Figuring Black Lives

Abstract

Figuring Black Lives Justin L. Mann (bio) It is sadly difficult to imagine myself going back in time to June 2020. The temporal dilation and spatial stasis wrought by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has stretched the last few years into some indeterminate meter. And so, it is also hard to resituate myself in relation to the triple murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd that marked the spring of that year and set the stage for the global uprising that dominated the summer of 2020. What I do have is a strong sense of how I felt that spring: already exhausted with online teaching, frustrated with reductive discourses about what anti-Black violence meant / didn't mean / couldn't mean, enraged that again, state and state-adjacent men with guns could kill Black people with impunity, and scared for my life. I was teaching an advanced undergraduate course called, dubiously, Black Insecurity, which sought to understand, according to the course description, the "interdependence" of anti-Black violence at home with what Erica R. Edwards and others call "the long War on Terror," geopolitical and imperial encounters throughout the global South, in the Middle East, and in the virtual world online. Predictably, much of our conversation turned to the relationship between overpolicing, the process of global securitization, and the effects of both on racial regimes, specifically although not exclusively white supremacy and anti-Blackness, in the US in the contemporary moment. Working our way through Black memoir—Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped—and situating these stories of Black life in an intellectual milieu that tracks how narratives of heartbreaking sadness, grief, and violence enliven, rather than obliterate, Blackness, Black people, and Black life, my students exhibited a unique and overwhelming heroism, soldiering (if you'll excuse the metaphor) through what are often bleak stories to arrive on the narrative other side. At around the same time, protests at Northwestern, my current institution, crescendoed; student-activists, including Northwestern Community Not Cops (NUCNC), urged university officials to defund campus policing while administrators defended police as a necessary and often benevolent force, protecting the property of stakeholders including parents, [End Page 635] professors, and trustees. At the fulcrum of this confrontation was the implicit misrecognition of the history and logic of policing, the denial of the relationship between race and surveillance, and the disavowal of the university's possessive investment, to crib George Lipsitz's oft-repeated phrase, in preserving its accounts receivable ledger. This is likely a familiar story and one I recount not to set out my experience as exceptional or unique but to mark my own expectation of the banality of this story, of its points of comparison with the experiences of so many others, especially those of my scholarly generation (indeed, I thought about dropping the autocratical outright, but here we are): old enough to remember LA burning, engaged in graduate study when the killer George Zimmerman was acquitted, weary at the litany of names we feel compelled to mention when writing about police murder, like the final tableau of Ava DuVernay's The 13th. A wall of text. A visual tomb. It is our job to make sense of senselessness, to define, analyze, assess, and contextualize brutality, to render thinkable the mindlessness of racism: a Sisyphean task to be sure. Racism is racism. The logics of anti-Black policing from the "Broken Windows" to "stop-and-frisk," to mandatory minimums, announce themselves in their appeal to common sense. As techniques of power, they draw into them racial and gendered logics that hail precisely whom they are meant to hail.1 They are, at base, ideological, stripped to the bones of discursive nuance and instead proclaiming their objectifying violence outright. What more sense is there to be made? No demystification necessary. This is not to indict the herculean efforts of scholars and critics, including Mariame Kaba, Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Simone Browne, Stuart Schrader, and so many others, who detail oppressive regimes in the service of the project of abolition, not just of the prison, or the carceral, but of Empire, and its institutions: the military...