Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section

Abstract

We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, originally a response to the July 2013 acquittal of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin's vigilante killer in Florida gained the silent hands up, don't shoot gesture in reference to the August 2014 fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer subsequently acquitted by a grand jury. That winter, a New York City policeman was acquitted by a grand jury despite videotaped evidence of the July 2014 choking of Eric Garner, and t-shirts worn at protests and at sporting events called us to remember Garner's last words: I can't breathe. In each case, the loss of a young black man's life was followed by a second symbolic death, in the highlighting of the victim's supposed flaws and mistakes and the subsequent failure to hold anyone accountable for the death. A growing litany of these police killings was then given intersectional nuance by #SayHerName's recounting of Black female, queer and trans victims who had not only been subject to violence but then omitted from the public recounting. The names of Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, Philando Castille, and too many others signal particular lives valued and mourned, but also indicate a repetition and wearing down of life. We wrote the proposal with ferocious anger and with the Movement for Black Lives in mind as an expression of righteous fury at state violence that cuts directly to the heart of race-biopolitics. Two years later, as we write this introduction, Donald Trump takes the office of US President. He promises to wall out Mexican and Latin American migrants, expel or register Muslims, and restore white nationalism. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, four million refugees have left Syria since 2011, and more than six million were internally displaced at the end of 2016 (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2017), but in the political discourse of the US 2016 elections, refugees were figured as security threat rather than as a humanitarian crisis engendered in part by US geopolitical strategy. Likewise, migrants crossing the US-Mexico border were figured as sexual predators and economic leeches; never mind the securitization that contributes to the average of 362 annual deaths along the Southwest sector of the border in the last five years when crossers succumb to dehydration, exposure, violence, or other risks (United States Border Patrol, 2016). As the articles in this issue suggest, when racism is crucified in public only to be born again in private, (Goldberg, 2008: 24) we must attend to how race is (re-)produced globally through biopolitical practices. However, the sharp turn and parallel track of the present moment, in which white supremacy is once again openly embraced in the public sphere, only reveals the absurdity of claims to a post-racial era. Now, more than ever (or perhaps, just as much as always?), political life is figured as a battle for a particular kind of future; in fact, the future is the term of the battle itself. Trump's signature phrase and line of hats, Make America Great Again, is a fundamentally biopolitical statement of a strikingly racialized and gendered future. Recent political events demand our attention not as breaks with the past, but for the continuities they reveal about the grammar of humanity (Spillers, 2003) through which life and death are made sensible. These issues of national concern resonate with the global turn to the right--in Britain, India, the Philippines, Turkey, France, Brazil, and other contexts that is emerging in local forms but holds at its center sharp disagreements over the future. …