American Carnage

With sage clarity, Baldwin insists that the sole function of the police in African-American communities is their violent subordination, which objectively situates the police as an enemy and a colonizing occupation force, and generates a toxic cycle of resentment and contempt that fuels the outright cruelty of the enforcers of the law. Confronted with the obscenity of law enforcement that repeatedly proves itself to be nothing less than torture and murder, the enraged response of aggrieved racially oppressed communities repeatedly finds itself with no other option than rioting and other forms of defiance toward the law. It is in this respect that most of what have been branded as “riots” have, in fact, been veritable urban insurrections, albeit largely spontaneous insurgencies against the systemic violence of the racial state, embodied and actualized in everyday life through the casual and ubiquitous violence of police racism.

For African-Americans, none of the systemic racist violence of the police can be separated from the enduring legacies of centuries of enslavement. The slavemasters’ ownership of human beings meant an absolute power of life and death over them: torture, rape, mutilation, and murder were intrinsically and integrally built into the system. For the enslaved to rebel against that absolute power over their lives and bodies could mean nothing less than the absolute destruction of that system of power. Consequently, in virtually every slave revolt in American history, the enslaved burnt down the master’s house and slaughtered him, his entire family, and all of his whip-cracking overseers and enforcers. Slave revolts were the ultimate manifestation of the collective will to stake life itself against a way of life, a sociopolitical order, and a system of organized violence, which were nothing less than a protracted lifelong way of death for the enslaved.

The disgraceful fact that the simple proposition that Black Lives Matter remains a matter of controversy and dispute in the United States merely reconfirms that those historic struggles have yet to be resolutely concluded. It is in this respect that Richard Wright⁵Wright, Richard 1941 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, p. 136. so eloquently reflected on the heroic self-sacrifice of “those who turn their backs upon our way of life… those brave ones who struggle against death… who bring new life into the world, even though they die to do so.” As Wright plainly intimated, writing in the mid-twentieth century, modern confrontations with the organized violence of the sociopolitical order of white supremacy, including riots, are the inexorable contemporary analogue of the same dynamic that animated slave insurrections throughout the history of slavery.

There has literally never been any progress toward racial justice in the United States without riots. By instigating a political crisis of social control, riots create a state of emergency for the state. Historically, riots that erupted in response to racist police abuse were predominantly confined to the specific racial communities targeted by the particular incidents of police violence. In this respect, the Los Angeles rebellion following the acquittal of the police brutalizers of Rodney King in 1992 marked a major turning point, as the massive explosion of civil unrest by African Americans was amplified by the extensive participation of Latinos in the rioting. In 2020, the George Floyd insurgency has involved an utterly unprecedented multi-racial mobilization, remarkably vast in scale and extent, in emphatic support of the central themes and motifs of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The large-scale participation of whites in support of the George Floyd protests, while truly inspiring and promising, is inevitably a complex and contradictory phenomenon. It has raised important and significant debates about leadership, autonomy, and political diversity within the protest movement, for instance. It has also unfortunately provided inadvertent cover for the devious infiltration of some of the protests by white supremacist militants seeking to cynically exacerbate the ferocity of the rioting in order to provoke still more intense repressive violence by police and National Guard troops against the protests, in a bid to accelerate the advent of their desired fascistic goal of a cataclysmic race war.

Yet, none of these contradictory features of the George Floyd uprising can detract from the breathtaking upheaval of genuine protest against the unrelenting anguish and agony of police racism and its deadly violence for Black Americans and other people of color. More fundamentally, the George Floyd protests have inspired a far-reaching and searching confrontation among people racialized as white with the moral and political necessity to interrogate how whiteness itself has been invented and constantly reinvigorated as a strategy and technology for incarcerating them within the treacherous seductions of the sociopolitical order of white supremacy⁶See (Baldwin 1984; Du Bois 1920; Editors of Ebony 1966; Harris 1993; Morrison 1992; Roediger 1998; Wright 1957.. For those of us racialized as white, it is now becoming more clear than ever that we must embrace an understanding of our “race” as anti-white as we commit ourselves to the project of an unapologetic renunciation and unwavering demolition of whiteness itself in the larger struggle to subvert and dismantle white supremacy.

The movement for racial justice that has arisen in response to the murder of George Floyd has been so devoted, resilient, and simply enormous that it is indeed the police who have resorted repeatedly to rioting in panicked, desperate, and fervent convulsions of violence, dedicated to restoring order for a sociopolitical system that has been overwhelmed and outflanked. The righteous rage of a broad coalescence of anti-racist protests is rapidly beginning to formulate new demands and press new questions about re-imagining and re-making the elementary forms of organization of U.S. sociopolitical life.

Furthermore, this moment confronts us with the bitter fact that U.S. nationalism itself, from its inception, has always been a racial formation of white supremacy⁷2006 “Introduction: Latino and Asian Racial Formations at the Frontiers of U.S. Nationalism.” Pp. 1-20 in Nicholas De Genova, ed. Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007 “The Stakes of an Anthropology of the United States.” CR: The New Centennial Review 7(2): 231–77.. But these aspirations for racial justice and social and political transformation would have none of the ominous gravity and poignant force that they are currently able to marshal were it not for the ferocity of the rioting that has answered the social and political American carnage of our era⁸2020 “‘Everything Is Permitted’: Trump, White Supremacy, Fascism.” American Anthropologist 122(1). Commentary, online supplement to Special Section on “The Anthropology of White Supremacy.”http://www.americananthropologist.org/2020/03/23/everything-is-permitted-trump-white-supremacy-fascism/ with monumental acts of physical carnage, and which has thereby sent an earthquake of deeply unsettling shocks and enduring tremors throughout the U.S. racial state.