Civil Rights Congress or Lempkin's response to this document. In the field
of Holocaust and genocide studies, we charge genocide as a document (in my view)
has just been dismissed to the ashes of history, so we want to return to this
lapse in reasoning not only as an instance of injustice but as situating a
context through which anti-black practices have been identified as
genocide and yet, because this genocide is situated within the cultural norms of
society that already exists, it disappears as an event. We are concerned
with the inability of the UN to hear the petition or respond to the petition at
the time of its presentation and with Lempkin's refusal to consider the content
of the petition. We are also concerned with the scholarly indifference to this
petition, which excludes it from philosophical and historical
consideration in the field of genocide studies in what way as the field of
genocide studies itself been shaped by this refusal to think about systemic
anti-black racism as a system of genocide. What assumptions have made this
refusal seem obvious and reasonable? We will identify and challenge one
assumption that precludes an interest in the genocidal character of anti-black
racism by promitizing the ontology of genocide as an event of extreme violence
against a targeted population, an event that is always marked apparently by
discreet and (obvious) the beginning and end to the violence
against the population. Construing genocide in terms of an extreme event of
mass violence against a targeted population is consistent with the
politics of a moralization that rests on a Liberatore or teleological view of
history and the history of social justice movements. In his new book, the
"Post-racial limits of Memorialization," Frank Kowski argues that the politics of
the public memorialization of anti-black violence in the United States reinforced
the post-racial discourse (right, like we're over racism) that represents this
violence as a product of the past overcome in the present. Dr. Frank Kowski
recommends a new politics of mourning (collective, political mourning) as counter
resistance to the moral and historical blindness induced by the politics of
memorialization and its optimistic representation of our progression toward
freedom and social equality of all historically oppressed groups for the
act of public mourning interrupts or disrupts the Liberatore reading of
social justice movements to better bear witness to the repetition of racist
oppression and systemic violence in the present. In this text, Frank Kowski
connects the teleological view of human suffering that we suffer less over time
with the perpetual production of unlivable life in the present always
already disavowed as a tragic exception to the norm of a better, less racist
society, so that's the problem is regarding every police murder of a young
black man as an exception to an otherwise justice system. That's why
we need genocide, these aren't tragic exceptions to a better norm and
the notion of genocide pathology can help us better see that and
recognize useless systemic violence as useless systemic violence. And can I add
just a little bit to that? I think one of the interesting things to
consider is that in our discourse, the first things that when we see
something like the killing of Freddie gray, one of the first
things that we do is we post-racialize it. We post-racialize it by saying
"this is horrible,
but at least it's not as bad things used to be" and at that
moment, we post racialized it. I want us to sort of think about that move, that
gesture, to take something that's very present and push it into the past
suddenly as a type of cannibalism I think. I think that it has that
same sort of feature of weaving together or sort of masking over a disgusting
practice in the present and trying to make it seem like it is as if it suddenly
becomes naturalized and notice that when Trayvon Martin's
killer was acquitted, what did Obama do? The first move was to
say, "we must acknowledge that we have come a long way as a country." He
post-racialized the moment suddenly. He post racialized it in such a way that
anything that came after is already seen within this long trajectory of history,
yet it is exactly the same violence, the same practice as
before and that's why the focus on aesthetics is so important here. Frankowski's
association between the aesthetic representation of state
violence (both in the media and through memorialization and the continuity of
that violence) is supported by the cassandra' complex, which he talks about
in his book, and which we can understand as a network of relations and systemic modes
of denial. Such collective practices and modes of denial induce
historical forgetting and moral blindness to the extremity of the
present that emerges from and survived the extreme violence of the past. The
complex is based on the tragic Greek figure of Cassandra, who
offered true prophecies that no one could believe and so suffered from the
violence she predicted. The aesthetic distortion of state violence in the past
and our post-racial representation of state violence in the
present preclude their comparative analysis as symptoms of the same
pathological logic that has always informed the practices, institutions, and
legal implementation of anti-black racism in the United States. Our
inability to think about the past history of anti-black racism (in terms of
how it is operative in the present) also serves to reinforce post-racial
discourse and perpetuate our Cassandra complex. Do you want see something say
something about the Cassandra? I'll say something later. I'm
just coming back in order to compliment a new aesthetics of state violence that
resists the representation of racist oppression as a problem of the past that
has been overcome in the present. We offer a new way to conceive of the
ontology of genocide as pathology rather than event. Drawing on the Cassandra
complex, we can assert that a repetition of practices over time is a system and a
repetition that conceals a dysfunction is a pathology, so I can repeat that we
can assert that a repetition of practices over time is a system and a
repetition that conceals a dysfunction is a pathology. I'm literally just
thinking of the justice system. If you think about the complex of practices
that have always been operative in the justice system that gets called justice,
it conceals the dysfunction in the very process of the system
that is really based on the production of unlivable lives and the distortion of
human life. So, in this way we can conceive of genocide as a pattern of
social, political, economic, aesthetic, and legal practices that produce and sustain
lethal dysfunctions in human behavior, such that entire populations are
targeted for state sanctioned violence on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity,
gender, ability, and/or nationality. Genocide is a pathological pattern
of socio-political practices that have always informed the racist distribution
of power and capital in the United States. In this way, the Cassandra'
complex does not simply designate a pathology of psychology but instead a
pathology of history by which patterns of violence are repeated but represented
such that we do not recognize their continuity and continuous transformation
in social and political institutions and interpersonal relations. Thus, our refusal
to hear the claims made and we charge genocide is both a symptom of this
pathology and to the extent that we refuse to hear its prophecy serves to
reinforce the pathological repetition of genocidal practices against black
Americans. One example that actually has been mentioned today is the fact that
obviously slavery isn't over in the United States. It is very alive and well in
all of our prisons. I don't know why we don't call it slave labor anymore but
I teach at and visit a women's prison near me and I was there once for
a TED talk where they had some of the women who are incarcerated tell their
stories or perform and I was sitting next to a woman (a white woman) and she
asked what I was doing there. I told her. She said, "I care about the women here too- I
own a corporation, we employ the women to make uniforms" and I said, "oh, so you're
supporting slave labor," and she said, "it's not slave labor," and I said "it's not
minimum wage." She said, "well, I would like for it to be... that would be great if it
was but I'm not supporting slave labor." I'm like, "no, this is slavery. You are
benefiting from slave labor," and she couldn't hear the words I was
saying right. So this is exactly what I'm trying to get at, like, yo there wasn't an
event of slavery and then it's over right. Like, slavery is one among a
complex of pathological practices that have always been present and informed
American society and create extremely dysfunctional interpersonal
relationships for all of us. Did you want to say something?
One concern I have is that everybody likes to talk about this
document, "To recharge genocide." Very few people read it and very few people
actually acknowledge its brilliance and the brilliance of its analysis. So one
thing I was going to do was read some passages from it, just show you that the
analysis you all wish was already there has already been done right and it's
shocking to the extent to which it's been ignored. I want to read a little
bit about it and also very few people know how Raphael Lemkin, who is kind of a
hero in genocide studies, had the most obnoxious, racist disavowal of "To recharge
Genocide" in the New York Times so it's gonna read a little bit about that. My
concern is that that sort of historical background, which I think is really
important( especially for this particular conference) but I don't want to take up
too much time because Al's contribution is the really meaty
theoretical work, talking more about the Cassandra' complex and sort of
the wrong way of acknowledging violence creates the seeds for repetition of that
violence. I'll say a little bit of this but maybe I'll cut myself short
or you can interrupt or something like that. So, this is one of the
most powerful passages and it's from the introduction. "To recharge genocide," which
again was written in 1951. I really can't say that enough. "Out of the inhuman black
ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the south, comes
this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and
distorted by the willful creation of conditions, making for premature death,
poverty and disease. It is a record that calls aloud for condemnation for an end
to these terrible injustices that constitute a daily and ever increasing
violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the crime of genocide." I hear so much underground rap, it's just a
continuing effort to put forward the mission set toward by "We recharge genocide."
I mean, as I've been sitting here like all these lyrics have come back to me
but that entire passage is actually present in a song by Brand Nubian (called
"Claim and I'm a criminal" and he was really... it's amazing song and
he's like, "it's the whole black race that they're fuckin'
with," like straight-up, right? He describes the extra legal conditions of getting
arrested, the humiliation, the conditions of confinement, which are brutality and
torture straight up. It's the whole black rights that they're fuckin with right
the underground rappers have not hesitated to use the word genocide and
so I see underground rap as continuing the project set by the Civil Rights
Congress. "Although the petition references the continuity of genocidal
violence against black Americans from slavery to the present, it focuses its
analyses on the legal discrimination and genocidal violence perpetuated through
the then operative Jim Crowe laws and mass lynching. And yet the descriptions
offered of the methodical state violence perpetrated through legal segregation is
also eerily descriptive of the violence now perpetrated through the U.S.
epidemic of police murders of unarmed African Americans and their mass
incarceration."The following passages could just as easily describe the racist
logic of our criminal justice system as the logic of Jim Crowe laws and lynching.
"The genocide of which we complain is as much a fact as gravity. The whole
world knows of it. The proof is in every day's newspapers in everyone's sight and
hearing in these United States, it's very familiarity disguises its
horror. It is a crime so embedded in law, so explained away by specious rationale,
so hidden by talk of Liberty, that even the conscience of the tender minded is
sometimes dulled. Yet the conscience of mankind cannot be beguiled from its duty
by the pious phrases and the deadly legal euphemisms with which its
perpetrators seek to transform their guilt into high moral purpose." So
law and order is a euphemism for, "let's arrest, attack and kill black bodies." I
think the phrase "the criminal justice system" is nothing but a euphemism.
"The conveners of this petition risked arrest after the presentation to the
United Nations offices in New York and the United States revoked the passport
of William Paterson after he presented this petition to the United Nations
Assembly in Paris. The authors of the document demand recognition of the
distinctly genocidal violence perpetrated by the Jim Crowe laws because
the term has political power and legal implications." We can't say, let's
ditch the word 'genocide' when you can see what a threat it was to United States,
like that means something that the United States was threatened by the
Civil Rights Congress. "The use of the term 'genocide' was necessary for this
group to oppose the pious phrases and deadly legal euphemisms that had masked
the regularity and brutality of state sanctioned violence against African
Americans. For this same reason, Claudia Card appealed to the definition of
genocide in order to explain and condemn the harm of social death that emerged
from the structural discrimination against entire populations in war and in
peace in the legal and medical and academic and domestic areas of human
life to support their case to the United Nations that the United States was
guilty of committing genocide against black Americans. The Civil Rights
Congress cited the then-current conditions of legal discrimination:
lynching, disenfranchisement, police brutality, and systematic systemic
inequalities, and health and the quality of life between white and black
Americans. Imac quite correctly cited article 2 of the convention to argue
that the United States had consistently committed genocide against black
Americans in the sense of - a killing members of the group to be causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and to see deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction, in whole or in part." And again, we see all three conditions
present, every single day in the everyday conditions of confinement in US prisons.
"The petition includes hundreds of descriptions
of then-recent cases, in which innocent black Americans (including
children) had been murdered by police brutality, lynchings, and the courts
sentenced to death. It also provides poignant descriptions of the mental
harms suffered by African-American communities from legal discrimination
and their exclusion from both moral consideration and the protection of the
law." So this bold and historic action taken
by the Civil Rights Congress was described in only two short paragraphs
in the New York Times on December 18 1951 under the headline
(think about the headline in the way we aesthetically represent things) "U.S.
accused in UN of Negro genocide." It was two paragraphs covering
this historic... U.S. accusing UN of Negro genocide." "These
two paragraphs that were just described what happened are followed by three
paragraphs that cover the reaction of Raphael Lemkin to their petition. Lemkin
was the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term 'genocide' and convinced the UN
to designate genocide as a violation of international law. The article states at
Lumpkin assailed the petition and 'said the accusations were a maneuver to
divert attention from the crimes of genocide committed against Estonians,
Latvians, Lithuanian, Poles and other Soviet subjugated peoples.' Lemkin was
offended that black Americans would make use of the new Genocide Convention to
draw attention to their 'plight' and understand their discrimination on par
with the Nazi genocide." Actually sounds like Holocaust and genocide studies as a
field in general. "Or indeed, for Soviet violence
against Eastern European populations..." I mean that's like every Holocaust
conference, is like how dare you try to understand violence against black
Americans as on par with what the Nazis - how dare you do that?
This is so puzzling because (as Elisa pointed out like very well this
morning), "his work had consistently provided a very expansive notion of
genocide. They did not reduce it to mass murder but instead recognized multiple
ways to destroy entire populations, in whole or in part.
Two years after the petition was presented," two years after Lempkin
couldn't let it go, "he then wrote an op-ed in The New York Times." Two years
afterwards. "Here is his title of his op-ed: 'Nature of genocide: Confusion with
Discrimination against Individuals Seen." Confusion with discrimination against
individual seen. That's why you have to keep saying, it's the whole black race
that they're fucking with. Do you see what I'm saying? We're not talking about
individuals. "Although he never mentions the Civil Rights Congress, he directs his
remarks against the opponents of the Genocide Convention." So he calls his
Civil Rights Congress, "the opponents of the Genocide Convention, or those who
appeal in order to name the system of racial oppression in the United States."
In Lempkin's title, "he denies the substance of the charges and we charge
genocide for he denies that discrimination against individual black
Americans (despite the continuous history of slavery and police brutality and
lynchings) could ever be interpreted as genocide."
"Instead, he callously (so callously) dismisses the right to compare racist
discrimination with genocidal violence," even though clearly in Nazi Germany,
you cannot just like separate racist discrimination from genocide or
violence. That's what he does in his op-ed and he just misses the "mental
anguish suffered from widespread poverty, lynchings, and police brutality as
nothing more than being frightened." And this is his exact quote, Raphael Lemkin.
"The opponents of the Genocide Convention have been asking literally, can one be
guilty of genocide when one frightens a negro?" And no one's read this and no
one in our field ever talks about this. We still lionize Lempkin as the most
important person ever. It's
unreal that he wrote this! "The opponents of the Genocide
Convention have been asking literally, can one be guilty of genocide when one
frightens a negro? Obviously not because fear alone cannot be considered as
serious mental harm, as meant by the authors of the convention. The act is not
directed against the Negro population of the country and by no stretch of
imagination can one discover in the United States an intent or plan to
exterminate the Negro population, which is increasing in conditions of evident
prosperity and progress in their petition to the United States the Civil
Rights Congress repeatedly emphasized that the American genocide against black
Americans had always been motivated by the desire for capital and power," as has
every genocide in the history of nations. So part of the epistemic injustice of
separating slavery and genocide is due to bad history in Holocaust Studies,
which previously had claimed the Holocaust is somehow different because
here, the Jews were being destroyed just because they were Jews and there was no
overriding instrumental desire for capital or power. That older view has
been completely destroyed by a newer generation of more Marxist minded
scholars (historical scholars) who understand capital and power
were part of the intent. But there is no pure intent to ever destroy people. It's
always a desire for capital and power but my point is that even before the new
sexy historians have been doing this in Holocaust Studies, Civil Rights Congress
said it in 1951. They said very clearly in the document: "all genocide is
motivated in part by desire for capital and power." And olympians are like, what
reason could America have? I can't imagine a reason why America would
want to destroy the negro?And yet, "Lemkin claims that by
no stretch of imagination can one possibly discover any intent in the
regular state sanctioned murder and exploitation of black Americans and this
legal system of discrimination that served to preserve it still serves to
preserve the status quo of white economic supremacy. Lempkin's willfully
naive perspective suggests that his inability to see and imagine black
Americans as victims of genocide has more to do with his own racist dismissal
of their plate than with any rational assessment of the extensive petition
presented by the Civil Rights Congress for he dismisses
a very real terror under which black Americans live by presenting it as a
problem affecting certain nervous individuals rather than an existential
threat that emerges from their extreme everyday vulnerability to state
sanctioned violence and death." Do you want to add something? Yes,
can we go back to Lempkin's first sentence again? Yes read it, you got it.
Want me to reread it? Just the first sentence. "The opponents of
the Genocide Convention have been asking literally, can one be guilty of genocide
when one frightens a negro?" I want to take off from there and
have us just think about what's going on at the level of
representation. A representation cannot cannot simply be... it is not just a
benign sort of thing. It's not just a record of what appears but what's
made to appear and here I think is a pretty clear record of how anti-black
violence in the United States has always had to pass a
certain threshold before it even gets to the level of representation. So when my
other obsessions (as Immanuel Kant would say, love/hate sort of obsession), you know, one
of the good things about Immanuel Kant was that he
says that a representation is not just about what hits your senses. It's
an act of consciousness, so it's an activity by which I pull together, what I
am sensing and represent it to myself. So socially,
representations have a very peculiar place because there are not simply
records of what's there but they are constructions and in many ways
values that are put into the domain of appearance.
So what Lempkin is representing to himself or what
this formal relationship is representing as fear is a
gross distortion of the situation, yes, but let's look at what is being
represented as a distortion. In 1934.,
Claude Neal was described in several newspapers as being... his lynching was
described in several newspapers (the publication was so popular that it was then
reprinted and sent around the country) and here's an excerpt of
that account: "First they cut off his penis. He was made
to eat it. Then they cut off his testicles and made him eat
them and say he liked it. Then they sliced his sides and stomach
with knives and every now and then someone would cut off a finger or a toe.
Red-hot irons were used on the nigger to burn him from top to bottom. From time to
time during the torture, a rope would be tied around Neal's neck and he would be
pulled over a limb and held there until he was almost choked to
death when he would automatically be let down and the torture
begun all over again. Neal's body was tied to the rear of an automobile and
dragged over the highway to the Kennedy home.
Here, a mob estimated to number somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 people from
7/11 states was excitedly waiting his arrival. A woman
came out of the Kennedy house and drove a butcher knife into his heart. Then the
crowd came by and some kicked him and some drove their cars over him. What
remained of the body was brought to the mob to Mariana
where it is now hanging from a tree on the northeast corner of the courthouse.
Photographers say that they will soon have pictures of the body for sale at
fifteen cents. Each fingers and toes from Neal's body are freely exhibited on this
street corners here."
The story became a representation of the
extraordinary violence at the national level but Neal's case was not distinctly
extraordinary, nor was it extraordinarily remarkable. Between 1877 and 1950, the
equal justice initiative has reported that nearly 3,959 lynchings
happened. This is more than what was estimated before that report came
out but I just want us to remember that those are recorded lynchings,
lynchings that were recorded as lynchings and that were successful
and so the thing that we have to think about when we think about the
representation of lynching is yes, there is extraordinary violence
but at what point does the violence become something that outstrips
our imagination? The term itself, lynching, is something that indicates an
extra juridical violence that exceeds the continuum of murder. It
exceeds the continuum of violence and harassment.
That's what Lempkin described as a type of fear and it's also when we think
about the history of lynching, we often will represent it as various events that
have beginnings and ends but not... In its excessiveness, lynchings were a form of
formal ritual. The script of Neal's lynching that
followed is a pretty normal one, of the genitalia being cut off. We can see this
again in the the documentary of the "Untold story of Emmett Till." The
genitalia being cut off and put into the mouth, the multiple sites of death and
particularly the public allottee of the specter of black torture.
These are the formal elements and they
exceed the actual event itself and remain with the
culture long afterwards and there's a necessity, the ending part right? The
ending part is necessary... that there's a necessary distribution of the body...
there's a necessary distribution of the torturer, there's a necessary
reproduction of the image over and over again - not to traumatize or even address
anything that Neal could have done, but to traumatize. As Dr. Skitolskyso
pointed out, to traumatize the whole entire black race.
First, I want to say that I also brought
my attention to contemporary forms or transmissions of lynching, like this is
also not a thing of the past. You should think (and this all
brought this to my attention), whenever a police officer does murder a
young black man, it then gets recorded . That's how it makes
news and it's called like a Jif or something.
Okay, that's what it's called.
Well you have to think about what's being done here when the .gif of a black
man being shot is being circulated, seeing and racing all over again.
Here we can see is that lynching isn't over, it's like a contemporary
manifestation of it.
So one of the things I think to consider is that
if lynching has this sort of formal aspect of it,
it's got to be public. It's got to be a redistributor. What have we done
away with? We've done away with the necessity of being present to the
killing and when we repost (whether or not we are reposting to
increase social consciousness or whether we are reposting out of some sick fetish
right), the repost itself puts us in the same
formal relationship as though the practice of lynching. So what I want
to encourage us to think about is not to focus so much on the gratuitous
violence that is represented, that detaches our sensibility
from it. A lot of times in our political imaginary, think about
lynchings is happening at them in the middle of night by a few bad apples that
have gotten too drunk at the gas station and have nothing to do and that's not
true. It's not true that most lynchings happen
that way. Most lynchings happened in public. They were planned a week or so in
advance. There was a picnic and carnivalesque
like atmosphere. Children were brought, music was played, cotton candy
distributed... so there's a way that the publicity of it is
necessary. We don't have those festivals anymore in that particular way
but in social space, when we repost something, are we participating in the
practice of lynching without the actual interaction? Without it, so its aesthetics
has shifted, yet our formal relationship remains the same. It means that we have
to draw a lot more questions about our practices I think. I guess the last
thing that Al has always made me realize about lynching is that we think about it
so little and we reconcile it as an event that's over, so we don't think
about how creepy that psychosexual investment is in watching black bodies
tortured. Where did that go? It didn't go anywhere. It's not like over,
so the psychosexual investment in watching black body suffer is now in
prisons so I don't know how to explain the excessive, unnecessary
gratuitous amount of violence inflicted on our prisoner population outside of
that sort of psychosexual investment in watching black bodies suffer but
transfer to the prison (and this is again, we mean like the event here it's hiding
and making us forget more than recognize or reckon with) so it is our view (Al and mine)
that the representation of genocide as an event
(with the discrete beginning, middle, and end) also serves as an epistemic
injustice, an injustice on the level of knowledge that prevents the
recognition of systemic oppression against a marginalized population as
genocidal and so it also serves to normalize the infliction of gratuitous
violence and social death on targeted populations
as mere discrimination that lacks the terror of a real genocide. The ontology
of the event as an extraordinary phenomenon that is collectively
recognized as such will always fail to represent or detect the genocide of
logics that are operative in the everyday practices that perpetuate and
normalized state sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies. It was
really wild for me when I started visiting prison after studying the
Holocaust for like 15 years. But I wasn't saying anything. I
haven't heard women say their... it's just like, how is this America? What the
fuck? Does everybody know what's going on in here? And I was like, what the fuck?
This is the concentration camp. I had no idea.
People who would describe what you see in the camps and they
wouldn't be believed. It's really unimaginable what
happens in the prison system and to reconcile that with American
democracy (of course there's no reconciliation necessarily because America
is genocidal) so the notions of the singular, the unique, and the
unprecedented all presuppose the ontology of the event as the basis for
the phenomenon that we call genocide or the coordinated effort to destroy an
entire population. These notions inform the field of comparative genocide
that aims to compare discrete, singular events of genocide that act as ruptures
in the political and social order. For this reason, the ontology of genocide as
event in this field has perpetuated our moral blindness to the continuity and
extremity of anti-black racism in the United States. So we argue - just a shift
of paradigm to a pathology - to better represent the temporarlity of genocidal
violence and detect the genocidal patterns of anti-black racism in the
United States. We think that... if we assume this new paradigm, we can better
recognize the genocidal nature of historically distinct phenomena (lynching
and mass incarceration) that do not represent events that begin and end so
much as distinct expressions of a continuous pattern of pathological state
sanctioned violence inflicted on African Americans as a
group. So the stakes are so high when you realize what genocide means as a
legal category because once you make the case that the prison system is a system
of genocide, there's no reforming that shit. You just have to abolish it.
You have to raze it to the ground and it gets so frustrating. People are like, well,
what else could we do? We have so much poverty of our moral
imagination that we can't think how to pursue justice other than inflicting
massive amounts of pain on lawbreakers or suspected lawbreakers. It
doesn't even matter what comes next, you just have to destroy the system of
concentration camps that poses as a criminal justice system in our country.
So you can't have an abolitionist movement
without the word genocide. It just doesn't work because then you're always
going to get into the neoliberal asking for reform and this is what frustrates
me with Michelle Alexander and the new Jim Crowe and that whole take on it,
which is that the problem isn't solved by reducing the number of black men in
prison. You're still talking about genocide, a la conditions of confinement
so even if there were less black men in prison it would still need to be
abolished. It would still be genocide. I don't like how the liberal
media is really focused on the word 'mass incarceration,' as if the problem with our
system is that there are just too many people in there. No, the problem is that
it's a sight of torture. It's not just so that there are too many people in
there that we keep and that's like to forget to represent in a way that
we forget the perpetuation of genocidal practices in this space, which is then
hidden from view. So to go back to thinking about
the ontology of the event, I want us to think a little. I
want to think with you a bit more about how lynching (not as a
representation) but as a framework or a form of practice frustrates or
this quite a bit. As the description of Neal's lynching attests,
the history of lynching has been characterized within
the discursive practices of the event and ontologizef as I passed from which no
trace has been left. This refers to the aesthetic claims of
erasure within our cultural, political present. Yet, erasure as in the changing
of sign names, is only one type of aesthetic erasure and it does not get at
how the aesthetic sentiments and practices continue despite this erasure,
the ratio of the traces. Indeed, the practice of lynching was
decidedly not something contained in the event, in the relations between
communities, or even in the historical closure of their horizon. Rather they
remain in the way terror texturizes the sensibility toward places and
peoples then and now and (maybe more importantly) in the way that sensibility
is cut off and seen only within a diasporic horizon that can never be
fully recognized as an event of the present. Interestingly enough, we
say that the lynching is not a present phenomenon. So let's do a I disagrees.
I disagree with the way in which lynching is often situated in
our language as something comparable to murder. It is not on the continuum of
murder and I think that it's imperative for us to refuse this
equation. I disagree with the way in
which lynching has become something that we somehow know how and what. It's
representation contains... I think we should be a lot more skeptical of when
we think that when something is categorized immediately not as a repetition of
lynching. I disagree with the way in which we think about lynching as an
individual or unique thing that only a few bad apples perform here and there. I
disagree with all of this and I think that what we need to see in all of these
various ways in which lynching is allowed to appear is
something much more pathological at work. Let's go back to this Cassandra complex.
I was gonna say one more thing and then go right into
Cassandra. I just want to say why this notion of
pathology is helpful, why this shift of paradigm... why we like this
notion of pathology to describe the nature and process of genocide. We should
think of genocide as a pathology or a complex of ways that informs a diseased
form of human life. It is through this pathological habit that individuals or
collectives attack the basic needs and capacities of entire communities. At the
same time that all communities suffer from a certain distortion of culture
that is contingent upon a particular set of conditions. And when I mean all
communities, I mean when I'm in the prison, I feel really bad for
correctional officers. They're like unbelievably fucked up. What they have
normalized for themselves. I don't... it's not like those who wield the power
.or in a good position, it's not like they're not also suffering from a
seriously pathological way of thinking and acting. So by framing genocide
as a pathology, we decline to situate the event as either inevitable or as natural
but rather as something difficult to discern and isolate from the larger
toxic conditions in our social environment, such as an economic system
based on monopoly capitalism, the lack of general access to decent healthcare, the
epidemic of child rape, and systemic state sanctioned violence against women,
immigrants, and people of color. The new field of epigenetics (which I'm now
actually getting obsessed with) is also helpful to better understand the
continuity of genocidal logics and assaults based on the capacity of our
genes to be altered by cultural experiences of trauma, such that the
children of traumatized parents are more susceptible to post-traumatic stress
disorder and the children of perpetrators are now thought to be more
susceptible to rage and violence against the perceived other. So this new field of
epigenetics is actually revealing that the wounds of genocide affected genetic
information pass to succeeding generations
and so, overturning the entire history of how, we've understood genetics . It's
not raw material that's delivered to succeeding generations unaffected by
what happens in history. Literally, the genetic information that we pass or the
dispositions that someone might inherit are affected by
what happens in history and in culture. But that means, if you think about
epigenetics and our notion of pathology, here the model of pathology is both
metaphor and a very literal way to understand the continuity of genocidal
practices over time that precede and survive any particular event of mass
violence. So let us refuse to take up the issue of
genocidal violence for the purposes of convenience to those who are living. It
is far too easy to speak of each event as isolated or as its own pattern but
this puts in place a practice of distortion whereby we forget in what we
remember. First, let us think about anti-black violence as always being
excessive. It's excessive to our political imaginary. It's not that we
haven't gotten the representations right, but that our political imaginary has
been formed in such a way that anti-black violence as actual violence
exceeds it. Second, anti-black violence is a practice that maintains a specter of
social death, of the rupture of vitality of the forecasts of a complete
annihilation. Third, anti-black violence is constantly a practice that is being
articulated within a sphere through memory, through rituals, through a type of
divert diversion and at the same time, it is a sphere of disarticulation. For
knowledge will not get us out of this, adding to the sphere of knowledge will
not disrupt our pathological relationship to anti-black
violence. Knowledge can only forecast that at some point,
we will reconcile ourselves to that path but again, I don't agree. I want us
to take up for a moment the position that we don't agree with the politics
implied by a reconciliation. The Cassandra complex... I started working
with the figure of Cassandra because what's
interesting about Cassandra (and Melissa has also got me to rethink a lot about
the Cassandra complex within the context of genocide) because Cassandra was the
prophetess to Apollo and at the fall of Troy, she sees that Troy is going
to fall and that she sees her own death. This is like the worst for the Greeks,
to know that you will die and not be able to do anything about it. So
she's tortured but what's curious about Cassandra is that she doesn't really
tell people about the future. She tells them about the past.
So Agamemnon comes and takes Cassandra as prize when he shows back up at the
house of Atreus. He's coming, he's greeted by the course and he's greeted by
great advices by some people and he's greeted by his wife Clytemnestra and
she takes him out of his carriage. She sees
Cassandra and the first thing that she says to Cassandra is she says she tries
to ask her if she understands her and Cassandra refuses to say anything. She
refuses. She's remained silent and then Cladamenstra, thinking that she
doesn't understand Greek, she says "take care of this barbarian,
treat her nicely when she comes into the house." As soon as Clements was gone,
Cassandra addresses though the people who are remaining the course and she
says this this house is the house of murder.
It smells like an open grave to me, it smells like an open grave to me. What
is she referring to? She's referring to a maybe the future right but,
definitely the feast of deities, which happens before Agamemnon leaves,
where the house of Atreus is cursed by a
rival who cooks children and
feeds them to Atreus, I believe. And so she says the cycle of
violence here. The cycle of violence is marked in this house, it smells like an
open grave to me. This is the house of horrible things, this is the house of
murder and the course responds by saying, "we don't know what she's
talking about." Now this is not possible.
They were structured in such a way that they immediately (when
confronted with what was apparent to them), they immediately turned
away from it and said I don't understand. This is not a
representation for me. It's not exactly the same as a denial and I want us to
think about the language of pathology here, it isn't exactly the same
as a denial... it's i a way in which we position ourselves formally
to something that is our content and yet we don't acknowledge it. We don't
recognize it. It doesn't get into the circuit of representation and that's
the complex part of it. When Cassandra goes into the house, she is of
course murdered but she's told them everything about their violence. If
she was in the United States, we could imagine her like the voice looking out
out from his tower and looking at the American society and the European
society looking at World War one and saying exactly what the boy said at this
site: "this is not 'you've gone mad' but rather, this seeming
terrible is the real soul of white culture, back of all culture, stripped
invisible today. This is where the world has arrived, these dark and awful depths
and not the shining and effort-able heights of which it is boasted." Therefore,
I would like to suggest that using this Cassandra
complex as a way of thinking about how and in what way anti-black violence is a
practice of genocide reframes the violence as a practice and is not about
denial. It is not about denial, it is not a matter of a lack of knowledge. It
denotes the practice of violence normalized without putting its own
practices into question. The fact that Cassandra's pathway to justice is
silenced means that it has never been tried. The fact that she has only
death never accounted for in the tragedy means that
it is still an option but this option only exists
against the restructuring of the state. If we can learn to
see that, the cassandra complex is not just a way of
understanding our pathology but a way of re-positioning our questions and
questioning what we take up as normative in the present. I think that there
is a way that we need to for the first time (again and again) and
counter that pathological relationship prevention in our context could only
mean maintenance, just as reconciliation can only mean a reproduction. The
question of mourning that I wanted to pose in my book and that I want
to pose to us is a question of reframing our political agency in ways that does
not rid itself of the reckoning with the practices of violence anymore than it
works toward a reinterpretation of what prevention reconciliation or recognition
may mean it is in this sense. It is present for us only in this sense.
Thank you.
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