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This paper argues that the increased killing of black youth has to be understood within the broader framework of an emerging authoritarianism in the United States. Focusing in police violence does not go far enough and misses the historical and contemporary changes that the US is under going in its slide into a neoliberal authoritarian space of lawlessness.
AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
A VERY SENSIBLE ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY PART TWO NOW WITH A 200 PAGES BOOK ON THE SUBJECT2019 •
HARRIS ( K O N S T A N T I N O S ) NOTTAS, CO AUTHORS DTMS ET AL D T M S AS WELL AS MANY OTHER ANAGRAMS
A VERY SENSIBLE ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY NOW WITH A 200 PAGES BOOK ON THE SUBJECT BLOOMBERG OPINION, 2019 HARRIS ( K O N S T A N T I N O S ) NOTTAS It took 70 years to build the interagency process that brought structure and discipline to U.S. leadership. It took less than three years for one man to shred it. Donald Trump's presidency represents a real-time experiment in the durability of the U.S.-led international order-the norms, alliances and other arrangements put into place since World War II that have made this an age of unprecedented global growth and stability. It is equally a test of the national security decision-making process. That system was created in the wake of World War II, as a means of bringing structure and discipline to U.S. policy. It has had its ups and downs over the decades, but has rarely been challenged as severely as during the Trump presidency. So far, Trump's two longest-serving national security advisers-H.R. McMaster and John Bolton-have pursued very different approaches to decision-making under a decidedly undisciplined president. Their experiences show that American presidents ultimately get the decision-making system they want-but not necessarily the one they, and the country, need. THE BOOK see separate post ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HENRY GIROUX’S AMERICAN NIGHTMARE FACING THE CHALLENGE OF FASCISM “In frightening times like these, what is desperately needed is an informed and wise voice that speaks clearly and with conviction about the situation we are in, and what can be done. Henry Giroux is one of the great public intellectuals of our times, and American Nightmare is exactly the book for people grappling with how to understand the Trump era and how to proceed. This is precisely the book that needs to be shared with friends and acquaintances. It will provoke hard thinking, bring clarity, and stimulate much-needed conversation and action.” —Robert W. McChesney, co-author of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy “At a moment when the news cycle presents the dangers of Trumpian authoritarianism through disjointed and discrete hottakes, Giroux’s wide reaching analysis accounts for our current American nightmare with necessary historical context, and in so doing creates an aperture for resistance more meaningful than a hashtag.” —Natasha Lennard, contributing writer for The Intercept, co-editor of Violence: Humans in Dark Times “We have no greater chronicler of these dystopian times. Giroux’s critique cuts to the crux of today’s authoritarian crisis, yet his voice remains one of hope that the people may collectively regain control. Even while living though systemic efforts to privatize hope, Giroux’s critique enacts the sort of shared resistance that can effectively challenge authoritarianism. American Nightmare demonstrates how we can resist the normalization of hate, authoritarianism and alienation in Trump’s America. He shows us that not only are we not alone, but we are among a majority who oppose the cruelties of American social policies.” —David H. Price, author of Cold War Anthropology: The CIA and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology “In this passionately argued volume, Henry Giroux, long known for his critical commentaries on the de-democratization of the U.S.A., on its rising inequ(al)ity and neoliberal excesses, reflects very thoughtfully on the specter of Trump’s America: on its violence, cruelty, and incivility, its burgeoning authoritarianism, its inexorable edging toward a Grave Neo World: in short, a rising specter that demands to be countered at all cost if the U.S. is to be rescued from itself.” —John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Harvard University
This paper looks at the rise of state torture in the U.S. and how its poisonous logic reinforces other policies of state violence
This is not a book, this is a special issue of "The Diaspora" (Fall 2014) that I served as Editor and Designer for the Dept. of African American Studies, UC Berkeley. Featuring contributions from: Robert Allen, Na'ilah Suad Nasir, Leigh Raiford, Ula Taylor, Tianna Paschel, Chiyuma Elliott, Aya de Leon, Charisse Burden, Jarvis Givens, Michael McGee, Jr., Kimberly Thomas McNair, Essence Harden, Jihaari Terry and others. Special thanks to my editing team: Na'ilah Suad Nasir and Anthony Williams
Anthropological Theory
Black Lives Matter, Gentrification and the Security State in the San Francisco Bay Area2017 •
In the Fall of 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States and the San Francisco Bay Area became the site of nightly demonstrations that deployed a range of disruptive practices and direct actions. The content and style of these protests reflected both the national political issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, and highly local and regional struggles over gentrification and displacement. In this article, I analyze these protests in relation to the regional political economy of the tech-industry, the real estate booms, and the attendant 'eviction epidemic' in the region. In doing so, I lay out an analysis of the relationship between policing and gen-trification in the Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area. In the first section, I analyze the regional political economy as the context in which these protests must be understood. In a second section, I argue that the protests created a regional protest geography that, in turn, was met by a regionalized repressive security state. Finally, I read the disruptive practices deployed by these protests as a series of complex and sophisticated contestations which embodied connections among policing, gentrification, and the regional political economy. As such, the Black Lives Matter protests produced an intersectional analysis and can be read as a regional uprising aimed to disrupt the security state.
Endnotes
Brown vs. Ferguson2015 •
A chronicle of #BlackLivesMatter, situating this movement in the history of race politics and struggles in the US. Traces the shifting meaning of black identity in a context of growing surplus populations managed by incarceration and police violence.
2018 •
Despite its overt message of minority group resistance, the new Planet of the Apes franchise engages in a form of racial politics that reflects an implicit white fear of an empowered African-American minority.
Violence rises in Minneapolis, as debate over role of police rages By Holly Bailey June 27, 2020 MINNEAPOLIS — At first, it sounded like fireworks, a loud crackling noise that has become the daily soundtrack of the city in recent weeks. But when David Trueblood, a coach for the Minnesota Jays youth football team, felt a bullet go whizzing by his head and heard the rapid pings of metal spray across a fence in Jordan Park, he screamed for his players, 50 kids ages 5 to 14, to hit the ground. “I thought somebody was going to die,” Trueblood said. As gunfire rang out early Monday evening here on the city’s north side, Trueblood and six other coaches threw their bodies atop as many children as they could. Frantic parents took cover behind cars, desperate to crawl to their kids but caught in the middle of a gun battle between a nearby group and a car that circled the park, spraying bullets across the field where the Jays were playing. Minneapolis officials have described an unprecedented burst of violence following George Floyd’s Memorial Day death, after an officer held him down with a knee to his neck, sparking worldwide fury and massive protests. At least 113 people have been shot since May 25, eight fatally, according to Minneapolis police, with hundreds of reports of gunfire across the city, including several shootings in broad daylight. The spike in violence has come amid a raging debate over the role the Minneapolis Police Department should play in addressing crime in this city. Public confidence has so deteriorated that a majority of the City Council has pledged to dismantle the agency. Some residents have accused officers of purposefully curbing response to crime, which police deny. Others have decided to stop using the agency’s services altogether. At the Jays’ practice on Monday, several parents frantically called 911, according to Trueblood. Officers, he said, still hadn’t arrived by the time they gathered up the children and fled. “We needed the police,” Trueblood said. On Monday, nine people were shot in a four-hour span across the city, starting around 2:30 p.m. That came a day after gunfire struck 11 people during an early-morning gun battle along a busy stretch of bars and restaurants in Uptown Minneapolis, in what officials called one of the worst mass shootings in the city’s history. Three other people have been killed, according to police, including one in a fatal stabbing Monday afternoon in downtown Minneapolis, just blocks from city hall. The police scanner has been jammed with reports of robberies, carjackings and other violent incidents across the city. Mayor Jacob Frey has asked for additional law enforcement assistance from several regional and federal agencies, including the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI and the Secret Service, to help investigate and stem the bloodshed. A more robust law enforcement operation featuring the additional agencies was to begin Friday. “The violence and lawlessness that we’ve seen the last few days is not acceptable in any form,” Frey told reporters this week. “We’re going to restore order. We’re going to make sure that people throughout our city feel safe.” Law enforcement and other city officials have been publicly reluctant to link the uptick of violence to Floyd’s death, but the incident stirred deep tensions between residents and the police department, which has long been accused of racism and use of excessive force against people of color. After Floyd’s death in South Minneapolis, scores of residents in the surrounding neighborhood, a deeply progressive area known for its diverse population, said they would no longer call the police out of fear they might put more African Americans at risk. The declaration was echoed in other parts of the city, where the plywood put up to protect windows of businesses during the recent demonstrations has been decorated with messages including “Stop Calling the Police.” A majority of the Minneapolis City Council announced earlier this month that they would work to defund and dismantle the police department, insisting past reform efforts had done little to change the culture and behavior of the long-troubled agency. The council voted Friday to advance a measure that would ask voters in November to approve a change to the city charter allowing Minneapolis to replace its police department with a new agency focused on safety and violence prevention. The proposed agency would employ some officers, though it’s unclear how many and how they would operate. Adding to the tensions are claims from some in the community that police officers have stepped back from the job amid the anti-police sentiment — a claim strongly denied by Minneapolis police officials, who say officers are working as hard as ever to protect the city amid sometimes “hostile” conditions. Both Frey and John Elder, a police spokesperson, have described incidents in recent days in which police officers were pelted with bottles and rocks while responding to scenes, including a shooting last Friday near 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, the site where Floyd was killed. On Monday, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo pointedly praised community members and bar and restaurant employees working near the site of Sunday’s shooting for “protecting officers and shielding them” as they responded to the scene. Officers have been working in “unbelievable conditions,” Arradondo said, but they “continue to show up and continue to serve.” But many residents have said in recent days that they have noticed a less robust presence from the police department, including in South Minneapolis, where they have seen fewer patrol cars in the past four weeks, even as there have been more sounds of gunshots and reports of crime. One South Minneapolis resident, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution, said after past police killings in the region, officers often tried to ease tensions within the community, by driving around with their windows down to encourage more interaction. “But all you see now is them with their windows up,” the person said. Jamar B. Nelson, a longtime Minneapolis activist who co-founded the anti-violence group A Mother’s Love, said he knows several people who have chosen to stop reporting crimes because they did not want to be labeled “snitches” by neighbors or others. He accused City Council members who have pushed to dismantle police of further eroding the “lack of respect” toward Minneapolis officers, which he said has in turn encouraged “lawless behavior” to spread across the city in recent weeks. Nelson was caught up in the early Sunday shooting while engaged in community outreach with members of the anti-violence group. He had seen just one visible officer patrol the area, even as the street grew busy with patrons visiting bars that had been closed for months because of the coronavirus. One of the gunmen had been just feet away from him, and Nelson estimated he fired dozens of rounds toward another gunman, who fired back. He saw bodies falling and was surrounded by people he thought were dead. “There was no fear,” Nelson said. “You get what’s happening from people not fearing police being called.” Lisa Bender, the president of the City Council, who has led efforts to dismantle the police department, did not respond to a request for comment. But in an interview with the Star Tribune, she linked recent shootings to the usual uptick in crime during the summer and ongoing stress in the community after Floyd’s death. And she pointedly said the police department was still in place. “We still have a police department today,” Bender told the Star Tribune. “Its funding has not changed from three weeks ago.” The fear of a potentially violent summer has scared Minneapolis residents still traumatized by Floyd’s death and the chaos that followed, including the fiery protests that burned and destroyed several hundred buildings across the city. In North Minneapolis, Monday’s close call has forced Trueblood and his Minnesota Jays to scramble to find a new place to practice and play. Benched for weeks because of the coronavirus, the Jays had only recently returned to the park, which has hosted summer youth football teams like theirs for decades. Minneapolis police officers usually came to watch, parking their squad cars and cheering on the kids, but “in the last week or so, we haven’t seen them,” Trueblood said. Like many of his young players, Trueblood is black. In recent weeks, the team, which also includes several white players, has grappled with the aftermath of Floyd’s death. They had talked about the images some had seen of the 46-year-old black man gasping for breath, a white police officer’s knee at his throat, and then the violent protests that had erupted afterward, leaving blocks of the city burned. They are raising money to help pay for the costs of renting a new practice field and transportation for kids who live near Jordan Park to travel there. At a team meetup at a park miles away on Wednesday night, the kids hugged and went back to practice, even as some were still jittery at the sound of fireworks popping in the distance. As a black man, Trueblood admitted he was “torn” over the debate about the police. But right now, he was more worried about what to say to his players. They were like his own kids. All he could do was promise to keep them safe. But what did that mean in Minneapolis at a moment like this? “We’ve played in the middle of Chicago, and nothing like this has ever happened,” Trueblood said. “It’s hard to understand.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/violence-rises-in-minneapolis-as-debate-over-role-of-police-rages/2020/06/26/12fd6020-b7c6-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_todays_headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_headlines
This paper examines environmental racism as an embodied, everyday insecurity in US cities today. We considered the racialized vulnerability to pollution and anti-black police violence through the act of breathing, and specifically the conditions through which breath is constricted or denied. In conversation with Katherine McKittrick's analytical concept of " black geographies " and Frantz Fanon's writings on the embodiment of racism and the racialized segregation of space, we tell an alternative genealogy of state security practices and the production of insecurity in the US today. We argue that thinking about racism as an embodied and situated experience opens up connections with the environmental justice movement, which has challenged racialized exposures to pollution and consequent health inequalities. We explore the constriction of breath through asthma and police violence on the streets of San Francisco and New York today. In San Francisco, we focus on the toxic ecologies of an abandoned military base, while in New York, we discuss the conditions of Eric Garner's death and the politics of identifying responsibility for his killing. In so doing, we explore insecure breathing spaces in the US as racialized geographies, and how the phrase " I can't breathe " at once reflects these uneven environmental conditions and is also an assertion of the humanity of a population for whom human-ness, and life, has been historically denied.
DOCUMENTOS DE TRABAJO DEL CIES
AGAINST RACISM Vida Cotidiana, espacio-temporalidad y Sensibilidades Sociales2020 •
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a disastrous event occurred in the United States, the death of George Floyd, the brutal murder of George Floyd. This event provoked numerous reactions of outrage, sadness, rejection and moral fatigue. Thousands of people throughout the United States, in Europe, in Latin America and across the rest of the world, demonstrated against racism in the context of the most widespread pandemic of recent centuries. Hundreds of thousands of people sensitized themselves, once again so far this century, to the "programmed" excesses of a capitalism that can only respond with death. In this framework, a group of friends and colleagues decided to deliver some words as untimely reflections on what happened, on its significance, on its meaning in context. The Center for Research and Sociological Studies proposed to prepare this Working Document which I am now pleased to present. Beyond stylistic refinement and editorial care, what is presented here are reflections of academics from three continents on what happened. Continuing the critical “dictum” of all the social sciences, the works presented here, brief but incisive, are the testimony of how multiple views and the diverse ways of seeing the world are necessary to elaborate a common criticism of all kinds of injustice and all kinds of inequality.
Journal of Lesbian Studies
Looking beyond the lesbian: The intersectionality of death on Netflix's Orange is the New Black2019 •
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
“R.I.P. Shirts or Shirts of the Movement: Reading the Death Paraphernalia of Black Lives”2018 •
2018 •
New Political Science
Carceral State 2.0?: From Enclosure to Control & Punishment to Surveillance2017 •
Communication Theory
Reporting from the Whites of their Eyes: How Whiteness as Neoliberalism Promotes Racism in the News Coverage of “All Lives Matter”2019 •
Systemic Humiliation in America
TruthTelling From the Margins: Exploring Black-led responses to police violence and systemic humiliation2018 •
Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment
Police-involved Homicide of Unarmed Black Males: Observations by Black Scholars in the Midst of the April 2015 Baltimore Uprising2016 •
International Handbook of Visual Criminology; Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carabine, Editors.
In Plain View: Violence and the police image2017 •
2019 •
Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime: Murray Lee and Gabe Mythen eds.
Fear the Monster!: racialized violence, sovereign power and the thin blue line
Henry Giroux