Racism and Sexism Questions

The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy April 13, 2021 AFAM & WMNST 103: Racism and Sexism

Steve Martinot: Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco State University. Martinot explores the history of racialization processes in the formation of the United States. He examines how racism has served as a barrier to working-class organization, and by implication, to systemic transformations. For Martinet, liberation in the United States presupposes deracializing, an issue that is unintelligible to most white people.

Jared Sexton, Professor of African American Studies and Film Studies, at the University of California, Irvine. He has written extensively on the topics of policing, imprisonment, and anti-blackness. He is one of the founding thinkers of the leading intellectual movement, Afro-Pessimsim, which centers anti- blackness as a lens to meditate on a range of themes such as social death, violence, sexuality, and gender.

Introduction of terms

The Police State Two theses: 1. police violence is a deviation from the

rules governing police procedures in general

2. These various forms of violence (e.g. racial profiling, street murders, terrorism) are the rule itself as standard operating procedure

* In other words, the deviation to the rules of governing policing procedures have become normalized and naturalized.

“Under conventional definitions of the government, we seem to be restricted to calling upon it for protection from its own agents. But what are we doing when demonstrate against police brutality, and find ourselves tacitly calling upon the government to help us do so? These notions of the state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same coin.”

- Echoing predecessors of black political thought such as George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis, authors point to the fact that the state and law enforcement fail in providing protection.

- At the same time, “racism” does not accurately encapsulate this failure

The system is NOT broken • The state and the institutions that accompany it normalize violence as the rule; • The authors pose a philosophical question:

• Can the language that we use to discuss race, police violence, and state repression viable or able to characterize the nature and scale of what is happening?

• Programmatic agenda of protest cannot reconcile the endless repetition of police murder.

• “The language in which we articulate our analyses doesn’t seem to allow for alternatives in practice. Even those who take seriously the second possibility (violence as a rule) find that the language of alternatives and the terms of relevance are constantly dragged into the political discourse they seek to oppose, namely, that the system works and is capable of reform.”

Los Angeles Riots

Rodney King was caught by the Los Angeles police after a high- speed chase on March 3, 1991. The officers pulled him out of the car and beat him brutally, while amateur cameraman George Holliday caught it all on videotape. The four L.A.P.D. officers involved were indicted on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force by a police officer. However, after a three-month trial, a predominantly white jury acquitted the officers, inflaming citizens and sparking the violent 1992 LosAngeles riots.

The system is not broken (continued)…

“It was as if the anC-racist campaigns (or uprisings) against police violence were co- opted by the police to augment their violence, rather than effecCvely closing it down as they had explicitly intended. In the wake of countless expose ́ s, the prison industrial complex has only expanded; the reportage on the racist operaCons of capital punishment and the legal system more generally have become absorbed in the acceleraCon of execuCon rates.” • The system conCnues to achieve what it is designed to do: police, capture, and

hold capCve black people. • Structural formaCon (not accidental) that there is a repeCCous occurrence of anC-

black police murders.

“Structural (not incidental or contingent)…”

Unspeakability of Violence (in spite of its repetition)

“In the face of the prosecution’s sanctimonious excess, those who bear witness to Tate’s suffering have only inarticulate outrage to offer as consolation. With recourse only to the usual rhetorical expletives about racism, the procedural ritualism of this white supremacist operation has confronted them with the absence of a real means of discerning the judiciary’s dissimulated machinations. The prosecutor was the banal functionary of a civil structure, a paradigmatic exercise of wanton violence that parades as moral rectitude but whose source is the paradigm of policing. All attempts to explain the malicious standard operating procedure of US white supremacy find themselves ham- strung by conceptual inadequacy; it remains describable, but not comprehensible. The story can be told, as the 41 bullets fired to slaughter Diallo can be counted, but the ethical meaning remains beyond the discursive resources of civil society, outside the framework for thinkable thought.”

Hidden Ethical Dimension of White Supremacy

“It is, of course, possible to speak out against such white supremacist violence as immoral, as illegal, even unconstitutional. But the impossibility of thinking through to the ethical dimension has a hidden structural effect. For those who are not racially profiled or tortured when arrested, who are not tried and sentenced with the presumption of guilt, who are not shot reaching for their identification, all of this is imminently ignorable. Between the inability to see and the refusal to acknowledge, a mode of social organisation is being cultivated for which the paradigm of policing is the cutting edge. We shall have to look beyond racialised police violence to see its logic. “

Impunity of Police Violence (the terror and seduction)

The impunity of racist police violence is the first implication of its ignorability to white civil society. The ignorability of police impunity is what renders it inarticulable outside of that hegemonic formation. If ethics is possible for white civil society within its social discourses, it is rendered irrelevant to the systematic violence deployed against the outside precisely because it is ignorable. Indeed, that ignorability becomes the condition of possibility for the ethical coherence of the inside. The dichotomy between a white ethical dimension and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is the very structure of racialisation today.

Ethical Structure of Police Violence

Naturalized as banal and everydayà leaves ethics to go unquestioned

Even becomes an invitation for police violence to be ignored to then,

Prevent further reflection from the racialization component of police violence

Martinot and Sexton are asserting that police violence is just the shell of something more problematic and a deeper unethical backbone that is the justification to the policing of racialized subjects (which only doubles-up as part of the racialization process).

“The Problem with the

Problem”

• Racist policing is paradigmatic– not contingent. (not just at the level of lived experience but at the level of culture, language, and thought).

• “The spectacular event camouflages the operation of police law as contempt, as terror, its occupation of neighbourhoods; the secret of police law is the fact that there is no recourse to the disruption of people’s lives by these activities. In fact, to focus on the spectacular event of police violence is to deploy (and thereby reaffirm) the logic of police profiling itself. Yet we can’t avoid this logic once we submit to the demand to provide examples or images of the paradigm. As a result, the attempt to articulate the paradigm of policing renders itself non-paradigmatic, reaffirms the logic of police profiling, and thereby reduces itself to the fraudulent ethics by which white civil society rationalises its existence.

• Language of policing normalizes it while leaving the internal ethical dilemma unattended.

“Most theories of white supremacy seek to plumb the depths of its excessive- ness, beyond the ordinary; they miss the fact that racism is a mundane affair. The fundamental excess of the paradigm of policing which infuses this culture is wholly banal.”

“… the intellectual quest for racism’s supposedly hidden meaning has afforded a refuge from confrontations with this banality, even its possible acknowledgement. The most egregious aspect of this banality is our tacit acquiescence to the rules of race and power, to the legitimacy white supremacy says it has, regardless of their total violation of reason and comprehensibility.”

White Supremacy Has Already Become an Everyday State of Affairs

Undoing the Paradigm

• Sexton and Martinot are arguing for a complete paradigm shift (one in which abolition has yet to achieve) in reconfiguring and rethinking how we turn to certain institutions, resources, and languages to understand white supremacy. For to do so, assumes that we are neither perpetrator nor victim;

• Highlighting the privilege in assuming one is outside of white supremacy

• Categories that encapsulate white supremacy itself are “genocidal”

Conclusion The foundations of US white supremacy are far from stable. Owing to the instability of white supremacy, the social structures of whiteness must ever be re-secured in an obsessive fashion. The process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the state, and the state has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the civil rights movements that sought to shatter this invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the state’s absorption and co-optation of that opposition for the reconstruction of the white social order has been reoccurring before our very eyes. White supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the sake of the social paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of racialisation that it calls the ‘maintenance of order’, all of which constitute its essential dimensions.