heres a paired down, glossed over, watered down version of anti blackness 101
First, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to answer this question in a detailed way. I feel that I have a better grasp on the argument now; I have a few more questions that I would like to ask, if that's alright.
i dont quite know why koslow says this-- he could have his own reasons. but the afro-pessimists( spillers, hartman, wilderson, sexton, patterson, vargus, brown) argue that anti-blackness is the reigning paradigm in the west--they argue that this results from a structural antagonism which is at the heart of civil society-- there are many salient examples of this but a pretty common one is that the conception of freedom that dominates u.s. democratic theory is understood in terms of "being not a slave" which means that in order for freedom to really mean anything, and in turn for the world writ large to maintain ethical coherence, the production of a slave class is necessary-- this, the afro-pessimists argue, is why the human and the slave are diametrically opposed because in the paradigm of anti-blackness the category of human derives meaning from what it isn't--the slave. in afro-pessimist thought, another word for slave is black.
A few questions;
1) Are there conceptions of freedom that do not rely on "slavery" as the constitutive other? Freedom from tyranny or oppression?
2) Are all types of slavery the same? I know a lot of Marxists discuss "slavery" in terms of "wage slavery", which is different in meaningful ways than the term as used by Wilderson. If "freedom" is defined as being free from "wage slavery", where does blackness come in?
3) Is the freedom-against-slavery narrative reliant on a slave class in the present? My first impression when reading that paragraph was that freedom in the present is contrasted against "where we came from / how far we've come". If freedom's constitutive other can be historical instead of modern, then why is a slave class necessary now?
4) Are all blacks part of the "slave class"?
5) How do other-color-bodies play into this narrative? Arab (brown)? Native American (red, according to Wilderson)? Light(er) skinned persons who can "pass" as white but are "black" by heritage / culture? Asian bodies?
still with me?
Basically, yes
according to afro-pessimism, this world, modernity itself, has as its condition of possibility the gratuitous( not contingent) violence of trans-atlantic slavery--this event stole from black folks something that they wont possibly get back--a constructed them as sites of social death--the condition of social death is, functionally, not being recognized as fully human by society--lacking an essential humanness, possessing a different grammar of suffering from the human, and subject to a different, kind of violence.
Ok, so far so good.
humans are victims of contingent violence, this means that that there is a reason for it--not a good one, or just one but an explanation of some kind. the slave/black/socially dead individual is victim of gratuitous violence which means it happens without much cause at all--it needn't any cause.
Could you give me an example that illustrates this, please?
humans(whites and junior partners of civil society) are exploited in various ways and alienated from their ability to do anything about it, exploitation and alienation are the humans grammar of suffering. The black/slave's grammar of suffering is fungibility and accumulation---in an anti-black world blacks are things to accumulated ( collected in prisons, on basketball teams, on the right side of the bracket) and are fungible( they can be exchanged one for another--each black is a perfect amalgam for every other black--)
Is this fungibility and accumulation unique to blacks? Does it happen to all blacks? In this context, what does it mean for a black person to "act white"? Does that restore to them some semblance of social signification?
I ask because I can see accumulation/fungibility along class lines more saliently than I see them along racial lines. Especially fungibility; workers (regardless of color) are hot-swappable for each other, and are perfect representations for every other worker. Poor people are accumulated (in shanty towns, factory floors, bars) in the same way.
Why should we read the situation as striated by race, instead of some other explanation? Not all blacks are "accumulated" for basketball teams; just athletic ones - but so are athletic whites. Not all blacks are "accumulated" in prisons; just poor ones - but so are poor whites. See what I mean?
How does this argument account for black nationalist movements; movements which existed within civil society (like the Black Panthers) that gave social signification to black bodies as black bodies?
this isn't a soley a question of structural position in an unethical world but the condition which makes that world terminally unethical--- the violence of the middle passage stripped the black body of its ability to register ontologically--thier being is a site of lack, of absence, of dereliction--black bodies don't mean what human bodies mean.
If the Middle Passage can reach out of history to constitute the present, why can't THAT be the constitutive other discussed in the first paragraph?
Not all black bodies underwent the middle passage during that time period; and no modern black bodies undergo the middle passage. Why/how does the middle passage continue to exert influence?
this is best understood thru examples-- bouazizi self immolated and started a revolution. his body carried with it the weight of finitude--the event literally resonated in the consciousness of the arab world--we called this event the arab spring. 3-4 years prior a african born woman in belgium did the same thing for the same reason to protest her inability to make a business for herself-- her name is maggie mufu and she doesnt even have a wikipedia page-- onlookers had no more empathy for her than they would a dog, they called her mad, and selfish, and mostly just of didn't give a rats ass. her body didn't elicit empathy because it lacked finitude--it was ontologically void.
I see. Was her ontological voidness due to her blackness, though?
There are many, many people who self-immolate and do nothing. Non-black Tibetans self-immolate all the time and people/the West are apathetic. In fact, in Algeria there were about 14 self-immolations prior to Bouazizi - and none of those started a revolution. Why should we believe that people "didn't give a rats ass" because she was black? Isn't it possible that they were just shitty human beings (equal opportunity misanthropes?)
so why is debate anti black--the short answer is because the world is, same way debate is capitalist and patriarchal -- the world is inherently, irredeemably unethical and debate is in that world-- "in the presence of the slave it is unethical to be free"
Could you explain the last sentence? I don't understand.
Are all microcosms of society anti-black? Were the black panthers anti-black?
but debate is specifically anti-black in ways that we often dont even see-- when a team reads Towson blocks against OU they are demonstrating black fungibility. when one assumes that any two black kids making K args are a project, or race, or "resistance" team they are illustrating the same thing.
Wow, really profound point.
I'd like to discuss this further; how often do you think "two black kids making K args" get essentialized as the same as Towson/Lville? For example, if two black kids were like "five off and case" and started reading baudrillard and bataille, I don't think most people would assume it was about race.
I know that certain squads and schools tend to make arguments along certain strata (Towson discusses race; Northwestern discusses framework). But those predictions don't seem racially driven, they seem to be driven by reptuation; I wouldn't think K teams who double prepped their framework answers before hitting Northwestern were being discriminatory.
How much of the disconnect between K args (ie, reading Towson answers to OU) is the result of misunderstanding? I know a lot of people that read "util good and realism" as the response to every K, regardless of whether or not it's responsive. Are those kritiks being treated "fungibly"?
diversity quotas are literally the practice of accumulating of black bodies in a given population.
Is this true even when black bodies specifically request diversity quotas? I followed the MJP discussion in the other thread and saw people talking about Affirmative Action MJP. If a black person (or black people) specifically requested that system, and it was implemented on the basis of that request, is such a system anti-black? In other words, can a system by blacks for blacks be anti-black? If so, what does it mean to be "anti-black"?
the general invisibility of black folks speaks to something deeper than just people are busy--some voices resonate, some voices are heard, some voices don't. that isnt an accident.
Again, profound. This is certainly my ignorance with the common practices of debate, but how often does this occur? Where and by whom, and why don't they get called out? Most teams seem comfortable calling out racism where they see it (see: discussion about the hotel with plantation style architecture a while back).
the way that black judges are pidgeon holed in certain ways when white men (like me) who have spent 10 years doing silly things with their judging practices keep getting more and more chances to be better--but a black woman is once and for all made biased by her blackness which comes with all the irrationality that white eyes ascribe to black bodies
Does this actually happen? I don't have the experience in debate to say/see. Again, why don't people call it out like they call other racialized issues out?
im probably gonna hear from someone that i got some part of this wrong--it is a pretty complicated argument.
i know this needs to be unpacked a great deal-- i hope it helps-- its a complex argument but i trust you can read and look stuff up and do some of that unpacking. if you are interested further and want some light reading on the matter i think i good place to start would be orlando patterson's slavery and social death. hope it helps in any event.
It definitely does. Thank you very, very much for your explanation and I definitely will pick up a copy of Patterson. I googled for Wilderson after hitting it, and could only find one chapter of Red White and Black online. I'll see if Patterson is there. Thanks again
