The Denial of Antiblackness This page intentionally left blank The Denial of Antiblackness Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering João H. Costa Vargas University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “Gendered Antiblackness and the Impossible Brazilian Project: Emerging Critical Black Brazilian Studies,” Cultural Dy- namics 24, no. 1 (2012): 3–11. doi.org/10.1177/0921374012452808. Portions of chapter 5 were previously published as “Black Disidentification: The 2013 Protests, Rolezinhos, and Racial Antagonism in Post-Lula Brazil,” Critical Sociology, December 24, 2014, 1–15. doi.org/10.1177/0896920514551208. The following publications are reprinted by permission of Red Salmon Arts. “Does Heav- en Have a Ghetto?” “Prayer,” “Dear Lord, I’m in residential,” “It’s Not Too Late,” “Hell ain’t shit compared to life—Protect me God it’s rough,” and “I’m trying to get out” from Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? copyright 2009 Red Salmon Press. “Praying for Freedom,” “Despite Hard Times,” “In My Hands,” “Dear Mama!” “Let It Slide By (A Whole Lot of Struggle),” “Where I Come From,” “New Beginning,” “Always Together,” “Trapped Inside,” “Hands in Diamond Shape,” “LSI (Low Self-Image),” and “All I Need” from I Come from a Teardrop copyright 2010 Red Salmon Press. Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy- ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0092-2 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0093-9 (pb) A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. UMP BmB 2018 Contents Preface: The Challenges of Black Autonomy vii Introduction. Our Lives Are Our Deaths: Antiblackness and Oblique Identification 1 Part I. Austin, U.S.A.: The Dynamics of Youth Incarceration 1. Does Heaven Have a Ghetto? Growing Up in Prisons 51 2. Stanzas of Oppression and Hope: Voices of Incarcerated Black and Latino Boys 81 3. Negotiating Quotidian Violence and Uncertain Futures: Narratives from Black and Latina Girls 113 Part II. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Empire-State Terror and Apartheid 4. Reclaiming Public Space: Rolezinhos as Protest 151 5. The Pacifying Police: Security through Brutality 181 Part III. The Denial of Antiblackness 6. Michael Zinzun: The Fall and Rise of the Black Cyborg 211 7. Black Suffering as Catalyst: Multiracial Blocs in Diaspora 239 Conclusion: The Slave against the Cyborg 259 Acknowledgments 273 Notes 275 Bibliography 305 Index 325 This page intentionally left blank vii Preface The Challenges of Black Autonomy This book is about challenges of Black autonomous analysis and politi- cal organizing. It examines how research and progressive multiracial ef- forts that address Black suffering are often unable to engage foundational, structural, multigenerational, and ubiquitous forms of antiblackness. Such efforts also crowd out the possibility of Black self-determination. This work not only calls into question a progressive canon of multiracial analysis and mobilization, but also argues for Black self-determination as a necessary condition for the effective identification, challenge, and over- coming of antiblackness. To do so, however, it must backtrack. In Parts I and II, it looks at what constitutes antiblackness in multiracial contexts of the diaspora: in formations of residential segregation, punitive schooling, juvenile imprisonment, policing practices, and political mobilization. In typical critical analyses and progressive multiracial mobilization address- ing these formations, Black suffering is acknowledged while antiblackness is negated. As Part III shows, the negation of antiblackness often occurs due to the need for establishing common grounds of oppression among Blacks and nonblacks, the basic principle underlying canonical critical social analyses as well as the progressive multiracial bloc. Over time and across countries, the permanence of antiblackness, however, signifies the imperative of Black self-determination as a collective organizing principle and mode of critical and transformative analysis. The case for self-determination is indicated in the fact that, in the United States and in Brazil, we are, once again, on the cusp of a shift in Black people’s engagement with politics, so-called civil society, and the empire-state. Whether and how this shift is going to fully actualize itself is impossible to say. In public events when Black people, especially the youth, talk about what is going on in their communities—continued bru- talization and assassinations of women, children, and men by the police, enduring poverty, disease, isolation, and stigmatization—one of the most viii · PREFACE often used expressions is that “we can’t take it anymore,” “não aguentamos mais.” Although terror has always defined Black existence as the condition of modernity—and Black people’s perception that their lives are worthless in supposedly multiracial democratic polities is hardly a novelty—there is an emerging agreement that traditional forms of political mobilization, which engage agents of the empire-state and civil society, and require a specific Black political subject, need to be radically remodeled, maybe even altogether dismissed. This emerging agreement does not surface purely, without attachment to more traditional modes of protest. For ex- ample, the charges of structural police misconduct, and even that of geno- cide, are often leveled against the empire-state apparatus (the occasional recourse to international courts notwithstanding). This approach requires that the political bloc engaging the official bureaucracy employ a specific vocabulary, demeanor, and ultimate belief in the redemptive capacity of the process. Such requirement produces a specific type of legible Black political subject: the researcher, academic, NGO operative, community organizer, and social movement militant who are able both to dialogue with Black people and to engage representatives of the empire-state and civil society. Yet, rage at the systematic actualizations of antiblackness, as it did in the past, intermittently but significantly, is turning into a negation of the empire- state and its protocols, including the legible Black political subject who, in the multiracial political bloc, uses Black suffering as a bar- gaining tool. So-called violent and irresponsible street manifestations— which in the United States and in Brazil lead to the intervention of “spe- cial” militarized force against protestors—the refusal to negotiate with officials, the disillusionment with the electoral process, and indeed the increasing emphasis on Black self-determination, are all evidence of this shift. Again, the shift is still incipient, seemingly uncoordinated with similar initiatives, and its manifestations are not yet completely divorced from normative Black politics and its commonly supportive multiracial blocs. Here is a report on a case of “unrest” following the all-too-common police use of lethal force against Black people, published in the New York Times on August 15, 2016, as i was finishing this preface: The burning buildings, smashed police cars and scuffles between police officers and angry protesters on Milwaukee’s north side over the weekend might have seemed like a spontaneous eruption. PREFACE · ix But for many in the city’s marginalized black community, it was an explosive release decades in the making. Milwaukee is one of the United States’ most segregated cities, where black men are incarcerated or unemployed at some of the highest rates in the country, and where the difference in poverty between black and white residents is about one and a half times the national average. There are barren lots and worn-down homes all over the predominantly black north side, while mostly white crowds traffic through the restaurants and boutiques downtown, or inhabit the glossy lakefront high rises. Add to that the disrespect that many black people say the police show them, and many of Milwaukee’s African- American residents are unsurprised by the volatile response after a police officer fatally shot a black man on Saturday—even though, as it turns out, the officer was also black. “This isn’t just, ‘Oh, my gosh, all of a sudden this happened,’ ” said Sharlen Moore, 39, who lives in Sherman Park, the mostly African-American neighborhood where the shooting and unrest occurred. “It’s a series of things that has happened over a period of time. And right now you shake a soda bottle and you open the top and it explodes, and this is what it is.” 1 This “unrest” is a manifestation of collective revolt against long-term pat- terns of antiblackness. Such patterns far exceed the period of mobilization in the United States that followed the February 26, 2012, assassination of Trayvon Martin. They define the Black experience in the diaspora. Just as defining is the cyclical social awareness that the empire-state and its institutions are irremediably antiblack. When this awareness emerges, so do collective actions, such as “unrest,” “riots,” and “uprisings” that reject institutional mechanisms of redressing grievances. For example, after the March 4, 1991, KTLA broadcast of the videotaped brutalization of Black motorist Rodney King by four police officers that had taken place the previous day, Blacks and their allies in Los Angeles patiently waited over a year, until May 29, 1992, in the hopes of obtaining a legal victory against law enforcement. It was only after the not-guilty verdicts were an- nounced in the Simi Valley court that the streets of South Central Los An- geles, the city’s historically Black area, became the stage on which to voice multigenerational grievances and rage against the antiblack society. The x · PREFACE Los Angeles rebellions, therefore, resulted from a rational choice to wait for the court verdict; they also materialized from a subsequent evaluation that the justice system, and indeed the larger social structure, did not work for Blacks. These were not “riots,” whose naming by the media monopoly suggests irrationality and criminality. Rather, the rebellions represented a shift, from a belief (or a suspension of disbelief) in the justice system and its attending political institutions and modes of operation, that included peaceful public multiracial demonstration, to a realization that only col- lective revolt was able to express long-term exclusion and perhaps bring about change. Today, similar shifts occurring in the diaspora are compounded by the collective frustration at two ineffective two-term presidencies, one headed by a Black man and former community organizer in the United States, and the other by a leftist labor unionist in Brazil. From a purely pragmatic Black standpoint, these federal administrations proved themselves futile in addressing, let alone combating, a litany of structural social vulnerabilities that define the majority Black experience. To be sure, the Lula presidency diminished poverty and opened access to consumer credit and first-time homeownership to the economically poor in unprecedented proportions; it aggressively implemented affirmative action policies in public universi- ties and a number of public sector occupations; the rising tide lifted many boats of the impoverished Black population. There were programmatic changes, albeit short-lived, and they are already being reversed (see Part II). The two Obama terms, however, were unable to produce even a modi- cum of programmatic improvement for the Black majority. According to Census Bureau figures, while in this period the national unemployment rate dropped to 7 percent, the jobless rate for Blacks hardly declined, from 12.7 percent in 2009 to 12.5 percent in 2014. In this time frame, poverty for Blacks sharply increased, from 12 percent to 16.1 percent. Moreover, al- though median income diminished by 3.6 percent for White households, to $58,000, it decreased 10.9 percent, to $33,500, for Black households. The differences in Black and nonblack wealth, which provide a more ac- curate measure of transgenerational disadvantages, are staggering. 2 And while the U.S. homicide rate showed signs of improvement, the homi- cide rate of Black people remained far greater than the country’s average. In Brazil, the homicide rate for Blacks actually spiked while the country’s average declined. There is no better proof of structural, long-term anti- blackness than continued vulnerability to disease and premature death PREFACE · xi by preventable causes, which includes homicide by the police but goes far beyond. The litany of disproportional incidence of cardiovascular ail- ments; AIDS/HIV infection; various diseases caused by environmental exposure to toxic chemicals as well as insects and pests; malnutrition; de- ficient and unavailable health care; and cancer, is evidence of how Black lives don’t matter. Protests against the use of deadly police force on Black people galvanize unaddressed grievances against the vast inventory of antiblack processes. This context explains why multiple groups of young Black people have begun to explore autonomous strategies of self-defense and collective support. In impoverished Black communities, in prisons, artistic venues, independent study groups and publications, Black youth are pushing back at their structural stigmatization while repudiating tra- ditional progressive analyses, strategies, and mobilization. Of course, most of the reports the world receives of this new wave of protest suggest a multiracial front. It is not accidental that the photograph accompanying the article quoted at length above focuses on a Black man beside a White man. But what the framing of these protests reveals is precisely the ca- nonical multiracial imperative, which crowds out Black autonomy. What is presented as a solution—multiracial solidarity, or multiraciality more broadly—becomes part of the problem, for it reveals deep fears of Black autonomy. Still, the logic of the continued multifaceted and transgenerational op- pression of Black people has nothing to do with either the Lula or Obama administrations. This book points to the elementary contradictions of a social formation that on the one hand purports to abide by principles of multiracial democracy, and on the other is spectacularly structured against Black people in methods at once foundational, essential, ever changing, and ubiquitous. One of the current contradictions is that, while there ap- pears to exist a greater social awareness of Black suffering, there is a gen- eralized incapacity to locate, particularly revealing in progressive circles, the antiblack logic at the very core of these empire-state formations. It is this logic that, unexamined, continues to systematically generate Black suffering. There prevails a belief, even among the progressive-minded, that multiracial formations can bring about full equality and inclusion of the oppressed and the Black. This belief is carried out by collective efforts that, since at least the 1960s, have relied on, produced, and reproduced the figure of the Black cyborg: the super-, extra-human being, of infinite wis- dom, boundless knowledge, unassailable strength, and universal love. The xii · PREFACE Black cyborg and his/her multiracial bloc believes in, and thus legitimates, the empire-state project of integration (chapter 6). When Blacks begin to shift their political practice away from the cy- borg, the principles and totality of the empire-state are also called into question. To grapple with the Black cyborg’s dilemmas is to engage the empire-state’s project of multiracial integration. Yet the social order that requires and sustains the cyborg’s multiracial progressive bloc is not about to go away. Multiraciality, and the invested belief in the empire-state’s re- demption, is still strong and normative, which means that the social will- ingness to address antiblackness is embryonic. Nevertheless, incubated in a newfound awareness of structural anti- blackness, insurgent imaginaries are relearning accumulated lessons of the past. Such is the Black imperative of transcendence. The figure of the slave, and her social practice and imagination, incarnate this imperative. 1 Introduction Our Lives Are Our Deaths Antiblackness and Oblique Identification The Denial of Antiblackness focuses on an intriguing social phenomenon, one that manifests itself across two of the largest countries of the Afri- can diaspora, Brazil and the United States: while there seems to be an in- creasing social awareness of Blacks’ experiences of discrimination, there is a denial of antiblackness as a foundational and structural fact. There is multiracial mobilization, outrage even, against the recent police kill- ings of unarmed Black women and men, but there is not a comparable public willingness, or capacity, to debate structural and historical forms of antiblackness as explanations for these recurring events. Antiblack- ness is seldom, if ever, considered a possible foundational reason for the ways these allegedly multiracial democracies function. In these two main countries of the Black diaspora, there exists the simultaneous acknowl- edgment of Black suffering and the denial of foundational and structural antiblackness. What makes the denial of the structural, historical, and enduring facts of gendered antiblackness all the more intriguing is that it is happen- ing when antiblack forces are now affecting nonblacks in unprecedented ways, at the levels of perception and experience. Blackness is always and already gendered, as subsequent chapters will show. Antiblackness is fun- damentally gendered not only because gender modulates how blackness is perceived and experienced (e.g., violence against Black males is related to but quantitatively and symbolically quite distinct from violence against Black females) but also because blackness shapes the ways in which gen- der is perceived and experienced, which means that normative (i.e., non- black) assumptions about femaleness (e.g., as equated to subordination) and maleness (e.g., as equated to domination) hardly, if ever, apply un- problematically to Blacks. 1 As i explain below, even though Blacks are still, by far, the most 2 · INTRODUCTION disproportionately affected by such processes, police brutality and mass incarceration are now increasingly affecting nonblacks in the United States and in Brazil as well. 2 Nonblacks are now directly impacted by anti- black forces and/or are seemingly more aware of them. So why does the denial of antiblackness persist (especially but not exclusively) among non- blacks? How does this negation take place? What political horizons does the negation of antiblackness engender? By stressing that much of our current mechanism of social contain- ment and repression is due to antiblackness, i am making a case that is as simple as it is controversial: take Blacks out of the picture, and such dynamics of containment and repression, and their corresponding institu- tions and socially shared values, make little, if any, sense. The diasporic war on drugs, stringent criminal law, and massive incarceration of vul- nerable communities: without Blacks, those scenarios lose most of their social meanings—that is, their collectively sanctioned symbolism, orga- nizing principle, legal underpinnings, historical roots, and indeed their sheer intensity and brutality. Hypersurveillance, dispossession, and death of Blacks constitute the central logic and are the expected result of ever- expanding panoptical police empire-states. 3 This does not exclude other logics that are at play (e.g., the logic of capital and its funneling of surplus to the unprecedented construction of prisons in California in the 1970s and 1980s), 4 nor the specific ways in which nonblack groups experience such processes. Rather, my point is to suggest that antiblackness is a cen- tral, but certainly not exclusive, overarching principle that combines with the empire-state’s desire to police and contain its so-called dangerous classes, among whom—or, as we shall see, in contradistinction to whom— Blacks occupy a unique position. 5 Antiblackness merges with, appropri- ates, intensifies, and indeed defines the inherent impulses of the Western penal system. In the process, it renders the Black subject its paradigmatic object, which is to say, it renders the Black subject a nonsubject. 6 Accord- ing to Michel Foucault, the penal system’s panoptical logic reproduces its own desire to know, catalog, and capture, in minute detail, figuratively and practically, as many subjects as possible. “The ideal point of penalty today,” Foucault affirms with relation to the drive of criminal justice, “would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more ana- lytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the consti- tution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty INTRODUCTION · 3 that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.” 7 If there is a simple truth about the U.S. criminal justice system’s operation since the dawn of the so-called war on drugs, it is its rapid expansion. In the early 1970s, activists and research- ers were perplexed at the two hundred thousand people the United States incarcerated domestically. 8 With about seven million people under some kind of correctional supervision, including 2.5 million currently behind bars, it is evident the U.S. carceral machine operates under the imperative of a “file that was never closed,” a permanently expansive drive whose very existence depends on its capacity to capture as many individuals as possi- ble, as well as their corresponding data universes. Students of the carceral regime have showed the very specific ways in which the employment of ever-morphing surveillance and policing technologies, in a transhistori- cal climate of barely dissimulated social hostility toward Blacks, produces its own demand for more data, which in turn drives additional and im- proved technology, staff, and public and private support for expansive and efficient forms of social management, including policing. 9 It is only fitting that, after the legal condemnation of New York Police Department’s stop- and-frisk policy, the new approach, endorsed by progressive mayor Bill de Blasio, is called Omnipresence. 10 The persistent disproportional targeting of Black women and men by these policing practices, and the correspond- ing disproportionality of Blacks under the supervision of the criminal jus- tice system, as we will see throughout this book, indicate the antiblack logic of such ever-expanding enterprises of social control. One could argue that, because Latin@s, Asians, Indians, and vulner- able Whites are also affected by massive criminalization and imprison- ment, the underlying logic of such processes of massive surveillance and warehousing is not antiblack; or, that when such processes affect non- blacks they acquire a distinct logic and thus are, or become, something other than a product of antiblackness. 11 As i show in chapters 1, 2, and 3, young Latin@s’ experiences with incarceration do indeed suggest a logic distinct from that of young Blacks under the same conditions. While in confinement, Latin@s are not as severely punished as Blacks; and once “in the free,” Latin@s can expect relatively better outcomes in employment, education, and future contact with the criminal justice institutions, in- cluding the foster care system. Chapters 4 and 5 show the ways in which, 4 · INTRODUCTION like Blacks, nonblacks in Brazil find themselves in spaces of social vul- nerability and experience the police through violence. However, based on recent demographic studies, in contrast to Blacks, vulnerable nonblacks may encounter police brutality often, but not structurally; the same is true for residential segregation, and deficient medical and educational institu- tions. 12 So in Brazil, like in the United States, there seem to be distinct log- ics according to which Black and nonblack persons experience suffering. Nevertheless, in both empire-state contexts, antiblackness becomes a compelling overarching explanatory category when we consider the very disproportionality of Blacks within institutions of confinement, impov- erished segregated urban spaces, and indeed their unique experiences of punishment in schools—which often lead to their first encounter with the empire-state’s punitive institutions. These factors, in turn, explain and are reinforced by the unmatched historical levels of Black unemployment, un- deremployment, and vulnerability to early death by preventable causes. When nonblacks experience such geographies of punishment, isolation, and dispossession, they experience the collateral effects of a transhistori- cal, society-sanctioned, institutionalized logic of antiblackness. Thus non- blacks do not experience antiblackness in the same way Blacks experience antiblackness. Nonblacks’ experience of antiblackness is distinct from Blacks’ experience of antiblackness insofar as nonblacks are not the para- digmatic objects of antiblackness; as such, nonblacks do not experience social death and early physical death by preventable causes as omnipres- ent, permanent, structural, and defining features of social life. Nonblacks do indeed experience aspects of preventable physical and social death, but such experience is of a different nature than what Blacks encounter: as the various chapters show, it is not as transhistorically and structurally persis- tent as it is for Blacks. Hence the distinct logics that operate for Blacks and nonblacks affected by antiblackness. Antiblackness, as an overarching social principle, affects Blacks and nonblacks in related but distinct ways. This differentiated impact makes antiblackness mostly incommunicable to nonblacks. It is thus unsurpris- ing that while currently there is nonblack acknowledgment of Black suf- fering and oppression, there is a seeming incapacity, or unwillingness, on the part of nonblacks to grapple with the transhistorical structural aspects of antiblackness. “You are playing oppression Olympics!”—the predict- able accusation against the focus on the logic of antiblackness and its effects—not only serves to disqualify the analytical effort on, and pivot the INTRODUCTION · 5 conversation away from Black experiences, but also reveals the canonical people-of-color framework this study analyzes in chapter 7. To examine these related yet distinct experiences, this work investi- gates evidence of continued antiblack institutional and everyday practices in Brazil and the United States. It focuses on the excesses such practices have generated. What types of demographic outcomes, social awareness, and collective mobilization emerge when antiblack technologies of sur- veillance, isolation, and containment increasingly affect nonblack social groups at the corporeal and/or perception levels? Because antiblack forces are currently impacting nonblacks in ways legible to researchers, policy makers, popular culture producers, and broader publics, they are creating conditions for, and indeed incipient traces of, what i call oblique identifica- tion . Oblique identification is the central concept i utilize to make sense of these curious social processes through which are manifested, on the one hand, a seeming empathy toward Blacks’ victimization by the empire- state, and on the other, a refusal to engage with the foundational and structural aspects of antiblackness. Oblique identification between nonblacks and Blacks takes place when nonblacks recognize as worthy of their concern, and/or are victimized by, processes that, historically and contemporarily, have disproportionally af- fected Blacks—processes, therefore, whose ideological core, institutional memory, and everyday manifestations are antiblack. Among these para- digmatic Black social phenomena that now increasingly figure in non- blacks’ collective awareness and/or experience are police misconduct, court bias, and mass incarceration. I call oblique identification this mode of relating to eminently Black processes. Oblique identification means that such Black processes are recognized only partially, belatedly, indirectly, re- luctantly, or even unknowingly. Though imperfectly, oblique identification engenders various and varying forms of nonblack–Black recognition. To make matters more in- teresting, oblique identification emerges in a political climate marked by narratives of and collective efforts aimed at empire-state redemption that seek to redress current injustices perpetrated against Black and nonblack persons, and actualize inclusive, democratic, and multiracial ideals. The Denial of Antiblackness starts by establishing the social facts of antiblackness. It employs multiple disciplinary studies, as well as ethnog- raphy, drawn from geographically and historically varied social sites, to examine current events such as residential segregation, school discipline 6 · INTRODUCTION policy, juvenile and adult incarceration, the continued and predictable brutalization and killing of Black people by empire-state agents, multira- cial and Black public protests, and the national and international debates about public security and democratic multiracial societal redemption. Taken together, the chapters show the continued and compounded effects of transgenerational cycles of dispossession subjugating already marginal- ized communities in the United States and in Brazil. While these empire- states are differentiated by their specific formations of social stratification and corresponding collective representations, as part of the Black dias- pora they actualize analogous patterns of marginalization that are greatly dependent on intersecting dynamics of race, particularly blackness, and gender. 13 A relational analysis, rather than a comparative approach, establishes a diasporic continuum whose fundamental logic, informing cognition, sociality, and the management of life and death technologies, is anti- blackness. 14 In both empire-states, social and economic indicators sug- gest that, local inflections notwithstanding, experiences in the spheres of work, housing, criminal justice, and health are correlated to one’s racial positionality: the closer one is to blackness—a measure that is always af- fected by social class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, among many other factors—the more intensely one meets social disadvantages and the more likely one is to die prematurely. 15 In Brazil and the United States, greater social disparities exist between Blacks and nonblacks than exist within discrete racial groups, yet another pattern indicative of a diasporic antiblack gendered logic of social antagonism. 16 Once we center on an- tiblackness, we are able to suspend the comparative impulse, thus open- ing up Black analytical and political orientations. Sexton argues for the connection between the relational method and its impact on the resulting political field of possibilities: If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps be- yond, the United States seems conditional to the historic instances and functions at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblack- ness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhausting and unchanging). If pursued with some consistency, the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of our INTRODUCTION · 7 political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task. 17 Antiblackness, as an underlying and mostly unaddressed logic (a struc- ture of positionality, as i discuss later in this chapter), generates oppres- sion in units of and across the Black diaspora: this is the broader ana- lytical framework with which i make sense of the selected empirical data, forms of sociality, and political imagination. By moving from Austin to Rio de Janeiro to Los Angeles, the chapters in The Denial of Antiblack- ness suggest persistent antiblack dispositions. In these two empire-states, neighborhoods continue to be defined by antiblackness in such a way that the greater the concentration of Blacks, the more impoverished, the more vulnerable to unemployment, and the more likely to produce early death by preventable causes a residential area will be. Black areas concentrate higher levels of imprisonment and homicide committed by agents of the empire-state. As occupied zones of dispossession, Black residential areas across the diaspora also tend to have the worst schools, health-care facili- ties, urban infrastructure, and overall living conditions, including dispro- portionate exposure to environmental hazards. 18 Zones of dispossession are zones of social and physical death by preventable, manageable causes. The chapters show the ways in which contemporary intersecting antiblack social forces—and most crucially, an overdetermining antiblack logic— are a critical, albeit often denied, aspect of how democratic and multira- cial empire-nations are imagined and managed. All of which is to say that, while this book is devoted primarily to the study of pragmatic social facts through quantitative, historical, and ethno- graphic data, these social facts are merely a partial consequence—a defi- cient translation, and at times a complete negation—of the antiblack logic that produces them. The logic of antiblackness far exceeds, and can indeed be disavowed by, its practical social manifestations. (On the disavowal of the logic of antiblackness by recourse to practical social facts, it is easy to imagine someone saying “But we just had a Black president,” or “Things have come a long way since the days of slavery and Jim Crow, and now there are laws that prohibit discrimination,” or even “Criminal justice re- form recognizes mistakes of the recent past and attempts to restore the country’s inclusive [multiracial] democratic principles.”) So the analyti- cal challenge is to access the logic of structural antiblackness through an