Colonial Racial Capitalism

SUSAN KOSHY, LISA MARIE CACHO, JODI A. BYRD, AND BRIAN JORDAN
JEFFERSON, EDITORS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS    Durham and London    2022

© 2022 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
“Racial Capitalism Now” © 2022 Michael C. Dawson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Project editor: Lisa Lawley
Designed by Matthew Tauch
Typeset in Arno Pro and Alegreya Sans by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Koshy, Susan, editor. | Cacho, Lisa Marie, editor. | Byrd, Jodi A., editor.
| Jefferson, Brian Jordan, [date] editor.
Title: Colonial racial capitalism / Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd,
and Brian Jefferson, editors.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022000016 (print)
LCCN 2022000017 (ebook)
ISBN 9781478016106 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781478018742 (paperback)
ISBN 9781478023371 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Indians, Treatment of—North America—History. | Settler
colonialism—United States—History. | Indians of North America—Economic
conditions. | Indians of North America—Colonization—History. | Imperialism—
Social aspects—North America—History. | Capitalism—North America—
History. | Racism—North America—History. | Racism Economic aspects—
North America. | North America—Race relations—History. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies |
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / Native American Studies
Classification: LCC E91 .C656 2022 (print) | LCC E91 (ebook) | DDC 970.004/97—
dc23/eng/20220518
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000016
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000017

Support for this research was provided by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive
Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
SUSAN KOSHY, LISA MARIE CACHO, JODI A. BYRD AND BRIAN
JORDAN JEFFERSON

I. Accumulation: Development by Dispossession

ONE · The Corporation and the Tribe

JOANNE BARKER

TWO · “In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant

Renewal”: The Social Reproduction of Racial
Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement
ALYOSHA GOLDSTEIN

THREE · The Racial Alchemy of Debt: Dispossession

and Accumulation in Afterlives of Slavery
CHERYL I. HARRIS

II. Administration: The Open Secret of Colonial Racial Capitalist

Violence

FOUR · In Search of the Next El Dorado: Mining for

Capital in a Frontier Market with Colonial Legacies
KIMBERLY KAY HOANG
 FIVE · “Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police”: Policing
as the Street Administration of Colonial Racial
Capitalist Orders
LISA MARIE CACHO AND JODI MELAMED

SIX· Policing Solidarity: Race, Violence, and the

University of Puerto Rico
MARISOL LEBRÓN

SEVEN· Programming Colonial Racial Capitalism:

Encoding Human Value in Smart Cities
BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON

III. Aesthetics: Reimagining the Sites of Cultural Memory

EIGHT · Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of

Logistical Failure
IYKO DAY

· Erasing Empire: Remembering the Mexican-

NINE
American War in Los Angeles
LAURA PULIDO

IV. Rehearsing for the Future

TEN· Racial Capitalism Now: A Conversation with

Michael Dawson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore
FACILITATED BY BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON AND JODI
MELAMED

Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This one is for Cedric Robinson. For everything he taught me about

race, politics, institutions, fighting, and living. I feel blessed to have
known Cedric as a friend and mentor for the nine years I was at UC–
Santa Barbara. His expansive intellect, his transfigurative political
commitments, his luminous integrity, and his mischievous humor
were a gift, teaching lessons I continue to learn. I hope that the work
in this volume as well as the work that it took to produce this volume
will carry forward the spirit of his work and testify to its horizon-
shifting powers.
Before this book took shape as a publication, it was an event. This
project was first conceived as a conference on racial capitalism
organized through the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in March 2019. I
would like to thank my co-organizers—Jodi Byrd, Lisa Marie Cacho,
Brian Jordan Jefferson, and Jodi Melamed—for their creativity and
dynamism in planning the conference. For their inspiring
contributions to the conference as keynote speakers and for the
example of their scholarship and activism, my deepest gratitude to
Michael Dawson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. To the contributors to
this volume, many of whom took time away from other long-term
projects to work on this collection, no thanks will suffice for your
remarkable scholarship and collaborative spirit. I also want to thank
the unit’s graduate assistants, Alyssa Bralower, Sarah Richter, and
Lettycia Terrones, who worked tirelessly to make the conference a
success.
This edited volume grows out of the mind-stretching experience of
writing and thinking about colonial racial capitalism with my
coeditors, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi Byrd, and Brian Jordan Jefferson. I
am grateful to Lisa for her keen insights, deft revisions, and writerly
instincts. My thanks to Jodi, who maintained a consistent focus on the
frames of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. I appreciate Brian’s
work in providing clarity, balance, and precision to our thinking at
every stage. To Md. Alamgir Hossain, who worked over the summer
editing the manuscript, special thanks for his dedicated work. Finally,
for her care and thoughtfulness in preparing this manuscript for
publication, thanks to the Unit for Criticism’s supremely capable
research assistant, Ashli Anda.
For the advice, encouragement, and life-giving conversations that
carried me through this work, my thanks to my family—Vinod,
Tanya, Sunjay, and Vinay.
SUSAN KOSHY

I feel like I will always be learning how to theorize, articulate, and

write about colonial racial capitalism, and I’d like to acknowledge a
few people for their brilliance and their patience in thinking through
and talking about these concepts with me over the years. Lisa Lowe,
Yen Espiritu, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and George Lipsitz are all
exceptional mentors who taught challenging classes and provided
generous feedback while I was a graduate student. I was also lucky to
learn from the other graduate students at UCSD during that time,
especially David Coyoca, Ruby Tapia, Rod Ferguson, Grace Hong,
Tony Tiongson, Ofelia Cuevas, and the Marlborough House Marxists:
Helen Jun, Albert Lowe, Barry Masuda, Boone Nguyen, and Randall
Williams. I am very grateful to my fellow coeditors: Jodi Byrd, Brian
Jordan Jefferson, and Susan Koshy. I’d like to give Susan a special
thanks for taking charge, organizing all of us, doing a lot of the hard
writing, and keeping us on track. I also want to acknowledge Jodi
Byrd for all her patience and support in helping me to rethink racial
capitalism in relation to settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies
over the last several years. I’d like to acknowledge a few people for
helping me think specifically about my coauthored chapter in this
 volume. I’d like to thank Ruth Nicole Brown for helping me to write
about hard things, and I want to thank her for the work that she does
because everything she does is the answer to that all-important
question: “So what do we do now?” I want to thank Chandan Reddy
for his own work, brilliance, and generosity in helping us to theorize
administrative power. And last, I extend much appreciation to Jodi
Melamed, my coauthor, longtime interlocutor, and much-loved friend.
I am so grateful for Jodi’s genius, clarity, big-picture theorizing, and
real-world activism. I love the work we produce together, and I love
the collaborative process we take to get our shared thoughts out into
the world.
LISA MARIE CACHO

I want to thank all my coeditors, and Lisa especially, for the

collaborative work on the introduction. I also want to thank Chandan
Reddy, Jodi Melamed, Iyko Day, and Alyosha Goldstein, but
everyone is already in the collection, so I’m just feeling lucky to have
been able to think with everyone for this conversation.
JODI A. BYRD

I would like to thank all who helped organize and participated in the
Racial Capitalism conference in Champaign-Urbana in 2019: Alyosha
Goldstein, Cheryl Harris, Marisol LeBrón, Kimberly Kay Hoang,
Iyko Day, Laura Pulido, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Michael Dawson, Jodi
Byrd, Jodi Melamed, Lisa Marie Cacho, Susan Koshy, Lee Gaines,
Chandan Reddy, Alyssa Bralower, and Sarah Richter. I would also
like to extend thanks to all the students, faculty, and members of the
community who came and provided lively discussion. This volume
would not have been possible without such robust and collective
input.
BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON

We are deeply grateful to our production team at Duke for their meticulous
attention to all aspects of this volume. Courtney Berger’s unflagging
support for this book and her deft guidance at every stage kept us on track,
despite the many troubles of the pandemic. Many thanks also to Sandra
Korn, Lisa Lawley, and Donald Pharr for seeing this book through
production and into the world.
Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, and Brian Jordan Jefferson
 Introduction

As Robin Kelley points out in his introduction to the 2020 reissue of Black
Marxism, Cedric Robinson did not coin the term racial capitalism, that it in
fact “originated in South Africa around 1976”—an origin point within a
settler colonial apartheid state that, importantly, signals the convergence of
settler colonialism, imperialism, anti-Blackness, and capitalism the
following essays address.1 For many, however, the concept of racial
capitalism has been most influentially formulated in Cedric Robinson’s
monumental study Black Marxism (1983). Robinson’s paradigmatic
challenge to Marx’s progressive teleology was transformative, and it
extended the critique of South African thinkers and activists, many in the
Black Consciousness movement and the Pan Africanist Congress, who were
concerned that “dismantling apartheid without overthrowing capitalism
would leave in place structures that reproduce racial inequality and the
exploitation of all workers.”2 The political and analytical interventions that
the framework of racial capitalism made in the work of Neville Alexander,
Barnard Magubane, James A. Turner, John S. Saul, Stephen Gelb, and
others were specific to South Africa. Robinson’s contribution was to
generalize and theorize racial capitalism on a world scale. His thesis was
that capitalism was racial capitalism everywhere.
Fundamentally, Robinson’s reworking of Marxism asserts that racism is
not extrinsic to capitalism; it does not merely exacerbate or justify class-
based inequalities. Critiquing key assumptions of Marxism, Robinson
explains that capitalism did not overthrow the fixed social hierarchies of
feudalism but instead extended and incorporated these unequal social and/or
colonial relations. Furthermore, he argues, these inequalities had always
been decidedly “racial.” According to Robinson, racism did not emerge at
the moment that Europeans justified the enslavement and colonization of
non-Europeans but functioned long before to naturalize economic, social,
and political inequalities within Europe that became entrenched within
capitalism. As he writes, “The tendency of European civilization through
capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate
regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”
In the conversation that concludes this book, Ruth Wilson Gilmore
reminds us that Robinson did not see the “racial” as synonymous with skin
color. According to Robinson, racial logics naturalize capitalist inequalities
and the violence that maintains them by naming the differences that justify
unequal social relations as innate—as “biological,” “cultural,”
“environmental,” and so forth. These differences refer to unequal social
relations, which can—but do not always or necessarily—correspond to skin
color. Hence, Gilmore challenges us to renew the analytic of racial
capitalism by asking us to think, “What is the ‘racial’ in racial capitalism?”
How do we combine the specificity of how difference functions within
specific locations to naturalize capitalist inequalities and their attendant
violences with the general trend of capitalism in the world today? As
Gilmore urges, “If we seriously want to enliven, and make useful, and keep
useful the concept of racial capitalism, we have to get over thinking that
what it’s about is white-people capitalism. There is white-people capitalism,
but that’s not all of capitalism.”3 For Gilmore, Robinson’s work offers
indispensable guidance in addressing this challenge in that he demonstrates
that although capitalism has always been racial capitalism, racial does not
necessarily mean Black or require white.
For instance, analyses of hierarchies of global space in postcolonial
studies illuminate a key racial logic inherent to Marxist stagism. The
division of the world into centers and peripheries, modern and backward
regions, and civilized and uncivilized peoples rested on what Enrique
Dussel terms “the fallacy of developmentalism,” the idea that the European
model of economic and political governance was a universal one that must
be followed by all other cultures.4 The “failure” of Third World countries to
develop along the pathways set up and exemplified by Euro-American
nations, especially after gaining political independence, was taken as proof
of a natural incapacity to reach humanity’s highest goals through the
exercise of universal reason. This failure served as warrant for continued
Western intervention in the markets and governments of “less-developed”
countries. As Denise Ferreira da Silva explains, developmentalism served
as an alibi for expropriating the productive capacity of lands and bodies
outside Europe by condensing three racial truths: “(a) that the targets of the
development project (illiteracy, poverty, famine) resulted from certain
peoples’ and places’ natural incapacity to move forward on their own, (b)
those who could: white/Europeans had the moral obligation to help those
(Asians, Africans, Latin Americans, and Pacific Islanders) who could not
develop, and (c) this natural incapacity preempts attributions of the failures
of development to past and current operations of colonial mechanisms of
expropriation.”5 In other words, the production of racially marked
hierarchies of space allows accumulation through dispossession to be
resignified as a problem of development. For this reason, Ferreira da Silva
explains, colonial racial critique offers a crucial corrective to Marxist
theory: “Racial critique yields an anticolonial analysis of global capitalism
without historical materialism’s ‘original’ Eurocentrism.”6
The racial grammar that shaped developmentalism in the twentieth
century is being reconfigured in the twenty-first century in ways that
highlight the urgency of connecting the critique of colonial and racial
capitalism. Several epochal shifts have undermined Euro-American
hegemony and the authority of linear models of development: the rapid
economic rise of East and Southeast Asian countries; the relocation of
industry to former colonies or semi-colonies; the counterweight of new
Chinese development projects reshaping investment and infrastructure in
Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America (e.g., the massive Belt and Road
Initiative launched in 2013); the heightened global consciousness of the
links between Western-style development and planetary environmental
catastrophes; the transcontinental effects of the 2008 financial crisis; and
most recently the cascading crises of the coronavirus pandemic alongside
the resurgence of Indigenous and Black-allied activism and leadership
against militarized police and the extractive industries that continue to
expropriate resources and lives. The reorientation of the global extractive
economy away from Euro-America and toward China, the paradoxical
conditions of increasing Western and Asian foreign investments in
emerging economies and the hyper-exploitation of racialized populations
within them, the creation of permanent surplus populations mostly in the
South but also in the North, and the hyper-exploitation of migrant labor
within postcolonial states, between them, and in the North point to the
emergence of new racializing regimes of accumulation and shifting
geographical contours and formations of race. These changes bring to the
fore the geographical fluidity of accumulation and racialized difference as
the circuits linking North-South, South-South, South-East, and North-East
proliferate and diversify at dizzying velocity.
Further complicating emerging global racial formations is the ambivalent
role of postcolonial elites in the aftermath of decolonization. As Heidi Nast
notes, “Since independence, for instance, postcolonial elites have, for
economic reasons, worked to identify tacitly and racially with global
hegemons. Yet, to stabilize and enhance their own local, national or
regional political positions, they have spoken in racialized opposition to
these same global hegemons, drawing on racialized commonalities with
their own ‘people.’ The ambivalence and contradictions of such positioning
has permitted a kind of racialized relay system in which political risk is
dispersed across global and local racial formations, allowing capital to
accumulate in ever more centripetal ways.”7 The strategic positioning of
postcolonial states and elites, sometimes glossed as “neoliberalism with
Southern characteristics” and sometimes seen as simply too heterogeneous
and divergent to be captured by this label, raises crucial questions about
racial capitalism now.8
In addition to rethinking primitive accumulation as endemic to capitalist
development, we need to rethink the analytic of “dispossession” so that we
can reframe and recenter land within analyses of colonial racial capitalism.
One of the interventions that North American Indigenous studies has made
to conversations about capitalism and racialization is to highlight how the
dispossessive regimes of accumulation through differentiation, elimination,
expropriation, enslavement, and incarceration have themselves always been
settler colonialist. What is more, these regimes have always been an attack
on collective life and its emphasis on relationality, kinship, and
responsibility that shapes so many Indigenous philosophies. As mentioned
above, Marx’s so-called primitive accumulation carries with it a temporal
and spatial teleology that assumes successive transformations of the means
of production and political economies as necessary conditions of possibility.
And even those necessary conditions of possibility rely on taken-for-
granted assumptions about land and property as givens.
In linking capitalism to settler colonialism, scholars in Indigenous and
settler colonial studies center land alongside labor within the horizons of
expropriation. But as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd cautions, although
settler colonial studies and critiques of racial capitalism often understand
land as necessary for life, Indigenous studies understands that land is life.9
Accordingly, Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard argues for a shift
from understanding capitalism as a social relation to understanding
capitalism as a colonial relation, an analytic reframing that he suggests
might help us “occupy a better angle from which to both anticipate and
interrogate practices of settler-state dispossession justified under otherwise
egalitarian principles and espoused with so-called ‘progressive’ political
agendas in mind.”10 From this better angle, we can push Robinson’s analytic
of racial capitalism back to the significance of the term’s South African
settler colonialist origins to examine how Indigenous dispossession is not
the precondition for racial capitalism to emerge but always has been part of
its very structure. To understand racial capitalism as additionally a colonial
relation, as Coulthard encourages us, is to understand that racial capitalism
exploits and expropriates not only labor but also land. For Coulthard,
Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation “thoroughly links the totalizing
power of capital with that of colonialism.”11 Hence, primitive accumulation
redirects attention to “the history and experience of dispossession, not
proletarianization.”12
In attempting to apprehend the difference that Indigenous dispossession
makes to Marxist understandings of land, labor, accumulation, and property,
Rob Nichols addresses what appears to be a contradiction outside of
Indigenous studies: If the Earth cannot be owned, how can land be stolen
from its rightful owners? He argues that, first, dispossession “transforms
nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones” and that, second, the
dispossessed “are figured as ‘original owners’ but only retroactively, that is,
refracted backward through the process itself.” As he elaborates, “It is thus
not (only) about the transfer of property but the transformation into
property.” Naming this process “recursive dispossession,” Nichols pinpoints
why Indigenous lands, stolen into property and possession, are so difficult
to apprehend outside the systems of property and possession. As he
explains, recursive dispossession works through “transformation,”
“transference,” and “retroactive attribution.” Indigenous peoples’ relations
to land are transformed (from a relation of responsibility to a relation of
rights) only so that land-as-a-property relation can be transferred or sold to
settlers. The act of selling belatedly names Indigenous peoples as “original
owners.” Dispossession, Nichols demonstrates in Theft Is Property!,
“produces what it presupposes.”13
This shift is important for rethinking how primitive accumulation was
not a stage of capitalist development but is, in fact, ongoing and necessary
for settler-state capital accumulation through its colonial relation.14 The
shift is also important for theorizing and learning from Indigenous
resistance: “The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism,
including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle
primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle
not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the
land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about
living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in
nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent
status as ‘rightless proletarians.’ ”15 As Coulthard explains, to see capitalism
as a colonial relation is not just to see capital accumulation through the lens
of ongoing dispossession but also to see anticapitalist activism in unceded
and occupied Indigenous lands beyond workers’ struggles—in other words,
to see “indigenous land-based direct action” as fundamentally revolutionary
and anticapitalist.16
For us, staging our analytic as colonial racial capitalism allows a
centering of relations of racism, settler and franchise colonialisms, and
capitalism across a variety of historical and geographical contexts and
engages their relation to the persistence of violence, precarity, and
inequality in capitalist modernity. Our analytic of colonial racial capitalism
brings together genealogies of decolonial, Indigenous, and Black radical
critique to explore how colonization and imperialism partitioned the globe
into racially differentiated lands and peoples, naturalizing and justifying the
expropriation of some bodies and lands for the benefit of others. As
Chandan Reddy notes, “For the last three hundred years, Westernization and
capitalism have refined and continuously expanded ‘society’ for the human
community while abandoning for death any life whose first and primary
crime has been its mere existence—that is, whose crime is that it exists
without value or meaning for westernized-man.”17
The essays in this volume move across a range of contexts, from the
strategies of Indigenous dispossession encoded in legal definitions of the
corporation and the tribe, to the historical erasure of the colonial violence of
the Mexican-American War in public memorials, to the cognitive mapping
of nuclear wastelands of colonial modernity located on Indigenous lands
and in the global South, to mechanisms of debt and development as race-
neutral means of asset-stripping Black communities, to the colonial legacies
shaping the Vietnamese state’s protection of natural resources in the mining
sector against Western and Chinese investors. The analyses link the logics
and violences of domination and dispossession to interconnections among
colonialism, racial capitalism, and formations of social difference. As they
construct new links across fields, extend the analytic to unforeseen
situations, and direct it toward new materialities, these essays open up
possibilities for solidarity, action, and reflection that work against the
processes of violent partition and repartition through which colonial racial
capitalism is reproduced.
Colonial Racial Capitalism

Racial capitalism is colonial capitalism, especially where settler and

imperial thefts of land, the production of hierarchies of global space, and
the expropriation of labor occur by means of recursive processes that
require possession and rights in order to produce dispossession and
rightlessness. As Jodi Melamed observes, “Capital can only be capital when
it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving
through relations of severe inequality among human groups—capitalists
with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence,
creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and
removed.”18 Thus, although liberal multiculturalism premised on anti-Black
settler colonial expropriation now promises inclusion and equality through
rights-based forms of administrative rule, colonial racial capitalism depends
upon a simultaneous violent disenfranchisement, dispossession, and
removal of certain bodies, subjectivities, and possible collectivities to
secure and maintain speculative financialization. In the context of US and
Canadian settler colonial societies, the ever-expanding logic of
accumulation through dispossession depends upon colonial relations with
Indigenous peoples as its condition of possibility, and as Joanne Barker
observes, “In a state whose capitalism is always already reaching out
globally, of course Indigenous peoples cannot have equal or commensurate
claims to any lands and resources that might compete with corporate-as-the-
government’s interests to expand, extract, and profit some more. Of
course.”19
This analytic of colonial racial capitalism therefore intervenes in and
refracts a broader re-theorization of the relationship between capitalism and
violence in Marxist theory that has been under way since the beginning of
the twenty-first century.20 The new work on capitalist violence issues from a
convergence of multiple efforts to grapple with the devastating inequalities
and cascading crises unleashed by global financialization: growing income
inequality and precarity; the gutting of the welfare state in the global North
and the social provisioning capacities of developing states in the global
South; the debt crises of the 1980s in Latin America and Africa and the
Asian financial crisis in 1997; the subprime mortgage crisis and the global
financial meltdown in 2008; the expulsion of surplus populations into
survival economies, prisons, slums, and migrant circuits; mass incarceration
and the militarization of policing and border control; the digitization of
social control, logistical operations, financial markets, property valuation,
and urban development; the reproduction of racial and colonial wastelands;
and “landgrabs” by old and new imperial powers in the South. The scope
and scale of these brute inequalities have focused unprecedented attention
on two cornerstones of Marxist theory: primitive accumulation and the
relation between expropriation and exploitation.
The reappraisals of so-called primitive accumulation highlight the
limitations of classical Marxist readings that treat it as a historically prior
stage in the development of capitalism (land enclosures, slavery, Indigenous
genocide and removal, colonial conquest and plunder) in which the use of
extra-economic force to separate people from the means of production and
subsistence is superseded in “mature” capitalism by the “the silent
compulsion of economic relations [that] sets the seal on the domination of
the capitalist over the worker.”21 Working largely from Marx’s changing
accounts of originary accumulation or Rosa Luxemburg’s study of force as
a permanent and intrinsic feature of capitalism that is repeatedly activated
as accumulation is extended to the entire world, these accounts reframe
primitive accumulation as an “inherent-continuous” element of capitalist
processes.22 These reformulations bring the work into closer alignment with
scholarship on slavery and colonialism in Black, Indigenous, and
postcolonial studies, which have long identified the enduring salience of
extra-economic coercion in historical and contemporary capitalism.23 As
Samir Amin notes, “Whenever the capitalist mode of production enters into
relations with pre-capitalist modes of production, and subjects these to
itself, transfers of value take place from the pre-capitalist to the capitalist
formations, as a result of the mechanisms of primitive accumulation.… It is
these forms of primitive accumulation, modified but persistent, to the
advantage of the centre, that form the domain of the theory of accumulation
on a world scale.”24 Crucially, recent reassessments in Marxism, like
Robinson’s prior work, have hinged on a move away from Eurocentric
models of capitalist development and toward “the colonial relation of
dispossession as a co-foundational feature of our understanding of and
critical engagement with capitalism.”25
Among the most comprehensive efforts to rethink the relationship
between capitalism and violence is Onur Ulas Ince’s study of “capital-
positing violence” and “capital-preserving violence.” As a preliminary step,
Ince insists that understanding primitive accumulation requires that “the
analytic aperture is widened to capture global networks of production and
exchange as the historical condition of capitalism, which in turn entails
abandoning the nation-state for the ‘colonial empire’ as the politico-legal
unit of analysis.” This scalar shift brings into view the otherwise obscured
interdependence between slave and free labor that underwrote industrial
capitalism as well as the racialized and gendered divisions between waged,
disposable, unpaid, and unfree labor structuring the current international
division of labor. Ince defines capital-positing violence as the brutal force
used to separate people from their means of production and to dispossess
them. This wholesale expropriation and expulsion of communities occurs
when capitalism forcibly incorporates noncapitalist social forms to its logic
of accumulation. By contrast, capital-preserving violence is less overt and
hides beneath the silent compulsion of economic relations. Exercised
primarily in quotidian forms through the law of the market, “capital-
preserving violence, as the institutionalization of coercion within
capitalism, thus encompasses not only the domain of law but a whole
panoply of infra-legal administrative techniques of micro-coercion, both
public and private, necessary for the reconstitution of ‘capital-positing
labor’ from one day to the next.”26 Nevertheless, despite their outward
difference, Ince insists that the two modalities of violence are interlinked
and aimed at creating and maintaining the institutional and normative
conditions for accumulation.
Black scholars, Indigenous scholars, feminist scholars, and scholars of
color have vitally reframed current debates by underscoring the centrality
and notable neglect of social reproduction and ecology in Marxist
reconsiderations of expropriation. These sites of expropriation are not
generally perceived as such because they are associated with the unpaid
reproductive and social labor of women and natives and the extraction and
commodification of natural resources and capacities in racial and gendered
spaces marked as underdeveloped or unproductive. Nevertheless, along
with expropriated labor, they form the disavowed foundation of processes
of capitalism.
More to the point, the discounted value of racialized and gendered
bodies, capacities, resources, and geographies is not accidental but is
actively produced both economically and epistemologically. As Jennifer
Morgan, Alys Weinbaum, Carole Boyce Davies, Sarah Haley, Erik
McDuffie, and Marisa Fuentes argue in their respective scholarship, the
development of racial capitalism has depended not only on Black women’s
labor and Black women’s activism but also on the archival erasure of Black
women’s physical, intellectual, and resistance work.27 The erasure of those
who labor in the service of social reproduction is crucial to the workings of
colonial racial capitalism.28 Archival erasure naturalizes the devaluation of
marginalized populations, the work they do, and the places they live, which
not only keeps wages low and unlivable but also keeps resource-rich land
exploitable and unprotected. Concurrently, this disavowal is also
reinscribed in false dichotomies and hierarchies within analyses of political-
economic processes that focus on paid, “productive” work at the expense of
those whose work is arbitrarily considered “reproductive.” Such archival
erasures and theoretical elisions obfuscate the racialized and gendered
nature of contemporary forms of unfree labor. As Ellie Gore and Genevieve
LaBaron remind us, “Understanding women’s unfree labour requires a
broad understanding of social reproduction as embodied and enacted at
individual and household levels, and the ways in which these are tied to
processes of value production.… Understanding how and why women
become vulnerable to unfree labor in global supply chains requires us to
centralise dynamics of social oppression and social reproduction—not
simply labour exploitation in economistic terms.”29 What links the distinct
sites of expropriated labor in the peripheries and the core, of the unpaid and
underpaid labor of social reproduction, and of low-cost food, energy, and
raw materials is that they serve as sites where “capital, science, and empire
… succeed in releasing new sources of free or low-cost human and extra-
human natures for capital.” These sites, vital to the incessant capitalist quest
for and production of “cheap natures,” sustain accumulation by driving
down costs and providing fixes for periodic crises.30 They are key sites of
expropriation because they are thinly protected by contractual obligations;
differentially devalued by racial and colonial legacies of conquest, plunder,
dispossession, and genocide; and disadvantaged through their low position
on a Eurocentric animacy hierarchy.
For Macarena Gómez-Barris, these key sites of expropriation exist in
what she refers to as the “extractive zone.” This is where colonial racial
capitalists actively and violently exploit and destroy social and ecological
life as well as the Indigenous, queer, and feminist epistemologies that value
relationality, land, plants, animals, and humans. As she writes, “The
‘extractive zone’ names the violence that capitalism does to reduce,
constrain, and convert life into commodities, as well as the epistemological
violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems.” In
addition to “mega-extractive projects, such as large dams and mines,”
extractive capitalism, according to Gómez-Barris, is expanded through
“prisons and security regimes.”31 Prisons, according to Gilmore, are
extractive because “prisons enable money to move because of the enforced
inactivity of people locked in them. It means people extracted from
communities, and people returned to communities but not entitled to be of
them, enable the circulation of money on rapid cycles. What’s extracted
from the extracted is the resource of life—time.”32 The racial and colonial
logics, mechanisms, and procedures of the carceral state not only create
“surplus” populations but also confine and criminalize the histories,
relationships, and knowledges that challenge the common sense of
exploitability and disposability. As Melamed points out, “We need a more
apposite language and a better way to think about capital as a system of
expropriating violence on collective life itself.”33 Incarceration extracts
time, the resource of life, and it extracts and criminalizes knowledge, the
resource of communities with long histories of struggle and resistance. For
this reason, it is important to work against the devaluation and erasure of
Indigenous, Black radical, and subaltern epistemologies because the
destruction of these worldviews is vital to the reproduction of colonial
racial capitalism precisely because they offer alternatives that have always
existed. Indigenous, decolonial, and Black radical critiques consider
colonization, racialization, and capitalism as coevolving and co-
constitutive; as Minneapolis-based poet Douglas Kearney observed in the
days following George Floyd’s murder by police, class is critical to analyses
of power and access within systems of privilege, but it is “more fluid than
perceived race. Police don’t check your credit rating before they shoot,
club, rough-ride, or strangle your life away because, you see, they already
know what they think you’re worth.”34
It is no accident that the extractive violences of colonial racial capitalism
target those people and places that are most vulnerable to devaluation and
criminalization. As Gómez-Barris writes, “It is often in the heart of
resource-rich territories that Indigenous peoples exist in complex tension
with extractive capitalism and land defense. In these geographies,
Indigenous peoples often multiply rather than reduce life possibilities,
protecting land and each other at often extremely high personal and
communal cost.”35 Hence, examining how racialized and gendered people
whose labor is considered unfree, reproductive, unproductive, or
nonproductive are devalued, exploited, disavowed, contained, criminalized,
incarcerated, and dispossessed requires examining how land itself is
reduced to only a property relation. To counter this academic tendency, it is
necessary to attend to land as the site of expropriation, dispossession, and
extraction as well as to apprehend land as the often unnamed but vital actor
that is always exceeding and resisting the violence of colonial racial
capitalism.
The framework of colonial racial capitalism centers land not only as the
site of expropriation and the place that social relations are enacted but also
as the unnamed actor that sometimes ostensibly but often invisibly
facilitates, mediates, and influences our social relations to state agents, one
another, the places we live, and the nonhuman lives and entities all around
us. It matters whether land is perceived as life, as private property, as terra
nullius, or as waste because such perceptions determine whether the land—
as well as its life, all the lives it sustains, and all the worldviews that value
it—is worthy of protection or vulnerable to extraction, expropriation,
violence, and dispossession. At the same time, we want to emphasize that
we need to see land beyond a property formation because if land is seen
only as owned or as not yet owned rather than as a relation, an actor, or kin,
then land, as well as all those the land sustains, will always be
misunderstood as valuable only in economic terms—as something to be
extracted from, possessed, exploited, damaged, owned, used, and abused.
We consider land relationally and, in so doing, assert as a grounding
assumption that land has its own capacities for agency, vitality, care, and
consent that should be respected and protected. Therefore, we need to
examine our relationships and responsibilities to land beyond its potential to
be parceled, enclosed, dispossessed, owned, and circulated as property.
Racism and colonialism naturalize not just brutal economic inequalities
but also the legal and extralegal violences and killings that come from
making dehumanization and devaluation seem endemic to impoverished
places and/or a product of people’s choices rather than as central to regimes
of accumulation. Thus, the framework of colonial racial capitalism is well
suited to grappling with the centrality of dispossession to the reproduction
of capitalist relations when it focuses on those peoples and places that are
recurring targets of capital-positing violence or where the boundary
between capital-positing and capital-preserving violence is weak and
permeable. This raises a number of crucial questions that lie at the heart of
the chapters in this collection. When do resistances to capital’s endless
drive for accumulation pose such a substantial threat as to unleash the direct
force held in check “in the ordinary run of things”?36 More importantly,
which sites and populations bear the brunt of capital-positing violence at
specific historical moments? How does this violence operate, and how can
it be resisted?
To address these questions through the framework of colonial racial
capitalism requires thinking about how the racial and colonial are
enmeshed. This approach also entails disregarding the structural separation
of economy from the ostensibly noneconomic realm of social
reproduction/kinship and ecology to examine their deep interconnections.
Finally, colonial racial capitalism as a framework recenters Indigenous and
settler colonial critique within what is often taken for granted within
Marxist analyses: who labors and is made to labor (and who is presumed
not to) in the presence and function of land in all its settler dispropriative
and counter-resistance registers as relation, as kin, as prior possession, as
property, and as the constitutive and literal theft of ground upon which
colonial and racial relations are enacted, policed, surveilled, speculated, and
monetized. The presumptions about land and labor bifurcated between
Indigeneity and Blackness, we argue, also compel the driving common
sense and taken-for-grantedness of racial capitalist critiques.
The framework of colonial racial capitalism counters the separation of
exchange, exploitation, and expropriation in dominant social theory. It not
only thematizes the structural interdependence of these three arenas; it also
offers a systemic analysis of the excesses of capitalist violence that have
and continue to target marginalized racial groups and peripheral spaces and
populations. In doing so, it offers a more expansive and complex
understanding of capitalist violence encompassing spectacular forms of
violence such as genocide, occupation, and removal, and the slower
violence of the destruction of collective knowledges, resources, languages,
relationships, and capacities. The chapters in this volume analyze the
interconnections among colonialism, racism, and capitalism from the
conquest period of “war capitalism” in the Americas, through industrial
capitalism, to contemporary financial capitalism.37 The various chapters
cover both settler colonialism in North America (Barker, Goldstein, Harris,
Day, Cacho and Melamed, Pulido) and franchise colonialism in Africa,
Asia, and Puerto Rico (Hoang, LeBrón, Jefferson, Day), exploring the
logics, mechanisms, and structures of Indigenous dispossession, conquest,
and slavery in the New World and the repressive and extractive modes of
occupation, resource control, and underdevelopment of colonial territories.
Importantly, the chapters do not solely offer a negative critique, taking
seriously Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s guidance to go beyond reciting the horrors
of capitalism to improvising resistance and rehearsing freedom for the
future. To become “good readers” requires divining possibilities for
different futures in the call of political movements and the expressive forms
of art (Barker, LeBrón, Cacho and Melamed, Harris, Day, Pulido) and then
putting this knowledge into action. Many of the essays channel dynamically
substantive traditions of radical thought in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian
American, and decolonial studies toward addressing the challenges of the
present. They resurrect and redescribe Indigenous and racial histories,
epistemologies, and struggles that have been systematically occluded,
erased, or distorted in dominant accounts. They recover and reveal refugia
of resistance, delineating the values, practices, and ontologies through
which Indigenous, enslaved, and colonized peoples define relationships to
one another, to purposeful activity, to sustenance, and to the Earth.
Structure of the Book

We have organized the volume into four sections: “Accumulation,”

“Administration,” “Aesthetics,” and “Rehearsing for the Future.” These
sections are not conceived as autonomous and separate but as intertwined.
Notably, many of the chapters could easily fit within two or even three
sections because capital accumulation often relies on administrative
procedures to abstract and obscure violence, and certain forms of art
making are explicitly imagined and designed to counter the violences of
capitalist exploitation and expropriation, as well as the legal and extralegal
coercion that upholds extractive capitalisms. In other words, the chapters
chosen to represent each section best highlight the specific organizing
concepts, but they also work cross-sectionally to illuminate the interaction
among capitalist accumulation, its law- and rule-making processes, and
artistic acts of contestation and rememory.
The first section, “Accumulation,” documents the persistence of so-
called primitive accumulation in Indigenous histories of land theft, removal,
and allotment (Barker); in the interconnected histories of Indigenous
dispossession through adoption, foster care, and inheritance laws and Black
subordination through heirs’ property laws after Reconstruction
(Goldstein); and in Black dispossession through debt and forced labor after
slavery, which was modeled on earlier systems of Indian debt peonage
(Harris). Working through Indigenous and Black history from the
eighteenth century to the present, these chapters show how colonial
relations of dispossession and servitude are inextricably linked to the
processes and institutions of capital accumulation. They also reveal how
Indigenous and Black dispossession beyond the land/labor divide was
enabled and justified by a liberal legal system that covers over the violent
illiberal origins of colonial racial capitalism.
The second section looks at administration as a dominant form of
colonial racial capitalist power in the neoliberal present, clarifying a shift
from lawmaking power to “the rule-making and rule-enforcing mode of
governance” as state bureaucracies become more complex.38 These chapters
home in on the infra-legal mechanisms of rules, rights, and procedures used
by states and institutions in the North and the South to manage racial
difference and colonial legacies of uneven development in a time of
neoliberal globalization. The chapters uncover telling differences in the use
of administrative power, from the opacity of rules strategically used by
Vietnamese state officials to parlay with Western and Chinese investors to
the abstraction and purported objectivity of smart governance algorithms
used for property valuation and waste management to the “transparent”
police procedures employed by the US administrative state to justify the
killing and criminalization of Black, Indigenous, gender-nonconforming,
and other marginalized communities (Hoang, Cacho, Melamed, Lebrón, and
Jefferson).
The third section, “Aesthetics,” contrasts the archival erasure of racial
and colonial dispossessive violence in official commemorations and its
recollection in counter-hegemonic visual art. In focusing on how visual
culture represents the nexus of military, technological, and economic
violence in contexts of conquest and occupation, this section examines how
the aesthetic can be marshaled by states to inculcate “colonial unknowing”
and also be mobilized in decolonial visions to “reverse, displace, and seize
the apparatus of value-coding.”39 This section centers artistic visions of land
and ecology in memorial sites, murals, sculptures, dioramas, and
photographs showing how, on the one hand, settler colonial and imperial
commemorations project landscapes improved by development and
technological modernization and, on the other hand, how oppositional art
represents the making of wastelands and the extirpation of Indigenous and
Native peoples as its necessary and brutal condition (Day, Pulido).
The concluding section, “Rehearsing for the Future,” takes the form of a
conversation between Michael Dawson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore in which
they reflect on their trajectories as scholars and activists and discuss
strategies for challenging racial capitalism now.
The first section considers the persistence of history in the present as the
chapters pull back from contemporary flash points—the Occupy Wall Street
(OWS) movement, the court challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act
(ICWA), the Flint water crisis, and the subprime loan crisis—to locate events
in the long duration of settler colonial capitalist expansion. All three
chapters in the opening section, Joanne Barker’s “The Corporation and the
Tribe,” Alyosha Goldstein’s “ ‘In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant
Renewal’: The Social Reproduction of Racial Capitalism and Settler
Colonial Entitlement,” and Cheryl I. Harris’s “The Racial Alchemy of Debt:
Dispossession and Accumulation in Afterlives of Slavery,” analyze
foundational legal rulings and policies through which the US government
expropriated and manipulated the land, labor, and kinship ties of Indigenous
and Black communities to support capitalist development and white
settlement. Barker’s chapter powerfully illustrates this dynamic, tracing the
concurrent evolution of the legal definitions of the “corporation” and the
“tribe” between 1790 and 1887 to reveal how the courts stripped away
Indian trade rights and sovereignty over land, resources, and capacities in
service of white settlement and corporate interests. The steady expansion of
corporate status and rights at the same time that Indian sovereignty was
being systematically undermined worked “to establish and protect
imperialist social relations and conditions … between powerful financial
interests, both government and corporate, and Indigenous peoples.” Barker
documents the massive loss of land, life, and lifeways that followed,
revealing dispossession as a world-historical reorientation to the nomos of
capital. This legal history, distinct from but connected to the struggles of
other oppressed racial groups, holds lessons for later generations struggling
against capitalism. Specifically, Barker notes that movements like OWS,
which bracket the centrality of Indigenous territorial-based claims to
sovereignty in their pursuit of economic justice, can offer only partial
remedies rather than radical transformation.
Alyosha Goldstein’s chapter picks up where Barker’s legal history ends,
with the 1887 General Allotment Act, but he shifts the focus of analysis to
social reproduction. His chapter shows how policies of adoption, foster
care, and inheritance served as instruments of ongoing Native
dispossession. Specifically, he explores how the notion of filius nullius
(“nobody’s child”), enacted in a range of child-removal policies, works in
tandem with terra nullius, implemented through federal policies for Indian
removal, allotment, termination, and relocation in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The dynamic and shifting policies encouraged the
adoption of Native children by non-Native parents and thereby
“insinuate[d] settler futurity over and against Indigenous life and relations.”
Adoption policies worked in concert with laws of inheritance to dispossess
Native people and Blacks through the fractionation of Native landed
property in the post-Allotment period (1887–1934) and through the
partition of heirs’ property that disproportionately affected Blacks after
Reconstruction. Both mechanisms “simultaneously advance a particular
normative relation to ownership while holding the possibility of possession
itself in abeyance and presuming the inevitability of loss as part of their
instantiation.” The violence that the chapter traces reaches through time,
enacting its dispossessive force across generations as it shifts shape from a
strategy of war to a civilizing strategy of uplift. Crucially, social
reproduction and ecology, both often analytically sequestered from the
economic because of their presumptively “natural” functions, capacities,
and resources, are revealed in this chapter as paradigmatic sites of what Rob
Nixon calls “slow violence” (see also Day).40 The slow violence of laws
restructuring kinship relations and inheritance dispossess marginalized
groups of the resources and relationships on which their future depends
while making their continued impoverishment appear to be endemic to the
communities themselves rather than to external forces.
Cheryl I. Harris’s “The Racial Alchemy of Debt: Dispossession and
Accumulation in Afterlives of Slavery” traces how racial dispossession by
debt has structured social relations and political economy in the afterlives of
slavery. Whereas debt is formally race-neutral, Harris argues, it operates as
a form of “racial alchemy” that obscures racially differentiated processes
and burdens and abstracts systemic racial violence. Furthermore, both
historically and contemporaneously, debt has turned racial subordination
into a commodity that can be bought, sold, and speculated on. She analyzes
this recurring pattern of dispossession through debt in its early form as
Indigenous debt peonage and later in coerced labor systems such as convict
leasing and chain gangs, tracing the changing forms of this extractive
infrastructure across different carceral regimes up to the recent subprime
mortgage and the Flint water crisis. Indian debt peonage, she argues, was
intimately related to systems of coerced labor applied to Blacks. The settler
colonial project of Indigenous land dispossession prepared the way for the
cash-crop economies worked by enslaved and coerced Black labor. Debt
peonage circumvented the formal abolition of Indian slavery and vagrancy
laws aimed at disciplining Indian labor and created a template for the laws
and work contracts imposed on Blacks after slavery. Abolition ended the
value of Black people as chattel, but the imposition of Black Codes across
the South and the system of convict leasing and the later chain gangs
“transformed freed people into assets yet again, ‘propertizing’ and
assigning value to Black bodies by virtue of their indebtedness.” These
systems were “implemented through formally color-blind laws and a
ruthlessly targeted system of racialized administration.” She concludes by
examining how the Flint water crisis illustrates how neoliberalism not only
dispossesses racial collectivities but can recycle what is devalued as
throwaway or waste land by monetizing it. Harris’s discussion of the
centrality of the carceral state to racial capitalist and colonial extraction is
taken up in the next section by Cacho and Melamed and by LeBrón, and the
analysis of the accumulative strategies of wastelanding is further explored
in the chapters by Jefferson and Day.
The chapters in the second section—Kimberly Kay Hoang’s “In Search
of the Next El Dorado: Mining for Capital in a Frontier Market with
Colonial Legacies,” Lisa Marie Cacho and Jodi Melamed’s “ ‘Don’t Arrest
Me, Arrest the Police’: Policing as the Street Administration of Colonial
Racial Capitalist Orders,” Marisol LeBrón’s “Policing Solidarity: Race,
Violence, and the University of Puerto Rico,” and Brian Jordan Jefferson’s
“Programming Colonial Racial Capitalism: Encoding Human Value in
Smart Cities”—all focus on administration as a dominant vector of capital-
preserving violence today. The chapters in the first section focus on
lawmaking as a key mechanism of primitive accumulation or capital-
positing violence, while the chapters that examine contemporary neoliberal
capitalism broaden the frame to encompass the law and a whole array of
administrative techniques.
In their recent work, Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy identify the
importance of administrative power in contemporary capitalism, noting that
it is the means through which racial violence becomes an “open secret” as
violence takes the guise of routine calculations and everyday procedures
that appear transparent and race-neutral. They specify three mechanisms
through which administered racial violence and colonial power operate: (1)
police procedures, (2) a liberal rights regime centered on accumulation
rather than freedom, and (3) geo-economic strategies of command and
control materialized in logistical operations.
The first chapter in this section illuminates administrative power within
the context of the regional asymmetries of global financialization by
looking at foreign direct investment flows into Vietnam, an emerging
market economy in socialist transition, imagined by Western investors
through a colonial prism as the “next El Dorado.” The chapter provides us a
detailed example of what Gómez-Barris has identified as a “mega-
extractive project”; such projects, she explains, are “one of today’s central
modes of perpetuating racial capitalism in the Global South.”41 Using an
extended case method, Hoang examines the face-off between the
Vietnamese government and Western foreign investors over control of
Vietranium (pseudonym) mining, a highly protected nationalistic sector of
the economy. Woven into both parties’ conflicting accounts of a failed $150
million investment venture is the gap between the white fantasy of a
“lucrative new frontier” for investment and the political reality of Vietnam’s
paradoxically weak yet opaque legal and administrative regime that lures
foreign investors in for quick profits but thwarts their efforts to obtain them.
The chapter maps the complicated and unstable trialectics of Vietnamese
negotiations with Western and Chinese capital, each marked by distinct
histories of colonial domination. Hoang offers us a detailed account of how
transnational capitalists move money across national borders and how a
postcolonial, socialist nation-state both encourages and resists foreign
investors’ efforts to extract the nation’s natural resources. She argues that
the defeat of Western foreign investors by a country with a weak legal
system and limited technological expertise appears counterintuitive but on
closer scrutiny exposes the inadequacies of colonizer/colonized and
center/periphery binaries prevalent in postcolonial studies. With the rise of
East and Southeast Asian economies and the regional dominance of inter-
Asian capital flows (in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s
withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership), Hoang suggests that new
paradigms are needed to grapple with the reconfiguration of postcoloniality,
sovereignty, and nationalism in countries like Vietnam. In the “Vietranium”
project, the government allowed Western investors to assume risk in raising
capital and testing for the profitability of mining operations, then used
arcane tax laws to push them out of the country once they “struck gold.”
But what, Hoang asks, are the implications of the government’s reassertion
of sovereignty over its natural resources when the wealthy local officials
and entrepreneurs who profit from it are not a nationalist vanguard but a
transnational global elite?
In their chapter, Lisa Marie Cacho and Jodi Melamed examine policing
as an administrative power that deploys violence work (including killing
with impunity) in real time to criminalize, disqualify, and sort people for
capitalist care or capitalist destruction, in order to fabricate and maintain
specific relations of colonial racial capitalist accumulation in specific
geographies. Seeing police work in this way allows us to understand the
demands that have emerged from Black, Indigenous, gender-
nonconforming, and other racialized and asset-stripped communities in the
wake of George Floyd’s killing—both the demand to defend oneself from
police violence and live and the demand to defend others from the precarity,
premature death, and economic violence of counterinsurgency policing—as
revolutionary, profoundly loving, and breathtakingly insubordinate. Cacho
and Melamed argue that to identify the weaknesses that colonial racial
capitalist policing administers, we have to rethink liberalism writ large
(private property, separation of powers, law) as a capitalist worlding praxis
that relies on organized violence to realize—to make real—its terms of
order. Policing must target the enlivening of Black, Indigenous, and people
of color when such enlivening targets the stability of colonial racial
capitalist modes of accumulation. Using examples of uprisings in the city
that settlers named Milwaukee, Cacho and Melamed examine how acts of
rebellion from communities that love themselves more than they fear the
police, such as unity fires, marches, and a block-party protest in front of the
city jail, defeat acts of policing as the street administration of colonial racial
capitalism and, in the process, offer alternative ways of living, being, and
relating to one another.
Marisol LeBrón also examines police procedures in her analysis of the
university administration’s deployment of police and private security forces
to repress student strikes at the University of Puerto Rico. The strike, a
direct challenge to the administration’s moves to privatize the flagship
campus, offers a striking example of a tipping point at which capital-
preserving violence, to which the largely middle- and upper-class students
on the flagship campus had been exposed till then, morphs suddenly into
capital-positing violence typically reserved for poor and racially
marginalized communities. LeBrón’s essay focuses on the state’s and
university administration’s responses to the fraught coalitions forged
between the student movement and racially and economically marginalized
Puerto Ricans during two university strikes. The difficulty that strikers had
in maintaining a broader anticapitalist agenda across race and class lines in
the face of police violence foregrounds the challenge for students and their
supporters in reading the structural relationship between violence and
capitalism and formulating a sustainable response to it. LeBrón draws
complicated lessons from the strike, pointing to utopian moments of
solidarity that emerged when students and security guards embraced and
shook hands, but also to the diversion of the second strike from
anticapitalist demands to containment of police violence as the coalition
expanded. Although the two goals were inherently connected in the minds
of many student activists, they became disarticulated as the violence against
protesters intensified. Perhaps the twisting course of the strikes and their
shifting solidarities, which importantly outlasted the strike and had “lasting
transformational effects” on many of those involved, exemplify the
potential and difficulty of seeing the link between violence and capitalism
in the administrative regimes of financial capitalism. In “Open Secret,”
Melamed provides a penetrating description of police procedures as “the
visible hand of the market,” a recognition that undergirds Cacho and
Melamed’s and LeBrón’s chapters, both of which point to the importance of
police violence as a key site of study and struggle.42
 Brian Jordan Jefferson’s chapter, “Programming Colonial Racial
Capitalism,” analyzes how racial and spatial value is encoded in smart city
governance through administrative software. In contrast to the overt if
routinized violence of police repression, the colonial racial violence of
smart technologies is abstracted, opaque, and remote. Smart governance
optimizes administrative efficiency and economic growth, thereby
reinforcing existing racial and colonial practices of human and geographical
valuation, devaluation, expendability, and waste (see also Day). Jefferson
analyzes two types of software, one used for property assessment and the
other for waste management. If the former administers “the economic
values of landscapes,” the latter administers “how pollutable they are.” The
comparison between the two types of software connects the spheres of
exchange and ecology to expose how algorithms routinize and rationalize
racial and geographical devaluation, as well as ecological and human
degradation and destruction. Ironically, as Jefferson notes, both
technologies are promoted as “neutral scientifically based” solutions that
remedy racially discriminatory decisions rooted in subjective bias. In this
way, computerized administration enables “the extension of market control
into minority communities inside wealthier Western countries and across
economically liberalizing areas of the global South.” Such administrative
software supports operations on a global scale but delivers lethal violence in
localities through operations that are harder to track and resist. The global
explosion of property-assessment technology facilitates the subsumption of
the cadastral systems of postcolonial countries into global finance markets,
whereas waste-management technology enables logistical operations that
generate differential “spatial profiles in ways that naturalize the logics of
the market and contribute to ‘group-differentiated vulnerability to
premature death.’ ” Jefferson points to the urgent need for an “algorithmic
abolitionist thinking” that can grapple with the violence of smart
urbanization. Indeed, he argues, within these emergent modes of racial
colonial governance, built on hierarchies of global space, new possibilities
for coalition building between the various devalued populations can
emerge.
 The third section (“Aesthetics”) features two essays, Iyko Day’s
“Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure” and Laura
Pulido’s “Erasing Empire: Remembering the Mexican-American War in
Los Angeles,” which explore the historical erasure of settler colonialism
and racial capitalism in public commemoration of two important military
events: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 and the Mexican-
American War (1846–1848). The century separating the two events shows
the recurrence of extra-economic coercion and dispossession in US
capitalist development. Yet the liberal ideology of market freedom and
democracy requires the disavowal of the deep reliance on lethal force to
establish and expand capitalist rule. Both Day and Pulido show how the
devastation inflicted by these wars is “aestheticized and anaesthetized” in
collective history and memory. These essays explore the various forms of
“colonial unknowing” perpetuated by official histories of the Mexican-
American War and the Hiroshima bombing.
Iyko Day argues that the global cultural memory of Hiroshima as a
cautionary tale of the excesses of technoscientific modernity, espoused in
different forms by the US and Japanese state, transmutes the historical
exploitation of nuclear modernity into universal stories of suffering that
obscure their respective imperial pasts. In contrast to the spectacular
violence of the Hiroshima bombing that has preoccupied cultural memory,
Day turns to visual representations of nuclear wastelands where radioactive
minerals are mined and toxic waste disposed, reading them as the
unregarded sites of the slow violence of military and economic domination.
From the vantage point of these devastated nuclear wastelands, many of
which lie on Indigenous lands and in the global South, “the antipolitical
frame of technopolitics reveals the coordinated expansion and technological
intensification of imperial state power that is secured through its
simultaneous depoliticization” (see also Harris and Jefferson on
wastelanding). These “radioactive nonsites of nuclear modernity,” she
argues, locate Hiroshima “in a history of colonial capitalism rooted in
energy extraction, from coal and oil to uranium.” Day takes up these
questions through an analysis of the sculptures in Hiroshima-based artist
Takahiro Iwasaki’s Out of Disorder series. In his table dioramas, Iwasaki
uses found materials to represent the energy landscapes of Hiroshima as a
literal wasteland. He composes his sculptures from discarded commodities
such as toothbrushes, kimonos, and towels, exposing through the
arrangement of this human detritus the failure of use values in capitalism
and the disruption of capitalist temporality and the commodity form. Thus,
Day concludes, Iwasaki’s works offer “alternative insights on energy
infrastructures in the shadow of nuclear modernity.”
Laura Pulido examines how the transition from Mexican to US rule is
envisioned and narrated in historical sites and landscapes commemorating
the Mexican-American War. She describes how the sites commemorating
the US government’s seizure of a quarter-million square miles of territory
recast the violence of conquest through romantic visions of a bucolic
Spanish past that gave way to modernizing US rule. Of two sites that were
important battlefields, she notes that the weaponry of domination—cannons
and guns—is showcased in decontextualized tributes to their technological
sophistication while “the violence of the war is largely evacuated.” The Fort
Moore Pioneer Memorial lauds the US battalions, pioneers, and Anglo-
American settlers as the primary agents responsible for “the evolution of the
region from US conquest to the 1950s, when the sculpture was completed.”
The bas-relief sculpture of pioneers, wagons, cows, houses, and trees
provide paeans to modernization, heteropatriarchy, land development, and
property ownership and overwrite the violent dispossession and
displacement of Indigenous people and Mexicans. To offer a counter-vision
of the Mexican-American War, Pulido examines the visual aesthetics of
Tree of Califas, which is featured in the underground train stop of the
Metropolitan Transit Authority adjacent to the Campo de Cahuenga site.
Highlighting the Mexican/Chicanx and Indigenous perspective, the mural
embeds the Mexican-American War in the violent transition from Spanish
conquest to US conquest. Rather than erasing empire, the installation
locates the war in the framework of “inter-imperiality,” highlighting and
connecting Indigenous dispossession and Mexican racialization between
two imperial regimes.43 The Mexican-American War marks not an entry
into capitalist modernity but the recurrence of imperial violence on land
seized by multiple empires.
 The final section of the book, “Rehearsing for the Future,” centers a
conversation between Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Michael Dawson that is
both a reflection on their careers as legendary scholar-activists and a primer
on the work still needed to seize the future away from the structures of
dispossessive racial capitalism. As scholar activists who were at the
forefront of shaping and cohering racial capitalism as a vitally necessary
response to the on-the-ground and on-the-ropes revolutionary movements in
California and Chicago that, as Dawson says, “were trying to understand
the intersection of white supremacy and capitalism in the United States,”
Gilmore and Dawson constellate some of the driving forces that centered
racial theory within political economy as a way to understand the
imperative nows of the present. With remembrances of and stories about
Cedric Robinson and Clyde Woods, critiques of the reformist Left, and
thoughts on reinvigorating the stakes in understanding that all capitalism is
racial, Dawson and Gilmore provide the counternarratives and time lines
through which to reimagine how the basic institutions of family, education,
work, and care might radically transform away from carcerality, debt
peonage, and violence and toward the grassroots collectivities and
solidarities that emerge beyond the continual rehearsing and circulation of
white supremacist horror on social media.
The year 2020 and the days, months, and year(s) to come may be
unprecedented, as many activists, pundits, politicians, and scholars have
already said—with the simultaneity of a global pandemic; economic,
financial, infrastructural, and housing crises; anti-Black police brutality;
social unrest and uprising; authoritarianism; ecological catastrophes; and
the competing forces of incarceration, eviction, homelessness, and the
vested interests of white supremacy and settler colonialism structuring the
logics of access—and we are only just beginning to understand the forces of
repression and transformation that have shaped the futures to come. What
we can see already is that the logistics of production, policing, health care,
and livability are intricately entangled with the structures of property, profit,
and security that have been the cornerstones of anti-Black settler
colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Incarcerating social-justice
workers and anticolonial laborers extracts energy, passion, life, time,
knowledge, history, and theory from communities, trying to force
interruptions and disruptions in their respective and collective struggles.
But this also happens when we lock away the lives of those with less
spectacular and less honorable backgrounds as if the complex, difficult
choices they made under trying circumstances nullify everything they can
offer to their communities and erase all their future brilliant ideas so
desperately needed in this society. Resisting itself becomes criminalized
and the frame and excuse for death-dealing regimes. In this way, we are all
recruited to affirm the logic of colonial racial capitalism by disavowing
those whom the carceral state and the authoritarian state have deemed guilty
and undeserving. Colonial racial capitalism not only exploits, destroys,
extracts, and devalues labor and land but also damages relationships,
communities, and the alternative visions and futures that we need to build
better lifeworlds. We believe that the chapters included in this collection
provide some of the critical tools and frameworks needed to build toward
those better lifeworlds that arise from the simultaneous struggles for
decolonization and abolition.
NOTES

1. Kelley, “Foreword,” xiv. The term racial capitalism was used in a pamphlet, Foreign
Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa, by white South African
Marxists Martin Legassick and David Hemson. They were part of a larger group of South
African thinkers and activists who used the term to analyze the distinctive nexus of white
supremacy, imperialism, and capitalism in apartheid South Africa.
2. Kelley, “Foreword,” xiv. See also Milkman, “Apartheid, Economic Growth”; Hudson,
“Racial Capitalism”; Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid; Kundnani, “What Is Racial Capitalism?”;
Burden-Stelly, Hudson, and Pierre, “Racial Capitalism, Black Liberation.”
3. Robinson, Black Marxism, 26; Gilmore, “What is the ‘Racial’?”
4. Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” 67.
5. Ferreira da Silva, “Globality,” 36.
6. Ferreira da Silva, “Globality,” 34.
7. Nast, “ ‘Race’ and the Bio(necro)polis,” 1458.
8. Prashad, Poorer Nations, 10.
9. Jodi A. Byrd, “Indigenomicon,” Zoom talk, Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser
University, May 5, 2021.
10. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 12.
11. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 7. Coulthard addresses several critiques of “primitive
accumulation,” among them that Marx and Marxists have narrated primitive accumulation in
ways that read the violent dispossession of colonized Indigenous peoples and their lands as a
finished moment in the history of modern capitalism, necessary to erect the contemporary
relations of exploitation that separate the waged worker from the means of production. This
incorrect premise, Coulthard explains, comes from Marx’s writings that described primitive
accumulation as “the accumulation of capital through violent state dispossession resulting in
proletarianization” (10). As Coulthard and others remind us, Indigenous people have also
always been laborers and Indigenous dispossession is still ongoing.
12. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 13.
13. Nichols, Theft Is Property!, 8, 31, 9.
14. Some scholars, such as Nancy Fraser, see primitive accumulation as always violent
because they connect it to racialized expropriation, but as Coulthard reminds us, this is not
necessarily the case: state dispossession also works through strategies of accommodation and
recognition. Challenges to stagist readings of primitive accumulation have also been made by
scholars in Black studies, such as Nikhil Pal Singh, who critiques the relegation of slavery to a
precapitalist or noncapitalist era in Marxist thought.
15. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 13.
16. Coulthard, “Colonialism of the Present.”
17. Reddy, “Is Justice a Process or an Outcome?”
18. Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” 77.
19. Barker, “Corporation and the Tribe,” 265.
20. See Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight”; De Angelis, “Marx’s Theory of Primitive
Accumulation”; Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Federici, “Debt Crisis”; Fraser,
“Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism”; Fraser, “Legitimation Crisis?”;
Hall, “Primitive Accumulation”; Harvey, New Imperialism; Ince, “Between Equal Rights”;
Ince, Colonial Capitalism; Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation”; Nichols, Theft
Is Property!; Sassen, Expulsions; Sassen, “Savage Sorting”; and Singh, “On Race, Violence,
and So-Called Primitive Accumulation.”
21. Marx, Capital, 899–900.
22. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, 364–66, 370–76, 452–54; De Angelis, “Marx’s
Theory of Primitive Accumulation,” 5.
23. See Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale; Banaji, Theory as History; Coulthard, Red
Skin, White Masks; Guha, Dominance without Hegemony; Guha, Elementary Aspects; Mintz,
Sweetness and Power; Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Sanyal, Rethinking
Capitalist Development; and Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
24. Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale, 3.
25. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 14.
26. Ince, “Between Equal Rights,” 9, 16–18, 19.
27. Davies, Left of Karl Marx; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Haley, No Mercy Here; McDuffie,
Sojourning for Freedom; Morgan, Reproduction and Gender; Weinbaum, Afterlife of
Reproductive Slavery.
28. Hong, Ruptures of American Capital, xxiv.
29. Gore and LaBaron, “Using Social Reproduction Theory,” 563.
30. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 53.
31. Gómez-Barris, Extractive Zone, xvi, xix, xvii.
32. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography,” 227.
33. Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” 78.
34. Kearney, “Dear Editor—.”
35. Gómez-Barris, Extractive Zone, xix.
36. Marx, Capital, 899.
37. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xv.
38. Melamed and Reddy, “Using Liberal Rights.”
39. Vimalassery, Pegues, and Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing,” 1042; Spivak, Outside in
the Teaching Machine, 63.
40. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.
41. Gómez-Barris, Extractive Zone, xvii.
42. Melamed, “Open Secret.”
43. Doyle, “Inter-imperiality,” 159.
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Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
Burden-Stelly, Cherisse, Peter James Hudson, and Jemima Pierre. “Racial Capitalism,
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Clarno, Andy. Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine, Israel and South Africa after 1994.
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Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of
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I    Accumulation
DEVELOPMENT BY DISPOSSESSION
ONE · Joanne Barker

The Corporation and the Tribe

The system ain’t broke. It was built to be this way.

TOM B. K. GOLDTOOTH (DINÉ/DAKOTA), 2012
A Prologue

This chapter examines how the foundational legal definitions of the

“corporation” and the “tribe” between 1790 and 1887 worked together to
establish and protect imperialist social relations and conditions in the
United States between powerful financial interests, both government and
corporate, and Indigenous peoples. Although the analysis is historically
focused, I want to frame it by the current political debates and organizing
efforts against government and corporate collusion and fraud represented by
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and my engagement with Occupy Oakland. I
hope this will help us to better understand how the history of the territorial
dispossession and collusive fraud enacted by the US government and
corporate interests against Indigenous peoples clarifies the kinds of issues
of government and corporate collusion and fraud that OWS has addressed. To
be clear, the 1 percent did not show up in 2008. They have been around all
along, targeting Indigenous peoples and their territories over which the US
empire was built and continues to operate.
On September 17, 2011, OWS began in Zuccotti Park (Liberty Plaza), in
Manhattan’s financial district, with the goal of “fighting back against the
corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the
democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic
collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.”1 From my
particular viewpoint in Oakland, California, it seemed that OWS had swiftly
coalesced the demands of a wide array of grassroots-based organizations
and individuals for solidarity against and open debate about the more
insidious legal protections of government and corporate collusion. For
instance, discussions prompted by OWS exposed the gross
misrepresentations of congressional representatives and energy industry
CEOs about job creation and public safety in Canada’s Keystone XL Pipeline
and its proposed extensions through the United States and then linked these
lies to the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples for environmental
justice.2 When so many Occupy Oakland participants began showing up in
solidarity at Indigenous actions in the Bay Area, such as the Chochenyo
Ohlone’s Annual Emeryville Shellmound Protest on Black Friday, I
genuinely believed that the OWS movement had succeeded in opening a
critical space for much-needed discussions about the structural, ideological,
and social links between the foreclosure of many Black people, Asian
Americans, and Latina/os from their homes and the US dispossession of
Indigenous peoples from their territorial homelands. I was optimistic—
unusually so for me—that these discussions would lead to meaningful
solidarity and transformation.
Many things happened that changed my mind and thinking so much that
I began the research that informs this chapter. The first occurred on October
27, 2011, when a group of us failed to convince those present at an Occupy
Oakland General Assembly to change the name of Occupy Oakland to
Decolonize Oakland in recognition of the fact that Oakland is already on
occupied lands. Although the assembly did pass a rather nonthreatening
statement of solidarity with Indigenous peoples, they accused us then and in
the Bay Area press of trying to “guilt trip” them into some larger-than-life
demand for Indigenous land reparations that went far beyond, they argued,
the urgent issues of the foreclosure crisis and the militarized crackdown on
OWS in Oakland that they cared about. They argued with us more sincerely,
and ironically, that changing the name from Occupy to Decolonize would
result in them losing “brand recognition” and so their affiliation with the
broader movement.3
We responded by organizing a series of teach-ins to more carefully work
people through the historical, legal, and social connections between the
foreclosures on Black, Asian American, and Latina/o homes and the
dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Bay Area. Along with several
other mostly Indigenous women, we hosted the teach-ins, just before the
Occupy Oakland General Assembly, from mid-December 2011 through
early May 2012 at Oscar Grant Plaza and then at community centers within
walking distance of the plaza. Initially, the teach-ins gathered a diverse
range of individuals. But almost immediately Indigenous peoples—
particularly Ohlone—stopped attending. This seemed to be because of the
hostile resistance we experienced against the historical links we argued
existed between the foreclosure crisis and the dispossession of Ohlone
people. The most severe expression of this hostility occurred when a man
who identified himself to me as a “member of the Black community”
accused me of having a “hidden agenda” to move “Indians” into the “family
homes of Black people” that the banks had foreclosed on.
The intergenerational consequences of foreclosure and the pain and
frustration of the rampant evictions of Black families from their homes in
Oakland were real and vicious. After several such exchanges, I came to
believe that those involved in the Occupy movement (including me) had not
done so well at fulfilling the core pedagogical mandate of movements like it
to provide the historical and social contexts needed for non-Indigenous
communities to understand why Indigenous peoples might perceive the
foreclosure crisis as merely (though importantly) the most recent
representation of a long history of collusive and fraudulent land issues
defining the US economy as an imperialist one.
This chapter results from my reflection on the pedagogical approaches
and content needed within movements like OWS to build lasting solidarities
across the very community divides—perceptual, structural, and other—on
which the US imperial formation depends. These approaches must be
characterized by compassion, generosity, reciprocity, and responsibility and
must be historical, social, and legal. Working to reform a bad set of laws
that protect Wall Street banking interests from taxation or bringing criminal
charges against banking executives will not—on their own—adequately
address the needs of our diverse communities. Corrections or amendments
or enforcement, in other words, does not demand any real structural change.
The kind of social transformations needed can happen only from a place of
genuine understanding—compassionate, respectful, and informed—about
all of the historical and social complexities of oppression and exploitation
that inform the perceptions and experiences of our communities.
An Introduction to “Corporations” and “Indian Tribes”

How does the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples

clarify the “corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations
over the democratic process” within the United States? How is “the role of
Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest
recession in generations” more effectively understood in relation to ongoing
Indigenous struggles against jurisdictional and territorial dispossession than
within its more popular frame of reference to the Great Depression?
This chapter, divided into two main sections, considers these questions
by examining how the core foundational definitions of the legal status and
rights of “corporations” and “Indian tribes” worked in concert to establish
and protect imperialist social relations and conditions between powerful
financial interests, both government and corporate, and Indigenous peoples.
The first part of the chapter examines the limitations of the status and rights
of “Indian tribes” to trade—commercially and in lands and resources—by
the US Congress through treaties between 1778 and 1871, the six Acts to
Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes between 1790 and
1834, and the pivotal decision of the Supreme Court of the United States
(SCOTUS) in Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh of 1823. I compare the
consequences of these laws to the SCOTUS decisions regarding corporate
rights in Fletcher v. Peck of 1810 and Trustees of Dartmouth College v.
Woodward of 1819. Therein, SCOTUS ruled that the US Constitution
provided (1) that states were restricted from invalidating contracts that
carried out the sale and acquisition of tribally treatied lands, irrespective of
any fraud or the possession of proper title on which those contracts were
based, and (2) that corporate charters qualified as contracts between private
parties with which states could not interfere.
In the second part of the chapter I examine how the legal status and
rights of “Indian tribes” were all but decimated by the US Senate’s
unilateral suspension of treaty making in 1871 and the terms and
administration of the General Allotment Act of 1887. I link the loss of
treaty-making powers and territorial dissolution to the SCOTUS decision in
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886). In that
decision, SCOTUS ruled that corporations possessed Fourteenth Amendment
rights analogous to those of “persons,” a stark contrast to the way
concurrent law was stripping tribes of any and all legal protections to
governance and lands.
Focused historically between 1790 and 1887, this chapter provides a
legal analysis of core US statutes and court decisions in the definition and
provision of corporate and tribal status and rights. Though focused
historically, it anticipates a readership that cares about how this history
matters in thinking through the socio-legal importance of the questions
raised by OWS and movements like it in relation to Indigenous strategies for
political coalition and legal revolution. It assumes that the US dispossession
of Indigenous peoples clarifies the “corrosive power of major banks and
multinational corporations over the democratic process” as well as “the role
of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest
recession in generations” by bringing into sharp relief the collusive and
fraudulent relations among the US Congress, the courts, and corporations.4
In doing so, it does not presume the current system’s catastrophes—marked
by the 2008 foreclosure crisis—are aberrations or abnormalities of US
democracy. Rather, as Tom B. K. Goldtooth (Diné/Dakota), executive
director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said during a 2012
Toronto symposium titled “The Occupy Talks: Indigenous Perspectives on
the Occupy Movement,” “The system ain’t broke. It was built to be this
way.”5
Part 1: Indian Tribes and Corporate Artificiality

THE TRADE IN “INDIAN TRIBES”

The phrase “Indian tribes” appears only once in the US Constitution.

Article 1, section 8, enumerates the powers of the US Congress, including
jurisdiction over taxation; the national debt and borrowing; naturalization
law; bankruptcy and counterfeit law; coinage; post offices and roads;
copyright protections; appointment of tribunals; prosecution of crimes on
the high seas and offenses against foreign nations; the declaration of war
and the commission of armies, naval forces, and militia; and the
construction of public buildings. It provides that Congress will “make all
laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the
foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the
government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.”
Clause 3 provides specifically that Congress has the power “to regulate
commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the
Indian tribes.”
Congressional power to regulate commerce with Indian tribes was
enacted in 371 ratified treaties between 1778 and 1871 and six separate
statutes in 1790, 1793, 1796, 1799, 1802, and 1834 titled “An Act to
Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes.” In ratified treaties,
Congress established the boundaries of tribal territories and secured tribal
rights to governance within them, excepting jurisdiction over US citizens
and slaves or Indians who committed crimes against them. The ratified
treaties frequently provided for forms of economic self-sufficiency unique
to the tribal signatories, such as protecting hunting and fishing rights in
“usual and accustomed places.” They often provided for annuities,
including payments and goods, in compensation for land cessions. They
explicitly guaranteed that no US citizen would be permitted to illegally
settle, hunt, or fish within tribal territories. They affirmed congressional
authority in tribal trade and protected tribal rights to trade with US citizens.
The 1790 Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes
established a federally regulated licensing system for US citizens wanting
to trade with tribes, strict punishments for crimes committed against tribes
on tribal lands by US citizens, the prohibition of liquor sales on tribal lands,
and restriction against tribal land sales to anyone but Congress by treaty:
“That no sale of lands made by any Indians, or any nation or tribe of
Indians within the United States, shall be valid to any person or persons, or
to any state, whether having the right of pre-emption to such lands or not,
unless the same shall be made and duly executed at some public treaty, held
under the authority of the United States.”6 In response to rampant treaty
violations, the 1793 and 1796 acts provided stricter measures for federal
oversight and licensing, stricter measures for horse sales, and an affirmation
of treaty provisions respecting tribal boundaries. Anyone attempting to
settle on tribal lands was to be expelled, fined up to $1,000, and imprisoned
up to one year.7 These measures were further strengthened in 1799, 1802,
and 1834.
Established by the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts (as they were
known), trading houses or posts operated under federal oversight from 1796
to 1822 “to supply the Indians with necessary goods at a fair price and offer
a fair price for the furs in exchange” (at the time, furs were the most
common trade item). The superintendent of Indian trade, a position
established in 1806, and the agents at the posts were appointed through the
office of the president, and their accounts were managed by the secretary of
the treasury.8 The posts were closed in 1822, in large part because fur
traders had so effectively circumvented the posts’ oversight that they
became obsolete.9 In 1824 the secretary of war created the Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA), in part to oversee trade with the tribes.10 The BIA was
transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1849.
Even while the US Congress recognized and protected the rights of
Indian tribes to commerce and trade over/within their territories by ratified
treaties and the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, it subjected the terms
and exercise of those rights to its own plenary authority. This subjugation
coalesced in the SCOTUS decision in Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh of 1823.11
On the surface, the case involved competing claims to the same eleven
thousand acres of land in the state of Illinois. The lands fell within the
unique territorial boundaries of the Piankeshaw Nation, whose particular
borders had been affirmed by 1773 and 1775 treaties with the British. Even
SCOTUS argued that the United States inherited the obligations of these
treaties from the Crown by the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
The plaintiffs were the legal heirs of Thomas Johnson, who, along with
several other British citizens, claimed to have lawfully purchased the
acreage and neighboring areas from the Piankeshaw and Illinois nations.
The defendant was William McIntosh, who claimed to have acquired a deed
to the land in 1818 from the US Department of the Interior. The question
before SCOTUS, as Chief Justice John Marshall framed it, was what kind of
title the Piankeshaw Nation held in the lands. But before deciding, the
Court had to address two facts: (1) the US Congress had acknowledged in
its ratified treaties with Indian tribes—as had all European nations before it
—that tribes possessed a land title that they could treat upon; and (2) the
treaties themselves referred to Indian tribes as sovereign nations with all
commensurate jurisdictional rights over and within their territories.
Though not missing the import of treaty language, SCOTUS sided with
McIntosh on the grounds that Indian tribes had never been recognized as
equal “sovereign, independent states”:
The uniform understanding and practice of European nations, and the
settled law, as laid down by the tribunals of civilized states, denied the
right of the Indians to be considered as independent communities, having
a permanent property in the soil, capable of alienation to private
individuals. They remain in a state of nature, and have never been
admitted into the general society of nations.
This understanding, SCOTUS maintained, was reflected in the treaties:
All the treaties and negotiations between the civilized powers of Europe
and of this continent … have uniformly disregarded their supposed right
to the territory included within the jurisdictional limits of those powers.
Not only has the practice of all civilized nations been in conformity with
this doctrine, but the whole theory of their titles to lands in America,
rests upon the hypothesis, that the Indians had no right of soil as
sovereign, independent states.
Effectively, SCOTUS rewrote treaty history to find that treaties with
Indigenous nations functioned internationally in a way contrary to the
precepts of international law. Instead of recognizing Indigenous
sovereignty, nationhood, and territorial rights, the Court argued that the
treaties had, all along, “disregarded” Indigenous legal status and rights as
sovereign nations. The Court argued that the evidence for this fact of
disregard was discovery:
Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this
overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives. The sovereignty and
eminent domain thus acquired, necessarily precludes the idea of any
other sovereignty existing within the same limits. The subjects of the
discovering nation must necessarily be bound by the declared sense of
their own government, as to the extent of this sovereignty, and the
domain acquired with it. Even if it should be admitted that the Indians
were originally an independent people, they have ceased to be so. A
nation that has passed under the dominion of another, is no longer a
sovereign state. The same treaties and negotiations, before referred to,
show their dependent condition.
The Court claimed that by virtue of their relationship to the land as Lockean
hunter-gatherers, having always already passed into a Hegelian
subservience to dominant sovereigns owing to their need for the master’s
protection, Indigenous peoples had been made “subject to the sovereignty
of the United States.” These were well-established facts, the Court
contended, of colonial law, which had wisely understood Indigenous people
“as an inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under
the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government” on the basis that
they were not in full possession of the lands over which they “wandered.”
In lieu of full title or property in the lands, SCOTUS offered “aboriginal
title” as the kind of title and thus rights that Indigenous people possessed in
the lands. Essentially, aboriginal title was the right to use and occupy lands,
“a mere right of usufruct and habitation.” It was not a right of ownership—
with the implied “power of alienation.” Consequently, the title could be
extinguished if found to be in lack. In other words, tribes not making
adequate use or occupation of their lands forfeited all claims to the lands.
The Johnson decision nullified the rights of Indigenous peoples to own and
trade over/within their territories by subjecting the terms and conditions of
all commerce in goods and lands to the plenary authority of Congress in
evaluating whether or not tribes were properly and adequately using and
occupying their lands.
In Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed
Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands, Lindsay G. Robertson provides an
exceptional analysis of the collusions informing Johnson’s Lessee v.
McIntosh. Johnson’s and McIntosh’s attorneys were hired by the same land-
development company operating out of New England and for decades
illegally buying up lands from Indigenous nations all over North America.
Even the particular plot of land in question was not in dispute; Johnson and
McIntosh held title to lands in Illinois that were fifty miles apart. However,
the case served to create the legal fiction that Congress and SCOTUS needed
about tribal land title amounting to nothing more than a benefit of federal
guardianship, the terms of which were left to the discretion of federal
authorities in assessing “use and occupancy” in relation to their own and
corporate interests in development.12

THE CONTRACT IN “ARTIFICIAL BEINGS”

The unilateral suspension of treaty making, the Indian Trade and Commerce
Acts, and the Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh decision are but one cluster of
the myriad efforts by US officials to decimate Indigenous territorial rights.
Simultaneously, there was a steady centralization and entitlement of
corporate rights to buy, lease, develop, and extract from tribal lands and
natural resources. In other words, legally contorting Indigenous nations into
the function and operation of “Indian tribes” in all matters of trade under
congressional authority worked to subject Indigenous peoples and their
territories to corporate interests altogether indistinguishable from
congressional ones by goal and office.
In the early laws of European kingdoms and nation-states, a king, a
parliament, or a pope issued charters to establish institutions such as
municipalities, universities, guilds, and churches that were considered self-
governing, able to hold property, and enter into contracts. Virtually absent
from these early charters were business entities; almost always the charters
were aimed at civic bodies that would provide some form of public service.
They were called corporations, “from the Latin word corpus, meaning body,
because the law recognized that the group of people who formed the
corporation could act as one body or one legal person.”13
By the seventeenth century, charters began to be issued to trading
companies that operated as finite partnerships that dissolved at the
conclusion of a specifically commissioned job, usually entailing naval
exploration and a guaranteed monopoly, such as in the spice trade. Different
from earlier chartered entities, these companies did not have the “features
of perpetual succession, identifiable persona, and asset separation.” Because
they proved to be financially risky, they were stabilized by England in 1600
with the charter of the East India Company and by the Netherlands in 1602
with the charter of the Dutch East India Company, both of which were soon
granted charters in perpetuity to protect their “building, populating, and
governing” of the colonies.14 In other words, by the early 1600s, chartered
corporations were entirely enveloped within the colonial projects of empire
building, invested by their respective kingdoms and then nation-states with
the powers of government and military.15 In fact, corporate executive
officers were often given state titles (governors) and corresponding
authority to purchase land, administer trade, and wage war.
The US Constitution provided that state legislatures take over the
responsibility of respecting preconstitutional charters and the task of issuing
new ones.16 The legal veracity of state charters was established by article 1,
section 10, clause 1, of the US Constitution, known as the contract clause,
which provided that “no State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or
Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit
Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in
Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law
impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.”
The first US Supreme Court decision, issued under Chief Justice John
Marshall, on the legal import of the contract clause was in Fletcher v. Peck
of 1810.17 In Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic; The Case of
Fletcher v. Peck, C. Peter Magrath provides an important examination of
the collusions and fraud that informed the landmark decision and so
anticipated those involved in Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh.
In 1789 three land companies formed in Georgia with the purpose of
buying land in the Yazoo River area, then included within the treatied
boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. The governor signed a deal to sell
nearly sixteen million acres of these lands to the companies for $200,000 (1
cent per acre). In 1790 President George Washington issued a stern warning
to Georgia regarding the treaty rights of the Cherokee Nation to the lands
and the potential of the deal to solicit armed conflict with the Cherokees
and their allies among the neighboring Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek
nations. Undeterred, the state passed a resolution requiring that the payment
for the lands be made in gold and silver, which the companies could not
accomplish. The deal fell through.18
Several years later, four new land companies formed, again with the
purpose of buying lands in the Yazoo River area. These companies included
speculators from Georgia and Pennsylvania, as well as two senators (one
from Georgia and one from Pennsylvania), two members of the House (one
from Georgia and one from South Carolina), three judges (including
Supreme Court Associate Justice James Wilson), and the Tennessee
territorial governor. Between 1794 and 1795, several Georgia legislators
received large grants of land in the eastern part of Georgia. In 1795 they
passed the Yazoo Land Act. By the act, Georgia claimed fee title to thirty-
five million acres of land and sold them to the four companies for $500,000
(1.4 cents per acre). The act likewise directed a resolution to the US
president requesting that the necessary treaty be made with the Cherokee
Nation securing the extinguishment of the Cherokees’ land title and so
allowing the sale to proceed.19
By this time, the Cherokee Nation had entered into treaties with the
United States in 1785 and 1791 that delineated the nation’s boundaries in
lands within and bordering Georgia. The 1791 boundaries were reaffirmed
by treaty in 1794. The boundaries were not redrawn until the treaty of 1798
and then again in treaties of 1804, 1805, 1806, 1816, 1817, and 1819. In
each treaty Georgia sought further and further land cessions from the
Cherokees. Georgia would achieve its goal for the complete cession of
Cherokee land title through the Cherokee removal treaty of 1835.
Meanwhile, the Yazoo Land Act of 1795 was exposed in state politics as
a collusion and taken up in debates between Georgian Federalists and
Republicans as the 1796 state election approached. The result was felt when
Georgia’s voters, enraged by the state’s creation of large land monopolies,
rejected most of the incumbents. The newly elected officials worked
quickly to pass a law that repealed the 1795 act, along with the titles issued
under its provisions. However, the land companies had already begun
selling Yazoo lands throughout the country, in some cases making nearly
650 percent profit on their original investments. One of the most important
of these sales was of eleven million acres to the New England Mississippi
Land Company, which included wealthy merchants, former elected officials
and judges, and land speculators in the New England region. When Georgia
legislators repealed the Yazoo Land Act in 1796, the company mobilized its
network to challenge the state’s repeal law and secure its land claims.
Failing to secure passage of a congressional law that would have
compensated it for alleged financial losses incurred as a result of the repeal
act, the company took its complaints to federal court.20
The complaint was orchestrated by the New England Mississippi Land
Company in 1803 between land speculator Robert Fletcher (of New
Hampshire) and the company’s director, John Peck (of Massachusetts).
Fletcher alleged that he had bought fifteen thousand acres from Peck and
that Peck breached the contract of sale by not having legal title.21 Peck
contended that Georgia’s repeal act was invalid. In 1810 the US Supreme
Court agreed with Peck.22
The Court conceded that there had been fraud underlying the original
sale of the Yazoo River lands but rejected Fletcher’s argument that Georgia
had the power to repeal the 1795 act on the grounds of the fraud. It argued
instead that Peck had entered into two valid contracts—one when
purchasing the land and one when selling it—and that those contracts
operated outside the original fraud: “When a law is in its nature a contract,
when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law
cannot divest those rights.” Fletcher’s claim was dismissed, and Georgia’s
law repealing land titles was nullified.23
Although the ruling made frequent passing remarks about “Indian title,”
it failed in all regards to address the substantive questions of the state’s
claim to fee title in the lands, the state’s rights to sell the lands, the fact that
tribal title had not been extinguished by treaty when the claim and sale were
enacted by state law, and the fact that the US Congress was not a party to
the sale in violation of the Constitution. Instead, SCOTUS sashayed over
“Indian title” as if it posed no legal challenge whatsoever to the question of
whether or not a state could breach a contract between individuals without
violating the Constitution. This fundamentally shifted the significance of
the contract clause away from its implication of tribal treaty rights—“No
State shall enter into any Treaty … or Law impairing the Obligation of
Contracts”—and toward service to corporate interests. It allowed, if not
outright encouraged, collusive investment practices in land speculation that
could be easily legalized by the exchange of money and contractual
signatures between those parties committing the fraud.24
The second US Supreme Court decision on the legal import of the
Constitution’s contract clause was in Trustees of Dartmouth College v.
Woodward (1819). The New Hampshire legislature amended Dartmouth’s
charter to change it from a private to a public institution, with trustees to be
appointed by the governor. The trustees challenged whether or not the state
could unilaterally amend the terms of the school’s charter.
The suit raised the question about whether or not charters—the
mechanism by which corporations were created—fell under constitutional
protections. The Court ruled that they did. However, it explained that the
entities created by charters—corporations—were created under state
authority: “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and
existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it
possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers
upon it either expressly or as incidental to its very existence. These are such
as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was
created.” These “properties” included the right of the individuals making up
corporations to “act together as a single person for purposes of holding
property, entering into contracts, and suing and being sued in court.” The
court ruled that charters “enable a corporation to manage its own affairs and
to hold property without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and
endless necessity, of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting
it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men,
in succession, with these qualities and capacities that corporations were
invented, and are in use.”25
The artificiality of chartered entities pretended that corporations were
overdetermined by constitutional law and state jurisdiction. It so invested
and protected corporate property rights in perpetuity, figuratively clothing
male executives in liberties and freedoms from having their corporate-held
property and individual investments (and so profits) divided, taxed, or
otherwise burdened by regulation.26 Protected as a constitutional right,
corporate property rights trumped tribal territorial claims, even when
secured by a treaty, and even when corporations acquired the lands by
fraud. Fletcher and Dartmouth thereby represented the rearticulation of
“Indian tribes” into a legal and economic structure predicated on imperialist
capitalism without any corporate accountability.
Part 2: Indian Tribes and Persons

The legal status and rights of “Indian tribes” were all but decimated in the
Reconstruction period by Congress’s unilateral suspension of treaty making
in 1871 and the consequences of the General Allotment Act of 1887, which
brought about both the privatization of tribal lands and an expansive yet
inefficient system of federal administration over remaining tribal lands,
natural resources, and financial assets. This virtual obliteration of tribal
rights contrasts sharply with the juridical expansion of corporate rights by
the SCOTUS decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
Company (1886). The Court ruled that corporations possessed Fourteenth
Amendment rights analogous to those of “persons,” including due process
and equal protection. This emboldened, entitled position—and the
surrounding rhetoric of the overburdened regulation and taxation borne by
corporations—evaded public and federal accountability for the role of
railroad and related companies in the dispossession and genocide of
Indigenous peoples.

RECONSTRUCTION

During and after the Civil War, Congress enacted a series of laws meant to
suspend the secession of the Confederacy, emancipate African slaves,
prohibit racial discrimination, and stimulate a free labor economy. The
Thirteenth Amendment (1865) and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
required that southern states, and the tribes that had aligned with them in
part or in whole during the war, modify their constitutions and bylaws to
abolish slavery and prohibit racial discrimination. For southern states, these
requirements were satisfied technically but met with grossly uneven
implementation and conflict marked by fiercely contested elections, such as
within Georgia over its constitutional revisions in 1865 (when it repealed
secession and abolished slavery), 1868 (when it extended suffrage to all
male citizens), and 1877 (when previous provisions were strengthened).
Conflict was also marked more popularly by the formation of the Ku Klux
Klan in 1865, initially in Tennessee, and state-sanctioned practices
condoning and enabling all manner of racial segregation, including those
within education and voting.
For tribes, particularly those that had been removed from the South and
into Indian Territory, the requirements of Reconstruction were imposed
through treaties, such as those ratified in 1866 with the Cherokee, Choctaw
and Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations.27 The treaties provided that
the tribes abolish slavery, enfranchise African freedmen, reintegrate those
factions that had fought for the South, and restore property confiscated from
those factions during the war. The treaties also provided that tribal
territories were to be subjected to the “right of way” of railroads but for the
first time required that federally issued licenses to individual and corporate
traders be approved by tribal governments (up to then, the BIA issued
licenses, often without consulting with tribes). The provisions of abolition
and enfranchisement of Blacks were deeply contested in intra- and
intertribal politics, including those that denied the existence of Black-
Native lineage, property, and voting rights. These provisions also
engendered multiple forms of opposition to allotment and statehood,
including armed militia and subversive acts of defiance.28
The complexities of postwar national politics included many social
movements against racial discrimination and segregation and for the
enfranchisement of women, as well as intertribal military and unarmed
alliances against US treaty violations. At the same time, there was an
explosive growth of business-minded corporations: from 7 in 1780, to 335
in 1800, to several thousand in 1850, to over half a million in 1900.29 Many
of these corporations were aimed at the development of tribal territories
(railroad tracks, postal routes, townsites, cattle grazing) and the extraction
of tribal resources (timber, oil, coal, gold) and were directly or implicitly
involved in violence and fraud against non-Indigenous people and Indian
tribes that resisted. In an effort to protect their often illegal
investment/development schemes against opposition, corporate boards and
their attorneys worked to claim constitutional protections, particularly
through the Fourteenth Amendment (1868).
The Fourteenth Amendment modified article 1, section 2, clause 3,
which enumerated the powers of the House of Representatives and
determined the apportionment of representatives and taxes. It is the only
appearance of “Indians” in the Constitution: “Representatives shall be
apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers,
counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not
taxed.” It provided that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and
of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law
which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United
States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.” In 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment
provided that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude.”30 Together, the amendments
attempted to address the social politics of abolition and enfranchisement, as
well as to protect the rights of all citizens to be represented fairly in
Congress and protected against unlawful government actions or
deprivations of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
As the amendments were being debated and passed, so too was Congress
assessing its financial obligations to tribes by treaty, no doubt in immediate
concern over the nation’s economy following the war but also in looking
forward to the expansion of its territories into the Pacific and Caribbean. In
1871 the House of Representatives took the initiative by adding a rider to
the annual Indian Appropriations Bill before it moved to the Senate: “No
Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be
acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with
whom the United States may contract by treaty; but no obligation of any
treaty lawfully made and ratified with any such Indian nation or tribe prior
to March 3, 1871, shall be hereby invalidated or impaired.”31 The Senate
agreed. “Indian tribes” were no longer to be recognized as independent
authorities with which the United States would “contract by treaty” and so
incur any further debt, although existing treaties and financial obligations
were to be fulfilled.
 The suspension of tribal treaty making invited corporate collusion with
federal efforts to subject remaining tribal territorial rights to the goals of
capitalist development, coalescing in the perfect socio-legal storm of the
privatization of tribal lands and the vast extension of federal administration
over remaining lands by the General Allotment Act (1887) and its
amendments by the Curtis Act (1898), the Burke Act (1906), and the
Omnibus Act (1910).32 The acts provided for reservations to be broken up
in severalty and issued to members as parcels, which ranged from forty to
six hundred acres each based on the value of the lands and the members’
marital and dependent status. The issuance of title was supposed to be based
likewise on assessments of individual “competency.” Those deemed
incompetent were given trust titles, their property held in trust by the BIA for
a period not supposed to exceed twenty-five years, during which time they
were to get educated in proper land use. Despite the suspension of trust
titles by the Burke Act (1906), 10.6 million acres of individually owned
lands are held in trust even now.33 The gross mismanagement of these lands
was addressed by the largest class-action suit in US history, Cobell v.
Salazar (1996), which was concluded by the Claims Resolution Act (2010).
Meanwhile, those who were deemed competent were issued fee titles,
awarding them with US citizenship and so subjecting them to property
taxes. Almost 60 percent of lands issued in fee were lost within a decade,
the majority of them to state property tax foreclosure.34
Surplus lands, or lands unassigned to tribal members, were sold to
nonmembers. Allotted and surplus lands were divided by the practice of
checkerboarding and fractionated heirship. Checkerboarding scattered tribal
allotments in between nontribal lands to disrupt tribal governance and
collective forms of economic self-sufficiency. It rendered shared-use
practices such as collectively operated agriculture and forest conservation
impossible. Fractionated heirship divided allotments among heirs who
shared an undivided interest in the land. Over time, this has meant that an
allotment can have thousands of owners. In most cases, heirs are absentee
leaseholders with leases that render them without the ability to use the lands
for their own economic self-sufficiency, little financial benefit, and no
collateral for developing credit.35
 Although total tribal and individual landholdings were reduced by about
two-thirds through allotment (from 148 to 48 million acres), many of these
lands were configured in such a way by checkerboarding and heirship that
nonmembers came to dominate the use if not the control of tribal lands.
This was furthered by the fact that even before but especially after
allotment of a given reservation, corporations secured thousands of leases
for grazing and licenses for resource extraction from both reservations and
allottees whose titles were held in trust.36 Allotment’s “Indian Tribe” was no
match for Santa Clara County’s corporate “person.” The “Indian Tribe” had
suspended rights to treaty making and was left only with an option to agree
or not with federal mandates, sometimes but not always negotiated through
finite contracts, but both of which were overshadowed by corporate
interests in expansive development and figured entirely through an “Indian
tribe” that was all but stripped of legal status.

THE EQUAL PROTECTION OF “PERSONS”

In what are known as the Slaughterhouse cases (1872), the US Supreme

Court issued its first opinion on the legal merits of the Fourteenth
Amendment.37 The cases emerged from three suits in New Orleans, where
residents had suffered eleven cholera outbreaks and related ill health as a
result of animal matter from slaughterhouses polluting the city’s drinking
water. In 1869 the state legislature passed a law that allowed New Orleans
to charter a single corporation (the Crescent City Livestock Landing and
Slaughterhouse Company) with the promise that it would centralize all
slaughterhouse operations in the city, confine butchers to areas that kept
them away from the city’s water supplies, and enable better regulatory
oversight. Represented by former Supreme Court justice John A. Campbell
(whose Confederate loyalties had forced him to resign from the Court), over
four hundred members of the Butchers’ Benevolent Association sued to
stop the city’s takeover of the slaughterhouse industry on the basis of the
Fourteenth Amendment’s protections for due process, equal protection, and
the privileges and immunities clause (section 1, clause 2: “The Congress
shall have power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper to
secure to the citizens of each state all privileges and immunities of citizens
in the several states”). In an opinion issued by Justice Samuel Freeman
Miller, SCOTUS held to a narrow interpretation of the amendment, arguing
that due process applied only to procedure, that equal protection applied
only to former slaves (“Freedmen”), and that the privileges and immunities
clause applied only to national and not state citizenship rights.
The Slaughterhouse decision was overturned in Santa Clara County v.
Southern Pacific Railroad Company in 1886.38 In 1879 the California
legislature ratified a new state constitution that, among other things,
outlined strict rules for the assessment of railroad property values and taxes.
In 1882 Santa Clara and Fresno counties assessed the “franchises, road-
ways, road-beds, rails, and rolling stock” of the Southern Pacific Railroad
Company and the Central Pacific Railroad Company to recover taxes for
the previous fiscal year, 1881–1882, under the new rules. The court found
that “the state board of equalization, in making the supposed assessment of
said roadway of defendant, did knowingly and designedly include in the
valuation of said roadway the value of fences erected upon the line between
said roadway and the land of coterminous proprietors. Said fences were
valued at $300 per mile.” The railroad companies appealed, claiming that
they were protected from such taxes under a federal statute of 1866,
affirmed by an 1870 state law, that established “a right of way over the
public domain” and liberal access to “public lands” in order to construct
and maintain a continuous railroad line from Missouri to the Pacific,
“subject to the use of the United States for postal, military, naval, and all
other government service, and to such regulations as congress might impose
for restricting the charges for government transportation.”
The Supreme Court found that in neither federal law nor state law were
fences to be assessed differently from the railroads and adjacent lands and
that therefore the state board did not have the power to include the fences in
its assessment of the railroads’ property values. The Court concluded that
“upon such an issue, the law, we think, is for the defendant. An assessment
of that kind is invalid, and will not support an action for the recovery of the
entire tax so levied.”
In framing its conclusion, the Court claimed that corporations were
protected against such actions under the Fourteenth Amendment: “One of
the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for
defendants in error was that ‘corporations are persons within the meaning of
the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’ Before
argument, Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: The court does not wish to hear
argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these
corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” Thereby SCOTUS
overturned the strict interpretation of Slaughterhouse on the questions of
procedural due process and equal protection for “former slaves,” not by
extending those protections to substantive due process and other racialized
groups but by assuming that the protections applied to corporations. This
almost dismissive caveat—“We are all of the opinion that it does”—would
be the first time SCOTUS ruled that corporations possessed Fourteenth
Amendment rights analogous to those of “persons.”
Irrespective of the Court’s intent, which has been much debated in legal
scholarship, the opinion served as precedent for the application of
Fourteenth Amendment protections to corporations. So consequential was
the decision that it created what has since been referred to as “corporate
personhood.”39 The rationale was that the US Constitution upheld the rights
of individuals, so their individual guarantees of due process, et cetera,
should extend naturally to corporations as mere amalgams of those
individuals.40
Nowhere within Santa Clara County is there any reckoning—even to an
imaginary of conquest as a fait accompli—for Indigenous territorial rights,
either within the counties suing the railroad for back taxes, more broadly
within the state of California, or within the US imperial formation
plummeting the nation forward into global capitalism marked by the illegal
annexation of Hawaii and the war with Spain over Pacific colonies in 1898.
This lack of reckoning underscores the way that “Indian tribes” were
perceived to be so thoroughly situated under a federal plenary authority
serving corporate interest as to be locally irrelevant. What changes in our
understanding of “corporate personhood” if we insist on an account of
Indigenous territorial rights within it?
 When Spain began its imperial efforts in the region where California was
to become a state, it is estimated conservatively that the tribal population
was around 300,000. Forced into slavery and starvation by the Spanish
military and Catholic Church working in concert to bring about Spanish-
Catholic power, about 100,000 people died between the first mission of
1769 and Spain’s cession of the territory to Mexico in 1821. At the close of
the US-Mexican War and the acquisition of California as part of the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, another 50,000 died as slavery, starvation,
and armed conflict characterized tribal-Mexican as they had tribal-Spanish
relations. After the gold rush of 1848, US miners, agriculturalists, and
railroad workers quickly outnumbered everyone else. Tribes were
aggressively removed from their territories in violation of the 1848 treaty,
which had provided that the United States would protect tribal land grants.
Undeterred, US citizens displaced and outright murdered tribal peoples to
gain hold of their lands and coerce survivors into servitude.
California was admitted to the United States as a free state in 1850. In
1851 the legislature passed the Act for the Government and Protection of
the Indians, which allowed any “white” to force into work any “Indian”
found to be “vagrant.” Mexicans were then classified as “whites” in state
law, so this enabled the enslavement of tribal peoples by all property
owners in the state. Because “Indians” could not testify against “whites” in
court, tribal people had no recourse to challenge either their forced removal
or enslavement or the physical and sexual violence that often came with it.
For despite its status as a free state, California permitted the open sale and
indenture of tribal people for labor and sex-trade purposes.41
In his 1851 inaugural address to the legislature, Governor Peter H.
Burnett promised that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged
between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”42 In 1853 the
legislature ordered the “extermination” of all Indians. Reimbursed by the
federal government, state bounties were paid per Indian scalp or severed
head, and all expenses related to the efforts were reimbursed, including the
cost of ammunition, guns, and horses. Within two years, California paid out
about $1 million to individuals who submitted claims. It was inhumane.
Whole tribes, bands, and families were massacred.
 Describing this campaign against Native Americans of California and
Nevada, Jack D. Forbes emphasizes that it was not merely military or state
officials who participated in it: “The sequence of events is all the more
distressing since it serves to indict not a group of cruel leaders, or a few
squads of rough soldiers, but, in effect, an entire people; for the conquest of
the Indigenous Californian was above all else a popular, mass enterprise.”43
By 1860, no more than twenty thousand of the tribal population had
survived. Those who did were almost entirely dispossessed of their
territories and living in conditions of gross poverty and ill health. Many had
begun to identify as Mexican to secure paid work as farmhands, passing
into an other, analogously complicated status in hopes of survival.
In 1851 the US Congress sent a commission to California to negotiate
treaties with tribes for land cession. By 1852, eighteen treaties had been
negotiated with more than one hundred tribes. The treaties would have
provided the tribes with approximately 8.5 million acres divided into
eighteen reservations. However, California’s governor and senate actively
opposed the treaties, seeing them as excessively generous and cumbersome
to the state’s goals. They, along with several private citizens (mostly
ranchers and miners), lobbied hard to stop the ratification process. As a
result, the US Senate put an “injunction of secrecy” on the treaties that held
until 1905. But the tribes were never notified that the treaties had not been
ratified. Federal and state agents and militia moved many onto smaller
reservations (often from several different tribes) under the auspices of
carrying out treaty provisions while they purchased the “deserted” lands for
themselves.
In his definitive historical study of imperialism, Violence over the Land:
Indians and Empires in the Early American West, Ned Blackhawk
demonstrates how each invading power directly created the economic and
social conditions in which the next prospered, and all at Indigenous
peoples’ expense.44 Spain and Mexico and then the immigrants who would
form California and join the Union in 1850 flourished as a direct result of
the genocide and dispossession that they enacted on Indigenous peoples,
producing the very conditions through which miners, agriculturalists, and
the railroad could lay claim to unfettered access and development of tribal
territories and natural resources.
In other words, the “corporate persons” of Santa Clara County were able
to claim tribal lands, resources, and bodies in California as a result of their
involvement in the genocide and dispossession of tribal peoples. Santa
Clara County legitimated this history and then protected the “persons”
involved as corporations with full constitutional rights. Santa Clara County
was thereby consistent with the historical work of corporations in
imperialism and its colonial projects as the entities through which the
“building, populating, and governing” of the empire were enabled.45
A Conclusion

Got land? Thank an Indian.

JEFF MANARD (PINE CREEK FIRST NATION), 2014

The legal precedent set by the congressional statutes and court rulings
described above deeply informed the re-formation of Indigenous
governments into corporations of a particular kind. The Hawaiian Homes
Commission Act of 1920, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and the
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 configured “Native Hawaiian
organizations,” “American Indian tribes,” and “Alaska Native villages” as
bodies possessing analogous rights between them to enter contracts. But by
the time that these statutes were passed into law, tribes had long since been
stripped by SCOTUS of the ability to own and alienate the lands they used
and occupied or to enter into contractually binding agreements with each
other or other political and economic entities without federal oversight and
approval. These serious limitations underscore the core capitalist ideologies
and practices that undergird the United States as an imperialist power and
social formation. In a state whose capitalism is always already reaching out
globally, of course Indigenous peoples cannot have equal or commensurate
claims to any lands and resources that might compete with corporate-as-the-
government’s interests to expand, extract, and profit some more. Of course.
The problematic erasures of the historical contextualization of
Indigenous territorial rights within the pedagogical mandates of OWS is not
about a forgetting of an imperial-colonial past that can be fixed with a
liberalist project of recovery or memorandum of solidarity—as if we just
included the facts about the historic wrongs of corporate-federal collusion
and fraud in the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples, then all
would be righted in radical social justice efforts against “the corrosive
power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic
process.”46
The erasures of Indigenous territorial rights and historical experiences of
corporate-government collusion and fraud are, rather, a politic of
epistemology—an ideology and practice of knowledge making—that takes
the imperial-colonial narrative for granted in its understanding of US
imperialism and in its thinking through strategies of opposition against its
injustices. That narrative believes in its own success story—that Indigenous
peoples are conquered, disappeared, lost, gone. Tragically but nonetheless
as an objective truth, the Indigenous has been eliminated from the lands and
resources of the empire and so from relevance to current political debate.
The question for OWS and related movements is why any effort against
the US empire needs a scandal of corporate-federal collusion and fraud like
that of the Wall Street foreclosure and securities crisis around which to
organize. Why OWS so early figured that scandal as a battle of the 1 percent
against the 99 percent. Why OWS’s resolutions have often been about arrest
and redistribution and not a radical transformation of the system. Why Wall
Street’s current behavior is exceptionalized. As if the US “democratic
process” has been merely corrupted and would otherwise not be but for the
selfish greed of a few.
It seems that Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation is important
again for understanding that the public performance of scandal is really an
act of concealing that there is no scandal at all—that the social relations and
conditions registered by the scandal-performed are the norm.47 This is
especially difficult to confront from any political perspective predicated on
contrasting the altruism of US democracy with the collusive fraud of
Congress and Wall Street. But what if US democracy has only ever been a
facade, a mask, a costume? A performance that conceals? That the
formative values at work in the US Constitution were not liberty, freedom,
and equality as celebrated but were aimed at establishing and protecting
government and corporate power of a government invested? What if it is
“US democracy” that is “the truth which conceals that there is none”?
This would certainly seem to be the case in the story of the multiple
kinds of racialized and gendered inequalities between “artificial entities”
and “Indian title,” “persons” and distreatied “Indian tribes,” that have been
articulated historically through corporate, court, and congressional
racketeering in Indigenous territorial rights. An epistemological practice
that begins with the presumption of the centrality of Indigenous territorial-
based claims to sovereignty and self-determination in the constitution of the
US political-economic system might more directly expose not only that the
“man behind the curtain” has always already been there but that all along
there has been a meaningful role of the audience in maintaining the theater
of democracy’s performance. Leaving behind the goal of trying to fix or
correct that which is broken or corrupted, of trying to revenue-share our
way into social justice, we might be able to think more productively
together about the necessity for meaningful and substantive social
reformation if we insisted on the empire’s accountability to the territorial
rights of Indigenous peoples.
 NOTES

“The Corporation and the Tribe” was originally published in American Indian Quarterly 39, no. 3
(Summer 2015): 243–70.
1. Occupy Wall Street, “About.” June 2012. http://occupywallst.org/about.
2. See, for example, “Watch: Michael Moore.”
3. For a record of the resolution, see “General Assembly Resolutions.”
4. “General Assembly Resolutions.”
5. Goldtooth, “Occupy Talks.”
6. United States, An Act to Regulate Trade, 1 Stat. 137.
7. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 100–102.
8. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 10.
9. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 102.
10. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 10.
11. Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, 5 L. Ed. 681, 1823 U.S. lexis 293 (1823).
12. See Robertson, Conquest by Law. The “Marshall Trilogy,” as it has been referred to
historically, also included the SCOTUS decisions in The Cherokee Nation v. The State of
Georgia (30 U.S. 1, 8 L. Ed. 25, 8 L. Ed. 2d 25, 1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (31 US 515, 8
L. Ed. 483, 8 L. Ed. 2d 483, 1832). Together, these decisions defined “Indian tribes” as having
passed under the juridical dominion and so protection of the United States as dependent
“wards.”
13. Blair, “Corporate Personhood,” 788, 789.
14. Blair, “Corporate Personhood,” 790, 791.
15. See Deloria, “Self-Determination”; and Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law.
16. Blair, “Corporate Personhood,” 793.
17. Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87, 3 L. Ed. 162, 3 L. Ed. 2d 162 (1810).
18. Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics, 4–5.
19. Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics, 6–9.
20. Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics, 15, 34, 38.
21. Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics, 54–55, 64–65.
22. See Robertson, Conquest by Law, 29–44.
23. It would not be until 1934 that the US Supreme Court would rule that a state could alter
the terms of a contract so long as the alteration was rationally tied to protecting the public’s
welfare (Home Building & Loan Assn. v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398, 54 S. Ct. 231, 78 L. Ed.
413).
24. See Robertson, “Harper,” in Conquest by Law, 29–44.
25. Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 250, 4 L. Ed. 629 (1819).
26. For analysis of the impact of gendered ideologies and property rights on Indigenous
women, see Berger, “After Pocahontas”; and Perdue, Cherokee Women.
27. Treaty with the Cherokee, 14 Stat. 799 (July 19, 1866); Treaty with the Choctaw and
Chickasaw, 14 Stat. 769 (April 28, 1866); Treaty with the Creek, 14 Stat. 785 (June 14, 1866);
Treaty with the Seminole, 14 Stat. 755 (March 21, 1866).
28. See, for example, Debo, And Still the Waters Run; and Harring, Crow Dog’s Case.
29. Johnson, “Law and Legal Theory,” 145.
30. However, it retained this right for men. It would not be until 1920 that the Nineteenth
Amendment extended voting rights to women. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment of 1971 would
lower the voting age to eighteen.
31. Indian Appropriations Bill, 25 U.S.C., § 71.
32. The collusions were initially conflicted. Some corporations affirmed tribal sovereignty and
treaty rights, whereas some argued for their annulment. The differences depended on whether
or not, within their respective relations with tribal governments and individuals, they had
found success in gaining unfettered access to tribal lands and resources. See Miner,
Corporation and the Indian; and Bledsoe, Indian Land Laws.
33. See US Department of the Interior, “Indian Affairs.”
34. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 192–94.
35. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 216.
36. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 214–15.
37. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872).
38. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886).
39. Blair, “Corporate Personhood,” 803.
40. See Horwitz, “Santa Clara Revisited”; and Blair, “Corporate Personhood,” 804.
41. Chatterjee, Gold, Greed, and Genocide.
42. See the California State Library for California governor, Peter Burnett’s State of the State
Address delivered January 6, 1851. Accessed August 23, 2021. https://governors.library.ca
.gov/addresses/s_01-Burnett2.html.
43. Forbes, Native Americans, 69.
44. Blackhawk, Violence over the Land.
45. Blair, “Corporate Personhood,” 791.
46. See especially Bruyneel, “Trouble with Amnesia.”
47. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anaya, S. James. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994.
Berger, Bethany Ruth. “After Pocahontas: Indian Women and the Law, 1830 to 1934.”
American Indian Law Review (1997): 1–62.
Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American
West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Blair, Margaret M. “Corporate Personhood and the Corporate Persona.” University of
Illinois Law Review no. 3 (2013): 785–820.
Bledsoe, Samuel Thomas. Indian Land Laws. Kansas City, MO: Vernon Law Book
Company, 1913.
Bruyneel, Kevin. “The Trouble with Amnesia: Collective Memory and Colonial
Injustice in the United States.” In Political Creativity: The Mangle of Institutional
Order, Agency and Change, edited by Gerald Berk, Dennis Galvan, and Victoria
Hattam. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming. Abstract
available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2272816.
Chatterjee, Pratap. Gold, Greed, and Genocide: Unmasking the Myth of the ’49ers.
Berkeley, CA: Project Underground, 1998.
Cohen, Felix S. Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Washington, DC: US Department of
the Interior, Office of the Solicitor, 1940.
Debo, Angie. And Still the Waters Run. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. “Self-Determination and the Concept of Sovereignty.” In Economic
Development in American Indian Reservations, edited by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz,
22–28. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Indigenous American Studies,
1979.
Forbes, Jack D. Native Americans of California and Nevada. Happy Camp, CA:
Naturegraph, 1982.
“General Assembly Resolutions (Oct 10–Nov 16 Summary)—Occupy Oakland.”
Occupy Oakland. November 17, 2011. https://occupyoakland.org/2011/11/general-
assembly-resolutions.
Goldtooth, Tom B. K. “Occupy Talks: Indigenous Perspectives on the Occupy
Movement.” Indigenous Environmental Network | Ienearth.org. January 23, 2013.
YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFWnD5UhbhY (accessed June
10, 2022).
Harring, Sidney L. Crow Dog’s Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and
United States Law in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Horwitz, Morton J. “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory.”
West Virginia Law Review 88 (1985): 173–224.
Indian Appropriations Bill, 25 U.S.C., § 71.
Johnson, Lyman. “Law and Legal Theory in the History of Corporate Responsibility:
Corporate Personhood.” Seattle University Law Review 35 (2012): 135–64.
Magrath, C. Peter. Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic: The Case of Fletcher v.
Peck. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1966.
Miner, H. Craig. The Corporation and the Indian: Tribal Sovereignty and Industrial
Civilization in Indian Territory, 1865–1907. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1989.
Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Robertson, Lindsay G. Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed
Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Treaty with the Cherokee, 7 Stat. 39 (July 2, 1791).
Treaty with the Cherokee, 14 Stat. 799 (July 19, 1866).
Treaty with the Choctaw and Chickasaw, 14 Stat. 769 (April 28, 1866).
Treaty with the Creek, 14 Stat. 785 (June 14, 1866).
Treaty with the Seminole, 14 Stat. 755 (March 21, 1866).
United States. An Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes. Adopted
July 22, 1790. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.21401300.
US Department of the Interior. “Indian Affairs: Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed
August 20, 2014. www.BIA.gov/faqs.
“Watch: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Others on What’s Next for OWS.” Nation,
June 29, 2015. www.thenation.com/video/164494/watch-michael-moore-naomi-klein
-and-others-owss-possibilities.
 TWO · Alyosha Goldstein

“In the Constant Flux of Its

Incessant Renewal”

: The Social Reproduction of Racial

Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement

Just as substantive endeavors for decolonization require an analysis of

contemporary racial capitalism, a critical understanding of the specificities
of racial capitalism in the United States demands confronting Indigenous
dispossession and settler colonialism as ongoing in the present. This chapter
considers the question of social reproduction as a means of addressing the
constitutive triangulation of race, capitalism, and colonialism today.
Thinking with Glen Coulthard’s call for “reestablishing the colonial relation
of dispossession as a co-foundational feature of our understanding of and
critical engagement with capitalism,”1 my intention here is to sketch two
possible approaches to the multiply inflected processes of reproduction as a
way to apprehend the colonial relation as both integral to the historical
development of capitalism and variously articulated with present-day
regimes of capitalist accumulation. Attending to the historical significance
of racial capitalism and colonialism as distinct and intertwined, this chapter
thus asks how and why the conditions and practices of the colonial relation
might likewise be remade—be both enduring and mutable—in the context
of the historical present.
 A focus on the dynamics of social reproduction serves as a way to
grapple with colonialism as ongoing, to ask what conception of historicity
might be adequate to understanding this sense of “ongoing” in a material,
juridical, and political sense that does not minimize disjuncture,
discontinuity, and change over time. Attending to social reproduction makes
apparent the perpetual remaking of colonial and capitalist social relations as
necessarily volatile, as a tenuous nontotality that capitalist ideology strives
to disavow, and as an opening and opportunity for disruption and living
otherwise.
In what follows I focus on how property relations, family, and prevailing
conceptions of ownership are key sites for the social reproduction of race,
capitalism, and the particularities of US settler colonialism. I begin by
discussing racial capitalism in relation to reproduction and then consider
how debates on “so-called primitive accumulation” matter for
understanding the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. I then
turn to recent legal challenges to the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act in the
historical context of the removal of Indigenous children through boarding
schools, adoption, and foster care, and the broader custodial circuits of poor
children of color. Finally, I consider the ongoing fractionation of Native
peoples’ land in the wake of the 1887 Allotment Act and the attrition of
African American land ownership through the partition of tenancy-in-
common of heirs’ property. I use these examples to show how the racial,
colonial, gendered, and generational making of property and the capacity
for possession are a consequence of particular historical conditions of
dispossession and continue to be reproduced in new ways in the present.
Adoption, foster care, and the legal regimes of inheritance—rendered
property relations through the emplotment of colonialism and capitalism—
in this sense are quite literally a matter of social reproduction and a site of
struggle over power and history in the context of the current moment.
The Colonial Pivot of Race, Reproduction, and Accumulation

During the 1970s and early 1980s, scholars and activists introduced the
term racial capitalism as a means of explicitly naming racial differentiation
and racism as inseparable from the capitalist political economy of the settler
colonies in southern Africa.2 Emerging from debates in the Black
Consciousness Movement in South Africa during the 1970s, the Manifesto
of the Azanian People, presented at the founding conference of the National
Forum in 1983, linked socialist anticolonial liberation to the movement
against apartheid and racial capitalism: “Our struggle for national liberation
is directed against the system of racial capitalism which holds the people of
Azania in bondage for the benefit of the small minority of white capitalists
and their allies.”3 Asserting that “usage of the land and all that accrues to it
shall be aimed at ending all forms and means of exploitation,” the manifesto
demanded “the abolition of all … pass laws” (established in 1952 to
constrain and control Black people’s movement), “the abolition of all
resettlement and group areas removals,” and the “reintegration of the
‘bantustan’ human dumping grounds into a unitary Azania.”4 Neville
Alexander, who wrote the draft document of the manifesto based on
proposed resolutions deliberated at the conference, insisted that “a non-
racial capitalism is impossible in South Africa.… Class, colour and nation
converge in the national liberation movement.”5
The analytic of racial capitalism was likewise conceived in terms of
social reproduction from the outset. Martin Legassick and David Hemson’s
1976 pamphlet Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial
Capitalism in South Africa not only was among the first publications to use
the term racial capitalism but also focused on the dynamics of social
reproduction to make the argument that colonial spatial politics and racial
segregation were constitutive for racial capitalism in South Africa.6 The
authors show how the subsistence economies of the “native reserves”
created by the 1913 Native Lands Act, recast as “homelands” or Bantustans
in 1959, made segregation and then the formal system of apartheid integral
to capitalist social reproduction and the suppression of wages and labor
rights. As a counter to those who argue that capitalist modernization
eventually leads to the diminished significance of race, they demonstrated
how this racial and colonial system expanded with the apartheid regime in
partnership with global finance capital. Although Legassick and Hemson
were primarily concerned with race and labor, dispossession and the
colonial administration of land were indispensable to what they described
as racial capitalism. The initial conceptions of racial capitalism were thus
articulated with what scholars and activists had begun to name and analyze
as settler colonialism in the context of southern Africa as well as Palestine
during this same time.7
Cedric Robinson’s theorization of racial capitalism in Black Marxism
(1983) broadened the temporal and geographic scope of the term to argue
that capitalism emerged historically through the already operative logics of
racial difference. What Robinson termed “racialism” took shape within
Europe under feudalism, gaining further impetus as a means to justify such
endeavors as the exploitation of Slavic migrant labor and England’s
colonization of Ireland. The development of capitalism through enclosure,
displacement, and proletarianization across Europe was interdependent with
the emergence and subsequent expansion of the Atlantic slave trade. In
contrast to variants of Marxist analysis that cast the white male industrial
working class of Europe as the privileged agents of historical
transformation, Robinson recenters the global contributions and presence of
Africa disavowed by European appropriation and erasure, focusing instead
on the collective struggle and oppositional consciousness of what he calls
the Black Radical Tradition. Robin D. G. Kelley, building on this analysis,
specifies that “capitalism developed and operates within a racial system or
racial regime. Racism is fundamental for the production and reproduction of
violence, and that violence is necessary for creating and maintaining
capitalism.” Kelley further insists that “race and gender are not incidental or
accidental features of the global capitalist order, they are constitutive.
Capitalism emerged as a racial and gendered regime.… The secret to
capitalism’s survival is racism, and the racial and patriarchal state.”8 The
multifaceted dynamics of reproduction in this sense connect racial
capitalism as theorized in the southern African context to the racial and
colonial conditions of capitalism more broadly.
 A full account of theories of social reproduction is beyond the scope of
this chapter but it is nevertheless important to selectively note some of the
genealogy of social reproduction as an analytic. According to Karl Marx,
“When viewed … as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its
incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a
process of reproduction.”9 As theorized in volumes 1 and 2 of Capital,
reproduction is divided into simple and expanded reproduction.10 Simple
reproduction “constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself” but without
accumulation.11 Expanded reproduction entails the perpetual renewal or
recreation of the means of production (land, raw materials, tools, etc.), of
labor power, of the capital relation, and of the conversion of a fraction of
the surplus value extracted into capital on behalf of ever-increasing
accumulation or so-called economic growth. Rosa Luxemburg critically
built upon Marx to emphasize the constitutive spatial dynamics between
capitalism and that which is external to capitalism. She argued that “the
existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-
capitalist forms of production,” along with a reserve of material and social
relations not yet commodified for capitalist market exchange.12 The
capitalist imperative for endless accumulation was thus dependent on
continuous so-called primitive accumulation to compel and forcibly
appropriate life, labor, and land external to the capitalist system in the
process of expanded reproduction. Luxemburg focused on imperialism,
international loans, and militarism as principal examples of the means
toward such appropriation during the time about which she was writing.
During the mid-1960s, Étienne Balibar usefully situated the question of
reproduction as a means of upending the base-superstructure hierarchy and
the economic determinism of historical analysis that predominated in
Marxist theory at the time. As Balibar notes, “For Marx the conceptual pair
of production/reproduction contains the definition of structure involved in
the analysis of the mode of production. On the plane instituted by the
analysis of reproduction, production is not the production of things, it is the
production and conservation of social relations.”13 Therefore, social
relations are at once the conditions for and consequence of a particular
historical mode of production. The link between reproduction and ideology
examined by Stuart Hall and others through the work of Louis Althusser
and Antonio Gramsci further encouraged an understanding of the primacy
of social struggle and how all such struggles engage power “without
guarantees” and without being determined in advance by immutable
historical determinations. In this way, social relations—including racial
formation, colonialism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy—can be
understood as always already constitutive of and shaped in relation to the
economic in a manner that remains vulnerable to contestation and
disruption in their need for perpetual re-creation, reiteration, and
reinscription.
Beginning in the 1970s, feminist social reproduction theory critically
extended the framework of reproduction in a number of crucial ways.14
Marxist-feminists focused on the gendered specificities of unwaged
reproductive sexual and social labor as central to a materialist analysis of
reproduction. Susan Ferguson observes that this analysis demonstrated “the
ways in which wider social reproduction of the [capitalist] system—that is
the daily and generational reproductive labor that occurs in households,
schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on—sustains the drive for
accumulation.”15 Where the “wages for housework” movement provided an
initial intervention in this regard, subsequent scholarship and organizing
have focused on analyzing and challenging hyper-exploitative regimes of
racialized domestic labor, the labor of migrant women in the global
economy of care work, and the gendered and sexual international division
of labor more broadly.16
The intellectual labor of Black feminists and women-of-color feminism
made clear the necessity of theorizing race in terms of the politics and
power relations of biological and social reproduction.17 For instance,
Jennifer Morgan contends that “reproduction functioned foundationally in
the development of racialist thinking, the onset of modern slave-ownership,
and the experience of enslavement.” She points out that “the obscene logic
of racial slavery defined reproduction as work, and the work of the colonies
—creating wealth out of the wilderness—relied on the appropriation of
enslaved women’s children by colonial slaveowners.”18 Variations and
elaborations on this appropriation remain evident in international
economies of biocapitalism today through configurations such as what Alys
Eve Weinbaum calls the “surrogacy/slavery nexus.”19 Dorothy Roberts
argues that “the criminal regulation of pregnancy … today is in some ways
unprecedented” but is nonetheless part of the “continuing legacy of the
degradation of Black motherhood” and “how the denial of Black
reproductive autonomy serves the interests of white supremacy.”20 Yet, here
again, attention to the always-contingent politics of reproduction also
allows for approaches to interruption, coalitional movement building, and
collective living otherwise through practices of radical care and what Jodi
Byrd calls “grounded relationalities.”21
For the purpose of what I am arguing in this chapter, it is important to
connect these multifaceted analyses of social reproduction to an
understanding of how colonization, both historical and ongoing, continues
to be closely aligned with the capitalist imperatives for perpetual expansion
and so-called growth (the ever-escalating incorporative intensities of
capitalist markets). Therefore, how is it that property relations and
possessive capacities require reproduction under historically shifting
capitalist modes of accumulation and in ways that constitutively entail
differentially racialized value and Indigenous dispossession? Because the
social process of reproduction relies on restaging colonial possession and
differentially racialized devaluation in order to sustain and extend capitalist
social relations, the precise way in which this process occurs—its
deliberately racial and dispossessive dynamics—takes on ever greater
significance. As the historical circumstances of racial capitalism shifted,
Nikhil Singh notes that “the production of race as a method for aggregating
and devaluing an entire group has depended on assessing the value of Black
social and biological reproduction in terms of capital accumulation and its
social reproduction.”22 Silvia Federici contends that capital will always need
these nonsubsumed or partially subsumed forms of devalued labor. She
argues that capital is “structurally dependent on the free appropriation of
immense quantities of labor and resources that must appear as externalities
to the market,” which are naturalized onto the bodies of those gendered as
women and nonwhite people in order not only to expand profit margins but
also to pacify, discipline, and divide.23 In this sense, racialized and gendered
relations of appropriation and reproduction have directly to do with the
specific questions of property, labor, and possession at work in colonialism
and empire.
Marx’s formulation of “so-called primitive accumulation”—the coerced
incorporation of noncapitalist forms of life, land, and labor into capitalist
social relations that separate people from the means of production—
continues to serve as a key referent for the analysis of and debate on the
intertwining of capitalism, race, colonialism, and imperialism. Disputes
over the meaning and scope of so-called primitive accumulation in this
respect often focus on whether it is conceived as a foundational moment
within the historical development of capitalism or is ongoing and integral to
the expanded reproduction of capitalism on a world scale. In Marx’s often-
quoted phrasing, “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the
extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the
turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins,
signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic
proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”24 As a
counter to the fabulations of classical political economists, in Marx’s
account the unadulterated violence of primitive accumulation serves as the
historical precondition for capitalist value and development. Further
exemplified by the enclosure of the commons in England, it is the brutal
transformation through which the property relation is consolidated, land is
privatized and commodified, and people previously able to live outside
capitalist market relations are proletarianized. So-called primitive
accumulation is thus the foundational process through which noncapitalist
forms of life are forcibly incorporated into capitalist social relations, the
ground upon which subsequently, in Marx’s phrasing, “the silent
compulsion of economic relations” becomes the principal means through
which “the domination of the capitalist over the worker” is secured and
perpetuated.25 The violence of modern capitalism, if given teleological
inflection, has become primarily immanent and “no longer requires direct
applications of coercive force” to maintain the labor relation.26
 Perhaps the most influential recent reassessment of Marx’s thesis has
been David Harvey’s theorization of “accumulation by dispossession,”
which, though not focused on the specificities of settler colonialism, is
nonetheless concerned with demonstrating how so-called primitive
accumulation continues in relation to capital accumulation and figures
prominently within the neoliberal era. Harvey’s conception of
“accumulation by dispossession” jettisons the teleological stagist narrative
in order to call attention to the fact that such dynamics persist. Violent
dispossession and the silent compulsion of the market coexist and, in fact,
are complementary. Rather than a temporal prior, accumulation by
dispossession serves as a spatial form prior to capitalist incorporation that is
the fodder for imperialist expansion. As with Luxemburg’s formulation, the
reiterative prior of so-called primitive accumulation in this sense remains
external to the capitalist labor relation as the process by which capitalism
continues to pursue and appropriate the constitutive outside that is its
condition of possibility. Despite the fact that Harvey’s conception of
“accumulation by dispossession” serves explicitly as a means of theorizing
what he calls the “new imperialism,” and that the Zapatista uprising figures
prominently in his account, he remains largely unconcerned with how the
specific conditions of ongoing colonialism or the significance of racialized
dispossession might matter for his analysis.27
Yet in places such as what is presently called the United States,
colonialism and the legacies of racial slavery remain actively constitutive
for capitalist accumulation. Colonialism in this context is not or not only a
process of expansion and incorporation but is a primary social, economic,
and political feature of the United States itself, a retrospective and
prospective feature that works in tandem with US imperial exploits
globally. It is crucial to address the specific ways in which contemporary
capitalism depends on and seeks to reproduce, remake, and repurpose the
dynamics of possession and expendability with regard to Indigenous
peoples, land, and differentially devalued gendered and racialized labor in
the service of the particular political economies, biopolitical orders, and
normative sociality of the present conjuncture. Chattel slavery and its
afterlives also shape both the historical conditions and present-day
dynamics of racialized dispossession. Native and Black dispossession is not
a concluded historical moment in a teleology of capitalist development but
continues and changes over time in ways that operate in conjunction with
other forms of expropriation and subjection and what Lisa Marie Cacho
describes as the “differential devaluation of racialized peoples.”28
Filius Nullius and the White Possessive

For the colonial imaginary of possession and emplacement, the notion of

filius nullius (“nobody’s child”) serves as an indispensable complement to
terra nullius and its rationalization of the “doctrine of discovery.” These
disavowals together appear as alibis for dispossession and reimagine the
brutality of removal as discovery and rescue—while seeking to render fully
unthought and unconnected the market in African children and children of
African descent under chattel slavery. The taking and trafficking of
Indigenous children, though varying in emphasis and tactics across time and
place, have been a common feature of colonial regimes, initially as an
explicit strategy of war and then also as a putatively civilizing process of
inculcation and uplift.29 This is perhaps especially the case in settler projects
such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. As
Christina Firpo and Margaret Jacobs have noted, “A recognition of the
ubiquity of child removal as a colonial tactic offers crucial insights into how
colonial authorities gained and sustained power through intervention into
the intimate lives of colonial subjects.”30 These were policies that
proliferated during the mid-twentieth century, when the United States
sought to implement the “termination” of tribal sovereignty and federal
treaty responsibilities, Australia promoted “assimilation,” Canada
advocated “integration,” and New Zealand’s Adoption Act of 1955
launched closed stranger adoption. Such initiatives were paralleled and
compounded by often furtive sterilization campaigns targeting Indigenous
women and other poor and colonized women of color.31 Indigenous
peoples’ resistance to child removal and sterilization prompted reforms
during the latter part of the twentieth century, such as the 1978 Indian Child
Welfare Act in the United States, yet adoption and foster care as key social
technologies for racial capitalism and settler colonialism persist.
Indeed, not only have the taking and trafficking of Indigenous children
continued, but there is now increasing reactionary settler momentum to
dismantle established reforms. In the United States these challenges to
reformist and protective gains often claim that the extreme harms of earlier
policies and practices have been resolved and therefore do not require
remediation by contemporary legislation. It is thus useful to briefly review
the history that is said to be over and done. During the late nineteenth
century, US colonial policy emphasized boarding schools for Indigenous
children and then shifted to promoting adoption of and foster care for
Native children in non-Native families in the mid-twentieth century.32 Such
assimilative and pedagogical endeavors served as a direct corollary to
federal policy for Indian removal, allotment, termination, and relocation.
Sarah Deer points out that “although assimilation or indoctrination was the
primary goal of the boarding schools, commercialization and profit was a
by-product of these boarding school efforts; the local communities often
benefited from cheap or free labor as a result of the process. In Phoenix, for
example, girls and young women were required to provide domestic
services for white families—often with substandard (or no) pay.”33 The
schools were designed to inculcate “proper” gender roles, with curriculum
for boys focusing on vocational and manual labor and an emphasis for girls
on domestic education. Ironically, these conditions also contributed to the
pan-Indian consciousness that propelled the emergence of the American
Indian Movement and the resurgence of Native American anticolonial
activism during the 1960s and 1970s. The number of Native American
children in boarding schools continued to grow—as well as the forms of
physical, psychological, and sexual abuse endemic to those institutions—
until reaching an estimated peak enrollment of sixty thousand in 1973.
During the 1950s and 1960s, adoption initiatives increased significantly
as a parallel mechanism for Indian removal.34 These initiatives also worked
in tandem with the termination and relocation policies of the time.
Termination became official federal policy in 1953 with the passage of
House Concurrent Resolution 108, which closed tribal rolls and began to
formally end recognition of tribal nations and the federal supervision
through which tribal land was held in protected trust status, and Public Law
280, which extended state criminal jurisdiction over tribal reservation in six
states. Tribal assets would be liquidated and distributed among each tribe’s
members, who would then be encouraged by relocation initiatives to
disperse and move to urban centers for work and adaptation to post-tribal
life. Placement of Indian children for adoption and foster care by non-
Indian families worked in tandem with these policies. The Indian Adoption
Project (IAP), a collaborative endeavor between the Bureau of Indian Affairs
and the Child Welfare League of America, began in 1958. According to
Margaret Jacobs, IAP supporters encouraged the removal of Indian children
by disseminating “mutually reinforcing images of unwed Indian mothers,
deviant extended families, and hopelessly impoverished and alcoholic
parents.”35 By the 1970s, with such state-supported projects as the IAP spin-
off Adoption Resource Exchange of North America under way, as many as
35 percent of all Indigenous children in the United States were being taken
from their families and placed in foster care or adoptive homes of almost
exclusively non-Indigenous families.36 These were the circumstances to
which 1978’s Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) most directly responded.
More broadly, the national, international, and transracial political
economy of adoption has historically relied on a markedly inequitable
distribution of resources, vulnerability, and immiseration that is partially a
consequence of but is not reducible to relations of colonial dispossession.
Laura Briggs points out that within this economic trajectory, it is principally
“the children of impoverished or otherwise disenfranchised mothers [who]
are transferred to middle-class, wealthy mothers (and fathers).” In the
United States “adoptable babies and children became disproportionately
black, Latino, and Native, or came from overseas.”37 At the same time,
measures such as ICWA and the 1972 statement by the National Association
of Black Social Workers responded to the deeply entrenched bias of
adoption policies that favored placement with heteronormative white
families. The association’s resolution affirmed the “inviolable position of
black children in black families where they belong.” A representative
explained that, rather than being a separatist antiwhite position—as it had
been depicted by those hostile to considering the issues raised by the
resolution—the resolution was “directed at the child welfare system that has
systematically separated Black children from their birth families.”38
From the 1980s onward, neoliberal proponents of so-called color-blind
law have attacked ICWA’s provision for “preferential placement.” The
landmark 2013 US Supreme Court ruling in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl
(the so-called Baby Veronica case) similarly cast its decision in post–civil
rights terms, condemning racial preference and the alleged “special rights”
of tribal nations in order to substantively undermine the defensive measures
instituted by ICWA.39 The Supreme Court opinion overturned a lower-court
decision and effectively transferred custody of a young Cherokee girl to
adoptive white parents over the opposition of her birth father and the
Cherokee Nation. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court decision stopped short of
directly challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act. Yet Justice Clarence
Thomas’s conclusion that the case presented “significant constitutional
problems” and Justice Samuel Alito’s suggestion that a comparable case
could potentially serve to overturn ICWA inspired the subsequent litigation
filed by the right-wing Goldwater Institute challenging the constitutionality
of ICWA.40 The institute, working with members of the for-profit adoption
industry and religious organizations, has “nearly identical arguments in
district and state courts … with the hopes that they would eventually find a
sympathetic judge.”41
The Brackeen v. Bernhardt suit (2018) was one notable result of this
effort. Brackeen was an effort to undermine the protective gains of the ICWA
by alleging that racial preference and “special rights” have been granted to
tribal nations. The lawsuit began with the adoption of a two-year-old
Cherokee and Navajo boy by a white couple in northern Texas. Despite the
fact that a Navajo family was willing to adopt the child, the Brackeens won
their case. Following the suit, the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana,
along with two other adoptive couples, joined the Brackeens to argue that
the entirety of ICWA should be declared unconstitutional.
This was the first case in which a state has sued the US Department of
the Interior over ICWA’s constitutionality. In defense of ICWA, the Cherokee
Nation, Morongo Band of Mission Indians, Oneida Nation, and Quinault
Indian Nation intervened to join the named defendant. Brackeen once again
rehashes anti-Native sovereignty arguments that the definition of “Indian
child” in ICWA is a racial category and therefore ICWA is “race-based” law.
Moreover, presiding judge Reed O’Connor went further, arguing that by
recognizing tribal preferences in child welfare proceedings, ICWA represents
an illegal grant of power to tribal governments that undermines US national
sovereignty. The case thus makes explicit the connection between efforts to
undermine the minimal protections in place on behalf of tribal jurisdiction
over Native children and a thoroughgoing attack on all manner of
Indigenous sovereignty. Judge O’Connor’s ruling speaks to both the force
and the fragility of settler sovereignty, historically and in the present.
Although ultimately Brackeen did not challenge the constitutionality of
ICWA, it served as yet another juridical step in that direction.
Goldwater Institute attorney Timothy Sandefur states that “American
Indian law is fraught with a bloody, tragic, often plainly disgusting history
of racism, violence, and even genocide. That history—which played a
prominent role in ICWA’s origin—must not and cannot be ignored or treated
euphemistically.” Yet this framing only serves as a rhetorical prelude to
Sandefur’s contention that “it is tragic that these problems persist to this day
—and that ICWA is partly to blame.”42 Alleging that ICWA is racist and
claiming to rescue Native children from the supposed tyranny of tribes and
failed Indigenous domesticity, the Goldwater Institute insists: “We want
federal and state laws to be changed to give abused and neglected Native
American children the same protections that are given to all other American
children: the right to be placed in a safe home based on their best interests,
not based on their race.”43 As is evident with its work to annul
antidiscrimination laws, the Goldwater Institute suit aims to make the repeal
of ICWA the precedent for extinguishing tribal sovereignty and securing the
jurispathic diminution of Indigeneity from a political relation to a
minoritized racial difference in the name of “equality” and the defense of
individual private property rights.
Much like the framing of attacks on affirmative action, anti-ICWA
litigants argue that the law is no longer needed. Yet even with ICWA in place,
Native children are still placed in foster care at disproportionate rates. As
journalist Rebecca Nagle points out, for example, in South Dakota, Native
Americans are less than 15 percent of the state’s population, but Native
youth represent 50 percent of all children in foster care, with almost 90
percent of them being raised in non-Native homes. In Minnesota, Native
Americans are only 1.4 percent of the population, but Native youth
represent 23.9 percent of the children in the state foster care system. Indeed,
currently more than half of US states are out of compliance with ICWA
guidelines.44 Cases such as Adoptive Couple and Brackeen are carefully
selected to showcase the alleged advantages of adoption by non-Native
families rather than to evoke the necropolitical logics of Native
disposability that continue to be pervasive.
The intimate forms of appropriation and the reproduction of possessive
relations at work in this colonial dynamic make clear some of the ways in
which the liberal presupposition of self-ownership and possessive
individualism assume an expansive capacity and are reproduced in the
taking of Indigenous children. Indeed, the possessive relation of ownership
is imagined as extending the domain of the individual. Adoption and foster
care of Native children by non-Native parents in this context not only
extend a particular affective and proprietary relation to the private sphere of
the bourgeois normative family but also perform a preemptory or even
eliminatory appropriation that insinuates settler futurity over and against
Indigenous life and relations. There is in such colonial practices a
biopolitical imperative that accentuates its necropolitical counterpart in the
possessive relation and its social reproduction. Crucial in this regard is the
question that Aileen Moreton-Robinson poses in the Australian context
regarding what the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and the casting of
Indigenous people as devoid of both will and the capacity to properly
possess do to convey the “constitution, currency and circulation of white
possession.”45
Dispossessive Inheritance

Perhaps less readily apparent than the removal and trafficking of Indigenous
people as a means of colonial and racialized dispossession but more overtly
as a matter of property and ownership, mechanisms of inheritance in the
United States have served similar or complementary ends. The fractionation
of landed property for Native peoples in the wake of the allotment policy
era (1887–1934) and the partition of heirs’ property not limited to but
disproportionately affecting African Americans since Reconstruction are
significant for the ways in which they link past and present dispossession.
For the wealthy, inheritance provides a genealogical distance from
conquest, genocide, and colonial slavery that offers a cover of ostensible
innocence and launders accumulated fortunes. For Native peoples, the
descendants of enslaved Africans, and other racialized peoples dispossessed
by colonization, inheritance endures as struggle and demand. Inherited
wealth contributes to racially overdetermined economic inequality and
advantage far more than present-day income.46 Thus, as problems arising
from protracted dynamics of inheritance, fractionation and the partition of
heirs’ property have directly to do with the conditions of racial capitalism
and colonial calculations of reproducing dispossession. Both participate in
the production of property and the reproduction of differential dispossession
today.
In 1887 the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Severalty
Act, unilaterally sought to divide the homelands of Native American
nations into alienable private property and distributed 80- to 160-acre
parcels to individual Indian “heads of household.” Supposedly designed to
protect Native peoples from further genocide and initially placing
allotments into trust status until allottees were deemed “competent,”
allotting tribal lands into individual private properties in fact not only
hastened further land loss by direct sale and the appropriation of “surplus”
land by the federal government but also accelerated sales to non-Indians by
tax forfeiture. Under allotment, Native landholding fell sharply from an
already diminished 138 million acres in 1887 to 52 million acres in 1934,
when allotment policy officially ended. At the same time, tribal sovereignty
was further eroded by the expansion of US federal authority through the
administration of allotment.
The allotment act instituted a single regime of private property over and
against the heterogeneous forms of property organized through the distinct
political authority of each Native nation.47 The 1900 Annual Report of the
Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Department of the Interior
infamously described the law as “a mighty pulverizing engine for breaking
up the tribal mass” and a means through which to “recognize the
individual” and “protect the family.”48 Although the law was intended to
create “independent” property-owning individuals out of Native peoples,
the allotments were conceived as a unique kind of property right over which
the federal government continued to act as trustee. As legal scholar Jessica
Shoemaker explains,
While held in trust, allotments were to be subject to complete federal
restraints on alienation, which meant that individual Indians could not
transfer their property freely nor could tribes effectuate local property
norms or apply their common law of descent. In addition to the rigid
restrictions during life, allottees were denied the right to devise or
otherwise determine the distribution of their allotments at death. Instead,
all allotments necessarily passed by the intestacy laws of the state that
surrounded them, often to multiple children and relatives. Thus,
allotment required sharing of land among an ever-increasing number of
heirs, as the original allottees died, and left no means for flexible
management, sale, or consolidation at any point in the process.49
The immediate and long-term consequence of allotment was the escalating
problem of fractionation, the division of property into ever-smaller units
through the exponential increase in individual owners as a result of
inheritance.50 Allotment also sought to denationalize tribes and minoritize
American Indians as a racial group within the United States.51 The legal
recognition of the right of individual Indians to draft federally approved
wills granted in 1910 only amplified logics of liberal individualist “estate
planning” that remained anathema to many Indigenous peoples. Despite
certain reform initiatives, the dispossessive force of fractionation continues
to accelerate today as a direct consequence of allotment policy. Thus,
allotment and fractionation are ongoing colonial logics of private property
that seek to reproduce normative property and personhood and the deferral
of both “proper” possession and self-determination for Native peoples
under US rule.
Although fractionation is an especially severe problem for Native
peoples as a direct result of US policy and colonization, it is also a
substantial issue for other impoverished people of color that remains in
some sense an effect of the colonial present.52 According to a 2016 national
Gallup poll, 56 percent of all respondents, 69 percent of respondents
identified as poor, and 72 percent of “nonwhite” respondents did not have
legal wills.53 Intestacy, the status of the estate of someone who dies without
having made a valid will or other binding declaration, is the basis for
tenancy-in-common as the principal form of concurrent real estate
ownership in the contemporary United States. Without clear title, tenancy-
in-common property cannot be mortgaged or used as a basis of credit, and
under default inheritance rules it produces a distinctly unstable form of
ownership called heirs’ property. Heirs’ property is the result of exponential
generational transmission wherein the cotenants each have an undivided
interest in the entire parcel of land even though their ownership interests
remain fractional shares. A real estate speculator seeking to acquire the
property can purchase a single heir’s share and, with the procurement of
this interest, has the right to demand that it be partitioned from the property
as a whole. As one legal scholar explains, “If the land cannot be easily
subdivided, the court will order a sale of the land and a division of the
proceeds. Often, by design, the person triggering the sale will then purchase
the entire tract,” with the other cotenants frequently not having access to
cash or credit to bid for the property.54 A lawyer in Mississippi thus
observed that “the partition action has been greatly abused by land
developers. By purchasing the interest of one joint owner, the developer is
entitled to sue for partition and have the land sold at auction where he is
able to buy the entire tract and force any occupants to vacate the land.”55
With multiple heirs of a single property, tenancy-in-common makes such
land particularly vulnerable to such tactics.
 Partition sale of heirs’ property has directly contributed to significant
African American dispossession. In spite of the failed promise of land
redistribution during Reconstruction and concerted antiblack laws and
violence in the former epicenter of colonial slavery, Black landholding in
the US South gained slowly but significantly between 1865 and 1910 to a
high of sixteen million acres of farmland. Yet partition sale of heirs’
property was part of the precipitous loss of more than ten million acres of
Black-owned land between 1910 and 1970. By the 1970s, approximately
one-third of all land held by African Americans living in the rural South
was held under tenancy-in-common.56 Moreover, as legal scholar Heather
Way observes, “It’s most definitely an urban issue too.… It’s very common
to see heirs’ property issues in low-income, older neighborhoods, where a
house has been in the family and passed down for generations.”57 Way also
notes cases in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in which Black
homeowners affected by the storm were unable to receive disaster-recovery
assistance because of title questions arising from heirs’ property issues.58
Such dynamics intensified the disproportionate foreclosure and eviction
among impoverished African Americans during the 2006–2008 financial
crisis triggered by subprime loan practices.59 Legislation such as the 2010
Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act aims to develop due process
protections and provide legal recourse for cotenant heirs, but predatory uses
of forced partition sale continue to link past and present precarity
overdetermined by racism.
Perhaps most significant for the argument that I am making here with
regard to reproduction is that both fractionation and the partition of heirs’
property simultaneously advance a particular normative relation to
ownership while holding the possibility of possession itself in abeyance and
presuming the inevitability of loss as part of their instantiation. What is
reproduced is at once an individuated possessory relation to private
property and the deferral of possession itself. Both are manifest through
familial and generational processes that incorporate heteronormative and
racial dispositions into their logics and logistics of reproduction, severalty,
and property. Furthermore, both are methods of dispossession seemingly
detached from the intentions of the state and capital that are nonetheless
direct outcomes of historical colonial and racial capitalist dispossession,
with significant consequences in the present. Fractionation and heirs’
property are not especially exemplary or exceptional instances through
which to foreground such practices and circumstances. But considering
them together provides a means of acknowledging the conditions of the
historical present in this regard, as well as suggesting a particular logic of
property and value that emerges in concert with the triangulation of race,
capitalism, and colonialism.
Relations Otherwise

The operation of social reproduction is a capacious and always unstable or

uncertain process that assembles and co-constitutes social formation.
Focusing on social reproduction is a means through which to contend with
the specific ways in which contemporary capitalism depends on and seeks
to remake and repurpose the dynamics of possession and expendability with
regard to Indigenous peoples, land, and differentially devalued gendered
and racialized labor in the service of the particular political economies,
biopolitical orders, and normative sociality of the present conjuncture. I am
suggesting that social reproduction should be understood in such a way that
not only complicates but materially and conceptually expands the frame of
labor and the labor process, as well as acknowledging relations of land,
place, and grounded genealogy. Social reproduction is likewise not only the
proposition and production of life itself but also a dialectical relation that
distributes attributions of disposability and premature death, organizing the
conditions of possibility and impossibility through particular capitalist
economies. It does not precede or exceed capitalism but is constitutive of its
formation and mutability. The history and present conditions of the foster
care and adoption of Indigenous children by non-Indigenous people and the
dispossessive force of fractionation and partition of heirs’ property in what
is at this conjuncture the United States exemplify these dynamics of social
reproduction in part because they make apparent the intimate political
economies of filiation, attrition, and elimination at work.
Although both racial capitalism and settler colonialism as co-constitutive
forms of power and dominion imagine themselves to be in some sense total,
inevitable, and in perpetuity, both in fact remain partial, incomplete, and
vulnerable to fundamental undoing. Indeed, both racial capitalism and
settler colonialism are heterogeneous formations. Both present their logics
of expansion as absolute and permanent—ostensibly there is no end to
settler colonial occupation, just as there is supposedly no truly feasible
alternative to capitalism. Yet attending to the imperative for and work of
reproduction not only underscores the unfinished and precarious character
of each but might also demonstrate the ongoing prospects for their
disruption and disassembly. Most importantly, focusing on social
reproduction underscores how both are counter-formations responding to
and seeking to contain and subsume such interruption and collective
contestation.
NOTES

1. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 14. Early work on settler colonialism that foregrounded
its inter-articulation with capitalism includes Emmanuel, “White-Settler Colonialism”; Good,
“Settler Colonialism”; Biermann and Kössler, “Settler Mode of Production”; Blaut,
“Colonialism and the Rise”; and Denoon, Settler Capitalism. For more recent scholarship that
theorizes race, capitalism, and colonialism as mutually constitutive, see, especially, Day, Alien
Capital; Wolfe, Traces of History; Ince, Colonial Capitalism; Bhandar, Colonial Lives of
Property; Nichols, Theft Is Property!; Estes, Our History Is the Future; and Karuka, Empire’s
Tracks.
2. Hudson, “Racial Capitalism”; Kelley, “Why Black Marxism?”; Jenkins and Leroy, “Old
History of Capitalism.”
3. “Azanian Manifesto,” 168. See also Alexander, “Illuminating Moment”; and Burden-Stelly,
Hudson, and Pierre, “Racial Capitalism, Black Liberation.”
4. “Azanian Manifesto,” 169.
5. Alexander, “Nation and Ethnicity,” 62.
6. Legassick and Hemson, Foreign Investment. Legassick and Hemson argue that the “Poverty
Datum Line” in South Africa is “racially calculated” to encourage “the payment of wage
levels at the minimum necessary to secure the reproduction of the workforce.… What is
judged the minimum necessary for an African family is different from, and substantially lower
than, equivalent estimates for the family of a white worker. The Poverty Datum Line concept,
in other words, is not only a formula for the reproduction of capitalist relationships in South
Africa, but also for the reproduction of racial capitalism” (11).
7. Kelley, “Rest of Us”; Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, 1–23; Veracini, “ ‘Settler Colonialism.’
”
8. Kelley, “What Is Racial Capitalism?” See also Melamed, “Racial Capitalism”; Dawson,
“Hidden in Plain Sight”; Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism; Burden-Stelly,
“Modern US Racial Capitalism”; and Gilmore, Change Everything.
9. Marx, Capital, 1:35, 1:565.
10. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, parts 7 and 8; Marx, Capital, vol. 2, chapters 20 and 21.
11. Marx, Capital, 1:575.
12. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, 348. Notably, the original subtitle A Contribution to
an Economic Explanation of Imperialism is unfortunately omitted from the Routledge
republication. For a generative collection of engagements with Luxemburg’s work, see Cornell
and Gordon, eds., Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. For an important contribution that engages
Luxemburg while theorizing the “operations” of capital, see Mezzadra and Neilson, Politics of
Operations.
13. Balibar, “Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” 437.
14. For example, see Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation; Katz, “Vagabond Capitalism”;
Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Nadasen, Household Workers Unite; Bhattacharya, ed.,
Social Reproduction Theory; and Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive.
15. Quoted in Bhattacharya, “Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” in Social Reproduction
Theory, 2.
16. Toupin, Wages for Housework; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and
Affect; Kofman and Raghuram, Gendered Migrations; Boris, “Reproduction as Production.”
17. Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”; Bridges,
Reproducing Race; Ross et al., eds., Radical Reproductive Justice; Davis, Reproductive
Injustice; Luna, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights; Nash, Birthing Black Mothers.
18. Morgan, Laboring Women, 144–45. See also Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery.
19. Weinbaum, Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery; Vora, Life Support; Vora, “After the
Housewife”; Valdez and Deomampo, eds., “Interrogating the Intersections of Race.”
20. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 154, 4.
21. See, for example, Hobart and Kneese, eds., “Radical Care”; Byrd, “What’s Normative?”;
Spade, Mutual Aid.
22. Singh, “Race, Violence, and ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” 57–58.
23. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 140.
24. Marx, Capital, 1:703.
25. Marx, Capital, 1:899.
26. Marx, Capital, 1:899.
27. Harvey, New Imperialism, 137–82. For especially insightful critical engagements with
Harvey’s conception of “dispossession by accumulation,” see Chakravartty and Ferreira da
Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt”; and Nichols, Theft Is Property!, 52–84.
28. Cacho, Social Death, 17. Of course, such dynamics are not limited to Black and Native
peoples. See, for instance, Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents; and Kang, Traffic in Asian
Women.
29. To be clear, I am not talking about adoption and foster care in general but specifically
about their use as part of an ensemble of colonial practices that operate in tandem with
imperial and white supremacist relations. I am not arguing against the possible legitimacy of
adoption or foster care as ways of making family and kinship.
30. Firpo and Jacobs, “Taking Children, Ruling Colonies,” 531. See also Briggs, Taking
Children.
31. Vergès, Wombs of Women; Gurr, Reproductive Justice; Zavella, Movement for
Reproductive Justice; Briggs, Reproducing Empire.
32. On the history of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples in the United States (and
elsewhere), see, for example, Adams, Education for Extinction; Lomawaima, They Called It
Prairie Light; Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, eds., Boarding School Blues; and Child and
Klopotek, eds., Indian Subjects.
33. Deer, Beginning and End of Rape, 71.
34. United States Congress, House of Representatives, Establishing Standards.
35. Jacobs, “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child,’ ” 144. See also Jacobs, Generation
Removed.
36. Palmiste, “From the Indian Adoption Project”; Jacobs, “Remembering the ‘Forgotten
Child.’ ”
37. Briggs, Somebody’s Children, 4, 6.
38. Quoted in Briggs, Somebody’s Children, 28.
39. Fletcher, Singel, and Fort, eds., Facing the Future; Goldstein, “Possessive Investment”;
Berger, “In the Name of the Child”; Barker, “Self-Determination”; Beardall, “Adoptive
Couple v. Baby Girl”; Rolnick and Pearson, “Racial Anxieties in Adoption.”
40. Fort, “Goldwater Institute.”
41. Nagle, “Texas Judge Rules.”
42. Sandefur, “Escaping the ICWA Penalty Box.”
43. Quoted in Dewan and Israel, “Why a Conservative Legal Organization.”
44. Nagle, “Texas Judge Rules.”
45. Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive, 110.
46. Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth; Strand, “Inheriting Inequality.”
47. Justice and O’Brien, eds., Allotment Stories; Bobroff, “Retelling Allotment.”
48. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 660, 658. See also Gates, “Next
Great Step,” 120. Gates also commends the allotment act for having “given a mighty impulse
toward family life and the cultivation of home virtues” (120).
49. Shoemaker, “Like Snow,” 738.
50. In addition to Shoemaker, “Like Snow,” see Shoemaker, “Complexity’s Shadow”;
McGrath, “Model Tribal Probate Code”; and Royster, “Legacy of Allotment.”
51. Barker, Native Acts.
52. Mitchell, “From Reconstruction to Deconstruction”; Rivers, “Inequity in Equity”;
Mitchell, “Reforming Property Law”; Spivack, “Broken Links.”
53. “Majority in US Do Not Have a Will.”
54. Graber, “Heirs Property,” 277.
55. Quoted in Graber, “Heirs Property,” 277.
56. Graber, “Heirs Property,” 273.
57. Heather Way, quoted in Persky, “In the Cross-Heirs.”
58. Heather Way, quoted in Persky, “In the Cross-Heirs.”
59. Nembhard and Otabor, “Great Recession and Land.” See also Fields and Raymond,
“Racialized Geographies of Housing Financialization.” On foreclosure as a technique of
racialized colonial dispossession, see Park, “Race, Innovation, and Financial Growth.”
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 THREE · Cheryl I. Harris

The Racial Alchemy of Debt

: Dispossession and Accumulation in

Afterlives of Slavery

Under our constitution, there can be no such thing as a either a creditor or debtor
race.… In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.
ANTONIN SCALIA, CONCURRING OPINION, ADARAND CONSTRUCTORS, INC. V. PEÑA, 1995

One hundred years [after Emancipation], the Negro lives on a lonely island of
poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.… In a sense we have
come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic
wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American
was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as
white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.… It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this
promissory note.… Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given
the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked
“insufficient funds.” … But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is
bankrupt. So we have come to cash this check—a check that will give us upon
demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., “I HAVE A DREAM,” 1963

The bondholders are sacred. They cannot be touched. People are not sacred.
CLAIRE MCCLINTON, FLINT DEMOCRACY DEFENSE LEAGUE, QUOTED IN BENJAMIN J. PAULI,
FLINT FIGHTS BACK, 2019

Recent work in conceptual art challenges the exemption of art and its
production from critiques of racial domination and capitalist exploitation.1
These artists expose this omission, not by focusing on the aesthetics of an
object but by attending to its modes of production. This radical
reorientation seeks to destabilize what is considered art as well as what one
considers the function of art to be. Against a notion of art as a unique,
stylized object or media, conceptual artists have embraced “the use of any
medium, event, or object deemed appropriate to the particular concepts the
artist chose to explore.”2 Cameron Rowland’s 2016 exhibition, 91020000, is
articulated in this register.3 The objects for consideration—a desk, a bench,
a fireman’s suit, a set of giant metal rings—are “ready-made,” stubbornly
ordinary, unadorned, unembellished, and fungible.4
This piece, titled Leveler (Extension) Rings for Manhole Openings,
consists of large, stacked aluminum rings. Leveler Rings, like other works
in the exhibition, initially discloses nothing of its origins or function. This
opacity is ruptured by Rowland’s rigorously researched and elegant notes
that reveal how the rings were produced and used, as well as the obscured
financial networks in which they circulate.5 The text fuses with the object;
the medium (object/text) expresses a message:6 “Manhole leveler rings are
cast by prisoners in Elmira Correctional Facility. When roads are repaved,
they are used to adjust the height of manhole openings and to maintain the
smooth surface of the road. Work on public roads, which was central to the
transition from convict leasing to the chain gang, continues within many
prison labor programs. The road is a public asset, instrumental to
commercial development.”7 As in many other prisons in the state, a
plurality if not a majority of the prisoners are Black.8 The prisoners’ labor is
compensated at steeply discounted rates—from $0.10 to $1.14 per hour.9
FIGURE 3.1.   Cameron Rowland, 91020000. Installation view, Artists Space, New York, 2016.
Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York.
Raceless Facades of Capital

The racially banal facade of Leveler Rings reflects the presumption of race
neutrality that has been the hallmark of the contemporary racial order.
Antonin Scalia’s declaration that there is no “creditor or debtor race” rejects
the very notion of racial subordination and encodes that logic in legal
doctrine.10 Yet the claim to neutrality is fictive both conceptually and
materially. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, “Capitalism requires inequality,
and racism enshrines it.”11 The racelessness of the capitalist order is and has
always been illusory. Likewise, the racelessness of the object is illusory:
Leveler Rings is freighted with a genealogy that begins with enslavement
and extends through its many afterlives to current regimes of state and
private power that operate to extract value and manage populations.12
History is central to understanding how Leveler Rings came into being as a
condition of Black life.
The modes of production of Leveler Rings and the roads built through
the use of such rings reflect a refurbished racialized system of incarceration
and capitalization that is connected logically and materially to earlier
structures. As Rowland explains, when four million formerly enslaved
Africans were no longer legally bound to their owners following the end of
the Civil War, state power was redeployed to coerce and appropriate freed
people’s labor through the enactment of laws that “criminalize black life.”13
Without being tethered to a white employer, Black men, women, and
children were subject to arrest and conviction for vague and fabricated
offenses and were assessed fines and fees through processes that mocked
notions of due process. Without the means to pay, the captives were deemed
legally indebted to the state, which then leased them to private businesses,
where they were subjected to a brutal form of labor extraction as the means
of repayment. Through this system the state achieved multiple goals: it
increased revenue without raising taxes, avoided expenditures on carceral
infrastructure, and satisfied the demand for the cheap labor that was crucial
to industrial development. The system was legitimated through law: the
imposition of incarceration through debt was deemed to stand outside the
proscriptions of the Thirteenth Amendment. That provision abolished both
“slavery” as well as “involuntary servitude,” but its remaining text, “except
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted,” has been interpreted—arguably misinterpreted—to authorize
convict leasing.14
Black labor extracted through the carceral regime became a significant
feature of the post–Civil War southern economy and was crucial to fueling
industrial production and the accumulation of capital. However,
profitability was eventually constrained by the lack of transportation
infrastructure, which restricted access to distribution networks and markets.
Over time, despite ruthless practices to reduce labor costs—wretched
housing, insufficient and rancid food, no medical care—leasing prices rose.
Rising costs converged with critiques of the brutality of the system and,
crucially, its negative impact on the bargaining power of free (white) labor.
As the political burdens of the lease system increased, the preferred solution
was to remove convicts from the private labor market and return control of
coerced labor back to the state. Persons convicted through the same rigged
processes were assembled—entrapped, in fact—in chain gangs and were
deployed to build roads, bridges, and other state infrastructure.15 Notably,
this reform did not contest and, in fact, legitimated the continued
appropriation of Black labor through the carceral system. The demise of
convict leasing by the early twentieth century, and of the chain gangs by the
1950s, reflects shifts rather than the elimination of forms of labor control
and capital accumulation extracted under carceral threat.16
Relations among labor, capital, and race changed as the US carceral
regime evolved through different phases. From the early twentieth century
to the early 1970s, the percentage of the population subjected to
incarceration remained relatively stable, even as imprisonment captured
disproportionate numbers of Black people as well as the poor of all races.17
However, economic, political, and legal changes soon caused explosive
growth in prison construction and the rate of incarceration. Invoking Ruth
Wilson Gilmore’s classic Golden Gulag, Rowland identifies mass
incarceration as the product of a diachronic interaction between racial
ideologies and, citing Gilmore, a crisis of “nonproductive surpluses of
‘finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity.’ ” This led states (California
being among the first) to adopt the “prison fix,” in which financiers
developed “public markets for private capital” tied to carceral projects.18 As
Rowland writes, the result “is an increasing set of capitalizations” that has
enmeshed “people in prison … [in] a nexus of government economic
interests.”19 This includes monopolizing prisoners’ consumption of goods
and services through private suppliers as well as imposing “pay to stay”
fees, in which the state charges people in prison for the costs of their
incarceration, creating a debt they carry upon release.
The labor value of prisoners who work is captured for state use in
infrastructure improvement and maintenance or is put to use in prison
operations.20 Rowland notes that often the labor of incarcerated people
“does not result in publicly traded profit, but rather in savings.”21 Whether a
given system produces actual savings is unclear, given decentralized
accounting and processes, and shifting definitions of costs, benefits, assets,
and liabilities across local, state, and federal carceral institutions.22
However, as Rowland explains, even without profits in the usual sense,
savings is a “form of austerity that may be more efficacious than profit [as]
these savings, as absences of costs and information[,] operate as financial
and rhetorical instruments of government opacity.”23 In this context Leveler
Rings is the product of a form of carceral extraction of value in which
racialized labor is managed through state-constructed markets of goods,
products, and services that occlude costs and deficits within the broader
political economy of mass incarceration.
Whereas race is a construct that inscribes bodies within hierarchies,
Leveler Rings also illuminates how race as structure and relation is
embedded in things, in objects, even those that appear racially anonymous.
The rings, once seen through the text with which they are branded, conjure
carceral circuits that trace and retrace one of many afterlives of slavery,
evoking a temporal slippage between the time of convict leasing and the
chain gang and the present. Simultaneously, the rings mark the transition
from these older forms of carceral labor to neoliberal systems in which
labor is flexibly deployed and recategorized, at times outside the framework
of “work,” according to the objectives of capital and changing political and
economic contexts. Leveler Rings illustrates the epochal shifts in the nexus
of racial regimes, carceral state power, and capitalist accumulation, as well
as enduring patterns and logics of racial coercion in which Black bodies and
collectivities are perpetually subject to plunder—what critical scholar Clyde
Woods termed “asset stripping.”24 Leveler Rings represents an example of
how a relation between race and coercion is both repeated and transformed.
It is, as law professor Noah Zatz frames, “a site that extends into the present
the insights of historiography of slavery and neoslavery[, one] integral to
US racial capitalism.”25
Debt as Essential Structure and Relation

In probing the terrain that Leveler Rings illuminates, a persistent feature of

these extractive practices, past and present, is debt. Although the concept of
debt is as ancient as the concept of money,26 my reference to debt here does
not hark back to classical political economy in the sense of debt as a system
of communal exchange. I am concerned more with debt as it currently
exists in today’s political economy. In this context, debt can be described as
“a promise of future reimbursement” that contemplates risk, including both
“temporal indeterminacy and unpredictability.”27 The creation of debt
involves the issuance of credit—a dialectical relation—in which debt, like
credit, is “a mechanism of intertemporal and intrapersonal redistribution.”28
Understanding capitalism to always already encompass racism, I want to
consider how debt, as a structure and relation, is implicated in the racial
landscape both historically and in the contemporary moment.
One can “read” the racial genealogies unearthed in Leveler Rings
through debt. Following the Civil War, debt became the principal
mechanism through which a system of labor extraction was constructed to
replace chattel slavery. The deployment of coerced Black labor was critical
to the development of modern economic industries and activities into the
twentieth century. Although the value of the Black body as chattel was
formally extinguished by abolition, the racial alchemy of debt transformed
freed people into assets yet again, “propertizing” and assigning value to
Black bodies by virtue of their indebtedness.29 As Saidiya Hartman has
noted so perceptively, emancipation was fabulated as a gift that had been
granted, and for which the freedmen were indebted, ensuring their
continued availability for extraction through the rights of the liberal
subject.30
Presently, the labor that produced Leveler Rings and that is deployed for
state use functions in the shadow of debt. Although earlier estimates
suggest that prison industries produce more than $2 billion of annual
revenue, prisoners’ labor is generally no longer directly leased out to
private entities to generate profit for the state.31 Yet the machinery of
incarceration is bound up with race and debt in several crucial ways. First,
debt is deeply embedded in policing practices and legal regimes that operate
to criminalize Black communities and legitimate racialized surveillance,
coercion, violence, and extraction. These abuses were most vividly
illustrated in the extrajudicial killing of Michael Brown by police officer
Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. A popular uprising emerged
nationally and globally under the banner of Black Lives Matter that
condemned routine policing practices as consistently productive of police
violence against Black bodies. The BLM-inspired resistance mobilized a
critique of policing in Ferguson that exposed the connective tissue between
the criminal sanction system, police coercion, and asset stripping. A now-
much-cited Department of Justice report as well as litigation brought on
behalf of Ferguson’s residents documented the experience of Black
residents who were aggressively surveilled, repeatedly cited for minor
municipal ordinance violations such as “manner of walking in street” and
“failure to obey,” and fined and assessed a host of fees and penalties used to
fund the city’s operations.32 As these onerous “criminal legal obligations”
became unpayable, many residents were arrested and incarcerated in city or
county jails, where they were required to “sit out their time” in order to
discharge their debt.33 Once incarcerated, they were charged the costs of
incarceration and became, literally, captive consumers of essential goods
and services sold at highly inflated prices. This extractive infrastructure
operated through manufacturing debt and criminalizing nonpayment.
Secondly, debt was central to the expansion of the carceral regime and
the explosive increase in the incarceration of Black bodies. Here the
institutions of finance capital, public debt, and the bond market incentivized
the growth of the carceral state. Again, however, as Gilmore demonstrated,
the exponential increase in the prison population was not the consequence
of increase in crime. Rather, changes in the political economy drove
decisions to funnel surplus capital and people deemed to be surplus labor
into carceral institutions, as distinct from other investments in public goods
such as education and health.34
In this sense, Leveler Rings is a provocation to go beyond visual
analogies to structural excavations. The rings are material manifestations of
recurring patterns of racialized coercion in the extraction of labor and value.
These mimetic practices are not uniformly or consistently authorized in
law; at times, they tread near or transgress the margins of formal legality.
But even when forms of labor coercion are subject to normative and legal
condemnation, they do not disappear; they are (re)established through the
imposition of debt. Debt peonage, defined as the “voluntary or involuntary
service or labor of any persons … in liquidation of any debt or obligation,”
was declared unlawful in 1867.35 Convict leasing was denounced broadly
and declared illegal in many states by 1928.36 Prison labor is condemned
and legally proscribed.37 Debtors’ prisons were declared unlawful as early
as the first part of the nineteenth century.38 Federal constitutional law
prohibits incarceration of those lacking resources for failure to pay criminal
legal debt,39 as do many state statutes. Yet incarceration for unpaid fines,
fees, and penalties—criminal legal debt—is rampant, as documented in
compelling critiques of the “new debtors’ prisons.”40 Beyond the criminal
context, forms of civil debt creation and debt collection deemed
unconscionable and especially burdensome persist, at times despite legal
prohibition.41
The recurrence of patterns of dispossession and accumulation and the
prominent role of debt are prefigured by critiques of neoliberalism that have
focused attention on the crucial role of debt in structuring social relations
and the political economy more broadly.42 Critical scholars and activists
have documented the oppressive nature of debt for the poor and working
class and the link between debt and capitalist accumulation.43 Many of these
accounts have highlighted the use of debt as an asset. Indeed, debt
constitutes a highly flexible form of capital that enables the transformation
of things—both tangible and intangible—into legally cognizable property
and transforms one form of property into another. Through this alchemical
process, debt—individual, organizational (corporate), and state—becomes a
commodity at the heart of economic activity and is a major preoccupation
of state managerial and (de)regulatory policies and practices.
What has been less explored is how, under racial capitalism, the
ubiquitous extraction, dispossession, and accumulation through debt are
connected to racial and racializing projects. Debt is formally race-neutral,
as reflected in neutral financial instruments and rules, but simultaneously
debt is also racially constitutive and saturated. Debt functions in racially
distinct ways and (re)produces profoundly racially unequal results. It
legitimates coercive practices and relations by rendering a racialized system
nominally consistent with norms of color blindness. At the same time, debt
authorizes forms of extraction that are constructed and concentrated through
racial difference but are not limited to specific populations. In this sense as
well, debt functions as a form of racial alchemy: it obscures highly
racialized processes and racially differentiated burdens, and it normalizes
and makes available for generalized application ever-more-rapacious and
predatory forms of extraction. Under a racial capitalist order, debt
commodifies racial subordination and abstracts systemic racial violence.
Through the debtor-creditor relation, racial extraction and dispossession
have been tethered to accumulation. Even as accumulation is limited to the
capitalist class, the conflation of whiteness and property operates to both
entrench and obscure that fact.
Just as property and wealth have been racially differentiated, forms of
incurring, valuing, collecting, and leveraging debt have been racially
demarcated. Black debtors face limited, if any, access to first-tier financial
institutions and products; instead, the debt they accrue is subject to more
onerous terms, both in law and in practice.44 Black debtors are largely
foreclosed from using debt as an asset.45 The racial stratification of debt has
been constructed and maintained through the conjoined technologies of
racial segregation and Black exclusion from productive credit, and the
incorporation or predatory inclusion of Black subjects into extractive credit
markets. Drawing from the work of radical scholars, particularly that of
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, I understand predatory inclusion to describe an
illusory project of racial liberalism that promotes inclusion into the market
and existing capitalist structures and institutions as the remedy for Black
subordination.46 The presumption that inclusion of Blacks into mainstream
credit markets from which they were previously excluded would ameliorate
racial inequity ignores the way that racial hierarchy is intimately entwined
in the extraction of value.47
Extending this insight, the right to extract payments through extreme
forms of coercion is an expectation legitimated by the degraded nature of
Black subjectivity. In this sense, Black debtors warrant punishment. At the
same time, one could say that Black debt is punishment. In other words, not
only is debt racially ordered in terms of the consequences and effects of
differential burdens and processes: debt further structures and reifies
racialized social relations.48 The racial segregation of debt, which was
initially de jure and has now become de facto, has simultaneously devalued
Blacks as legitimate subjects to access credit and increased their
vulnerability to speculative and asset-stripping debt-creation and debt-
collection practices. Yet even the exclusion of Blacks from mainstream
credit markets was cast within the narrow legal parameters of
“discrimination” that presumed the neutrality of the market but for
intentionally biased conduct. This limiting frame rendered most
discrimination beyond legal sanction and allowed for experimentation with
proxies and technologies that maintained racialized distinctions without
explicit reference to race. The realignment materialized in defining risk
through opaque processes and discourses of finance that rest on thinly
concealed racialized logics. Blacks are constructed as not “creditworthy”
and are consigned to subprime credit markets as “risky” borrowers, subject
to higher costs and fees.49 A prominent example is identified by Denise
Ferreira da Silva and Paula Chakravartty, who point out that in the context
of the 2008 financial crisis, “subprime” became “a racial signifier” as
perceived “racial/cultural difference … enter[ed] into risk calculations.”50
Thus, the implosion of the mortgage market was ascribed to the borrowers’
deficiencies, not the risky and predatory behavior of the finance sector,
which generated and financialized the debt for profit. The interpolation of
race into risk assessment supports the creation of Black debt on onerous and
extractive terms and masks this asset stripping as consensual, contractually
governed, rational market exchange. Because Black people have been
devalued as economic subjects, deemed forever unstable, subprime, and
“high risk,” this degraded status (re)authorizes forms of debt formation and
collection through coercion and violence, including but not limited to
incarceration, that persist in the shadow of law and periodic illegality.
The racialized framework embedded in financial ratings and
determinations of creditworthiness has profound implications in a
neoliberal social order where debt—individual, corporate, and state debt—
is a key commodity at the heart of much economic activity, negotiation, and
exchange. Where higher risk is associated with higher returns, Black debt
can become a valued commodity.51 Moreover, if, as has been argued, debt is
infinite, this is particularly true for Black debt, which can never be repaid
and is rarely if ever forgiven.52 Thus, although debt is cast as a neutral form
of economic exchange, under racial capitalism debt is a racialized structure
of extraction and accumulation central to the production and maintenance
of (white) property. The liberal concept of property embedded in US law
originates in and reifies Indigenous and Black dispossession and labor
extraction. Debt bears a similar neutral facade that obscures its racialized
histories and its exploitative function. This does not mean that these
extractive processes are fixed or that they operate against only one
population. Indeed, the processes by which debts are authorized,
implemented, and regulated are often highly contingent, contested, and
generalizable.53
I consider the role of debt as a racialized economic structure and social
relation in the context of two examples of extracting value: the first, in the
past, involving the (racially) indebted body of the enslaved and formerly
enslaved, and the second, in the present, concerning the (racially) indebted
community. They illustrate in different ways how debt structures relations
among people, capital, and state power; abstracts systemic racial violence;
and normalizes racialized extraction and accumulation. I want to complicate
and deepen the racial aspect of this account by focusing on the nexus and
continuity between forms of labor extraction from Indigenous communities
through debt peonage and the post–Civil War labor coercion of freed people
through convict leasing. The experiences and histories of Black and
Indigenous peoples differ in important ways, but the coercion of Indian
labor by colonial and neocolonial regimes through debt normalized these
practices and enabled their extension to other populations. Imposing debt
peonage on Indigenous peoples was a means of evading a ban on
enslavement while authorizing continued racialized dispossession and
accumulation through ostensibly raceless forms. The illusion of
racelessness not only masks the racial character of capitalism; it also
delimits apprehending the complexity of that racial character.54
Debt operates on and through collectivities as well as individuals. Thus,
Black geographies and spaces as well as Black bodies are similarly subject
to being placed under the heel of debt.55 Black geographies are deemed to
be insolvent “waste” lands, “no-go” areas, drowning in debt and in
inevitable decay resulting from the deficiencies of their occupants. By
virtue of this characterization, Black geographies are transformed into
locations to be rescued both through austerity programs and development or
“improvement” initiatives that reproduce Black dispossession and capital
accumulation through the creation and management of debt.56 Here I
consider the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as an example of this pattern.
The poisoning of Flint is tethered to an economy of race that materialized
through the promotion of particular forms of capital-public obligation bonds
that the city was compelled to issue to obtain water service. In fact, the city
lost safe water service as it accrued more debt—a debt that became literally
toxic at the level of everyday life. Unpacking the relationship between debt
and water in Flint discloses the way that debt as racialized structure and
relation shapes and intensifies the financialization of crucial aspects of
Black life and Black geographies. Both then and now, debt’s racial alchemy
operates to not only legitimate myriad forms of extreme extraction that rest
upon and construct Black subordination but to also further concentrate
wealth and control in a racialized elite class.
Enslavement and Debt: Black and Red

No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof,
escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be
discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the
party to whom such service or labour may be due.
FUGITIVE SLAVE CLAUSE, US CONSTITUTION, 1850

That when a person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United
States, has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory of
the United States, the person or persons to whom such service or labor may be
due, or his, her, or their agent or attorney … may pursue and reclaim such
fugitive person … either by procuring a warrant … or by seizing and arresting
such fugitive.
FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT OF 1850, CH. 60, 9 STAT. 462

Debt was implicated in chattel slavery and the carceral systems of labor that
replaced enslavement after abolition. Abolition was itself complicated by
the fact that enslavement was so deeply entrenched. Throughout the
colonial period, enslavement was the primordial form of racialized labor
extraction. Chattel slavery was particularly central in the political economy
of the North American colonies that ultimately formed the United States.
With the substitution of enslaved African labor for Indigenous and white
indentured labor, chattel slavery also emerged as a system of property. The
racial alchemy of debt “propertized” and securitized Black bodies as a
source of great value. Black bodies were cast as living currency around
which were built valuation systems, insurance, financial products and
institutions, and forms of financialization central to the development of
capitalism.
Indeed, chattel slavery as a system of economic production was central
to the growth of a financial system founded in debt. As historian Calvin
Schermerhorn argues, the slave trade was built on debt as “chains of debt
moved around the Atlantic basin in countermotion to the trajectories of
captives, goods, and commodities.” Debt obligations allowed future
promises to substitute for immediate payment in circumstances where time
and distance made such payment impossible. Moreover, the expansion of
debt was key: the transatlantic system stretched over continents and
encompassed a wide range of actors not limited to the immediate purveyors
of captured Africans or to the enterprises that depended upon their stolen
labor. Schermerhorn points out that captives were treated as “debt
payments” by “those who bought, shipped, and sold the survivors to
Americans[, including] shipmasters, merchants, investors, bankers, planters,
and owners of collateral industries.”57
Debt was not only the mechanism that enabled exchange and commerce;
debt was also a means of leveraging value, effectively broadening the reach
of the profits from enslavement through debt markets. Mortgages backed by
enslaved persons became paper bonds sold to investors, thereby generating
the capital necessary to fuel the growth of the system of enslavement and
the larger economy. Asset securitization expanded profit beyond the interest
charged on the debt by abstracting the enslaved Black body encumbered by
debt into capital appropriated through racially defined and exclusionary
markets. The financialization of the enslaved Black body reflected its value
as a commodity that secured dizzying profits that enriched the holdings of
financiers and merchants on both sides of the Atlantic.
In a sense, the “slave” was born in debt and embodied debt. As reflected
in the Fugitive Slave Clause and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the
fugitive was subject to be seized as one who owed a debt to the owner. The
fugitive was runaway capital, stolen by herself. Fugitivity was configured
as a form of theft in which the enslaved—a “person held to service or
labor”58—remained indebted to her owner. The concept of compensated
emancipation similarly made Black freedom contingent on paying the
owner the value of his investment. Indebtedness then was cast as a
characteristic of Blackness; the Black body was always already in debt.
Chattel slavery sutured Blackness to debt and capital accumulation in
these specific ways, but these systems were also intimately related to
Indigenous dispossession.59 As stolen land is at the heart of the colonial
project, critiques of colonialism have rightly focused on Native land
dispossession as both a historical and ongoing structure. Yet the system of
enslavement of Native peoples by Europeans was another crucial
component of the evolution of chattel slavery of Africans and successive
regimes of labor coercion. The forms of labor imposed following formal
abolition in each case were structured through debt. Indeed, although the
system of Indigenous enslavement ended, the coercion and extraction of the
labor of Indigenous people continued and relied on debt.
To begin, it is important to recognize the scale of Indian slavery: even
though it often operated outside formal legality, that did not diminish its
reach or significance. As historian Andrés Reséndez points out, from the
inception of European colonization of the Americas in 1492 to the end of
the nineteenth century, estimates are that between 2.5 million and 5 million
Indigenous people were taken as slaves. This system differed in some ways
from the African slave trade, for the majority of Indian slaves were women
and children: the latter were ostensibly favored because of their purported
ability to adapt, to fit in, to become westernized, whereas a premium was
paid for women for their reproductive and domestic labor.60 Unlike chattel
slavery, under Indian slavery, slave status was not formally heritable in all
instances, nor were Indigenous enslaved people routinely sold through
centralized markets,61 albeit in some regions there were some
intergenerational transfers of slave status and sales between parties.62
The enslavement of Indigenous peoples enabled the dispossession of
Indigenous land—a process essential to the creation of cash-crop economies
later serviced by enslaved African labor. Indian enslavement inflicted
massive destruction and precipitated rapid population decline.63 In addition
to overt acts of removal and violence against Indigenous peoples,
administrative actions enacted other lethal policies by separating
Indigenous peoples from traditional diet and health practices, herding them
into toxic conditions, and exposing them to pandemics from European
diseases. The resulting depopulation enabled the project of eliminating
Indigenous control of native land.
Even though Spain began to limit slavery in the 1500s and prohibited
slavery by 1542, this action did not operate to end the practice. Indian
slavery endured through other euphemistic forms of servitude
—“encomiendas, repartimientos”—and, most relevant here, debt peonage.64
Apart from the long-standing debate over whether these forms of labor
coercion were actual enslavement, crucially, “like a deadly virus, Indian
slavery mutated into these strains and became extraordinarily resilient
through the centuries.”65 This persistence was particularly evident in the
lands that ultimately became part of the western territories controlled by the
United States.
After Abolition

A pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land. The merchants are in debt to the
wholesalers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the
planters, and the laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all.
W. E. B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, 1903

We do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider they are in debt to us.
And we do not consider that we buy and sell them; we consider that we transfer
the debt, and the man goes with the debt.
PRESIDENT OF THE AGRICULTURAL CHAMBER OF YUCATAN TO JOHN KENNETH TURNER, 1908

The abolition of slavery in the United States by Emancipation and

ultimately the Thirteenth Amendment transformed but did not end
racialized dispossession and coerced labor. In slavery’s afterlife, systems of
extraction were reshaped and reconstituted. A prominent feature of the new
regime was the creation and management of Black debt. The convict-lease
system, as described previously, was structured around state-created debt
arising from criminal legal obligations fraudulently imposed. Black debt
was generated through the criminal sanction system and, in the civil arena,
through the discourse of contracts. A central feature of the period was the
porous line between contractual and criminal debt and the role of debt in
manufacturing the illusion of consent. The legal regime of contract,
extended to Black people in the transition from chattel to constitutional
citizen, became the means by which Blacks were deemed to have consented
to their punishment for nonpayment of debt. This, in effect, resembled debt
peonage—authorizing a party to compel, under threat of criminal
punishment, a person’s labor to discharge a debt. In a sense, convict leasing
was a state-operated form of peonage.
The convict-leasing system was not a novel form of labor coercion: in
the United States, it was first deployed in New York in 1825 and spread
through the North and Midwest, where the prisoners were primarily white
men; the punishment of enslaved Africans was largely the prerogative of
slaveholders.66 But the expansion of convict leasing in the southern region
even after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment drew on debt
peonage, a form of labor extraction prevalent in the West. Debt peonage had
a long lineage: it was imposed on Indigenous peoples in western lands
colonized by the Spanish, later governed by Mexico, and subsequently
incorporated into the United States at the end of the US-Mexican War in
1848. The persistence of debt peonage after Indian enslavement was
formally ended and its emergence and retrofitting in the South reflect the
tenacity, flexibility, and adaptability of racial regimes of labor extraction
and capital accumulation.
The War for Mexican Independence succeeded in overthrowing Spanish
colonial rule in 1822, yet this change in governance did not significantly
change the pattern of labor coercion of Indigenous peoples in the region.
This was so notwithstanding the fact that the Mexican government extended
citizenship to all Indians and formally abolished slavery in 1829. In part this
was a result of the persistent influence of a cultural regime that consigned
unbaptized Indigenous peoples to the category “gente sin razon” (people
without reason) in contrast to “gente de razon” (people with reason):
Catholics, Spaniards, criollas (mixed-race people with Spanish ancestry),
and others deemed acculturated to Europe.67 Thus, the demand for labor
was articulated through a racialized hierarchy that cast gente sin razon as
workers requiring discipline. Formal enslavement was replaced by
increased reliance on debt peonage: “In the absence of slavery, the only way
for Mexicans to bind workers to their properties and businesses was by
extending credit to them.” Impoverished and landless peoples were offered
loans on predatory terms that virtually guaranteed they could not be repaid.
The debtor and his family were thus pressed into indefinite servitude, often
further extended by the practice of treating the debts of the father as
heritable. Although there were variations across regions in the particular
provisions, debt peonage expanded and became entrenched across
Mexico.68
Equally as significant was the use of the criminal sanction system. The
new Mexican government’s conferral of universal male citizenship to the
multiracial peoples of the region shifted the crucial distinction from
citizen/noncitizen to citizen/criminal. As historian Robert Buffington notes,
“Criminal acts rather than … ‘natural conditions’ … provided elite policy
makers the flexibility needed to legally delimit the all-too-inclusive (if still
male) category of citizen.”69 By the 1830s, laws in jurisdictions such as Los
Angeles required all Native peoples residing in the area to work or be
arrested and fined, and, if unable to pay, to perform forced labor. Over time,
the law dispensed with the payment of fines and sentenced Indigenous
peoples who were unemployed to work.70
Political conflict between the Mexican government and the United States
combined with the rise of manifest destiny as the new frame through which
colonization and expansion were justified as bestowing a benefit on
populations in need of improvement. Although there was opposition to the
project of acquiring Mexican lands because that acquisition would also
entail the incorporation of the Mexican (nonwhite) populations living
there,71 the Mexican-American War commenced in 1846. It ended in 1848
with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, pursuant to which the United States
took one-third of Mexico’s territory, including Texas, California, and New
Mexico, where debt peonage was prominent.
The treaty enabled further legal dispossession of Indigenous lands,
effectively eviscerated Mexican land grants, and placed the massive cession
lands under control of the US Congress and the designated territorial
governments. Each territory confronted fraught questions regarding the
pathway to statehood: What would be the status of chattel slavery? And
what would be the status of the far more prevalent system of debt peonage?
Indeed, there were many debates over whether debt peonage in the West
was equivalent to chattel slavery or was distinct, and these questions
overlapped with increasing sectional conflict between the North and South,
particularly over the question of the expansion of chattel slavery into the
territories.72 Congress adopted the Compromise of 1850, permitting
California to enter as a free state, while tightening the Fugitive Slave Act
and establishing territorial governments in Utah and New Mexico.
For the elites as well as settlers and would-be elites, it was important that
California be both free and securely under white control: the proposed state
constitution restricted the franchise to white males, defined white to include
“white male citizens of Mexico,” and banned chattel (Black) slavery.
However, rejecting the institution of slavery did not reflect egalitarian
sentiment, for the legislature also debated a provision to exclude all Blacks
from the state. The opposition to slavery derived from its asserted
degrading effect on white workers, but the contempt for slavery extended to
contempt for enslaved people as well. Ultimately, the formal ban was
abandoned, principally out of fear that it would compromise the state’s
efforts to enter the union.73
At the same time, the subjection of Indians was presumed. In 1850, the
year of statehood, the state legislature adopted “An Act for the Government
and Protection of Indians”—an Orwellian title for a measure that sought to
ensure Indigenous domination. Although the act provided that Indians
would be allowed to live in their traditional “homes and villages,” they
could be removed to another place “at the request of a white person or
proprietor.”74 Most significantly, as historian Shirley Ann Moore describes,
“Foreshadowing the restrictive work contracts, vagrancy laws, and black
codes that would subjugate the freedmen and freedwomen in the post-Civil
War South a decade and a half later, the new California law controlled
Indian labor, permitting the indenture of Indian children and mandating that
all Indians work. On the word of any white person, any Indian deemed to be
‘loitering or strolling about’ could be arrested and sold to the highest bidder
to labor for a period of four months.”75 This law specifically targeted
“Indians,” but by 1855 it was modified and amended to extend to all
“beggars … [or] persons who roam about from place to place.”76 This shift
proved an influential template for southern states after the Civil War.
Initial efforts to return formerly enslaved people to legal bondage were
robust in the form of the Black Codes adopted all across the South by
white-controlled state legislatures.77 One of the first, Mississippi’s “Act to
Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen,” authorized the arrest of any freedman
who left his employer by any white person, who, upon returning the
freedman to his employer, would then be entitled to receive a fee.78 The
Vagrancy Act required that “all freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes in this
State, over the age of eighteen” have written proof of employment at the
beginning of the year or face conviction and fines.79 Congress, under the
control of the Republican majority, was angered by these efforts to overturn
the result of the war and reinstall slavery, and in response it pushed for the
adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and ultimately the Fourteenth
Amendment, which barred states from denying equal protection of the laws.
In the wake of these constraints, southern legislatures shifted toward
formally race-neutral measures that proved equally effective. Instead of
imposing a requirement on “freedmen” or “mulattos,” vagrant was defined
as “any person wandering or strolling about in idleness, who is able to
work, and has no property to support him; or any person leading an idle,
immoral, profligate life.”80 In so doing, the law conferred virtually
unlimited discretion to sanction a person’s condition—unemployed,
unhoused, unfed—rather than their conduct. Once a person was arrested,
conviction followed, as did fines, then transfer, then work, and then—too
often—death.
The convict-leasing system was implemented through formally color-
blind laws and a ruthlessly targeted system of racialized administration.
Replacing the formal racial hierarchy of the Black Codes with the flexibility
of vagrancy and other public-order laws allowed for the evolution of a
system of labor extraction that thrived for a crucial period in the new
political economy of the South. In related time, debt peonage in the West
was coming under increasing pressure, and after legal proscription in 1867,
it slowly began to decrease in the region. However, important elements of
the system, particularly its reliance on debt to control labor, influenced the
southern regime. Thus, “the same forms of coercive labor that Congress
banned in New Mexico subsequently existed throughout the South into the
early twentieth century.”81
The spectacular violence of the convict-leasing system and free labor’s
hostility toward it for undermining the power of labor generated pressure
for reform and legal restrictions beginning in the late nineteenth century.
However, the conflict was resolved by restricting prison labor to state use,
replacing convict leasing with the chain gang. Under both regimes,
Blackness legitimated predatory extraction through the imposition of debt
constructed in color-blind legal forms. In many respects the formal erasure
of race has enabled the maintenance and recurrence of predatory forms of
debt and coercive collection practices despite the formal demise of debt
peonage, the condemnation of debtors’ prisons, and restrictions on prison
labor.
Debt and Water

Not only do racialized debt regimes extract through individual assignment

of obligations and enforcement through criminal sanctions; they also
operate through the market of financial products and the structures of state
finance under the neoliberal framework. Neoliberalism is heavily reliant on
debt as a way of structuring social, political, and economic relations.
Neoliberal economies also operate through a process of recycling in which
that which is devalued—the throwaway—is monetized. Race is central to
this process: the market encodes places and property with present and future
valuations while erasing or obscuring the historical patterns of racialized
dispossession at its core. Black spaces and geographies are cast as “no
man’s lands” that are not only forbidding but also trapped in a process of
decay from which they must be rescued. The predicate for intervention is
often a crisis of debt.
Black geographies are policed through the mechanism of permanent
emergency built around debt crises. They are locations that require extra
scrutiny—financial racial profiling—ostensibly because they have incurred
too much debt and lack the capacity or will to pay. Yet these same Black
spaces are prime sites of extraction through debt. Flint exemplifies these
phenomena and illustrates how racialized logics function through the
structure of debt.
The broad contours of the Flint water crisis are fairly well-known and
offer an account of official neglect, mismanagement, and malfeasance of a
predominantly Black and poor city. Although this narrative is not wrong, it
is incomplete: Flint’s water crisis was the outgrowth of a broader set of
conflicts and multiple structural crises that involved the manipulation of
public finance bonding authority tied to the provision of a public good—
access to clean water—and the incentives of the financial market. The net
result of the project was the exact opposite of the stated purpose: to obtain
clean water at a lower price. Instead, the city and its residents were
burdened with more debt and lost access to clean, safe water. The contours
of the extraction were shaped through a discourse of improvement and
development and were implemented through manipulating the city’s debt.
The poisoning of Flint is tethered to an economy of race that extracted
capital through the city’s precarity.
The prevailing narrative regarding Flint begins with its deficits: a
majority-Black city (60 percent), a high poverty rate (40 percent), a
decaying, debt-burdened wasteland in need of proper fiscal management.
Proper management came in the form of an emergency manager appointed
by the governor under a law ostensibly intended to relieve fiscally
distressed cities and to put their fiscal house in order.82 On this account,
Flint’s financial problems resulted from lack of fiscal discipline and the
reluctance to implement necessary but politically unpopular decisions. Put
another way, as Peter Hammer, a lawyer who has worked closely on the
crisis, states, the view was that “municipal distress is the outcome of public
mismanagement by groups of people who are incapable of governing
themselves.”83
Still, the emergency manager system was born in controversy. Prior
Michigan law authorized the appointment of emergency financial managers
to address fiscal problems in local government, but in 2011 Governor Rick
Snyder, dissatisfied with the limited authority the law conferred, advocated
for the enactment of a new provision that granted sweeping powers to the
emergency manager to supplant the authority of elected officials.84 Public
Law 4 was adopted and signed into law. However, the lack of any measure
of accountability fueled sustained and broad opposition, leading to a
referendum that repealed it. In response, the Republican-led state legislature
overrode the electorate and in 2012 enacted a law embodying the same
provisions.85
Flint became one of several cities or municipal agencies—the majority
of them predominantly Black or Latinx—to be deemed a financial disaster
in need of rescue.86 Governor Snyder invoked the act and installed an
emergency manager, who superseded the authority of the elected city
council. The emergency manager was empowered to negotiate and make all
decisions regarding the city’s operation—cancel contracts, including
collective bargaining agreements, sell public assets, hire and fire city
employees—but there was one crucial exception: the manager was
foreclosed from challenging any bond contracts and was required to pay the
city’s debt in full.87
In the search for cost savings, the emergency manager turned to the
city’s water-provision arrangements. Flint had a long-standing contract—
since 1967—with the Detroit Water Sewer District (DWSD) to supply Flint’s
water wholesale. Although there had not been complaints about the water
quality, some of the small cities and predominantly white areas of Genesee
County complained that they were overpaying Detroit and should seek an
alternative water source. A persistent dynamic of white distancing was
fueled by conjoining a narrative of cost savings with the depiction of DWSD
as dysfunctional and irredeemably fiscally irresponsible. Beginning in the
early 2000s, Genesee County began exploring the development of an
alternative plan to build a pipeline to Lake Huron. Despite the significant
cost—some $600 million—county officials argued that a new system would
be more cost-effective. The Karegnondi Regional Water Planning Group
was formed in 2007 to begin preliminary studies and was formally
incorporated in 2010. The city of Flint was identified as a participant in the
project, notwithstanding its prominent status as a too-poor, too-Black space.
As the end of Flint’s contract with DWSD approached, there were three
options for the water supply: (1) the city could continue to use DWSD water;
(2) it could reduce consumption of DWSD water and combine it with Flint
River water, treated in Flint’s own water treatment plant; or (3) Flint could
switch its water source entirely to the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA)
once it was built and, in the interim, could use treated Flint River water. The
latter two options required a major upgrade to the Flint water treatment
plant at a cost of $25–$60 million.
For a small city already in debt and under emergency management, the
prospect of locating that kind of capital was beyond daunting. Nevertheless,
the emergency manager selected the KWA option, rejecting the findings of
one report that recommended a different choice. He also removed the other,
less expensive options from consideration and even rejected an offer from
DWSD that potentially provided a 20 percent savings over thirty years when
compared to the KWA proposal. By 2013, Flint was still part of the KWA
project and was committed to fund 30 percent of the $285 million cost—
approximately $85 million. Of course, the core problem was that Flint could
not meet this obligation, nor could it have ever done so. The matter became
more urgent as KWA prepared to issue bonds in order to fund construction.
The answer came in the form of state intervention to enable the deal. The
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) used a procedure for
environmental enforcement actions, an “administrative consent order”
(ACO), that allows a local government to issue bonds beyond the
government’s bond limit to repair or mitigate an environmental violation.
Correspondence within the DEQ reflects that in this instance staffers
searched for a violation that would allow an ACO to be issued, while KWA’s
bond attorney anxiously warned that construction on the project would have
to cease if the ACO were not immediately forthcoming. The violation that
was the predicate for the ACO was remediating a small lime-sludge pool.
Accordingly, the loan was ultimately issued; it included a stipulation that
Flint use Flint River water while waiting for the pipeline to be completed.
However, not only was the bulk of the money to be spent on the KWA
pipeline; there was no consideration of financing to repair the city’s water
treatment plant.
The lack of any plan to provide clean water to the residents of Flint was
not legible: the primary focus remained on the financing. On this view, the
more salient problem was that, given Flint’s fiscal condition, the city would
default on repayment. To ensure that the bonds received a high rating and
consequently an attractive interest rate, Genesee County promised to
backstop Flint’s portion of the debt. In exchange, however, should Flint not
pay, the county could take a quarter of Flint’s state revenue-sharing money
and compel Flint to levy a tax to reimburse KWA. According to a member of
the Genesee County Board of Commissioners, the reality was that Flint
could “lose everything” if it left the KWA project.88 These terms obligated
Flint to gamble its limited finances to pay for a water-supply system that
was not yet completed, that it could not yet use, and that could not be
accessed without new city infrastructure for which it could not pay. Because
this deal was struck with the emergency manager, neither the residents of
Flint nor the elected officials who were stripped of decision-making
authority had any opportunity for meaningful input. However, the bond deal
itself was lauded: it won Bond Buyer magazine’s “Midwest Region Deal of
the Year” award in 2014.
By 2014, the contract with DWSD had ended, the KWA pipeline was not
complete, and the city’s water treatment plant still had not been repaired.
Although the rest of the county continued to get its water from DWSD while
construction on the pipeline proceeded, the emergency manager in Flint
decided that the city would not continue to purchase DWSD water, and he
instead authorized water to be drawn directly from the Flint River. What
followed was the silent poisoning of the city’s water supply as the untreated
water leached lead from the pipes. The consequence was permanent damage
to the infrastructure, estimated to cost $1.5 billion to repair.89
As the community began to experience persistent and significant health
complaints, and the condition of the water visibly deteriorated, residents
began to raise concerns, initially to no avail. It took two years of organizing
and protest by veteran organizers such as Claire McClinton and Nayyirah
Shariff of the Flint Democracy Defense League and Melissa Mays of Water
You Fighting For? to break through the wall of denial as officials repeatedly
asserted that the water was safe. These organizations, largely led by women
of color, persisted in getting the water tested, enlisting the assistance of a
few scientists and demanding the provision of alternative supplies of water.
Flint- and Detroit-based organizers marshaled community-based
research that not only uncovered the problem with the water but further
exposed the multiple structural factors that brought it about. Their analysis
first pointed toward the crucial institutional change that enabled the creation
of the crisis: the appointment of the emergency manager. After the authority
of the mayor, the city council, and the administrative officers had been
supplanted, the residents were left without access to information or the
means to hold decision makers accountable.
Secondly, although the prevailing view was that Flint’s financial distress
was caused by “natural” forces of deindustrialization, one proximate cause
of its dire straits and debt load was the state’s unilateral reduction of Flint’s
statutory share of revenue reimbursement over several years. The state
justified its fiscal decisions to deprive the city of critical resources as
needed fiscal discipline, but the foreseeable result, not only for Flint but
also for Detroit and other cities, was to make them poorer and more
indebted.90 The stage was set for the fiscal “emergency” that ushered in the
emergency management system and provided a rationale for a series of
otherwise untenable decisions.
Moreover, as Nayyirah Sharrif explained, the water crisis in Flint was
connected to the water crisis in the city of Detroit and the city’s bankruptcy.
In both instances, debt became the instrumentality and the justification for
implementing structural changes in governance and ceding control of the
cities’ assets and infrastructure to corporate capital. We the People of
Detroit, through its Community Research Collective, which included
Monica Lewis Patrick, exposed that the financial crisis in DWSD was related
to its investment strategy and its integration into the financial markets. In
purchasing credit-default swaps and embracing other exotic products and
transactions, DWSD lost vast amounts of money when the value of these
investments collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis. The deficit placed the
agency under severe strain, which it sought to solve on the backs of
Detroit’s residents by increasing rates and implementing a series of water
shutoffs for nonpayment in 2014.91 This draconian decision did not avert the
fiscal problems; the agency faced insolvency. As its financial status
deteriorated, so too did the city of Detroit face increasing pressure and
scrutiny for its asserted financial decline. Ultimately, Detroit was placed
under the control of emergency management. The status of DWSD was
implicated in Detroit’s bankruptcy petition filed by its emergency manager,
but the outcome did not reduce or discharge the agency’s debt. Instead,
Detroit’s bankruptcy settlement created a new entity—the Great Lakes
Water Authority—that took control of DWSD’s infrastructure for $50 million
per year. Once again, the reorganization reinforced a pattern in which race
and debt and dispossession are enmeshed within a logic of development and
a discourse of rescue. The consequences were clear to the activists:
NAYYIRAH SHARIFF: One of the consequences that happened is, I mean, I
call it, it’s a scheme. So what they did, the consequence of that was
the city of Flint, which was Detroit’s largest customer, water
customer, went off the system. It destabilized Detroit’s revenue, and it
was used as justification, the emergency manager in Detroit used it as
 justification for them to file bankruptcy. And a consequence of the
bankruptcy was that it regionalized the water system.
So really it was taking control away from a majority black
community and putting it into the hands of the more wealthy white
counterparts. And Flint kind of became collateral damage in the
scheme of taking this massively huge water system that’s worth
billions of dollars and transferring that control into another, another
system, probably on this road to privatize the system, and to totally
take it away from public hands and transfer it into private
corporations.…
So right now, like, we’re part of a regional authority. Detroit no
longer has ownership of their municipal water system. So that was, I
would say, like, the overall consequence of this whole thing.92
The regionalization of the system was not the only objective of the deal:
the reorganization was a prelude to an investment opportunity. Although
Flint appeared to lack valuable assets, its indebtedness made it a candidate
for another kind of asset stripping: the use of its bonding authority to
generate instruments for private investment and capital accumulation. By
dispensing with even limited forms of accountability, key elites in the
financial sector were able to deploy the city’s apparatus to further
financialize and extract private profits from public goods and infrastructure.
The structure of the bond deal for KWA required the participation of Flint,
and the fact that the city was insolvent was not allowed to impede that
participation. The object then was not to secure water for Flint but to use
Flint to structure the bond deal, producing profits for investors through
securing a healthy rate of return and fees for various banking and legal
services required in connection with the bond issue.
After the protracted struggle to obtain clean water in Flint in the wake of
the water crisis, it did not ultimately come from the KWA. In October 2015
Flint switched back to DWSD, now the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA),
and signed a thirty-year contract for its water supply. Yet the city was and is
still indebted for its 30 percent ownership share of the KWA pipeline.
Although Flint’s required payment to GLWA is reduced by the amount that
the city pays for debt service, it has not been released from the bond debt,
notwithstanding criminal investigations of various parties. The targeting of
cities like Flint for these forms of racialized extraction is part of larger
processes of accumulation through manufacturing and manipulating debt.
As Claire McClinton notes, in contrast to the devaluation of the people of
Flint, “the bondholders are sacred.”
The struggle over access to water in Flint reveals how dispossession and
accumulation are linked and produced through a racial logic that targets
Black spaces as useful raw material in public finance, debt production, and
financial markets. Examined more closely, it also discloses that under racial
capitalism, forms of extraction initiated against particular racialized
locations or subjects are rarely limited to one population. Both the problem
of manufactured debt and fiscal retrenchment have extended beyond the
boundaries of the city.93 The Flint Democracy League, speaking through
McClinton, powerfully illustrates this point: “We are a throwaway class
whose lives don’t matter. The pretext that was used to even get these
emergency managers in motion was that these minority cities are incapable
of handling their finances.… Let’s understand that it was a vehicle to
ensnare the whole state before they get through with it. So we have to
understand how they use the color question to attack all the people.”94
Her voice is a reminder. The forms of debt creation and management
across societal lines are certain; at the same time, racial hierarchy shapes
the contour of these systems and concentrates their effects. The mandate to
make Black lives matter is the possibility of altering the necropolitics of
racial capitalism, which has required violent extraction and racial
domination to sustain itself.
 NOTES

Chapter 3 epigraphs: Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200, 239 (1995); Martin Luther
King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963,
Washington, DC; Claire McClinton, Flint Democracy Defense League, quoted in Pauli, Flint Fights
Back.
1. Analytic philosopher and leading conceptual artist Adrien Piper describes conceptual art as
follows:
Most explicitly since [Marcel] Duchamp, the most significant works of art … have taken
seriously the challenge of heightened cognitive discrimination, i.e., the challenge to compel
the viewer to see what he did not see before.… [To do so, artists] question and extend the
limits of knowledge by offering anomalous objects, innovative in form, content, or both, as
an antidote to provincial and conventional habits of thought.… The point of presenting
geometrically, materially, and formally reductive objects was to draw the viewer’s attention
away from extrinsic associations and toward the specificity and materiality of the particular
object itself.… It was even more clearly the intrinsic meaning of the work, and not the
cognitive preconceptions the viewer brought to it, that dictated its appropriate
conceptualization. In subordinating medium to concept, Conceptual Art not only reaffirmed
the conceptual fluidity and inclusiveness of art … it also opened the door to the use of any
medium, event, or object deemed appropriate to the particular concepts the artist chose to
explore. Thus Conceptual Art repudiated all remaining traditional restrictions on content and
subject matter as well as on medium. Any such object became a potential locus of original
conceptual investigation, and all such objects became potential threats to the conceptual
unity of a rigidly or provincially structured self. Piper, “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” 41–
42.
Piper’s work grapples with crucial issues of identity, contesting dominant understandings of
race and gender, as well as the structures of the art world and the market. See Piper, “Adrien
Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.”
2. Piper, “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” 42.
3. Smith, “Cameron Rowland’s ‘91020000.’ ” The exhibition was first shown in Artists’
Space, New York City, in January 2016.
4. Duchamp, “1959 Interview.” Rowland’s use of fungible objects upends traditional
presumptions that the valuation of art is tied to its rare or unique character, its “pricelessness.”
Rowland’s artistic practice reflects the influence of artists such as Piper and, before her,
Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was a highly influential twentieth-century artist who rejected a
conception of art that invested objects with aesthetic value and meaning according to their
visual appeal. Instead, Duchamp initiated the use of “readymade” objects, ordinary everyday
things, designated as art by the artist. As a result, the focus of the artwork was not “retinal,” as
Duchamp called it, but the process and the concept that undergirded its presentation.
5. Uri McMillan, email message to author, December 15, 2015. McMillan, a cultural historian,
suggests that one might think of this work as “experimenting with the ways that an object
might address not only its beholder but the financial networks it circulates within.”
6. The text then is (part of) the work itself, conveying a specific and unambiguous message. It
is a deeply political project that does not rely on individual perception to determine the work’s
meaning. As Adrien Piper explains, “The union of the personal with the political often makes
such work seem excessively confrontational or didactic. I think this is because art functions for
me as not only a medium of exploration, but also a medium of communication between me
and the viewer. The idea that art may actually attempt to communicate something to a viewer
is historically a commonsense concept. But it has been lost in a contemporary art context that
has been cowed into self-censorship.” Piper, Out of Order, 1:xxxi.
In this way, Rowland’s use of the material form is designed to expose and call attention to
structural realities. As he puts it, he is concerned with “how these structural (economic, legal
and political) conditions manifest and determine reality. If these realities may be understood
through their materiality, then sculpture may be an appropriate form towards an analysis and
criticism of such realities. I understand materials to include laws and policies as well as
physical matter. The dynamics of privatization, subsistence and criminalization, are central.”
Cameron Rowland, email message to author, February 25, 2015.
7. Rowland, 91020000, 5.
8. Weprin, 2018 Annual Report; Nellis, Color of Justice. Blacks also experience the highest
rate of incarceration and constitute more than 50 percent of the prison population in twelve
states.
9. Rowland, 91020000, 4.
10. Adarand v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995).
11. Gilmore, “What Is the ‘Racial’?” Crucial to Gilmore’s intervention is the reminder that
“racial” should not be exclusively or reductively coded as white over Black; see Robinson,
Black Marxism, 2–4, 25–27. As Cedric Robinson insists, not only can the origins of capitalism
not be disaggregated from racism, but from capitalism’s inception, its racial character rested
on constructed differences among peoples within Europe. Thus, racialist myths were not
exclusive to Europe’s colonial encounter with Africa but were manifest in, for example,
England’s earlier colonization and settlement of Ireland—a project justified on the grounds
that the Irish were an “inferior race.”
12. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6. Slavery’s afterlife is not affect, attitude, or metaphor, nor
does it rest on equivalences between current and historical practices. As Saidiya Hartman
explains, slavery’s afterlife indexes the way that “black lives are still imperiled and devalued
by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”
13. Lichtenstein, Twice the Work. Although white supremacist ideology had cast Black people
as inherently criminal, prior to Emancipation prisons in the South were populated by whites
because slave owners were the primary source of punishment of enslaved people. Oshinsky,
“Worse Than Slavery,” 32. After the war, Black freedom was seen as a threat to “good order,”
so petty crimes such as theft of food or other essential goods, or “disorderly” behaviors, were
magnified as existential threats and invoked to justify the mass incarceration of formerly
enslaved persons. The result was that “Southern prisons turned Black.” Oshinsky, “Worse
Than Slavery,” 34.
14. US Const. amend. XIII, § 1 (1865); Pope, “Mass Incarceration.” Legal scholar James Gray
Pope argues that the current reading of the amendment as authorizing imprisonment for a
crime actually contravenes its original meaning as reflected by the actions taken by the
Republican Congress after ratification, including outlawing convict leasing.
15. “Unlike convict leasing, which facilitated private corporations’ use of prisoners’ labor, the
chain gang system restricted the labor of the incarcerated to ‘state-use.’ … The interwoven
economy of road improvement and prison labor expanded on previous stages of
industrialization. The development of transport infrastructure and logistics was a precondition
for the shipping of slaves across the Atlantic.… The transition to chain gang labor extended
this genealogy, adapting it to the development of publicly owned infrastructure.” Rowland,
91020000, 2–3.
16. Gorman, “Back on the Chain Gang,” 441.
17. Rowland, 91020000, 3; Scherrer and Shah, “Political Economy of Prison Labour,” 32;
Delaney et al., American History, Race, and Prison.
18. Rowland, 91020000, 3, citing Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 57, 83. That capital investment was
routed to prison construction was not inevitable. It was the outcome of a crisis-management
strategy in which political consensus was built around a narrative of the “problem” and the
characteristics of the “relative surplus population” that was geographically and racially
concentrated. See Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 107–13.
19. Rowland, 91020000, 3.
20. Zatz, “Working at the Boundaries,” 870. Gilmore notes that even though most states
legally require prisoners to work, “the fact is that most prisoners are idle, and that those who
work do so for a public agency.” Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 21. Gilmore’s observation is situated
in the context of refuting equivalences between contemporary forms of carceral labor and
convict leasing, for the latter involved the direct transfer of the value of prisoners’ labor to
private capital. Nevertheless, carceral institutions are expressly given legal authority to compel
incarcerated people to work, and many do, particularly in operating the institutions
themselves. Earlier estimates from 2008 are that between 600,000 and 1,000,000 prisoners in
jails and prisons work, representing approximately one-half of the total population. Zatz,
“Working at the Boundaries,” 857. Moreover, given the limits on pay and on the ability to
refuse work, or to affect working conditions, “incarcerated … workers’ labor … is the inverse
of free waged labor” and can function as a form of punishment. Hatton, “When Work Is
Punishment,” 175. Prison authorities are not subject to routine mechanisms of accountability
or transparency with regard to prisoners’ labor. Scherrer and Shah, “Political Economy of
Prison Labour,” 41. The current value of goods and services produced by prisoners’ labor is
thus difficult to accurately access. In 2008, the estimated value was more than $2 billion
annually. Zatz, “Working at the Boundaries,” 869. In the absence of other rehabilitative
options, however, access to work is sometimes cast as a benefit or a privilege for which people
in prison compete.
21. Rowland, 91020000, 4.
22. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 117. Thus, for example, the savings from the reduced price paid
for incarcerated labor is not booked as profit but is dispersed as savings. Gilmore notes that the
operating budget of the California Department of Corrections, the largest state agency, “is
flexible, moving costs among line items,” including, for example, paying guards’ overtime
salaries out of funds allocated for prisoners’ medical expenses (119).
23. Rowland, 91020000, 4.
24. Woods, “Les Misérables of New Orleans.”
25. Zatz, “Get to Work,” 329. Zatz’s project powerfully addresses the undertheorized domain
of work requirements enforced through threat of incarceration. His analysis identifies carceral
work mandates—policies such as child support and criminal legal debt that require the debtor
to “Get to Work, or Go to Jail” as such a location.
26. Graeber, Debt, 21.
27. Charbonneau and Hansen, “Debt, Neoliberalism and Crisis,” 1042. Lazzarato relies on
Friedrich Nietzsche for this formulation.
28. Atkinson, “Rethinking Credit as Social Provision,” 1098.
29. One of the main arguments advanced by slaveholders was that abolition destroyed their
property without compensation. Indeed, this was the premise of the holding in Dred Scott that
the Missouri Compromise, which banned slavery in the Northwest territories, operated as an
uncompensated taking of private property without due process of law. Dred Scott v. Sandford,
60 U.S. 393 (1857). Although abolition arguably destroyed the value of enslaved persons as
assets or wealth, this did not settle the issue of value. Courts decided, often over express
legislative provisions to the contrary, that debt obligations secured by enslaved people
survived emancipation. Even after the formal end of enslavement, the law legitimated financial
transactions tethered to Black bodies through the obligation of contract. In White v. Hart, the
Supreme Court held invalid a provision of the post–Civil War Georgia state constitution
prohibiting the enforcement of any debt “the consideration for which was a slave,” thus
permitting such debts to be collected. 80 U.S. 646 (1871). That same year the Court, in Osborn
v. Nicholson, upheld a debt incurred to purchase a slave notwithstanding Emancipation or the
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. 80 U.S. 654 (1871). Moreover, not only were various
compensation schemes for slave owners proposed; ultimately, one was successfully adopted
and implemented for slave owners in Washington, DC, who were paid $300 per enslaved
person as part of the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862. Hunter, “When
Slaveowners Got Reparations.”
30. As Hartman notes, “If the control of blacks was formerly effected by absolute rights of
property in the black body, dishonor, and the quotidian routine of violence, these techniques
were supplanted by the liberty of contract that spawned debt-peonage, the bestowal of right
that engendered indebtedness and obligation and licensed naked forms of domination and
coercion, and the cultivation of a work ethic that promoted self-discipline and induced internal
forms of policing.” She identifies and traces this logic, even in textbooks written for and
taught to the freedmen. One passage she cites reads as follows: “With treasure and precious
blood your freedom has been purchased. Let these sufferings and sacrifices never be forgotten
when you remember that you are not now a slave but a freedman.” Hartman, Scenes of
Subjection, 130, citing Isaac W. Brinckerhoff, Advice to Freedmen (New York, 1864). The
freedman thus came into being as an indebted subject.
31. Zatz, “Working at the Boundaries,” 869–70. Some researchers estimate that a relatively
small percentage—perhaps 10 percent—of imprisoned people work in prison industries:
private companies that contract for their labor or governmental prison-industry companies that
rely on that labor for the production of goods. The majority of incarcerated people who work
do so for the operation of the prison itself. Scherrer and Shah, “Political Economy of Prison
Labour,” 41. Trade-union and small-firm opposition to prison labor has kept the percentage
relatively low, as have federal bans on goods produced by compulsory labor. At the same time,
there are carve-outs: notably, the federal prohibition does not extend to services provided by
prison labor. Zatz, “Working at the Boundaries,” 869. There are other provisions that further
relax the restriction: the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program of 1979 sets
parameters for private firms using prison labor; the Percy Amendment authorizes the sale of
prison-made goods contingent on meeting specific conditions; and UNICOR, the
governmental prison-industry company that produces goods for governmental agencies and,
since 2012, for private companies. Scherrer and Shah, “Political Economy of Prison Labour,”
40. States have followed suit in creating structures for deploying prison labor to perform
services or produce products outside the regulatory framework of employment law regarding
wages, hours, or a host of other conditions. Zatz, “Working at the Boundaries,” 868–69. The
data on the number of hours worked, net wages, and work conditions are not generally
collected or published; this is an area in which the state’s operations are “opaque.” Scherrer
and Shah, “Political Economy of Prison Labour,” 41. There are signs that convict leasing is
once again emerging. Zatz, “Working at the Boundaries,” 870. Noteworthy is its reappearance
in the agricultural sector, particularly as immigration enforcement has become more draconian.
Rice, “How Anti-immigration Policies Are Leading Prisons.”
32. United States Department of Justice, Investigation of the Ferguson Police.
33. Benns and Strode, “Debtor’s Prison”; Harvard Law Review Association, “State Bans on
Debtors’ Prisons,” 1027–30.
34. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 17–20, 125–27. The system of municipal finance is further
implicated in buttressing police violence as well as mass incarceration as even difficult-to-
obtain judgments or settlements obtained against cities for police brutality are sometimes paid
through the issuance of bonds. Goodwin, Shepard, and Sloan, Police Brutality Bonds.
35. The Peonage Abolition Act of 1867, U.S. Statutes at Large, 39th Cong. Sess. II. Chap. 187,
p. 546 (1867).
36. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another, 222. Convict leasing was formally abolished across the
South from the 1890s to 1928, while the practice often continued in other forms.
37. Zatz, “Working at the Boundaries,” 869. Federal law prohibits the sale of goods produced
through prison labor in interstate commerce. However, this prohibition does not apply to goods
produced for state use.
38. Hampson, “New American Debtors’ Prisons,” 19–20. In 1821, Kentucky became the first
state to abolish debtors’ prisons. “Many other states followed suit in the 1830s and 1840s, and
by the 1870s the practice was discontinued by almost all of the states then part of the Union”
(21).
39. Federal constitutional law has repeatedly articulated these limitations. Extending a
person’s jail sentence for inability to pay criminal justice obligation was held to violate equal
protection in Williams v. Illinois, 399 U.S. 235 (1970). In Tate v. Short, the Court held that it
was unconstitutional to “impos[e] a fine as a sentence and then automatically [convert] it into
a jail term because the defendant is indigent and cannot forthwith pay the fine in full.” 401
U.S. 395, 397 (1971). In Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court held that it was
unconstitutional to revoke a defendant’s probation for failure to pay a fine or restitution
without determining that the failure is willful. 461 U.S. 660 (1983). However, Bearden’s
admonition that the state may not “punish a person for his poverty” has largely been observed
in the breach. Birckhead, “New Peonage,” 1595. In the main, reform efforts have sought to
enforce the requirement that the court make an individual assessment of the debtor’s ability to
pay. Given the localized inquiry and the latitude permitted for judicial discretion, these
reforms have been difficult to implement and monitor.
40. The literature is extensive. Some prominent examples include ACLU, In for a Penny;
Harris, Pound of Flesh; and Murch, “Paying for Punishment.”
41. Examination of the specific social and political contexts and conditions that triggered legal
sanction in each of these instances is beyond the scope of this chapter, although it is important
to note that, broadly speaking, dynamics of resistance, reform, and retrenchment are evident,
as are changes in political economy and societal ruptures.
42. Political theorist Mauricio Lazzarato has convincingly argued that “neoliberalism has,
since its emergence, been founded on a logic of debt.” Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man,
25. As Lazzarato contends, the reality of debt under neoliberalism is that it has become a
“highly efficient mechanism of control and capture” as debt has become “infinite.”
Charbonneau and Hansen, “Debt, Neoliberalism and Crisis,” 1042.
43. Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man; Appel, Whitley, and Kline, Power of Debt.
44. Seamster, “Black Debt, White Debt,” 31.
45. “Black debt is harder to convert into an asset.” See Seamster, “Black Debt, White Debt,”
33.
46. In Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor provides a compelling example of predatory
inclusion in post-1960s housing policy that incorporated Black people, and particularly
women, into the housing market. As the market was riddled with exploitative patterns and
incentives—unfair lending, fraudulent appraisals and disclosures, dilapidated properties—
many Black home buyers were left in debt, left in foreclosure, or locked in substandard
housing. As Taylor points out, the project of reform was “a classic formulation of postwar
racial liberalism” that “posited inclusion as the antidote to the crisis created by exclusion”
without contending with the structure of the market under racial capitalism. Taylor, Race for
Profit, 17.
47. Louise Seamster and Raphaël Charron-Chénier similarly define predatory inclusion as “a
process whereby members of a marginalized group are provided with access to a good,
service, or opportunity from which they have historically been excluded but under conditions
that jeopardize the benefits of this access …, reproduc[ing] marginalization for these groups
while allowing already-dominant social actors to derive significant profits.” Seamster and
Charron-Chénier, “Predatory Inclusion and Education Debt,” 199.
48. As Miranda Joseph argues, Michel Foucault’s “economy of illegalities” under which
property crimes of the poor are sanctioned through criminal law while commercial crimes of
the capitalist class are managed through systems of mitigation is both a disciplinary project
and “a central strategy of racial formation.” Joseph, Debt to Society, 46.
49. Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks. Thus, as Baradaran has documented, the exodus of
banking institutions from poor minority communities, facilitated by deregulation, resulted in
casting poor people into the market of fringe lenders, such as payday lenders and check-
cashing services.
50. Ferreira da Silva and Chakravartty, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt,” 363–64.
51. “Black debt is a key industry for generating white wealth.” Seamster, “Black Debt, White
Debt,” 34.
52. Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man.
53. Though beyond the scope of this chapter, one way of thinking about Black debt is that it
marks the outer limits of the coercive and predatory dimensions of debt. This excess provides
legitimacy to lesser but still exploitative dimensions of debt creation and collection, with some
modifications, extended to other vulnerable populations.
54. Gilmore, “What Is the ‘Racial’?”
55. Katherine McKittrick describes Black geographies as follows: “These black geographies,
while certainly not solely inhabited by black bodies, are classified as imperiled and dangerous,
or spaces ‘without’/spaces of exclusion, even as those who have always struggled against
racial violence and containment populate them.” McKittrick, “On Plantations,” 947.
56. In this sense, this observation is consistent with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s description of
the “inner-city”—what I describe here as Black geographies—as a place often mistakenly cast
as a low-value location: “Far from being a static site of dilapidation and ruin, the urban core
was becoming an attractive place of unparalleled opportunity, a new frontier of economic
investment and extraction for the real estate and banking industries. The race for profit in the
1970s transformed decaying urban space into what one U.S. Senator described as a ‘golden
ghetto,’ where profits for banks and real estate brokers were never ending.” Taylor, Race for
Profit, 4.
57. Schermerhorn, Business of Slavery, 2.
58. Fugitive Slave Clause, US Const. art. IV, § 2, cl. 3; Kish and Leroy, “Bonded Life,” 633.
Indeed, Jefferson described slaves as “indebted to him.”
59. As K-Sue Park has powerfully illustrated, the expansion of mortgage foreclosure as a debt-
collection mechanism that included forfeiture of the land was an innovation of the settler
colonies in North America. Under English law, a mortgagor could foreclose on a debtor but
could not evict him and take the land. This limitation eroded in the colonies. European settlers
fraudulently induced Indigenous people to borrow money to purchase goods, securing the loan
with the land as collateral. Once the debt was unpaid, the creditors moved to foreclose, and
they took the land to discharge the debt. These and related practices were deemed necessary
for development to avoid clogging the market. Thus, land became fully commodified in the
colonies, enabling the expansion of credit, land acquisition, capitalist accumulation, and
concentration of wealth. Park, “Money, Mortgages.”
60. Reséndez, Other Slavery, 5, 6.
61. Reséndez, Other Slavery, 246. Reséndez describes the New Mexico sale of Indigenous
slaves as “fragmented,” and at times involving negotiations with those subjected to the
transaction over the terms of service.
62. Gómez, Manifest Destinies, 111–12.
63. Reséndez, Other Slavery, 5–6.
64. Reséndez, Other Slavery, 10. Notably, even though some of these forms such as
encomiendas were constructed to limit the authority of the grant holders by requiring payment
of wages, limiting the term of work, and restricting the sale or leasing of the laborers, over
time, particularly in the Caribbean and parts of Mexico, these constraints eroded to the point
that Indians subjected to this system were effectively enslaved. Reséndez, Other Slavery, 36.
65. As Reséndez argues, they shared common characteristics with slavery: “forcible removal
…, inability to leave, violence or threat of violence to compel work, and nominal or no pay.”
Reséndez, Other Slavery, 10.
66. Freeman and Fraser, “Barbarism and Progress,” 2.
67. Moore, “ ‘We Feel the Want,’ ” 97.
68. Reséndez, Other Slavery, 238.
69. Buffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico, 4.
70. Importantly, Kelly Hernandez’s compelling account reveals that this carceral regime was
not simply about labor control but also about displacement, dispossession, and Native
elimination. Hernandez, City of Inmates, 33.
71. Gómez, Manifest Destinies, 3–5, 17. Laura Gómez’s Manifest Destinies includes an
illuminating discussion of the debate over manifest destiny, particularly in the context of the
American Southwest.
72. Kiser, “ ‘Charming Name,’ ” 170.
73. Moore, “ ‘We Feel the Want,’ ” 103, 104.
74. Moore, “ ‘We Feel the Want,’ ” 105.
75. Moore, “ ‘We Feel the Want,’ ” 105. As the statute provided,
Any Indian able to work and support himself in some honest calling, not having
wherewithal to maintain himself, who shall be found loitering and strolling about, or
frequenting public places where liquors are sold, begging, or leading an immoral or
profligate course of life, shall be liable to be arrested on the complaint of any resident
citizen of the county, and brought before the Justice of the Peace.… And if said Justice …
shall be satisfied that he is a vagrant … he shall make out a warrant under his hand and seal,
authorizing and requiring the officer having him in custody, to hire out such vagrant within
twenty four hours to the best bidder … for the highest price that can be had, for any term not
exceeding four months. The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, ch. 133, Cal.
Stat. (April 22, 1850).
76. An Act To Punish Vagrants, Vagabonds, and Dangerous and Suspicious Persons (Cal.
1855), 217.
77. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery,” 20–22.
78. An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen (Miss. 1865), 84.
79. An Act to Amend the Vagrant Laws of the State (Miss. 1866), 9.
80. A vagrant is “any person wandering or strolling about in idleness, who is able to work, and
has no property to support him; or any person leading an idle, immoral, profligate life, having
no property to support him.” An Act to Define and Punish Vagrancy (Ala. 1903), 244.
81. Kiser, “ ‘Charming Name,’ ” 189.
82. This account draws from Hammer, “Flint Water Crisis,” as well as presentations by the
Flint Democracy Defense League and We the People of Detroit.
83. Hammer, “Flint Water Crisis,” 103, 106.
84. Public Act 101 of 1988 and Public Act 72 of 1990 were passed to give the state some
control over governmental bodies facing bankruptcy. Snyder proposed Public Act 4, which in
cases of “financial stress” authorized the governor to appoint an emergency manager “to act
for and in the place and stead of the governing body and the office of chief administrative
officer of the local government.” Michigan Public Act 4 (2011). The powers granted were
broad: to modify or terminate contracts, including collective-bargaining agreements; to
eliminate or consolidate departments; and to privatize and sell public assets. Once the
emergency manager was appointed, the governing body and the administrative officer could
act only upon his or her approval.
85. Although the law was blocked by popular referendum, it was reimposed in essentially the
same form through the state legislature. Michigan Public Act 436 (2012).
86. Because the emergency manager law has been deployed more often against Black cities
and municipal agencies, a lawsuit was filed against the state, alleging racially discriminatory
administration of the act, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection
guarantee. The complaint also included a claim under the Voting Rights Act, asserting that the
displacement of city government by the emergency manager was a denial of democratic
control. In Phillips, et al. v. Snyder, the district court dismissed the voting rights claim. 2014
WL 6474344 (E.D.Mich., 2014). The decision was upheld on review. Phillips v. Snyder, 836
F.3d 707 (6th Cir. 2016). The discriminatory administration claim was left standing. In 2017
the petition for review was denied by the US Supreme Court. Bellant v. Snyder, 138 S.Ct. 66
(2017). See also Bosman and Davey, “Anger in Michigan.”
87. Stanley, “Emergency Manager,” 17.
88. Pauli, Flint Fights Back, 89.
89. Hammer, “Flint Water Crisis,” 116.
90. As one article describes it, the dire fiscal condition of several Michigan cities was
attributable to the state’s actions:
Over the past decade, lawmakers and governors from both political parties have used some
$6.2 billion in sales tax collections to fill state budget holes rather than fulfill a statutory
revenue sharing promise to local communities, according to the Michigan Municipal
League.… Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, missed out on $732
million between 2003 and 2013, per the report. Flint, under control of an emergency
manager, could have had an extra $54.9 million to work with. Cities like Pontiac and
Lansing have lost more than $40 million each. The Municipal League says the annual
budget “raid” has diverted money that should have been used to maintain city services. It
argues that the Legislature has helped caused some of the very financial emergencies that
have prompted state takeovers or other forms of intervention.
“It’s like somebody stealing your wallet and then coming back hours later and saying,
‘What, you have no money?’ ” said Utica Mayor Jacqueline Noonan, whose small city of
4,700 residents missed out on $1.4 million in the last decade. “It’s ridiculous. It’s insane.”
Oosting, “Michigan’s Revenue Sharing ‘Raid.’ ”
91. We the People of Detroit, Mapping the Water Crisis; Ponder and Omstedt, “Violence of
Municipal Debt.”
92. Shariff, “Is Flint Michigan’s Water Quality Really Restored?”
93. Ponder and Omstedt, “Violence of Municipal Debt,” 6.
94. Bailey, “Untold Story of Flint.”
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II   Administration
THE OPEN SECRET OF COLONIAL RACIAL CAPITALIST VIOLENCE
 FOUR · Kimberly Kay Hoang

In Search of the Next El Dorado

: Mining for Capital in a Frontier Market with

Colonial Legacies

Over the last fifteen years we have witnessed the simultaneous economic
rise of East Asia economies and the decline of Western economies. As of
2012, according to the World Bank, Asia’s stock markets accounted for 32
percent of global market capitalization, ahead of the United States at 30
percent and Europe at 25 percent.1 In this context, categories like First
World and Third World or global North and global South are no longer
useful concepts for thinking about the world economy. The world is now
divided between a global elite of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and poor
folks in developed and emerging markets around the world2 or, as Chandra
Mohanty previously conceptualized this division, the one-third world and
the two-thirds world, respectively.3
With their rapid growth, emerging and frontier markets are poised to
become the most important markets of the twenty-first century.4 Found in
developing countries with rapid industrialization and increasing integration
into the global economy, emerging and frontier markets are experiencing
growth rates more than double those of advanced economies.5 Despite the
centrality of emerging markets in the global economy, these markets have
attracted more attention from managers and investors than from scholars in
the social sciences or humanities.6
 Social scientists who examine emerging markets focus their work
primarily on how institutions—or the formal and informal “rules of the
game”—affect economic activity.7 For example, economic sociologists
focus on the conditions for investment, such as levels of corruption,
stability of the legal regime, and types of accountability.8 Political scientists
develop typologies of state regimes through cross-country comparisons.9
Humanities researchers tend to focus overwhelmingly on the devastating
consequences of dispossession that result from these capital flows.10 The
majority of this work analyzes capitalism through a problematic binary of
wealthy, white, foreign capitalists and a group of dispossessed, local poor
people of color.11 Virtually no one studies the capitalists themselves and the
tensions that exist at the top between foreign and local elites who cooperate
and compete to profit off national resources.
This chapter is motivated by one basic question: how do foreign
investors move money from around the world into emerging and frontier
markets (a) with histories of colonialism and imperialism and (b) where
local elite government officials strongly resist new forms of neo-economic
colonialism from foreign investors? This chapter brings together insights
from the humanities and social sciences to examine how the broader social,
historical, and colonial contexts set the stage for contemporary investment
relations between foreign investors and postcolonial/imperial government
officials in highly regulated and protected sectors of the economy that
might be perceived as particularly nationalistic, such as mining, oil, gas,
natural resources, and real estate.
Drawing inspiration from scholars of postcolonialism and racial
capitalism, this chapter makes two important contributions to the study of
global elites. First, it employs Michael Burawoy’s extended case method by
applying “reflexive science to ethnography in order to extract the general
from the unique, to move from ‘micro’ to the ‘macro,’ and to connect the
present to the past in anticipation of the future, all by building on
preexisting theory.” In doing so, this chapter works to analyze
contemporary investment flows through a postcolonial lens by “dig[ging]
beneath the political binaries of colonizer and colonized … metropolis and
periphery,” East and West, and capital and state, to uncover the multiple
processes and tensions in negotiating control of a country’s natural
resources.12 Second, working through a framework of racial capitalism, this
chapter disrupts the current scholarship that focuses on the ultra-wealthy
with assumptions that they all come from Western nations. The emergence
of new wealth made in Russia, East and Southeast Asia, and the Middle
East unsettles previous assumptions that wealth is associated with Western
nations and by proxy with whiteness. As I illustrate, a new global elite that
makes up part of the one-third world has become extremely wealthy as a
result of the fortunes amassed in emerging and frontier markets. Pushing the
analysis one step further, this chapter advances a colonial racial capitalist
framework that accounts for the fact that elites of any color can exploit the
poor of color.13 At the same time, power struggles among global elites occur
between groups of people who are not all white. In fact, local elites operate
with anticolonial frames that are often caught in a power struggle with
foreign investors over who gets to profit off the national resources.
The country that I focus on in this chapter is Vietnam; however, as the
chapter will detail, capital investment into this market comes from all over
the world. I trace the movement of global capital from offshore companies
in places like the British Virgin Islands to special-purpose vehicles or
holding companies in Singapore or Thailand before being invested onshore
in Vietnam. The sector of the economy that this chapter focuses on is
mining.14 Because this sector is so small, however, this chapter develops a
composite case by merging investments into three different mines to better
anonymize my data sources. The case illustrates how mining for capital led
to a showdown between investors and the government that left each entity
feeling slighted by the other and ultimately led to the demise of a $140
million investment project. This created a cascade effect of losses for both
institutional investors and small mom-and-pop shop investors from all over
the world.
Vietnam: Legacies of Colonialism

Vietnam endured more than a thousand years of Chinese colonialism. The

Han Chinese Empire led a conquest of Vietnam in 111 BCE, which was
followed by a revolt against Chinese occupation by the Trung sisters in 39
CE. After the Vietnamese gained independence in 939 CE, they continued to
adopt Chinese political institutions and social values while creating their
own distinct cultural world. During its early conquest in 111 BCE, the Han
Dynasty forced Vietnam to adopt the Chinese writing system, their native
language and culture, and Confucianism. Through a series of dynasties (Ly,
Ngo, Dinh, Le, Ly Tran, and Ho) and after a thousand years of on-and-off
rule, Vietnam gained its independence from China following a Vietnamese
rebellion and Le Loi’s defeat in 1427. Between 1427 and the early 1600s,
Vietnam was led by the Le and Mac dynasties.
In the early 1600s, Alexandre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit missionary,
first arrived in Hanoi. France obtained control over northern Vietnam
following victory over China in the Sino-French War in 1884. Between
1844 and 1873, the French captured various parts of Vietnam, starting with
Da Nang, followed by Saigon, and then finally Hanoi. French Indochina,
which was established in 1887, brought together Annam (Da La), Tonkin
(Hanoi), and Cochinchina (Saigon), Cambodia, and Laos. For nearly a
century the French colonized modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos,
which were officially known collectively as the French Indochinese Union
in 1877. France colonized Vietnam for nearly sixty years before it came
under Japanese occupation in 1945 during World War II. Between 1946 and
1954, the Viet Minh engaged in an anti-French resistance war, led by Ho
Chi Minh and the People’s Army of Vietnam’s Vo Nguyen Giap. In 1954
Ho Chi Minh declared the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam
after the Viet Minh won the war with France in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
This led to the partition of Vietnam into two parts: the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam in the North, under the control of the Viet Minh, and the State of
Vietnam in the South. Following the Geneva Accord of 1954, the French
left Vietnam, bringing an end to French Indochina.
 The Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, which involved the USS Maddox and
North Vietnamese boats in an international confrontation, eventually led to
the US involvement in the Vietnam War. This war, also referred to as the
Second Indochina War, was officially fought between North Vietnam and
South Vietnam. The North was backed by the Soviet Union and China, and
the South was supported primarily by the United States, with allies from
South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia. United States
involvement in South Vietnam dramatically transformed the local political
economy, for the US military fought alongside the South Vietnamese
republican forces against northern Vietnamese communist fighters.
Between 1962 and 1975, the United States spent more than $169 billion on
the Vietnam War, which was more than the total economic aid given to all
other developing countries during those years.15 The capture of South
Vietnam in Saigon by the People’s Army of Vietnam led to the fall of
Saigon in 1975, marking the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification
of North and South Vietnam.
After the fall of Saigon, Vietnam was closed off from other nations, but
“the Vietnamese were no longer hesitant to assert their territorial claims
against China, nor were the Cambodians reluctant to press theirs against
Vietnam.”16 During 1978–1979, Vietnam found itself in an armed conflict
with Cambodia to remove Pol Pot from power. In China, however, Mao
fully endorsed Pol Pot’s plans for Cambodia. At the same time, the Sino-
Vietnamese War, also known as the Third Indochina War, involved a border
conflict as China reacted to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. In addition,
Vietnam began to lay claim to the islands in the Spratly group in the South
China Sea, which led to a series of naval conflicts with China that lasted for
a decade.
During the postwar period, “Vietnam was in need of massive aid in order
to rebuild and while the leadership in Hanoi was attracted to Western aid
which would have come with more advanced technologies, they wanted to
strengthen their relationships with the Soviet Bloc and China who would
provide half of the aid and Western Europe, the United States, Japan, and
Canada would provide the other half.”17 The Soviet Union was richer at the
time and provided much more aid than China did, and in exchange the
Soviet Union expected Vietnam to support Soviet policies, which made
Vietnamese leaders anxious about getting caught in the middle of a Sino-
Soviet conflict. The White House perspective on this conflict was that the
Vietnam-Cambodia conflict represented the war between China and Russia.
In 1978 Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Jimmy Carter’s national
security adviser at the time—went on a trip to China, where he declared US
support for China against “regional hegemony,” which was in reference to
Vietnam’s preparation to invade Cambodia. Brzezinski pressed Carter to
develop a relationship with China as part of a long-term strategy to oppose
regional hegemony by any single power, thereby signaling to China that
Washington was sympathetic to its troubles with the Soviet Union and
Vietnam. To the United States, Vietnam was just a puppet for the Soviet
Union, and the fact that China was worried about Vietnam becoming a
Soviet base at the time was important for US strategic influence in the
region.18
Meanwhile, Vietnam effectively closed its doors to foreign relations
(except for the Soviet Bloc) and established a communist property market
where the state owned and controlled the land. Vietnam’s socialist project
then began to collapse under conditions of extreme poverty. Vietnam
continued to suffer from economic stagnation, lagging productivity, and
rapid inflation. During the time that the newly independent country
negotiated its conflicts and strategic relations with China, Russia, and
Cambodia, citizens in the country were living in an environment of
widespread poverty, heavily subsidized production, and postwar
infrastructural instability as the country worked to rebuild itself.
Vietnam’s Postwar Market Economy: Opening Its Doors to Foreign Trade
and Investment

In 1986, after a decade of lagging productivity and rapid inflation in the

context of communist reform and other worldwide transformations
(glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union and the Deng Xiaoping
reforms in China), Vietnam introduced the Doi Moi program of economic
liberalization, which effectively transitioned Vietnam into a socialist-
oriented market economy in which the Communist Party maintained a
political monopoly. These reforms opened Vietnam to foreign trade,
investment, and large-scale tourism, setting off a prolonged and continuing
period of economic growth and development.19 In a “market economy with
a socialist transition,” foreign investors were allowed to enter the market,
and the government encouraged private businesses via free trade, free
markets, and profits for some and wages for others.20 After 2000, economic
changes accelerated, and the political balance shifted as the country
managed pressure from foreign investors to open its economy. Vietnam
approved the sale of its state-owned companies.
Between 1986 and 2005, most of the foreign capital entering Vietnam
came primarily from Western nations, including the United States, Canada,
and Australia. In this culturally defined socialist market, which was
characterized by “fuzzy property boundaries,”21 there were no clear
boundaries between state and society and no clear rules about private
property.22 In addition, the state had to manage its disparagement of private
property in order to organize relations that encouraged investment, thereby
shaping a new relational and cultural constitution of foreign and local
capital. Until 2005, foreign direct investment (FDI) in Vietnam went
primarily into export-oriented manufacturing industries, such as garments
and textiles, footwear, furniture, wood, and automobiles, which accounted
for 42 percent of the cumulative approved FDI in 2005.23 However, the
mining industry has grown by a factor of ten, from $2.13 million in 2000 to
$20.58 million in 2013. This is capital brought onshore and does not
account for the capital sitting in offshore bank accounts designated for the
exploration and development of these mines.24 However, there are no
official statistics on the flow of capital that went into the privatization and
sale of state-owned enterprises.
In 2007 Vietnam officially joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) as
the 150th member and established both bilateral and multilateral trade
agreements, further strengthening its relationship with other member
nations. Following its membership in the WTO, Vietnam’s economy
experienced an annual economic growth of 8 percent per year. This growth
served as a magnet for investment: FDI increased dramatically each year
between 2006 and 2014 (see figure 4.1). The amounts shown in figure 4.1
represent reported capital that had been registered and disbursed. Totals for
committed or promised capital are higher. For example, at the peak of the
2008 financial crisis, committed capital reached nearly $71 billion.
Furthermore, the persistent weakness of Western economies in the wake
of the 2008 global economic crisis enabled countries in the region to play a
major role in structuring Vietnam’s economy. Between 1995 and 2005,
Australia, Canada, and the United States were the largest providers of FDI to
Vietnam. By 2010, however, the five leading contributors were South
Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and the British Virgin Islands (see figure
4.2).25 These shifting capital sources overpowered both Western
investments and overseas remittances, putting an Asian face to wealth in
Vietnam through new inter-Asian circuits of global capital.26
FIGURE 4.1.   Disbursed Foreign Direct Investment in Vietnam, 2005–2014. Source: General
Statistics Office (GSO) Vietnam 2014.
FIGURE 4.2.   Vietnam Foreign Direct Investment by Source Country, 2015. Source: Vietnam
Economic Times and General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam; see Nguyen (2015).
Rivalry between the United States and China in Contemporary Vietnam

In recent years, China and the United States have been competing to gain a
foothold in the region. In 2015 Chinese leaders established the Asia
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). In a responsive effort to moderate
China’s influence in the region, several Western nations (the United States,
Canada, and Australia) came together to establish the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP). The rivalry between the United States and China is
transparent. As the TPP website literally states, “The rules of the road are up
for grabs in Asia. If we don’t pass this [Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership]
agreement and write those rules, competitors [i.e., China] will set weak
rules of the road … undermining US leadership in Asia.”27
When President Donald Trump took office, he denounced the TPP
because of its ties to the Obama legacy, leaving the other countries to
renegotiate a trade agreement without the United States. Even though the
United States is no longer part of that trade agreement, the first Southeast
Asian leader to visit the White House under the Trump administration came
from Vietnam (even though the United States had stronger strategic
relations with the Philippines and Thailand). This is because Vietnam had
hired the Podesta Group of brothers—one of whom was formerly the
campaign director for Hillary Clinton—to lobby for the Vietnamese prime
minister’s visit to the White House. This was part of an ongoing effort to
maintain trade relations and moderate China’s influence in the region.
Shortly after that, Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both
made stops in Vietnam, making similar efforts to maintain a foothold in the
region.
After President Trump pulled out of the TPP, China began negotiating
more than a dozen trade agreements, collectively called the Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership, in an effort to build alternatives to
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are Western
institutions. In this context, “America’s status as the linchpin of the global
economic order is now endangered. The trading system China dominates
has reduced the long dependency of Latin American and sub-Saharan
African countries on American and European markets. China is now … in
the process of making East Asia the center of the new world economy.”28 In
this context, smaller countries such as Vietnam pivoted toward China after
Trump’s election, enabling them to take a much more aggressive stance
against foreign investors that originate in Western nations, thereby
contesting Western forms of hegemony but drawing on alternative regional
investment relations.
A Protectionist Anticolonial State

With complex histories of Chinese colonialism, French colonialism, and US

imperialism, as well as relations with the Soviet Bloc, Vietnam has gone to
great lengths to ensure that foreigners do not become new economic
colonialists and that local resources, land, and commodities remain owned
and controlled internally by local Vietnamese. Therefore, state banks are the
main source of internal capital allocation, which is based on long-term
relationships with the state; local business networks gain access to the best
market sites through personal ties to the Communist Party.29 Several
scholars who examine Vietnamese state-society relations show that the
relationships between private and public sectors are often murky and highly
contentious: state-society relationships involve entrepreneurial practices
where public officials and private investors provide networking services
while simultaneously lining their pockets.30 As Tu Nguyen asserts, “In a
political climate in which administrative power is decentralised and
diffused, the growth of non-conventional interests and new modes of mass
mobilisation convolutes the power hierarchies and blurs the line separating
public and private interests.”31 Importantly, Vietnam’s decentralized
government has led to much internal variation related to state-market-
society. Edmund Malesky, Neil McCulloch, and Nguyen Duc Nhat point
out that it is important to look at the internal variation of governance within
countries. In their view, “Most business/government interactions [are]
decentralized to the provincial level, including business registration,
environmental and safety inspections, labour oversight, local government
procurement, and land allocation.… As a result, many studies have
documented that the provincial government, more than the central
government, is the relevant level of government when analyzing the
institutional climate facing firms.”32 Their findings point to the possibility
that multiple state-market relations can exist within the same state,
depending on the investment project’s provincial location and the
relationship that both local and foreign investors have with their local state
officials. The varied relationships that investors have with state officials are
crucial because Vietnam does not have strong legal institutions and the law
is open to interpretation at the provincial level.
Hun Kim’s and my qualitative research on inter-Asian circulations of
capital in Ho Chi Minh City’s property market further reveals that the city is
being remade through different circuits of foreign capital.33 The rise of East
Asian financial centers dramatically altered intraregional investment,
transforming less developed countries in Southeast Asia into a lucrative
new frontier, thus increasing inter-Asian circulations of capital.34 Political
elites in less developed countries must now find ways to appeal to local
entrepreneurs, Western (US, Canadian, and Western European) investors,
and Japanese investors, as well as investors from other parts of
East/Southeast Asia.35 At the same time, recent global economic
transformations have produced a newly competitive landscape for Western
and East/Southeast Asian investors looking to invest in emerging markets.36
The competing circuits of FDI are “grounded in state experimentation
with variegated governing techniques and competing regulatory modes that
drive the city’s development.”37 Importantly, Kim shows how opaque and
transparent modalities of reform coexist in the same market. Developing the
concept of regulatory opacity, Kim describes the practices of state agencies
and urban developers as they negotiate a multitude of urban development
regulations at both urban and national levels. Kim’s concept of regulatory
transparency highlights the work of the state, in concert with multilateral
institutions, to address the problem of state corruption in urban
development. These two contradictory modes of governance—opacity and
transparency—coexist in the same space. Advancing Kim’s work by
looking at this relationship from the perspective of market actors, I argue
that the varying degrees of legal transparency and opacity, coupled with a
decentralized government, enable local and state officials to keep profits
generated through resource extraction in the hands of local elites.38
Research Methods

Data collected for my larger book project map a global network of financial
elites throughout the world.39 Overall, I conducted twenty-six months of
ethnographic- and interview-based research in three main phases: 2009–
2010, 2012–2015, and eighteen continuous months during 2016–2017.
During 2016–2017 I traveled more than 350,000 miles, following the
movement of global capital from offshore accounts in such places as the
British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Samoa, and Panama to special-
purpose vehicles or holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong before
being invested onshore in Vietnam and Myanmar. I also conducted follow-
up interviews on shorter research trips during 2017–2019. In total, I
interviewed more than three hundred respondents, including private wealth
managers, fund managers, chairpersons, local entrepreneurs, C-suite
executives, lawyers, bankers, auditors, and company secretaries. The
investment deals I have studied range between $200,000 and $450 million
and include such sectors as real estate, manufacturing, mining, technology,
the service sector, and trade. I had the generous help of thirteen research
assistants who spent a great deal of time with me helping to recruit research
subjects, accompanying me on interviews, writing field notes, transcribing,
coding the data, writing narrative summaries, and helping me comb the
internet for news articles, legal proceedings, and press releases in order to
triangulate our case studies.
Overall, only 52 percent of my interview subjects gave me permission to
audio-record. For those who did not allow me to record their interviews, I
took extensive field notes; if a student accompanied me, he or she did the
same so that I had two sets of notes for each interview.
This chapter focuses on a small subset of interviews in the mining sector.
To anonymize my research subjects, I do not use the real names of the
people, firms, or natural resources in this chapter. In addition, I created a
composite case by merging three cases with similar investors into one in
order to anonymize all of the people with whom I spoke. The reason for this
is that there are only two or three major mining projects in the country; the
same is true for oil and gas companies. Therefore, naming the strategic
resource would make it impossible to anonymize my research subjects. In
addition, I triangulate interview data with legal documents, press releases,
and media interviews to gain some perspective outside of the protagonist
who leads the story from the interview. I focus on a natural resource in a
highly protected sector of the economy that has heavy state involvement.
Mining for Capital: A Showdown between Foreign Investors and the
Government

VIETNAM AS THE MODERN “EL DORADO”

George began his relationship with Vietnam after his first trip in 1989,
when a small group of investors came to Vietnam, all in search of “an El
Dorado,” as he called it. At that time he told me, “Your typical mining areas
are often very well developed and tightly controlled and tightly owned. So
you are always looking for something where the chances of finding
something are better and the chances of finding something bigger are
better.” He was then working in Australia, where it was difficult to find
good ground because all the major mines had already been explored with
advanced technologies.
The logics of colonial racial capitalism are evident in George’s motives
to go to Vietnam in search of a new frontier, or “El Dorado,” as he called it.
Vietnam was attractive to George and his team because it was just
beginning to open up and had not been explored with modern technologies.
George told me that in their own research, a look back in time showed that
Vietnam was once a place that had been mined by explorers from all around
the world. In one of their corporate presentations, which they used to raise
capital, they had a slide that detailed the history that dates back to 1850,
when Chinese miners first discovered Vietranium in Vietnam (Vietranium is
the pseudonym for the real mineral). Then in the early 1900s, a major
British development company mined small shallow pits with limited
tunnels. Sometime between 1950 and 2000, a group from an unidentified
country (possibly Thailand, based on our interview) dug a couple of tunnels
and ended its development after concluding that the price of the mineral
was too low and not worth the exploration, development, and extraction
efforts. By the time George began poking around, he said: “Historically we
always knew that Vietnam was a good Vietranium producer. There were
some well-known mines that the French had mined, the Portuguese mined,
and geologically when you look at it from space and all of the records, it
looked like a very good area to be in, and it was just opening up. It was a
country [where] we felt we could acquire good land packages that were a
reasonable size and productive.” This history allowed George and his team
to generate a great deal of buzz around the mine in order to raise capital
based purely on speculation. Using a speculative logic of potential, George
was able to raise money from global financial institutions and small mom-
and-pop investors interested in entering this highly speculative new frontier.
When I asked him about the risks going in, he told me that some of their
major concerns were that there was a lack of “good working mining
legislation and a lack of any international mining infrastructure in terms of
knowledge, administration, and modern commercial economics.” In their
initial discussions with government officials, they spent four to five years
negotiating between their tax rate and what the government wanted. From
George’s perspective, they wanted certainty up front, and their idea of what
would be an acceptable profit was different from the government’s. They
believed that the investment came with great risks that the government did
not understand because officials could not comprehend the modern business
structure or technology that would be required in the research and
exploration phase.
At the same time, these officials believed that it would not be fair if
George and his team took charge, had a great commercial success, and
made a fortune because Vietranium was inherently a product of Vietnam;
therefore, any profits belonged to the Vietnamese people. After years of not
being able to negotiate a “sound business agreement with the government
and what the [Communist] Party put forward,” they ended up buying into a
project where all of that had already been negotiated and the existing
partner was looking for an opportunity to exit.

COWBOY DAYS OF VIETNAM

Once George and his partners got the license, they had to do a lot of work
before they were comfortable putting money into the production process of
the mine. As George explained, “There were a whole lot of cowboys around
Vietnam in that time, and a lot of promises were made in that time just so
they could get the documentation in place.” In a postcolonial/imperial state
it was difficult for them to figure out who were the important political
power players or who had access to the key government officials who could
help move their project along. In the beginning they relied a great deal on
middlemen, otherwise known as brokers or fixers. George stated: “They
were a lot of carpetbaggers walking around. They were guys promising that
they could get you deals and were asking for money up front to do it, and in
the end it was almost impossible for anyone to give you a deal. There were
a lot of guys saying they had relationships that could get you a deal like
they knew the daughter or wife of this person, and you would just have to
pay the money, [but] you wouldn’t get anywhere.”
Over the course of nearly thirty years in Vietnam, the one lesson George
learned was that negotiations with government officials were a “full-time
dynamic and ever-changing process,” as he described it. This regulatory
opacity—the lack of clarity with regard to regulations and legislation—
meant that every step of the process had to be negotiated. Moreover,
because the people in positions of political power shift every couple of
years, all of these relationships had to be renegotiated with every new
election, making it exceptionally difficult to develop long-term projections.
Given the sheer number of years that George had spent in Vietnam, it
seemed like he might feel very confident about knowing how to navigate
government relations. In fact, several other interviewees who had made
investments in very different sectors of the economy told me that George
was someone to whom they often went to seek advice on how to manage
government relations. When I asked him to reflect on how his strategies for
dealing with government relations had evolved over the years, he said:
This is the puzzle of Vietnam. I don’t think you ever quite solve the
puzzle, because the puzzle is constantly changing, because Vietnam
doesn’t seem to have one strong man or one strong woman or a strong
entity. It’s a difference between being designed that way—it’s as if the
communist system has been designed [so] that no one ever truly gets full
decision making. It will always need the support of someone else. Those
political alliances or allegiances are constantly changing, and they all
have different political capital that they are using for different projects,
and it is a constantly changing wind. You are constantly at a stage of
wondering if you have enough support to keep a project moving.
George went on to describe how state officials are constantly shifting
positions every four to five years with each new election cycle in the party:
There always seems to be someone retiring in the next twelve to eighteen
months, and they are aggressive. I’ve got to make as much money as
possible, so I am not signing or doing anything unless there is a lot of
money on the table. It always seems to be someone that you need.…
[With] natural resources, there is a lot more control [because] the
Vietnamese treat their oil, coal, and gold resources as theirs. When I
think of property, I think you have the owner of land on one side and the
rest of the bureaucracy you have to find your way through.… But the
owner of our land is typically the government.… I spend 70 percent of
my time dealing with government relations.
For George and his partners, one of the greatest risks and areas of
uncertainty had less to do with the actual processes of exploration,
extraction, and production in the mine and much more to do with managing
the dynamic relations with government officials. With every new election
cycle, they had to deal with a new set of personalities and demands that
were much less predictable under a system without a clear set of written
state policies and legislation.
Ironically, the move to Vietnam turned out to be a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, because it was a country that was just opening up, with a
lack of clear legislation, it had a frontier “El Dorado” feel, where George
and his partners could gamble and cash in on the “gold rush.” On the other
hand, the lack of clear legislation also meant that they were constantly
beholden to the different people who occupied various positions of power.
This tug-of-war could eventually be the demise of their entire investment.

THE “BACK TAX”: NAVIGATING MURKY RELATIONSHIPS WITH

VIETNAMESE GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

In negotiating the tension between navigating an unpredictable bureaucracy

and trying to move forward with their investment, George and his partners
did a lot of “front running” in the early stages of development, when they
moved forward on investments without the proper licenses in place at the
start of a project. He said:
 We are a little bit like property people; you have to front run quite a lot,
to the extent you can. But more and more now, it is difficult for us to do
anything without approvals and licensing first. In the early days,
[government officials] pushed us to get into production … before it was
commercially viable. Then it seemed once you do get into production
and you are making money—for a while the process worked. You got
approvals when you needed them because money was flowing, people
were getting paid, taxes were being paid. And then we fell afoul with the
tax department, and life became impossible. You didn’t get anything.
That was really hard because we spent $140 million while the
government was trying to shut us down, and we had to find a way to
keep going.
What George described was pressure from the government to raise money
and begin the production phase in the mine. The project had raised over
$140 million through a variety of different sources, from institutional
investors to small mom-and-pop investors, who, according to the court
documents, had invested as little as $2,500. When things were going well,
he explained, “they were flush with investment money, and everyone was
getting paid.”
Then one day the government effectively shut them down by issuing
them a back-tax bill once it discovered that the mine was commercially
viable; this was a strategy to push the investors out. George said:
What happened was one day we woke up, and the tax department said
we owed them $15 million without any basis. They had done a similar
thing to [a large company that George was acquainted with], and I think
there was another motor vehicle company, and it was just a shakedown.
The grossly inefficient government departments are told by the Ministry
of Finance that they need to raise more money, and just like in the old
days when businesses were government owned, government business
had to find more money and satisfy the state budget.…
It is hard to know when to involve lawyers, because … law firms are
not well established. The law is totally different. It’s not strength-based
law, where the government is constantly putting out directives.… It’s
 mainly negotiation. You have to work behind the department and work
one department off of another one. For example, … we had to go to the
Ministry of Science and show what the Vietranium processing was, and
they said that it was obvious that we had processed the ore into some sort
of state, and the tax department would say they disagree and determine
the tax. That took us years. In the meantime, we had this $15 million
back tax hanging over our heads, and there was no way we could pay the
$15 million because we would never get it back. So we then came under
tax coercion, which means they were constantly taking away our invoice
book, constantly trying to shut us down, and made an administrative
nightmare for us.… We tried all sorts of lobbying groups and law firms,
and none of them would take the case because we were dealing with the
[highest level of government], and they are very corrupt. They didn’t
want to use their political capital representing us. Their only suggestion
was that we owed $15 million and we probably [would] just have to pay
10 percent of that in bribes, but there is no way we can pay a $1.5
million bribe. I am listed on global securities in Canada and Australia. I
know where I would end up [implying jail].
From George’s perspective, the lack of a clear rule of law with respect to
taxes meant that the government could arbitrarily levy a $15 million back
tax, which would place the investment in a status of noncompliance and
affect its listing on the US, Canadian, and Australian stock exchanges. This
status could force them into bankruptcy, effectively pushing George and his
partners out of the country.
George also described how challenging it had been to get proper media
attention to portray their side of the story. He compared Vietnam to Korea:
“There are a smaller number of really powerful Vietnamese businessmen
who are also politicians, who are trying to collect the full sweep of
investments in the Korean way. The political interests and the media would
always work against the foreign investor because the Vietnamese
[politicians and bureaucrats] are incredibly nationalistic and patriotic,
almost xenophobic. They hate to see foreigners come in and mine natural
resources and take profits out of the country.” George was describing a
tension that resonates with Vietnam’s history of colonialism,
anticolonialism, and imperialism. As a foreign investor, he saw government
relations deteriorate as the government tried to push them out after
discovering that the mine had valuable resources. In this way, George’s
efforts to bring “modern technologies” to a new frontier backfired as the
government took the mine back after the most risky and speculative stage of
investment. However, from the government’s perspective, those resources
belonged to the country and were not something they would allow a foreign
investor to easily exploit.

THE VIETNAMESE GOVERNMENT’S PERSPECTIVE

Although I was not able to formally interview the government officials

linked to this specific project, several interviews and reports by journalists
helped me to triangulate this case from the government’s perspective. In an
interview the director of the Department of Taxation told the press that
“there were signs that these companies had sold their mineral to parent
companies at less than market prices while materials were imported at
higher prices to evade taxes.” In the same report, the deputy prime minister
told local authorities that “tax debts must be collected or guaranteed before
the two Vietranium mining companies are issued new licenses.”40 This back
tax was assessed after the mining company reported cumulative losses of
$30 million in 2014. What government officials are referring to here is the
process through which investors book their liabilities onshore in Vietnam
while declaring their profits offshore in another country. These tax-
avoidance strategies have long been attributed to foreign investors.
I read the government officials’ public statements, and then I searched
through the court filings to find a detailed chart of the mining company’s
tax default as the company worked to declare bankruptcy. The court
documents revealed the complex ownership structure of the companies,
which led the government to conclude that George and his team were trying
to evade taxes onshore. Figure 4.3 shows the legal offshore structures
George and his team set up all around the world. The Vietnamese entities
are subsidiaries of companies in Thailand and the British Virgin Islands,
and the latter two are a subsidiary of a company incorporated in North
America. Given the setup of this structure, it not difficult to see why the
government might conclude that George and his group were not being
honest about their earnings.
After two years of unsuccessful negotiations over their tax bill, the
Vietnamese government revoked their business registration certificate,
forcing the mining company to stop all operations. Public reports stated that
at the time of losing its business license, the mine had already racked up
over $145 million in losses. In 2017 George and his firm announced its
withdrawal from Vietnam and stated that the companies would be sold to
get money in order to repay their debts. Following this announcement,
several people in Vietnam commented on what they felt were problems with
the mine and its relationship to the government.
However, the buyers of the companies were two of the firm’s former
executives. As local advisers to the government began investigating, they
told the press, “The biggest question is why a heavily indebted company
can be sold. The buyers understand the problems with the companies and
therefore, it is a mystery why they bought such bad companies. Maybe the
buyers have found the solutions to the companies’ problems or it is just a
game played by foreign investors?” (emphasis added).
FIGURE 4.3.   El Dorado Mining Company ownership structure. Source: author composite.

In my conversations with George, he insisted that all of this was a

calculated ploy by the Vietnamese government to smear the company’s
image in the country. He insisted that they were honest with their reporting
and that they were good guys caught in a bad system, where everyone is
believed to be underreporting their earnings. He said:
We responded to [those reports by] saying that we are an international
company, and we are listed on reputable stock exchanges; we are audited
by international auditors, and we can’t do that. But they had a mindset at
the time—they weren’t worldly and they thought, “We know auditors
can be bought, everyone can be bought,” and they didn’t trust us. I don’t
know whether it was if they truly believed that or not or if there was a
 plan to squeeze us out, but the effect was that the pressure came from all
directions, and very few people were willing to stand behind us.
Quite frankly we cannot pay huge bribes; we cannot pay $200,000
here, $500,000 there, and $1 million over there. We can’t do it.
In some respects, I believe most of the wealth created in Vietnam is
through corruption and comes from internal contracts … the building of
infrastructure, roads, bridges, courts, airports. This is why with the TPP,
they really insisted on private investors being able to sue the
government. Americans had a similar problem in China because 97
percent of the economy was the government.…
In our case, when it came to a problem of renewing licenses … they
said openly in the People’s Committee when they met us [that] “you will
not be able to renew this license until you bring a Vietnamese partner up
to a certain percent ownership, and we want the Vietnamese partner to be
in control and we want them to be in control of the money.”
The press is controlled. When we said to the [People’s Committee]
that if you keep up the royalty, then we will shut down. Their response
was “Don’t threaten us.” … We are not threatening you; it’s a fact! We
cannot afford to pay it, and they would say we are cheap.… We are
captive. No one will buy this project; Vietnam is a pariah.… No one will
put in more money.
What George was describing is a showdown between El Dorado Mining
and the Vietnamese government. Neither party trusted the other, and both
felt that they were fundamentally being cheated somehow. The tension
escalated as El Dorado Mining solicited help from foreign embassies and
governments, but Vietnam’s unwillingness to back down led George and his
group to begin financially engineering the sale and transfer of the company
within the same group of people. After over two years of being in a standoff
with the government, however, George sold their stake in the firm to a
group of other executives. Shortly after that, they declared bankruptcy and
left Vietnam for good. In my last follow-up conversation with him, they
were pursuing legal advice and public relations consulting in London but
did not feel hopeful that they would reach any kind of resolution with the
government.
 In the end, the truth probably lies somewhere in between what the
government claims to be an underreporting of earnings and what George
and his firm believed was a hostage takeover of a business that was just
beginning to generate profits as a result of its refusal to pay out bribes.
Vietnam’s resistance to new forms of economic colonialism has greatly
affected both parties, for George and his team are now mired in a whole
slew of lawsuits from their investors, seeking to collect the debt owed to
them, while the government manages a mine that once employed more than
two thousand people and now is boarded up and completely empty. This
kind of loss that George described is one where it is very difficult to see
light at the end of a tunnel because nearly thirty years of nonstop
negotiations led to a government takeover of their business.
Resisting Neocolonialism

In the foreword to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Homi Bhabha
writes,
It must seem ironic, even absurd at first, to search for associations and
intersections between decolonization and globalization—parallels would
be pushing the analogy—when decolonization had the dream of a “Third
World” of free, postcolonial nations firmly on its horizon, whereas
globalization gazes at the nation through the back mirror, as it speeds
toward the strategic denationalization of state sovereignty.… While it is
the primary purpose of decolonization to repossess land and territoriality
in order to ensure the security of the national polity and global equity …
in what way, then can the once colonized … become figures of
instruction for our global century?41
At the time of Bhabha’s writing, the humanities and social sciences were
fixated on the divide between First World nations and Third World nations
that had emerged as a consequence of colonialism.
Today, that very world order has become less stable. The rise of China
and other East and Southeast Asian nations has given smaller countries like
Vietnam a platform not only to resist new forms of neo-economic
colonialism from Western nationals but also to test the limits of their
economic relations with Western investors by allowing them to pour money
into a country, asking them to assume a great deal of risk in the early stages
of mining for capital and raising capital, and then effectively pushing
investors out of the country once they have struck gold in the “El Dorado.”
For Fanon and Bhabha, this very act serves the purpose of decolonization,
but what does that mean, and how do we theorize that in a postcolonial
context?
From the perspective of foreign investors, this case study illustrates the
ways that colonial relations of the past helped investors legitimize the
project by speculating that Vietranium was in fact there and that all they
needed was money to bring modern technologies to Vietnam. From the
perspective of Vietnamese state officials, however, pushing investors out
after they had effectively mined the area serves as a model for how other
nations might still be able to hold on to what is theirs. But in an
increasingly global world where the top 1 to 10 percent of the global elite
are effectively citizens of many places, who even benefits from resistance
struggles between global and local elites?
In a postcolonial and postwar context, after the Vietnamese effectively
fought off the Chinese, the French, and the Americans, for years they were
dependent on these very countries for both public aid and private
investment. As several countries vied for economic influence in the country,
this provided Vietnam with the power to pit powerful nations against each
other. The new competition between China and the United States has
enabled Vietnam to turn away from Western capital and toward East and
Southeast Asian investors, thereby resisting the “peremptory and polarizing
choices that superpowers impose on their ‘client’ states.”42 But does
resisting one form of colonialism come with the pressure to accept another
form? In pushing Western investors out of the country, Vietnamese state
officials now have the power to choose between two “varieties of capital”:
(a) state capital, which comes from many different countries, such as China,
and serves the interests of the state; and (b) global private capital, which
serves the interests of shareholders.43 Given the rise of non-Western nations,
are we beginning to see one form of domination replacing another?
The colonial racial capitalism framework in this chapter examines the
case of a communist postcolonial/post-imperial state and analyzes how that
state relies on neoliberal policies to expand global capitalism while also
privileging state ownership and control over important natural resources in
the mines. It is this tension between foreign investors and local
anticolonialists that interrupts the transfer of wealth from Vietnam to
foreign capitalists. Therefore, a racial framework here must take into
account the fact that “race” looks different not just in different countries but
in different governments and different investment narratives that are not
easily collapsed as working only in the interests of global capitalists. We
must think about the multiple layers involved in a context of colonial racial
capitalism that allows global elites to capitalize on inside access to deals
and resources. At the heart of this chapter is a story of how Vietnamese
state actors actively push back against neo-economic colonialism. Local
state elites adopt a strategy of allowing foreigners to come in to explore and
develop the mines and then pushing out foreigners after they have been able
to mine valuable resources. At the same time, because these investments are
so risky, foreigners use offshore vehicles that allow for high levels of
financial speculation to capture capital offshore and to protect their
investments from full state capture. This is not a simple story of
exploiter/exploited, colonizer/dispossessed, but rather a new tension that is
possible only in the aftermath of colonialism and imperialism.
This changing global economic order opens the door for a new set of
questions about how to theorize and conceptualize colonialism outside of
overused binaries like East/West, global North/global South, or First
World/Third World. New South–South relations, coupled with the persistent
weakening of Western power, have fundamentally shifted the political
economic landscape and require new theories of postcolonialism as new
insurgent economic groups test the limits of Western power.
Directions for Future Research

In an effort to study capitalists and the flow of capital, this chapter focuses
primarily on the friction between local and global elites. However,
underneath this tension is an important land and labor story. Future research
would benefit from an analysis of how these relations of colonial racial
capitalism affect the miners and the communities located around the mining
industries. The view that I had was a view from above: looking at
investment sites through the eyes of local elites and foreign investors. The
view from above highlights a story of capital, investment, and nation.
However, a view from below would focus on a labor story that is a
consequence of these elite power struggles. No one triangulates the view
from above with the view from below, but there is an important body of
work in the area of racial capitalism that zooms in to focus on the
consequences of foreign investment and development for local
communities. For example, a critical view offered by Macarena Gómez-
Barris is one that highlights how the extractive nature of capitalism in
mining often involves a search for “undeveloped” Indigenous people’s
land.44
These neocolonial power struggles at the top have two possible effects.
On the one hand, mining will likely have an effect on the land and
communities most vulnerable to exploitation, as so many others have
described. On the other hand, Nhi Ba Nguyen and colleagues have found
that mining is one of the drivers of socioeconomic well-being at the
national level.45 These findings seem to leave open the possibility that the
local government’s adoption of a protectionist stance might be the key
mechanism to the redistribution of wealth locally by drawing on investors at
a global scale. Hence, a focus on the people embedded in these mining
communities in the contexts of a power struggle between foreign capitalists
and local elites might address a much larger question of who ultimately
wins and loses in a context of colonial racial capitalism.
NOTES

1. World Bank, “Global Financial Development.”

2. Freeland, Plutocrats.
3. Mohanty, “ ‘Under Western Eyes Revisited,’ ” 505–6. Mohanty borrows the terms One-
Third World and Two-Thirds World from Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, who use
them to refer to social minorities and social majorities in both the North and the South that are
differentiated by their quality of life (Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-modernism, 16–
17). The terms avoid the geographical and ideological binarism of terms like First World and
Third World and highlight uneven development within and across affluent and postcolonial
nations under global capitalism.
4. O’Neill, Growth Map, x.
5. Hoskisson et al., “Strategy in Emerging Economies”; Gray, “World’s Fastest Growing
Economies.”
6. Davis and Marquis, “Prospects for Organizational Theory.”
7. North, Institutions, Institutional Change.
8. Fligstein, Architecture of Markets; Gereffi, “Global Economy”; Storz et al., “Bringing
Asia”; Witt and Redding, “Asian Business Systems.”
9. Kang, Crony Capitalism.
10. Krippner, “Unbounding the Economy.”
11. Byrd et al., “Predatory Value.”
12. Burawoy, “Extended Case Method,” 5, 6.
13. This colonial racial capitalism framework emerged through feedback given to me by Lisa
Cacho as she engaged with my public lecture at the Race and Capitalism Conference held at
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2019 and from her feedback on the working
draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank my research assistant, Brian Fenaughty, for his
critical engagement with the ideas here.
14. To date, most of the research on mining in Vietnam has looked primarily on the role that
mining has played with respect to economic development and its ability to influence the
livelihoods of local communities. See, for example, N. Nguyen, Boruff, and Tonts, “Mining,
Development, and Well-Being.”
15. Wood, “Basic Needs.”
16. Chanda, Brother Enemy, 11.
17. Chanda, Brother Enemy, 180–81.
18. Chanda, Brother Enemy, 181.
19. Hoang, Dealing in Desire.
20. Davies, “Vietnam 40 Years On.”
21. Stark and Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways, 130.
22. Hoang, “Risky Investments.”
23. T. N. Nguyen, “Foreign Direct Investment.”
24. N. Nguyen, Boruff, and Tonts, “Mining, Development and Well-Being.”
25. GSO of Vietnam, Foreign Direct Investment Projects.
26. Hoang, Dealing in Desire; Hoang, Cobb, and Lei, “Guest Editors’ Introduction.”
27. USTR, “Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
28. Mishra, “Rise of China.”
29. Witt and Redding, “Asian Business Systems.”
30. See, for example, Beresford, “Doi Moi in Review”; and Gillen, “Examination of
Entrepreneurial Relationships.”
31. T. P. Nguyen, “Rethinking State-Society Relations in Vietnam,” 100.
32. Malesky, McCulloch, and Nhat, “Impact of Governance and Transparency,” 681.
33. Kim, “Capturing World-Class Urbanism”; Hoang, “Risky Investments.”
34. Koolhaas, “Beijing Manifesto.”
35. Hoang, “Risky Investments.”
36. Nam, “Phnom Penh.”
37. Kim, “Capturing World Class Urbanism.”
38. Hoang, “Risky Investments.”
39. Hoang, Spiderweb Capitalism.
40. Vietnam Economic Times article from 2016, not described here to maintain anonymity of
research subjects.
41. Bhabha, Foreword, xi.
42. Bhabha, Foreword, xiv.
43. Lee, Specter of Global China.
44. Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Mnemonics.”
45. N. Nguyen, Boruff, and Tonts, “Mining, Development and Well-Being.”
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 FIVE · Lisa Marie Cacho and Jodi Melamed

“Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the

Police”

: Policing as the Street Administration of

Colonial Racial Capitalist Orders

As Black-led marches took to the streets of Milwaukee night after night in

May, June, July, and August of 2020, long-time Indigenous community
defenders lit a ceremonial fire, calling it a unity fire. There would be many
more unity fires in the coming months, but this particular fire burned for
four days.1 When the fire was lit, Mark Denning, the unity fire’s first
firekeeper, described it as a gathering for Milwaukee’s Indigenous
community to come together in a time of illness, isolation, and unrest. They
enacted Indigenous sovereignty and governance by listening and thinking
together in ceremony and preparing for diplomacy with elected settler city
officials.2 As uprisings against police violence continued to hold the streets
of Milwaukee, Indigenous community defenders invited Black march
leaders, various religious groups, students, social justice organizations, and
everyone else to participate in the unity fires. As Denning explained, the
fire was for reflection, not congregation or rally.3 Yet as the fire burned, it
was clear that reflection can be collective and that collective reflection can
itself become a ceremony for uniting consciousness and creating grounded
relations.
 The fire brought together people participating in Black radical uprisings
with people participating in ongoing Indigenous existence-as-resistance,
both experiencing the present, both respecting and honoring the land on
which the fire had been lit and continued to burn. They shared stories about
police violence, stories about the central role of police violence within long
histories of anti-Blackness and eternities of anti-Indianism. They talked
with one another about what matters, deep epistemes of Indigenous
knowing and Black knowing, of knowing Milwaukee as Black liberator
land despite premature death, of knowing Wisconsin as Indigenous
homeland despite ongoing settler wars of conquest to diminish Native
resurgence. These small but powerful sparks were co-enlivening Black and
Indigenous lives, undoing the performative power of criminalization and
undermining the ways in which criminalization devalues Black and Native
lives to justify the many kinds of violences that colonial racial capitalisms
require. Because it promoted collective reflection and intense, reciprocal
listening, the unity fire opened possibilities, such as becoming relatives in a
grounded relation with land as agential or enacting abolition and
decolonization. The unity fire itself is about possibility. During some of the
ceremonies, precious, life-giving medicines are burned. To explain why,
Denning says, “One of our young people asked, if that medicine is so
beautiful and so clean and wonderful, and you sing to it to help create it, to
help someone out, why is it that you would destroy it? That to me kind of
comes to the end of why this was done was because when those kinds of
things come crashing down around a person, when destruction is present,
sometimes, and not all the time, but sometimes creation can happen for
something more beautiful.”4 As Denning explains, they lit a unity fire not to
guarantee change but to create possibility for change, to light the sparks.
Unity fires continue to be lit in the city settlers call Milwaukee on
Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homeland because the sparks are
needed and necessary, not only in this settler city but in all settler cities
across the nation. George Floyd was Minneapolis police officer Derek
Chauvin’s second murder and fifth death. In 2005 Chauvin and another
officer were chasing a vehicle that then hit another, causing two people to
die on impact and a third passenger to die a few days later from the injuries.
And in 2006 he murdered Wayne Reyes, a member of the Leech Lake
Ojibwe Nation.5 Indeed, we must credit seventeen-year-old Darnella
Frazier, who filmed George Floyd’s last moments, and the bystanders who
were doing all they could, for saving countless lives that the four officers in
Minneapolis would surely have taken throughout their careers. This scared,
brave, traumatized teenager filmed the murder that became a movement not
just against police violence but against what police violence is purposed to
fabricate and defend: colonial racial capitalism.
In “Why Black Marxism, Why Now?” Robin D. G. Kelley describes 26
million people taking to the streets in the wake of the police murder of
George Floyd as an uprising against racial capitalism.6 Here we follow
Kelley’s thread and what the movement itself teaches us. In this chapter, we
examine why the demand to live in the face of police violence—to defend
yourself from the police while Black and/or Indigenous—is revolutionary
and why the collective demand to defend others from the violences of
colonial racial capitalisms (including police violence and the conditions of
precarity, unlivability, and premature death that it secures) is also
revolutionary. These acts are revolutionary because they know and
denounce the purpose of police “violence work” to be the real-time, on-the-
street administration of counterinsurgency for colonial racial capitalism.7
They know that at the end of the day the police target the enlivening of
BIPOC, queer, two-spirit, trans, and poor (or, more accurately, economically
immiserated) lives when such enlivening (often and inevitably) targets the
stability of colonial racial capitalist modes of accumulation by threatening
relations of accumulation in a specific, political geography (i.e., real estate
capitalisms that produce profits through racialized segregation) or by
threatening its boundary conditions (seeing land as kin, rather than private
property; demanding collective well-being that threatens capitalist modes of
profiting from social reproduction by commodifying housing, health, food,
and education).
To ground our thinking, we examine the summer 2020 uprisings against
policing on the southwest shores of Michigami, where the Milwaukee,
Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet on Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and
Menominee homeland in the city that settlers call Milwaukee, which
remains a meeting place for diasporic Indigenous people from throughout
Turtle Island and has hosted Black liberators from the beginning of ongoing
wars of conquest and occupation. Milwaukee, like every other settler city, is
“a spatialized expression of settler violence.”8 In Milwaukee it is primarily
the police, as the visible hand of collective settler violence, who target
Indigenous empowerment—that is, the enlivening of Indigenous lives and
the relatives and relations (human and more-than-human) that co-sustain
Indigenous worldings. Undeniably, the target of policing is BIPOC
empowerment: the enlivening of Black and Indigenous lives. Empowerment
takes several forms. We see it in the basic form of a will to live, to save
oneself and others from being killed by police, and in the determination to
save others from the violences of colonial racial capitalism that require
police violence. And we see it in collective empowerment, such as
Indigenous unity fires and Black protest parties. The targets of policing are
all those ways of living that portend the abolition of “deliberately
propagated fatalities and forms and patterns that coalesce into premature
death” that colonial racial capitalisms require.9
Policing is an administrative power that deploys violence work in real
time to criminalize, disqualify, and sort people for capitalist care or
capitalist destruction in order to fabricate and maintain specific relations of
colonial racial capitalist accumulation in specific geographies.10 Acts of
resisting police power constitute threats to the colonial racial capitalist
order, which is why such acts are revolutionary and hence so thoroughly
criminalized. We argue that attempts to save your life and/or the lives of
others from police violence or police-maintained organized abandonment
while Black, brown, Asian, Indigenous, asset-stripped, and/or gender-
nonconforming are not only powerful acts but also profoundly loving and
breathtakingly insubordinate. To paraphrase Ruth Nicole Brown, defending
yourself from or trying to evade police violence means that you love
yourself more than you fear the police.11 If you love yourself more than you
fear the police, you defy the devaluing logics of colonial racial capitalism
and the administrative powers that work to sustain it. If you love yourself
more than you fear the police, then you repudiate police authority by
affirming your right to be treated with dignity. If you love yourself more
than you fear the police, you run or you resist arrest the moment you
recognize that the officers are taking away the precious life you built for
yourself. And if you love others more than you fear the police, then you risk
your safety, your freedom, even your own life to protect others from harm.
Decriminalizing saving one’s life and others’ lives from counterinsurgency
policing is thus, at once, a pragmatic and revolutionary act.
Policing as Administrative Power: Killing with Impunity

In order to understand policing as the street administration of colonial racial

capitalism, we have to understand the world system of liberal capitalist
democracies, constitutively and continually structured by colonialism, racial
domination, and heteropatriarchy, to be a mode of governance that
irreducibly deploys criminalization, such that whole populations of people
can be strategically—sometimes more or less permanently, sometimes “at
will”—subject to rule by coercion, even as they exist within a capitalist
world system that uses liberal freedoms (with violence)12 as realizing praxis
concepts to manifest and stabilize conditions of capital accumulation.
Operationalized with and as racialization (usually but not necessarily along
color lines), criminalization “sorts humans for capitalist care or
destruction.”13 Criminalization reserves the capacity to exercise liberal
“freedoms,” to be governed by “consent,” to participate in capitalist
“democracy” (always limited, racialized, and settler/colonial) for privileged
groups whose “consent” can be aligned with dominant capitalist classes.14
Developed over long histories of correlating liberalism, capitalism, race
making, gender making, and colonialism, liberal capitalist democracies
continually place the violence required by dominant capitalist arrangements
(always racial, always colonial) outside the realm of the political by
combining the materializing effects of liberalism’s praxis concepts—
property, deed, ownership—and the tool of criminalization to
performatively constitute populations that can be left out of liberal rights for
strategic purposes and to represent other nonliberal rights demands
(collective, Indigenous) to be irrational, illegal, and immoral. Thus, for US
capitalist democracy and elsewhere in the transnational order it helps
articulate, criminalization is always our mode of governance, constitutively
with liberal (always capitalist) rights.15
To understand police as administrators who criminalize as they do
violence work for colonial racial capitalist orders in the United States (and
other settler colonial and colonizing Western “democracies”), we have to
leave behind a lot of stories that liberalism writ large (liberalism conceived
as a thick episteme that organizes an enduring common sense) tells about
itself: about the economy (free markets), the state (consent by the
governed), and civil society. More to the point, we have to stop thinking
about liberalism in liberal terms—that is, we have to stop thinking about it
as primarily an economic, moral, or political philosophy that upholds
individual rights, civil liberties, and economic freedoms. Instead, we should
think of liberalism as a capitalist worlding praxis, as a realizing, onto-
epistemological power, as a power that enables the ways in which
capitalism not only tries to dictate how we exist in the world but also
structures how we make sense of the world in which we live. In other
words, to think of liberalism as a capitalist worlding praxis means to
understand we cannot rely on liberal solutions (better laws and political
rights) to colonial racial capitalism because colonial racial capitalism does
not exist without liberalism.
Liberalism is founded in and continues to work through colonial
administration, racial and gendered slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and
the management of racial difference.16 These liberal narratives of individual
rights, civil liberties, and economic freedoms shape how we interpret our
relations to one another, to land, and to all social and ecological life through
a capitalist value-making system that reduces land to property, plants and
animals to extractable resources, and human beings to their labor power as
productive, reproductive, or unproductive. To think of liberalism as a
capitalist worlding praxis means to understand that liberal narratives are
schemas that colonial racial capitalists use to continually divide people,
practices, domains, and situations into the political (hegemony) and the
administrative (coercion). The work of the administrative is to ensure
circulations of colonial racial capitalist accumulation and to manage the
“ungovernable” through policing and bureaucracy.17
In order to understand how power—including police power—really
works to secure and reproduce conditions for capital accumulation, we must
again think outside liberal epistemes. If we use a colonial racial capitalist
framework of analysis, we see that accumulation is operationalized through
liberal onto-epistemes that are capitalist-worlding praxis concepts, always
conjoined with specific formations of organized (police-military-privatized)
physical violence, always targeting groups that are marked by the dominant
as permitted to be violated through intersecting processes of racialization,
gendering, heteropatriarchy, ethno-nationalism, and more. We also see that
liberal modes of understanding separate “kinds” of power (political versus
economic power, legal power versus police power, etc.) are useful
subterfuges that disguise and deploy a more fundamental, operationalizing
power for colonial racial capitalist orders that we call administrative power.
According to liberalism as a thick, enduring episteme, power is not
located in what it defines as the “administrative”; rather, it is located in law,
economy, politics, and popular will. For liberal epistemes, administration is
just neutral procedures or technical routines that provide efficiency and
ensure against bias—not a power itself. In contrast, the historical and lived
experiences of much of humanity—sorted into groups through racialized,
heteropatriarchal, settler colonial, and criminalizing schemes endemic to
racial capitalist modernity and marked off for administrative (not political)
governance—encounter “administrative power” as constitutive to and
required for colonial racial capitalism, allowing us to see liberalism as a
theory and practice of administration backed up by police-military-physical
force.
Rather than power exercised merely as laws getting passed,
technological progress, or political processes responding to the will of the
people, liberal praxis concepts (politics, law, progress) can be understood as
part of a kind of “it-gets-done (if-it-can-get-done)” administrative power.
Under various kinds of duress and out of a moving base of forces
(competitive, oppositional, alternative, residual, or emergent), specific
dominating colonial racial capitalist class assemblages determine social
processes as much as possible to realize accumulation, then recursively
assemble law, political rationales, and technological fixes accordingly.
Far from being the handmaid to rule according to a “separation of
powers,” administrative power is at once legislative, adjudicating, and
executive. It tries—and happily often fails—to arrange things in a way that
appears apolitical so that day to day the empirical, accumulative goals of
the reigning colonial racial capitalist bloc are achieved by hook or by crook.
Police power, as a kind of administrative power, works this way. Rather
than being a purely executive power or enforcement power, it operates
recursively along a law-administration-force continuum, doing violence
work that has already been justified as necessary to sustain reigning
relations of accumulation (hyperbolized as “law and order”), then
assembling legal, moral, standard operating protocol, and even using after-
the-fact medical (“excited delirium,” “sickle cell trait”) justifications for
acts of police violence.
In reality, this very logic was the foundation for the Uniform Arrest Act,
first proposed in 1942. At the time, the vast majority of arrests by police
officers were technically illegal. The Uniform Arrest Act proposed that
states change their criminal laws so that officers’ mostly illegal actions in
practice would become legal on the books. To reconcile police officers’
actions with the law on the books, the writer of the act, Sam B. Warner,
spent months with officers to observe how they arrested people in practice.
With the input of a committee consisting of police officers, judges,
prosecutors, law professors, defense attorneys, and attorneys general,
Warner drafted the act so that arrest laws would match officers’ arresting,
detaining, searching, and questioning procedures—essentially legalizing
officers’ illegal policing practices. For instance, in some states it was not
legal for officers to use deadly force unless they were arresting someone
who had committed a felony with violence. It was also a person’s right to
resist an illegal arrest with force; it was even within people’s rights to kill
an officer to protect themselves against death or great injury if they were
resisting an illegal arrest.18 By criminalizing resistance to an illegal arrest,
as legal scholars Craig Hemmens and Daniel Levin comment, officers’
authority could “follow the badge rather than the law.”19 In addition to
permitting officers the use of deadly force against people suspected of
committing misdemeanors and criminalizing civilian efforts to resist illegal
arrests, the Uniform Arrest Act also advocated changes that made it easier
to detain people (who had not been arrested) for longer, to frisk any
potential suspect for weapons irrespective of reasonable suspicion and
without an arrest, and to arrest people suspected of committing
misdemeanors without a warrant even if the officer did not witness the
crime committed.20
 Many believe that the criminal justice system is able to keep law
enforcement in check, but in actuality these powers are not separate at all.
People believe that law is supposed to check police power to make sure that
police authority is not abused, but in actuality police do what they want first
and then find the law, policies, or procedures to justify their actions after the
fact. People believe that prosecutors are supposed to use the law to rein in
and discipline police abuse of power, but in actuality they cite the law as the
reason why officers cannot be prosecuted at all for killing civilians, not just
enabling but empowering officers to continue criminalizing, terrorizing,
abusing, and murdering those most vulnerable. This recursivity (the
meaning of law is the effect of police violence work) shows us how
policing is an administrative power that is “above the law” because its
actual work is to criminalize groups of people whose vulnerability,
disposability, and precarity are value making for others within specific
circulations of colonial racial capitalism (i.e., by generating fines and fees
through policing) or to secure the conditions of possibility for these
circulations (i.e., by valuing private property over BIPOC lives).
To put it plainly, criminalization operationalizes colonial racial
capitalisms. By “operationalize,” we mean that criminalization provides a
“how” for circulations of colonial racial capitalism in process; it is a
procedure that shapes and conditions relations of accumulation. In the
words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Criminalization remains a complicated
means and process to achieve a simple thing: To enclose people in
situations where they are expected, and in many ways compelled, to sicken
and to die.… [Carceral geographies] reveal real human sacrifice as an
organizing principle, or perhaps more precisely as an unprincipled form of
organizing, which returns us to racial capitalism and the role of
criminalization in it.”21 And as Robert Nichols writes,
The extension of criminal jurisdiction has long been central to the
subjugation and displacement of indigenous polities.… What has
changed is that unlike previous eras (unlike even, the 1970s, e.g., Pine
Ridge), the incarceration of indigenous peoples is increasingly
dehistoricized—and thus depoliticized—through its representation as the
general extension of racialized criminality.… [Criminalization] functions
 to erect a strict separation between criminal control and conquest despite
indigenous societies’ continued insistence that externally imposed
coercive control over their members (for whatever reason) is an affront
to the inherent right to self-government.22
In other words, police criminalize Indigenous people for colonial racial
capitalisms by depoliticizing and severing their relations to the land that
“contradictorily provides the material and spiritual sustenance of
Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-
formation, settlement and capitalist development on the other.”23
Police are administrators who criminalize in real time as they do the
violence work that colonial racial capitalism requires. From the beginning
of colonial racial capitalist modernity, criminalizing processes and
repertories have sorted people, geographies, and socialities into the political
and the administrative, yet these have arguably taken on a specific, central
function in the United States in the era of official antiracism because they
enable the ways of anti-Blackness and other racial and settler colonial
oppressions to appear compatible with versions of multiculturalism that
differentiate BIPOC people marked as law-abiding or assimilable from those
who are criminalized and therefore marked as disposable and excludable.24
Policing is only one of many processes and apparatuses that fabricate,
manage, and organize criminalization. It exists in a specific continuum with
“therapeutic” apparatuses of public administration—education, housing,
health care, social-service management, and other apparatuses—which, like
policing, continually fabricate and operationalize dividing lines between the
respectable poor and the lumpen rabble, between those worthy of state care
and the unworthy, between people marked as victims and those marked as
threats. Like policing, these administrative apparatuses criminalize to
legitimate social violence (hunger, political exclusion, denial of health care,
sexual exploitation) that is already built into schemes of colonial racial
capitalist accumulation.
What is singular about policing and criminalization is that the specific
activity of policing (as opposed to other criminalizing processes) is to
enforce colonial racial capitalist conditions on the street and in real time
through violence work. Policing is an activity that makes criminal in real
time to justify officers’ physical violence that has already been authorized
in the name of “law and order”—that is, in the name of fabricating and
maintaining a colonial racial capitalist order of value making and
accumulation that circulates and produces group-differentiated (BIPOC, the
asset-stripped) premature death.25
Gilmore gives us a sense of policing as the activity that criminalizes in
order to enforce racial capitalist orders to the point of real-time killing. In an
interview published in the Guardian after the Baltimore uprisings in
response to the police murder of Freddie Gray in 2015, Gilmore asks us to
rethink the idea that police kill Black people because society sees them as
criminals. Instead, Gilmore asserts, racialized criminalization is the effect or
the consequence of police power to kill Black people with impunity: “I
think many people respond to these high-profile police killings by thinking:
‘They can kill us because they can lock us up.’ But I think it goes the other
way: they can lock us up because they know they can kill us, because they
can kill with impunity.”26 The difference is not insignificant: if the police
can murder BIPOC people because they can turn them into criminals, then it
means all our attention should focus on making laws fairer and officers less
racist. But if it is the other way around, if police can criminalize BIPOC
people because they can kill them with impunity, then we have to change
everything. It’s crucial to recognize that the reason why police can kill
BIPOC people with impunity is because colonial racial capitalism renders
asset-stripped, racialized, vulnerable people disposable. This power to kill
those deemed disposable with impunity is the basis of police power. In
other words, as Gilmore suggests, behind the police power to criminalize is
the police power to kill in real time on the street in order to preserve and
defend prevailing colonial racial capitalist arrangements.
Because people who are in reality ruled by domination and coercion, not
hegemony (people marked for capitalist destruction, not capitalist care),
resist this order of things all the time, they are marked as counterinsurgent
even when only living their lives. Living their lives is a form of resistance
both individually and collectively; making their lives more livable and more
enjoyable is about resisting colonial racial capitalism by taking up space on
public or, rather, stolen land denied to them and the land’s Indigenous kin.
 For instance, during the post–World War II era in Milwaukee, as in much
of the nation, law enforcement harassed Black residents frequently,
extensively, cruelly, brutally, and indiscriminately. The constant, oppressive
presence of police in Black neighborhoods was not about keeping Black
people safe; it was not about protecting Black residents. It was about
exerting control over every aspect of Black social life, criminalizing
African Americans’ relationships to one another and to their own
neighborhoods. As Simon Ezra Balto writes, “Officers working the beat in
black Milwaukee racked up significant numbers of arrests for vagrancy,
public consumption of alcohol, and loitering—charges directly related to
people’s presence in and uses of public space.”27 These charges were
explicitly about criminalizing all the parts of Black life that were not about
working for someone else—criminalizing all the activities Black people did
with one another after work was over. It also tells us that police harassment
was not just about enforcing segregation; it was also about criminalizing
Black presence in public space on stolen land. In other words, law
enforcement did not just criminalize Blacks’ relationships with white
people and white spaces; they also criminalized Blacks’ social relationships
with one another, Blacks’ leisure and recreational (noneconomic) activities,
and Blacks’ relationships to the public spaces they shared.
This situation continues today, and it is the same policing that is intrinsic
to ongoing settler colonial occupation, to violence work for colonization, on
land that settlers call Milwaukee. Settler colonial occupation requires the
persistent policing of Indigenous relations, presence, and bodies (especially
unsheltered and poor people) because the persistence of Indigenous life
itself threatens the (always incomplete) territorialization of settler command
and control. In other words, it threatens US nation-state sovereignty, which,
Manu Karuka reminds us, is always a counter-sovereignty.28 As the authors
of Red Nation Rising explain, US settler capitalist democracy requires a
commitment to collective violence in order to keep Indigenous people off
the land, to hinder Indigenous practices and relations based on land, and to
repress Indigenous sovereignty. In Milwaukee this commitment to
collective violence is mostly contracted out to police, whose enduring
function for settler society is “Indian killers.”29 Milwaukee police are able
to criminalize Black and Indigenous people because they do violence work
as the infliction of administrative power—that is, they are tasked to use
lethal violence to maintain relations of colonial racial capitalist
accumulation such as racial segregation, settler occupation, migrant
precarity produced through border-organized matrices of oppression, and
“carceral regimes of private property” that alienate, cage, and commodify
human relations with land and other life-affirming material beings and
caretaking activities.30
How Police Use Discretion to Criminalize

Counterinsurgent policing on the street and in real time must be constant. It

must also be flexible in terms of its operations and targets because (1)
colonial racial capitalist strategies of accumulation are always changing
(through and because of competition and opposition) and (2) many
contemporary strategies enmeshed with neoliberal multiculturalism require
the momentary rehabilitation of criminalized groups (e.g., “redevelopment”
strategies for real estate capital, “rehabilitation” strategies for therapeutic
carceral economies, “human resource” strategies for education
corporations). Thus, police as street administrators of colonial racial
capitalist orders require operational flexibility. Police must continually and
flexibly fabricate and enforce dividing lines (enduringly racialized) between
people marked as moral, legitimate, worthy of investment, and innocent and
those marked as immoral, suspicious, disposable, and threatening—in short,
criminalizable—in accordance with specific colonial racial capitalist
strategies of accumulation.
Today, police criminalize in real time BIPOC movement through city
space to maintain the territorialized whiteness that drives real-estate profits,
and police criminalize BIPOC immobility when neighborhoods are targeted
for redevelopment. Police criminalize to produce benefits and profits for
criminal justice economies and technologies, including prison, weapon, and
surveillance industries. They criminalize in real time, on the street, for
financial capitalism: to anchor municipal finance and bond schemes, to
boost payday lenders, to prepare places for investment, and to produce fines
and fees for city budgets. They criminalize in real time informal economic
activities that are the survival work of the asset-stripped yet also criminalize
activities of leisure, recreation, and sociality that embody self-determination
and nurture liberatory existence that threatens colonial, racial orders.
When we see that police criminalize in real time to fabricate and
maintain colonial racial capitalist orders, we can see instances or acts of
policing as administrative (or as enactments of administrative power) and
recognize that police activities are not “responses” to individual actions;
rather, the violence work they inflict has already been “decided upon” (not
intentionally) by the requirements of strategic colonial racial capitalist
arrangements and the necessity to defend police power. Criminalizing,
enacted with and through acts of policing, does the deed and is the cover-
up.
Key to criminalization is an indispensable procedure of police power that
is often perceived as being only about what individual police officers do
(rather than an anchor for policing as acts of administrative power) and thus
preoccupies reformers: police discretion. Discretion is necessary for
policing as administering colonial racial capitalist orders in real time and on
the street pervasively and flexibly, as an “it-gets-done” kind of
administrative sorting, ordering, disqualifying, and marking of people
through violence work for accumulation. Discretion also,
counterinsurgently, lets police inflict sanctioned violence day to day to
make sure that the social relations defined as legal by the capitalist state
(private property, eminent domain, the commodification of health, housing,
land) define the material conditions of daily life, thus repressing
Indigenous, Black radical, socialist, and other anticapitalist, grounded
modes of relationality.31 Discretion gives police the operational power to
structure every single encounter: to look the other way or pursue, to warn or
arrest, to insert someone into the criminal justice apparatus of human
sacrifice and impoverishment or not.
Liberal law-and-order proposals often point to discretion as the weak
point in policing—police act in a biased way, they make bad decisions, they
go after the wrong person—but discretion is not a weakness in policing.
Police discretion is the source of its operational strength. Discretion is a
way of fixing the structures of social domination durably in the experiential
and lived dispositions of police as violence workers who are socialized to
act in accord with background conditions structured by toxic masculinity,
anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. This means that
the administering police do on the fly—surveilling, informing, repressing,
arranging things on the street, drawing the line between the worthy poor
and disposable lumpen—can be done “with discretion” in accord with all
these background conditions. In fact, as Andrea Ritchie reminds us, police
discretion is the foundation for policing the everyday living of BIPOC
communities:
Police officers are afforded almost unlimited discretion when
determining who and what conduct is deemed disorderly or unlawful.
More specific regulations, such as those criminalizing sleeping,
consuming food or alcohol, or urinating in public spaces, criminalize
activities so common they can’t be enforced at all times against all
people. As a result, both vague and specific quality-of-life offenses are
selectively enforced in particular neighborhoods and communities, or
against particular people, including people who, due to poverty and
homelessness, have no choice but to engage in such activities in public
spaces.32
A prime example of discretion in Wisconsin (as in much of the nation) is
traffic stops. Police routinely target cars with tribal license places as well as
cars with feathers or dream catchers hanging from visors or rearview
mirrors.33 Because it is illegal to hang anything that might obstruct a
driver’s view, police use their discretion to decide whether or not something
hanging from a rearview mirror obstructs a driver’s view. Police also don’t
need a reason to pull someone over—they can easily argue that a traffic
violation might be occurring, which can be premised on how a person
drives, a “broken” taillight, the color and make of the vehicle, registration
stickers, and so forth. Mary Annette Pember recounts a terrifying incident
when an officer pulled her over in northern Wisconsin as she was driving
off the reservation after attending a ceremony. After she answered the
officer’s questions—“What are you doing here? Where are you from?
Where are you going? Where are you staying?”—he asked for her license
and registration. Trying to be helpful, Pember’s autistic daughter opened the
glove box. In response, the officer put his hand on his gun and shone his
flashlight toward her daughter and the glove box, which made her daughter
scream. Fortunately, Pember was able to defuse the situation. He told her
that he pulled her over because she ran a stop sign, but he didn’t give her a
ticket. She writes that “I’m pretty sure I had stopped at the sign, but I sure
wasn’t going to argue with him.”34 The incident, extremely common for
Indigenous drivers, reveals the extent of police discretion; there is
essentially no limit. He could pull her over whether or not she actually
stopped at the sign.
Pulling someone over provides officers the opportunity to find a reason
to arrest by, for instance, conducting a test for driving under the influence or
searching for drugs, contraband, or “weapons” (which are themselves
defined according to officers’ discretion). In Native nations where police
have jurisdiction due to Public Law 280, Indigenous persons are
overrepresented in jails by as much as five times. In Vilas County,
Wisconsin, where the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa
Indians live, half of the incarcerated population is Indigenous, but Natives
represent only 11 percent of the county’s residents. In 2018 data reported
that the rate of Indigenous people incarcerated in Wisconsin was second
only to that of African Americans.35 The experience of being pulled over for
a traffic stop is so common that Natives refer to it as a DWI crime: “driving
while Indian.”36 Police discretion enables officers to essentially pull anyone
over at any time because officers’ feelings and beliefs—not reality—found
the premise for discretion.
When the practice of officers using their discretion to pull over people
who were not engaging in traffic violations was challenged in the
Milwaukee court system as a violation of a person’s rights, it was simply
converted into law by State v. Houghton (2015). In State v. Houghton, the
Wisconsin Supreme Court determined that a reasonable suspicion of a
traffic violation is enough evidence to conduct a traffic stop and any
subsequent searches; hence, an officer’s “objectively reasonable mistake of
law may form the basis for a finding of reasonable suspicion.”37 In other
words, officers can argue that they suspected someone was maybe engaging
in a traffic violation; if it turns out that their suspicion was groundless, they
can still reasonably suspect that you may be engaged in criminal activity,
which provides them the legal justification to search your person or your
car, and whatever they find can send you to jail or prison. This happens
often with drivers who hang decorative items from rearview mirrors—it is
obvious that such trinkets do not obstruct a driver’s view, but the court
determined that even when such cases are obviously not violations, police
officers’ actions should still be considered “reasonable mistakes.” It did not
matter if Pember stopped at the sign or didn’t. If the officer decided to
search her car, any evidence he found could be the basis for an arrest
because his “reasonable mistake” can still be the basis for someone’s arrest
and subsequent incarceration. Police discretion does the deed and is the
cover-up.
So-called reasonable mistakes do not need to be legal or legalized; even
discretionary police conduct found to be unconstitutional continues
unabated, underlining that police discretion is the source of its operational
strength. In 2017 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin,
representing six Milwaukee residents, sued the city of Milwaukee over its
police department’s racially discriminatory, unconstitutional stop-and-frisk
program.38 The plaintiffs were all Black and Latinx and included a
seventeen-year-old Black teenager who had already been stopped three
times (the first time when he was eleven) and a Latinx grandmother. Collins
v. City of Milwaukee (2017) exposed that from 2010 to 2017, the
Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) conducted hundreds of thousands of
pedestrian and traffic stops without reasonable suspicion—in other words,
officers conducted stops and sometimes searches for no justifiable reason at
all.39
The former chief of police, Edward Flynn, denied that such a stop-and-
frisk program existed. However, he did share Milwaukee’s policies as an
example of “best practices” for the report Stop and Frisk: Balancing Crime
Control with Community Relations.40 In this report the MPD’s policy is
clearly about the hyper-policing of Black and brown people and the places
they live: “We operate under the belief that when we focus on the right
person or persons responsible for crime and disorder, we will see results.
Our interaction with the community and enforcement of laws and
ordinances are not random, instead it is a purposeful linkage of enforcement
and gives proper attention to areas prone to violent crime and disorder.”41
As the ACLU documented, the MPD’s “not random” policies and directives
essentially constituted a stop-and-frisk program conducted in predominantly
Black and Latinx neighborhoods. As the suit asserted, “The strategy
includes blanketing certain geographic areas in which residents are
predominantly people of color with ‘saturation patrols’ by MPD officers,
who conduct high-volume, suspicionless stops and frisks throughout the
area. Over time, the MPD’s program has developed into a formal and
informal quota system that requires patrol officers to meet numerical targets
for stops on a regular basis.”42 In fact, the de facto stop-and-frisk program
was so punishing that it was difficult for officers to execute at the level
expected. Therefore, the president of the Milwaukee police union brought it
to the attention of the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission in 2016. As
he complained, “Police officers were clearly directed that the norm, or
average, was two traffic stops per day. The requirement therefore moving
forward, was that everyone would be required to produce two stops every
day. For those that did not comply, they could expect progressive discipline
up to and including termination.…”43
The ACLU did win the case. Nusrat Choudhury, deputy director of the
ACLU Racial Justice Program, wrote a hopeful blog post, citing Milwaukee
as an example for the rest of the nation to follow:
The settlement mandates reforms that are expansive and profound. It
requires the overhaul of how police conduct and report stops and frisks
in Milwaukee. The settlement also compels the city to take concrete
steps to ensure that police stops and frisks are supervised and monitored
and that officers who conduct unlawful encounters are counseled,
retrained, or disciplined. And the City must sustain the Community
Collaborative Committee, a group of community members who will
meet regularly with Milwaukee police and the City’s Fire and Police
Commission to provide input on policing strategies and their impact on
the public.
Cities and towns across the United States should do what Milwaukee
is now required by the settlement to do—conduct internal and external
audits to ensure that stops and frisks are supported by the reasonable
suspicion required by the Fourth Amendment. If stops and frisks do not
meet this standard, officers must be disciplined for violating the
Constitution. Only a true embrace of evidence-based policing and
accountability measures can guard against policing based on bias in
violation of the 14th Amendment’s basic guarantee of equal protection of
 the law. And to work for all of us, policing depends on law enforcement
efforts based on evidence, not stereotypes or bias.44
The most recent data reveal that the changes “required” of the MPD over the
last three years have not been implemented in meaningful ways. The MPD
complies with sharing its data (although many records are still incomplete),
yet officers continue to stop and frisk primarily Black and Latinx residents
without justification at alarming rates, which should serve as evidence that
police reform through law is completely untenable. Among several
stipulations, the MPD was supposed to show that 15 percent of no-action
encounters were conducted without reasonable suspicion, but police officers
actually regressed, showing that 63.2 percent were conducted without
reasonable suspicion, up from 50 percent in the previous report.45 More than
half of all discretionary police encounters without reasonable suspicion
involved Black people, so we can assume that this number
disproportionately affects African Americans.46 The MPD was also supposed
to demonstrate that fewer than 15 percent of frisks were conducted without
reasonable suspicion that the person stopped was armed and dangerous, but
87.2 percent of frisks were not justified. Of those frisked, 86 percent were
Black and 7.9 percent were Latinx, together totaling 93.9 percent of all
those frisked in Milwaukee. This has had dire consequences for those
targeted: 70.6 percent of the contraband found was discovered during
unjustified frisks.47
Police saturate Black and brown neighborhoods and decide who is
suspicious and who is not. The fact that a neighborhood has a heavy police
presence means that more people will be arrested. Discretion is
indispensable for policing, and it is kept in play by making sure that so
many life activities are criminalized that they can’t be enforced at all times
against all people. Whether police discretion is legalized or disciplined,
nothing happens to curtail it or check it because the violence work of police
discretion maintains colonial racial capitalist relations of accumulation. It
does not matter whether police actions are legal, illegal, or a “reasonable
mistake” because their violence work is not about enforcing the law; it is
about preserving colonial racial capitalist relations of accumulation—
keeping entire Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities unreasonably
vulnerable to capitalist exploitation, violence, and policing itself.
In Milwaukee, stop-and-frisk, discretionary policing keeps the city
racially segregated (by making it dangerous for BIPOC working-class people
to live or travel through white areas), and racial segregation works for racial
capital accumulation by structuring a development strategy in which city
officials and real estate capitalists use the banality of “two Milwaukees”—
one white, one Black, one rich, one poor—to justify financing downtown
projects (stadiums, condominiums, office buildings) and withholding public
and private money from Black and brown neighborhoods.48
Stop-and-frisk, discretionary policing in Milwaukee is also part of a
colonial racial capitalist economy that profits from border imperialism.
People who were set on the move by US-backed capitalist violence in
Mexico and Central and South America are coerced into extractive housing
and labor conditions by a matrix of oppressions that pervasive on-the-street,
stop-and-frisk policing maintains in Milwaukee.49 Discretionary policing
also maintains settler capitalism through constant potential violence against
Indigenous presence in the city of Milwaukee, making Indigenous
stewardship and relations with the land, water, plants, medicines, and other
life-sustaining material beings difficult while instead turning these into
private property, investments, and fixed capital.50 Overall, the discretionary
policing of BIPOC and asset-stripped Milwaukeeans functions as
counterinsurgency for colonial racial capitalism by wielding the threat of
violence (the impunity to kill) constantly and pervasively against those
whose disposability, domination, or premature death enables capital
accumulation for elites and allies.
Criminalizing Self-Defense from and Activism against Police Violence

With Milwaukee’s Black and brown neighborhoods saturated by police who

are able to stop and frisk anyone they want despite the finding that their
practices are unconstitutional, despite the settlement requiring the
department to change, and despite grumblings from police officers
themselves, it should come as no surprise that more arrests will be made in
“not random” areas. These circumstances are created because police’s right
to kill “the right person or persons” with impunity has already been
“decided upon.” Because they can kill anyone in entire communities
deemed disposable, it does not matter whether their use of “not random”
discretion is accurate, legal, or constitutional. Hence, more people will be
caught in dangerous and/or compromising situations not just because police
face no consequences when they conduct unconstitutional frisks without
reasonable suspicion but also because of the sheer number of officers
patrolling these neighborhoods.
The structure of the criminal justice system itself makes it extremely
difficult to hold officers accountable and makes it impossible to provide all
criminally accused a jury trial, so using the court system to address not only
officers’ misconduct but also officers’ mistakes or inaccurate charges is
extremely burdensome for the criminally accused.51 Somil Trivedi and
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve argue that prosecutors’ reliance on police to
win their cases has created a “persistent, codependent relationship between
police and prosecutors [that] exacerbates police misconduct and violence
and is aided by prosecutors in both legal and extralegal ways.”52 When
accused people don’t have the time and money to go to court, they may be
pressured to take a deal and plead guilty or no contest to crimes they did not
commit because it is expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally
exhausting to go to court even for petty crimes. As Malcolm M. Feeley says
in The Process Is the Punishment, “Pretrial detention, bail, repeated court
appearances, and forfeited wages all exact their toll on the criminally
accused.”53 It’s understandable, then that people sometimes resist arrest or
run away. They know that the police do not have to arrest them and that the
cases themselves may even fall apart in court, so they might run away or
resist arrest to be able to work the next day, to be able to go home that
night, to escape costly court and lawyer fees, to hold on to dignity, to
bypass further humiliation, or to avoid having to take a plea because a plea
would be more convenient and cheaper than fighting the charge in court. It
makes sense that with so many very public cases about police brutality and
killings, some people would try to defend themselves against the possibility
of police violence by resisting arrest or running away. These actions of
BIPOC people loving themselves more than they fear the police are not just
about self-defense; they are also forms of resistance that undermine police
power itself.
In order for policing to administer colonial racial capitalist orders on the
street and in real time through violence work, policing’s prime directive—
and where the administrative character of policing is readily graspable—is
the defense of police power as such. Through charges such as “failure to
obey” or “resisting arrest,” police criminalize people who threaten in real
time exercises of racialized colonial capitalist police power. Such charges
defend police power by making every act of resistance to police activities
criminalizable. Importantly, police criminalize BIPOC and asset-stripped
people who threaten police power in real time (for example, by not
responding to a police command or just seeming not to respond) as
intolerable threats who can be killed for this one act alone. This is because
such acts of refusal embody challenges to police power writ large, not
merely resistance to an individual officer’s will.
In this way the act of self-defense against acts of police violence in real
time, on the street, performatively diminishes police power because it
embodies a refusal to submit to illegitimate authority, and it epitomizes
loving oneself over fearing the police. When uprisings against police
violence mourn and honor people whose revolutionary acts of self-defense
against police power were not able to save their lives, the empowering
chants of protesters are not only angry and sad but also insightful, genius,
and revolutionary. They discredit the power of police to criminalize those
they kill with impunity by saying the names of loved ones over and over
and over again, etching their names in art, media, public policy, law, public
debates, movements, hearts, and minds, reminding everyone that those
deemed disposable are never ever that, that these loved ones are absolutely
irreplaceable, desperately missed, and fiercely loved. When marchers
proceed to #sayhername or when they imbue George Floyd’s name with
preciousness and power, they identify and resist criminalization as a mode
of governance, a fulcrum of US multicultural white supremacist settler
capitalist democracy. They make us attend to the role of criminalization in
colonial racial capitalism and policing as counterinsurgency violence work,
essential for a system that relies constitutively on organized premature
death. Marchers know that in the eyes of the state, Black, Indigenous,
Latinx, Asian, Arab, queer, trans, two-spirit men, women, children, and
teenagers become criminals in death precisely for defending their lives from
the police. Imbuing their names with incalculable worth and immeasurable
value, with soul-deep mourning and bone-aching anger, with preciousness
and power activates an epistemological imperative, a Black radical
imperative, a queer-of-color imperative, an Indigenous decolonial
imperative: these lives lost are irreplaceable.
“Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police” is a crystallized expression of the
collective, embodied knowledge that police brutalize BIPOC people precisely
for their will to live and to defend themselves against police as
administrators of a social order predicated on the insecurity and violability
of BIPOC lives and the lives of poor people. The chants rehearse a legal-
social order that judges the need of those killed to defend themselves from
police as imminently reasonable and condemns police power for its
genocidal license to kill. By stripping away the recursive procedure of
criminalizing people for trying to save their lives from police, they help us
see that evasive actions taken to defy the racialized death-dealing powers of
police should be legible as revolutionary acts.
For example, when people in Milwaukee began marching after the police
murder of George Floyd in 2020 (they are still marching), they chanted,
along with Floyd’s name, the names of Black, brown, and Indigenous
people killed in Milwaukee for the “crime” of trying to save their lives from
officers fully committed to their job of maintaining racialized social control
in the hyper-segregated city. Protesters said the name “Dontre Hamilton,” a
young man with schizophrenia who was sleeping on a downtown park
bench outside a Starbucks. He was shot fourteen times by Darren Wilson
after he grabbed the baton that Wilson was using to beat him. He was killed
when he exercised his legal right to self-defense against an officer’s use of
excessive force. They say “Jay Anderson” for a young father and cook at
Ruby Tuesday’s who was awakened by police while sleeping in his car in a
park and killed for having his hands below the officer’s line of sight. He
was killed because lethal force was used first, making self-defense
impossible. They say “Antonio Gonzales” for a twenty-nine-year-old queer
Indigenous-Latinx lover of Emo-music who was killed outside his front
door by the same officer who would later kill Anderson because he held on
to a sword he clutched (but did not wield threateningly), perhaps as a
talisman of protection. And they say “Sylville Smith” for a neighborhood-
famous, much-loved “soft soul” who was chased by a police officer he
knew disliked him and was killed as he threw his legally possessed gun on
the ground to give the officer no excuse to shoot him. He was exercising a
duty to retreat, was engaged in an act of self-preservation, and was doing
everything he could to not be read as “resisting arrest” or as “threatening.”
He was trying to save his life. As Sylville’s father said to marchers in
Milwaukee, “He was running away from the problem. How can he be the
problem?”
After each killing, the police officer involved claimed self-defense while
using each young man’s own self-defensive actions—trying to stop the
blows raining down, throwing away a gun he was legally allowed to carry
while running for his life—as “proof” of criminality. After each killing,
community members turned their names into shibboleths of pain and
protection, saying them again and again. Their names have become
revolutionary commitments, rehearsals for freedom, promises to remain
alive and thus insurgent, to exist and resist, to decriminalize the murdered
and condemn their killing. Their names defy the logic of disposability, of
interchangeability, of surplus. Saying their names is not only about the
refusal to forget and the refusal to be forgotten; it is also a demand for a
reckoning with irreplaceable lives stolen: saying their names is a first
pragmatic step to change everything.54
 Movements against police violence decriminalize people who died trying
to save their lives from the police. Because movements politicize police
violence, demand responses from elected officials, encourage people to stay
on the streets, and win some definitional authority over police encounters
for the policed, movements against police violence also threaten police
power. They create relations where people collectively commit to watch
police, to stand up for one another during police encounters, to film and
spread warnings and community intelligence about police actions.
Movements against police violence turn criminalizing procedures on their
heads because they enliven infrastructures of radical consciousness of
police violence work as itself criminal. When peaceful marchers are met
with armored tactical vehicles, tear gas, tasers, riot shields, batons, and
police aligned in military formation, it demonstrates how this kind of
extreme lethality is always there in ordinary (which is always
counterinsurgent) policing, always just one mayoral declaration of “civil
disturbance” away, on permanent, settler colonial standby. In short, it lets us
know that policing’s function is gendered racial and colonial oppression.55
Because of the far-reaching and radical power of movements against
police violence, state-legal-police assemblages target these movements for
special kinds of repression and especially repress those who gather the
marches, who are known as community defenders, who motivate people to
march together to demand that police stop killing Black, brown, Native,
poor, and gender-nonconforming people. In fact, the charge of “resisting
arrest,” though now banal and used for daily repressive policing, was first
used to target the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the American
Indian Movement and other revolutionary movements crystallized from
commitments to collective self-defense against police violence. Such
charges were used to criminalize activism and provide law enforcement the
legal reasoning they needed to use violence to suppress community leaders.
Representing Black, brown, and Indigenous activists as violent criminals
who resisted arrest diverted attention away from movement demands,
discredited the community work that activists did, and in some cases even
delegitimated the activists’ organizations. The charge of “resisting arrest” is
important in narrating these stories because Black, brown, and Indigenous
activists were often not criminals who resisted arrest but “criminals”
because they “resisted arrest,” according to police.
Historian and activist Yohuru Williams details a violent confrontation
between members of the Milwaukee Black Panther Party (BPP) and the
police in Milwaukee in 1969.56 The event that ignited this controversy
occurred when police charged Black Panthers Jesse Lee White, Earl Walter
Leverette, and Booker Collins for resisting arrest. According to the officers,
the BPP members were pulled over because their car matched the description
of another that had allegedly shot at a patrolman. As Officer Thomas
Lelinski arrested the men, Lieutenant Raymond Beste pointed a shotgun at
them. Lelinski claimed that White shoved him and tried to escape,
encouraging Collins and Leverette to enter the struggle at the exact same
time that police backup arrived. The officers claim they used appropriate
force and quickly squashed the conflict.
White, Leverette, and Collins told a different version of the event.
According to these targeted BPP members, when the rest of the police
arrived, they had already been handcuffed by the arresting officers. All the
officers—those that arrested them as well as the more than twenty officers
who arrived as backup—proceeded to beat the already handcuffed men with
“fists, firearm butts, and blackjacks.”57 White, Leverette, and Collins were
charged with the misdemeanor of resisting arrest. Williams explains that
this confrontation and the legal trial and appeal that followed exhausted the
chapter’s resources and energy, which then decimated its membership and
soon resulted in the local party’s disbandment by the national offices of the
BPP. Although it’s possible that Lelinski and Beste had reasonable suspicion
to arrest White, Leverette, and Collins, it’s also clear that there was no
evidence to connect them to the alleged shots fired from a car that
supposedly looked like theirs. The only “crime” that White, Leverette, and
Collins were charged with and ultimately convicted of after losing their
appeal was “resisting arrest.” This was the illegal activity that turned these
community leaders into criminals. When the supposed crime that led to the
arrest cannot be proven in court, we need to consider that the arrest itself
that the men resisted may have been completely unwarranted and perhaps
even illegal. Officers can easily claim “reasonable suspicion” (isn’t their car
the same color as one we suspect?), which places the law on their side, but
this “suspicion” did not lead to any convictions. Instead, this suspicion led
to more than twenty officers violently beating three handcuffed men for a
crime they did not commit. The law reads this suspicion as “reasonable,”
giving law enforcement officers the benefit of the doubt, the ability to use
their judgment, their discretion. But police discretion and the laws, policies,
and procedures that empower and protect officers’ decisions to arrest or not,
to tase or not, to shoot or not, are not at all reasonable but were in all
likelihood simply a policing tactic to humiliate and intimidate prominent
activists, to bankrupt their cash reserves, and to discredit the Milwaukee
chapter of the Black Panther Party by turning their leaders into “criminals.”
Recently, “resisting arrest” has been taken out of the bag of tricks again
in Milwaukee. In the first days of the new 2020 march on Milwaukee, the
police tried to use “resisting arrest” tactics to threaten and suppress
activists, as they had historically toward the Milwaukee Black Panthers.
This time, their primary target was community defender Frank Sensabaugh,
better known as Frank Nitty II, who has demonstrated the capacity to move
large numbers of Black, white, brown, and Native residents to peaceful
protest. As he marched with hundreds across a downtown bridge, officers
with the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department tear-gassed and violently
arrested him while he was live-streaming. According to Nitty, the police
were threatening to charge him with felony resisting arrest.58 Apparently,
the officers, dressed in riot gear and body armor, hurt themselves while
slamming Nitty’s prone and complying body to the ground. Nitty’s body
itself, all by itself, is narrated as an automated weapon that is somehow able
to “assault” officers while lying on the ground, motionless.59 As with Kayla
Moore, Mike Brown, Tanisha Anderson, Carlos Ingram-Lopez, Tony
McDade, Mario Gonzalez, George Floyd, Jonathan Tubby, Davinian
Darnell Williams, Eric Garner, Adam Toledo, Delmar Espejo, Jason Ike
Pero, and far too many others, Nitty’s Black body was literally criminalized
for its mere existence and potential to move, justifying the charge of
“resisting arrest.” In this case, as in others, Nitty was not charged with
anything, but he was made aware that the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s
office was not just considering the charge but circulating the narrative that
he “resisted arrest” to the mainstream media to give a reason for injuring
him so badly that he was taken to a hospital.60
Because uprisings have the power to interrupt policing as administering
colonial racial capitalisms in real time and the power to politicize violence
that police depoliticize through criminalizing procedures (such as using
resisting arrest or self-defense to justify and depoliticize killing with
impunity), state legislatures have accelerated the passage of laws to defend
police power in advance. Since the Ferguson, Standing Rock, and George
Floyd uprisings, state legislatures have been proposing laws that make
people who protest the violences of colonial racial capitalism,
administrative power, and/or the policing agencies vulnerable to repressive
police violence, incarceration, and/or heavy fines. Such laws have a
counterinsurgent function: to criminalize people occupying space (in the
streets, on the land) to defend themselves and all kin from police and
capitalist exploitation (furthering Black liberation, enacting Indigenous
sovereignty, demanding livable lives where they are) before they gather so
that all the violence deployed on them in defense of police power can be
represented as depoliticized counterviolence.61
Since the 2016 Standing Rock uprisings, there have been more than 226
initiatives at the state and federal level to suppress, criminalize, and punish
peaceful assembly. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit
Law, which tracks legislation limiting the right to protest, seventeen states
have enacted harsh penalties for protests near gas and oil pipelines and
other “critical infrastructure,” a category that most of these laws expand to
include any place or equipment associated with existing or planned oil, gas,
electric, water, telecommunications, railroad, and other projects and
facilities.62 In West Virginia a law was passed eliminating police liability for
injuries and deaths while dispersing “riots and unlawful assemblies.” Many
states have added criminal and civil penalties for protesters who block
traffic, sit in, or stand in, thus redefining core strategies of “peaceful civil
disobedience” as “rioting.” Conversely, white supremacists are being
protected by law for engaging in acts of violence. Oklahoma and Iowa have
granted immunity to drivers who run over protesters, redefining hit-and-run
as noncriminal if motivated by the driver’s support for “law and order,”
rendering BIPOC activists and their allies disposable when they destabilize
and delegitimate the power of police to kill with impunity. Since the spring
and summer 2020 uprisings, a torrent of laws have been passed that
redefine the smallest gathering of people as riots, even when literally
nothing has happened. Police (or their white settler counterparts/vigilantes)
need only to fear that a gathering of BIPOC people in public is a prelude to
something happening. For example, in April 2021 Arkansas passed a law
that redefines rioting as engaging with two or more persons in “tumultuous”
conduct that creates a “substantial risk” of “public alarm.” Other pending
legislation would prohibit people convicted of lawful protesting from
receiving student loans, unemployment assistance, or housing benefits
(Indiana) and bars anyone convicted of unlawful protesting from holding
state employment (Minnesota).63
Florida’s HB-1 bill (which became law in April 2021), “Combating
Public Disorder,” typifies the current tactic of layering multiple
punishments for people who protest police violence and its ideological and
financial supports: it makes it a felony to participate in a riot, defined as
three or more people acting in common to “assist each other in violent and
disorderly conduct”; it makes pulling down or otherwise damaging a
historical (Confederate) monument a second-degree felony with a fifteen-
year prison sentence; it provides draconian mandatory sentences for assaults
on law enforcement officers during protests and forbids protesters from
being released on bail before seeing a judge; it allows residents or elected
officials to appeal to the state should a municipality seek to cut police
budgets; and it frees from civil liability people who deliberately injure
protesters. Such legislation plays defense for police power; it hyper-
criminalizes, in advance, people who protest police violence while cloaking
police and nonpolice agents of the settler racial capitalist state (i.e., white
settlers who run over protesters) with legal protections to encourage them to
hurt protesters—to defend police power with extreme violence.
These contemporary laws, which criminalize BIPOC activists and allies
before they decide to protest, basically make BIPOC protest itself illegal, not
only discrediting activism before it starts but also justifying police
repression of activists before they organize as a way of upholding the law.
By further criminalizing protests, marches, and uprisings through these new
laws, state legislatures are attempting to depoliticize police repression
similar to the ways in which “resisting arrest” justifies and depoliticizes
police killings for much of the US public.64 This is why we have to think
outside of liberal terms. We name the law-administration-force continuum
administrative power in part to emphasize that laws are not politically
neutral: they are used to violently repress and criminalize BIPOC
communities, activisms, teachings, and everyday living. We cannot rely on
the law or policy changes to prevent police violence when the very purpose
of these is to preauthorize, manage, and extend it. Consider how often more
police training is offered as the solution to police violence, which merely
increases police budgets and infrastructure without actually lessening police
violence or officer-caused deaths.65
Although it’s incredibly disheartening to witness so many laws passing
so quickly to criminalize protesters before they gather, it’s important to
remember that this is another example of the recursivity of police violence
work. There are so many uprisings around the nation precisely because
officers are so rarely charged or prosecuted for injuring or killing BIPOC—
whether they are protesting, lawbreaking, or just living their lives—because
state statutes and the codependent relationship of police and prosecutors
make it incredibly difficult to use the law to hold officers accountable.
People who run over protesters are already not charged with hit-and-run
crimes.66 Efforts to defund the police are already undermined by rerouting
police budgets to other institutions’ budgets for policing, such as moving
New York Police Department (NYPD) money to the department of education,
which hires the NYPD as school safety agents.67 Indigenous land and water
protectors are already arrested for trespass and rioting when they try to
block pipelines, mines, and other harmful settler intrusions on treaty lands
and waters, unceded lands and waters, or Indigenous homelands and waters
(all of Turtle Island). Criminalizing “trespassing” and criminalizing land
and water protectors are themselves examples of the capitalist worlding
praxis that turns land into private property and water into an extractable
natural resource. And as we’ve been arguing, in cities such as Milwaukee,
police regard economically immiserated Black, Indigenous, Asian, and
Latinx people and the neighborhoods they live in as if they are disposable,
as if the police are able to kill them with impunity and therefore are able to
use their “discretion” to criminalize these people on the street in real time,
extracting them from their communities through incarceration, detention,
and all the consequences that come with these, such as losing wages or
employment. This new rash of laws is not “new”—in the sense that there
are already laws on the books that criminalize BIPOC protesters—but rather
these current anti-protest laws are responding to new forms of organizing,
contemporary methods of publicizing local uprisings through social media,
present-day strategies for acquiring allies, and, of course, all the violence
work of white supremacist counterprotesters. Just as with the Uniform
Arrest Act, discussed above, laws are being written to legalize the violence
work that police are already doing. These new laws are the effect of police
violence work that has already been happening on the street in real time
against protesters as they are protesting, publicizing, and undermining
police violence.
Police, of course, exert special effort to surveil, harass, and target for
criminalization activists known to defend the community from the police or
who expose policing as intrinsic to gendered racial capitalist domination
and settler occupation in their community activism. We often think of this
as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) repression, which in the era
of US President Donald Trump appeared under the sign of the FBI-
fabricated category of “Black Identity Extremists.” That the purpose of the
category was to organize, stoke, and aim police power at activists whose
commitments to Black community defense were articulated as defense from
police violence is obvious from the title of a 2018 FBI intelligence
assessment—“Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law
Enforcement”—which was disseminated to eighteen thousand law
enforcement agencies across the country.68 Eventually, the Trump
administration dropped the category for a facile substitute, “Racially or
Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.” The administration of US
President Joseph Biden has retained this designation with the stated
intention of using it to identify, deter, and prosecute white supremacists, but
its lineage speaks to the ease with which it can enable and disguise
government action against politically targeted Black activists.
Yet, as we see from the example of the Milwaukee Black Panthers,
politically motivated police persecution of activists doesn’t have to be
organized by the FBI. Police departments on their own initiative regularly
subject known activists to pervasive and saturating policing that wields the
threat of criminalization and punishment in escalating intensities. Such
policing of community defenders is sometimes the charge of “special
operations” or “special investigations” units, but more often police harass
activists under the cover of “suspected criminal activities” of all types (drug
dealing, burglary, gang activity, attempted murder, etc.).
Black Milwaukee activist Vaun Mayes was arrested in 2018 to
criminalize him for his leadership during the Sherman Park 2016 uprising,
which honored and remembered Sylville Smith, who was killed by police
officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown. Mayes was arrested for allegedly
planning to firebomb a police station and intimidating a witness, crimes that
never did occur.69 The so-called evidence that led to Mayes’s arrest—the
makings of Molotov cocktails—was found not in Mayes’s possession or in
his home but in dumpsters near Sherman Park. The federal raid of Mayes’s
home turned up only empty juice bottles.70 In addition to the lack of
evidence and Mayes’s role as a prominent activist, what makes this arrest so
clearly about punishing and criminalizing his activism is that he was also
charged under specific sections of the Civil Obedience Act, which was
designed to repress activism in the 1960s. The federal statute criminalizes
any conduct that might interfere with police officers carrying out their
duties during “civil disorder” (i.e., protests, riots, rebellions, and uprisings).
Recently, the law has been used against protesters in major cities, such as
Portland, Oregon, and Philadelphia. Mayes is one of only two people in the
Eastern District of Wisconsin ever charged under this law since the 1970s.
(The other person charged hurt a police officer during the August 2020
protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, honoring Jacob Blake, a Black man left
paralyzed after being shot seven times in the back by police officer Rusten
Sheskey. Sheskey’s actions were found lawful; he was not charged or
disciplined.)71
 Arresting Mayes criminalizes him. In real time and on the streets, police
officers arrested him in 2018. Because he is facing pending federal charges,
he has been unduly vulnerable to police abuse, harassment, humiliation, and
intimidation since then. He is reminded daily of his vulnerability to police
violence. He is constantly harassed and pulled over in officers’ attempts to
remind him that he is vulnerable, in their attempts to curtail all the
community work he does. And because of the pending charges, he never
resists; he is always compliant, no matter the affronts to his dignity.
Because he is criminalized, everything they do to him is already legally
justified, preauthorized as maintaining law and order. Officers know Mayes
because he is so involved in protesting police shootings, and officers also
know that Mayes’s pending federal charges make him always reasonably
suspicious. They know and Mayes knows that because he is criminalized,
all and any of his actions can be read as giving the police probable cause.
Criminalizing Mayes does the deed and is the cover-up.
Criminalizing Community Defenders and Those They Defend from
Premature Death

Although Mayes’s prior arrest renders him incredibly vulnerable to police

harassment, it does not stop him from protesting police power or from
defending others against the violences of colonial racial capitalism that
require the violence work of policing. In Milwaukee, capital accumulation
circuits through legal and illegal economies (capital doesn’t care;
criminalization allows for intensive kinds of capital extraction and
exploitation), and it works through racialized and gendered violences that
include hyper-segregation and organized abandonment, hedge-fund-driven
housing (eviction) markets, poverty-wage service work, the subsidizing of
white leisure and work environments, “therapeutic” economies of (for-
profit, nonprofit, municipal) carceral management, and the hyper-extraction
of sex work from the commodified bodies of women, girls, and boys made
disposable through racialized criminalization inflicted by policing. In
Milwaukee, called “the Harvard of pimp schools,” defending Black women,
girls, and boys from the violence of human-trafficking economies
subtended by criminalizing policing often falls to community defenders
such as Vaun Mayes.
When Mayes was arrested again in June 2020, he was at Fortieth and
Lloyd Streets, trying to calm a rightfully angry crowd.72 After two young
Black girls went missing, dozens gathered in front of a home suspected to
be involved in sex trafficking. They had been missing for days, but the
police never issued an Amber Alert, claiming that the girls were not
eligible. The community took it upon themselves to find the young girls and
other Black children who had gone missing. They went to the suspicious
house on their own. The police then arrived outfitted in riot gear, yet their
presence did not make anything or anyone safer. Even though the police
stationed themselves outside the house, it was still somehow set on fire. The
house was burned along with any evidence of sex trafficking that officers
claimed did not exist.73 Some members of the crowd tried to enter the home
—perhaps to confront the people inside, look for missing children, or get
evidence to confirm that children were being sexually exploited. Some may
have feared that evidence was being destroyed. Mayes was arrested in this
context, although it is not clear from the video released by the MPD to Fox6
Milwaukee that Mayes was among those who entered the house. (He is seen
only walking up the steps.)74 The police blotter listed his charge as burglary,
and the statement put out by former Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso
Morales said Mayes’s arrest was “in connection with the civil unrest” on
Fortieth and Lloyd Streets, in particular for a “felony charge related to his
alleged involvement in criminal activities.”75
The MPD’s statement, found in several news articles, also commented on
the missing girls’ experiences: “MPD interviewed both teenagers who denied
going to or being at the residence and denied meeting or knowing anyone
who lived at that residence. There is also no evidence to substantiate that
human trafficking occurred at that location.”76 Much of online crime
reporting today publishes police statements word for word yet prefaces
them with a journalistic title which suggests that investigative reporting was
conducted. Fox6 Milwaukee did not even acknowledge that it was using the
MPD’s statement in its article titled “4 Sought in Arson, Shots Fired Near
40th and Lloyd; Police Say No Evidence to Suggest Missing Girls Were
There.”77 In this article, “written” by Angélica Sánchez and Ashley Sears,
exact sentences and phrases from the MPD statement are used throughout but
not acknowledged as such, thereby providing police statements the guise of
objectivity and neutrality. The MPD statement on the arrest of Mayes and its
use by mainstream media criminalize and discredit the people involved in
the protest while dismissing the girls’ traumatic experiences, representing
Mayes’s arrest as necessary for maintaining law and order.
This is policing on the streets and in real time—Mayes, community
defender and respected activist, is criminalized, arrested for a crime that he
did not commit. He was at the scene, trying to deescalate the crowd and
help the mothers find their missing girls. He was trying to protect young
Black teenagers who he knew were vulnerable to the violences of an
informal economy that profited from the sex work of those most socially
and politically marginalized, those inordinately immiserated. The violence
work of police—willfully not conducting a thorough investigation when the
girls were reported missing, neglectfully letting people’s homes and any
potential evidence burn, intimidating community members who took it
upon themselves to find missing children, and arresting a prominent activist
who live-streamed the events—ensured that people profiting from the
informal economy would continue to profit while those exploited by it and
those trying to challenge it would be further criminalized.
It would be irresponsible to take the MPD’s words at face value and
dismiss the residents’ anger and fears because sex trafficking in Milwaukee
is a thriving industry; the city is known as the “Harvard of pimp schools,”
and Wisconsin is known as “the hub of human-trafficking.”78 And
importantly, what makes Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women, girls, boys,
and LGBTQ youths so intensely vulnerable to human trafficking in
Milwaukee is policing. A 2018 report confirmed that victims of sex
trafficking in Milwaukee were not just overwhelmingly young, Black
women and girls—they were also young, Black women and girls who had
previous interactions with the Milwaukee Police Department.79 In other
words, criminalization was key to making young Black women and girls,
already economically immiserated, immensely vulnerable to sexual
exploitation and commodification. Their interactions with police evidence
both their vulnerability to violent situations (domestic violence, child abuse,
and sexual assault) and their vulnerability to policing itself (drug crimes,
homelessness, stealing, missing person reports, prostitution, and prior
experience of trafficking). Both these vulnerabilities create conditions of
possibility for sex-trade economies, a mode of gendered racial colonial
capitalist accumulation.
The missing girls’ confusing, disoriented statements should be read in
this context. When the community found the girls 3.5 miles from the
suspicious house, a mother of one of the missing girls, Selcy Perkins, along
with Mayes, addressed concerned community members and the press. As
she told reporters, “My daughter said she walked a lot of places. She’s
saying she’s been in this house, she’s saying she wasn’t in this house. She
said she laid down, she woke up and now she’s saying she was never at this
address.… So to be honest with you I don’t know what is going on with this
address, but what I do know is there are a lot of children and a lot of parents
affiliated with missing children at this same address. This address was not
just pulled up out of the air.”80 If the girls were earning money for sex, this
would complicate how they answered questions and how their statements
would be represented and received. Perkins’s daughter is likely not easily
read as an “innocent” victim. The false dichotomy between victimization
and agency informs how people assign blame and confer compassion. If
children and teens are choosing sex work, they will be seen as at least
partially culpable for the abuses they face, which can obscure the fact that
trafficked minors, who earn money for sex, are extremely vulnerable to
sexual exploitation and violence.
Both Mayes and Perkins told reporters that “the house is just one of
many in the area that have kids coming and going.”81 If kids are choosing to
come and go, it is likely that children and teens are not just coerced but are
also choosing this work, whether for money, out of fear, or through
necessity. They may be choosing to come and go because they are being
manipulated or threatened by someone in the industry, but it’s also possible
that sex work gives them a sense of autonomy. And because they are
complicated young people, their reasons may change from day to day. Yet
regardless of whether children are engaging in sex acts for money of their
own accord, it is the act of criminalization that makes them so very
vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Because minors cannot legally consent to sex, under Wisconsin and
federal law any sex act with a minor for money is considered trafficking.82
However, many states, such as Wisconsin, allow minors who are trafficked
to also be arrested for prostitution. Perkins’s daughter told her mom that she
saw MPD officers ten times and spoke to them once while she was missing.
Seeing MPD officers and receiving no help can have several interpretations
—officers could be actually involved in trafficking or simply did not care,
and/or Perkins’s daughter could have feared that interacting with the
officers would lead only to sexual exploitation, abuse, and arrest. Because
she was missing, we know that even if she had been coming and going
before, something terrible happened to her that made it impossible for her to
go home. She needed members of the community to care, to look for her, to
find her, to put it out there that she was loved.
 In her work critiquing the ways in which anti-trafficking advocates fail
to consider Black girls’ specific vulnerabilities to criminalization and sex
work, Jasmine Phillips asserts that “the dominant exploiter-victim narrative
obscures the economic and social realities that serve as pathways into sex
work … [because it] assumes that a majority of girls involved in sex work
are doing so under the authority and control of an exploiter.”83 Young Black
women and girls involved in sex work cannot be represented as completely
and easily victimized; they are more likely to be criminalized and/or
arrested for prostitution rather than aided by laws like the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act (2000).
Young people were returned because community members took it upon
themselves to look for them. If these children had been found by police,
they would likely have been arrested for prostitution, starting or adding to a
criminal record, which would make them even more vulnerable to sexual
exploitation, abuse, and violence. Doing little to nothing when these young
Black children and teens go missing for days, weeks, and more is
essentially killing them with impunity: informal economies, such as human
trafficking, are often highly exploitative, extracting labor from those
deemed disposable by turning their bodies into commodities. The power of
police lies in its organized abandonment of the neighborhood’s most
vulnerable children, leaving them for dead when they are missing, arresting
them if they are found. The MPD narrated its actions as legitimate and sent
the statement to mainstream media to be written up, word for word, under
the guise of journalistic objectivity. Mayes critiqued the MPD: “You call it
vigilantism, but I call it three almost four young people returning home in a
matter of hours versus them being missing for days and weeks with you all
handling it.”84 He cared about the young, criminalized Black girls and boys
that the MPD was not looking for. He was part of the reason that the children
were found, and he was arrested because of it.
A Block-Party Protest on the County Jail Lawn

Part of the force of administrative power lies in the very narratives we

weave to explain how it works because it appears to operate so thoroughly,
so pervasively, so ubiquitously, and with such devastating effects and
deadly consequences. And we have explicated only one small aspect of
administrative power: policing. In doing that we have explained how police
discretion is not an aberration or a weak link in a fair system of law and
order, but a factor necessary for the system to operate efficiently and
dangerously to do the sorting on the street and in real time that criminalizes
people and actions that threaten colonial racial capitalist arrangements.
Additionally, we’ve examined how liberalism as a capitalist worlding praxis
preauthorizes police killings of those whom colonial racial capitalism
deems disposable. Indeed, to explain how administrative power works
requires that we refuse the narrative it tells about itself: that it is incredibly
overwhelming, touching everything and everyone.
But it is absolutely crucial that we remember several vitally important
aspects of this form of colonial, racial violence that disguises itself as the
benign race-neutral business-as-usual work of institutions. First, no form of
power is absolute. Second, what makes administrative power appear
absolute and totalizing is also what makes it so incredibly fragile.
Administrative power seems to touch all and everything; it appears to
require the cooperation and complicity of millions of people to either do the
violence work of business as usual or to ignore it. In fact, a lot of
ideological work goes into representing administrative power as too
overwhelming to overcome, too dangerous to defeat, and too big to bother
trying. But, in fact, the opposite is true. The larger the reach, the deeper the
entrenchment, and the more people involved, the more fragile this power
actually is. It is a power like glass—glass is quite durable and strong, but
the thinner the glass, the more prone it is to cracking, breaking, or
shattering, which brings us to the third point we need to keep in mind.
Movements that undo administrative power do not need to have an
overwhelming reach, intensity, or number of people in order to effectively
interrupt its devastating consequences and delegitimate its reasons for
enacting violence. The common question “What do we do now?” assumes
that resistance to oppression needs to match or be more forceful than
oppressive power structures in order to effect meaningful change. We
believe this is the wrong question because all acts of resistance (no matter
how small) to colonial racial capitalism and the administrative violences
that sustain it work not only to undermine and discredit colonial racial
capitalism but also to offer, in the process, alternative ways of living, being,
and relating to one another. They are, as Gilmore says, “rehearsals for
freedom.”85 Therefore, a better question to ask is “How can we support and
join the work that activists and community defenders are already doing?”
Like very thin glass, administrative power can be shattered by the smallest
acts of rebellion—by communities that love themselves more than they fear
the police.
So we end with community members who love themselves and one
another more than they fear the police to illustrate how administrative
power, though deadly and devastating, is also so very fragile. It is so fragile
that it can shatter when Black people hold a party. When Vaun Mayes was
arrested on June 29, 2020, Frank Nitty II organized Black community
members and their allies. They gathered outside the Milwaukee County
Courthouse and County Jail, where Mayes was detained, demanding that he
be set free. They chanted, “Don’t arrest me, arrest the police!” and “Free
Vaun Mayes!”86 They set up a DJ and played songs to dance to, including
Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” and Marcia Griffith’s “Electric Boogie.” They
grilled food. They played spades. They set up video games and a bounce
house for children. Someone did henna tattoos. They set up tents and air
mattresses and camped out, waiting. For two days, they set up a twenty-
four-hour celebration of Black social life, taking up space, using land not as
property but as a partner in doing revolutionary work. They repurposed this
land by using it as a site for life, love, music, games, dancing, building
relationships, relaxing, self-care. In chalk, they scrawled “Black Lives
Matter” on the concrete, reclaiming and renaming the land itself so that for
these days this land was used not solely as the foundation for the courthouse
and the jail, as the foundation for institutions that did the not-at-all benign
business-as-usual work of disrupting Black, brown, and Indigenous lives
and relationships. For these two days this space was about Black people
enjoying their lives and one another; for these two days this space enabled
the protesters to make not just “peaceful” but loving demands.
The protesters were caring for one another in front of the county
courthouse and jail. As they waited for their demand that Vaun Mayes be
set free to be realized, they became examples of alternatives to unpaid
reproductive labor. Care work was not just collective at the party; it was
also no longer “work.” Care work was central to celebrating Black life.
People were feeding each other, watching over everyone’s children, playing
cards and board games, having a good time, enjoying one another’s
company while they waited. They supported each other, nervous, anxious,
excited, and confident. Colonial racial capitalism could not make a profit
from the people who decided to party at the courthouse instead of working
at their jobs. And even those who went to work first or after or even during
the protest party interrupted the usual work/rest pattern of colonial racial
capitalism. Instead of collapsing and falling asleep in front of a mind-
numbing television show at the end of a long, exhausting workday, they
went to 949 North Ninth Street to a twenty-four-hour protest party where
rest and dancing and friendship were energizing, creative, necessary, and
revolutionary.
The protesters were doing the hardest but most rewarding work of all,
visioning and living in the world they wanted, enacting and putting into
practice their collective “freedom dreams.”87 We might read them as
working against the ways in which Black life has so often been portrayed as
one-dimensional, as only the struggle against racism, as only pain and
disappointment. Because liberalism assumes that white empathy is the only
path to Black liberation, liberals and liberal media too often showcase and
exploit Black suffering because this is the assumed way to encourage white
people to demand that Black people’s individual rights need to be protected
in the name of democracy. We might read the partygoers as working against
this portrayal, but of course they are not thinking at all about the people
who don’t support them; they are not worrying about whether coverage of
their protest party will encourage not-yet-allies to be supportive. They don’t
care about the branding of their revolutionary work.
 They are just living their complex lives, loving one another, spending
time with one another, enjoying one another, and working very hard to
create a welcoming place for Vaun Mayes to join when he is released. They
make sure there is food for him to eat, people to talk to and love him,
children to play with and music to dance to. They make sure they are
witnesses to the trauma of his arrest and detainment, and they make sure
they are participants in and witnesses to the triumph of his release.
Vaun was released, as they knew he would be. A bounce house and a
buffet shattered administrative power. A DJ and a Sony PlayStation undid all
the purposeful violence work that police officers, using their “discretion,”
put in to arrest Mayes. The partying protesters shattered administrative
power with food, music, community, love, and time. And this shattering
was so much more powerful than the arrests and detainments. The arrest
ignited anger and frustration. But the release touched the protesters down
deep, where feelings really matter. When Vaun was freed, it wasn’t just the
protesters who felt euphoric, ecstatic, and energized; it was also everyone
who watched their live feeds, anticipating their success. On one post
Marquita Hartfield wrote, “I can’t even Lie this is very touching! We need
more of this and less of the bullshit! Salute to all y’all! This is what you call
a good ol time!”88 With so much of this chapter focusing on all the terrible
ways that administrative power weaves itself into Black social life, some
might think that all anyone would be able to feel would be resentment,
anger, despair, and paralysis. But administrative power, no matter how
overwhelming it seems to be, is just nowhere near as powerful as a good
time. As Eva Welch posted, “They were down there with a DJ, a buffet, a
damn bouncy house, a dance party! OMG This has to go down as the BEST
protest ever!!!! I LOVE MILWAUKEE!”89 The best protest ever was so very
touching—touching everyone down deep and so powerfully that all they
felt was love, and this love was felt so profoundly that they could not
contain it, could not be embarrassed by the intensity of their emotions.
Antwann McBride took footage of Vaun’s release; in his filming he took us
to Frank Nitty II. Antwann was overcome with emotion. You can hear it in
his voice. He speaks slowly with so much intention, every word
emphasized: “This [camera on Frank Nitty] the real GOAT [greatest of all
time], Bro. I love you, man, love you. My mom love you, my family love
you, my nieces love you. The world love you! We all love you, Frank!” He
takes the camera to scan the party and Vaun being embraced and says,
“Look at this, man, just so beautiful. Vaun free! Vaun free, Baby!”90
The thing with glass is that with just one tiny crack, it is only a matter of
time before the rest of it shatters. All the partygoers knew this, and they felt
the shattering. Vaun is released, but they don’t go home. They are energized
now, still euphoric, still ecstatic, filled with so much love for Frank Nitty,
for Vaun Mayes, for themselves, for one another, for the city and the land
it’s built on. They stay, party more, demand the release of activist
Demetrius Griffin, who live-streamed the police overseeing people leaving
the home on Fortieth and Lloyd.91 Griffin is also freed.
We can’t lie. The euphoria and the love of the protest partygoers are so
very touching that it touches us too even a year later (and for one of us,
more than eight hundred miles away). It touches us more deeply than
administrative power, no matter how extensive, ever could. We feel it too,
this energizing, contagious, uncontainable love, able to shatter
administrative power with a bounce house, able to replace fear of the police
with freedom dreams, able to rehearse freedom in front of the county jail,
just so beautiful.
NOTES

1. Repairing Together, “Unity Fire MKE.”

2. “When we want to hear from the community, we’re going four days for 24 hours. That’s an
entirely different mindset than the public servants that are elected into positions that are
supposed to [represent] us.” Mark Denning, quoted by Erin Bloodgood in “Mark Denning
Lifts Native Voices.”
3. Repairing Together, “Unity Fire MKE.”
4. Repairing Together, “Unity Fire MKE.”
5. Read, “Derek Chauvin.”
6. Kelley, “Why Black Marxism, Why Now?”
7. With the term violence work we follow Micol Seigel, who describes police as agents of
violence who “realize—they make real—the core power of the state” (10) and differ from
other agents of multiple kinds of structural violence (psychic, epistemic, discursive, etc.) in
that they are authorized by the state to use physical force on the bodies of human beings. In
Seigel’s words, police are violence workers “whose labors are enabled by the fact that at some
point they are entitled to bring out the handcuffs” (11).
8. Bordertown Violence Working Group, Red Nation Rising, 6.
9. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography,” 229.
10. On policing as the fabrication and maintenance of social orders structured in dominance,
see Neocleous, Fabrication of Social Order. On policing—in the United States and as a US
export to allied nations across the globe—as a means for “suppressing civil unrest and
securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism,” see Schrader, Badges without
Borders. On the function of police in fabricating neoliberalism and functioning as
counterinsurgency to Black and brown freedom struggles from during and after the Watts
rebellion in 1965 to post-Katrina uprisings in New Orleans in 2005, see Camp, Incarcerating
the Crisis.
11. Ruth Nicole Brown, personal communication with Lisa Marie Cacho, December 2018.
12. See Reddy, Freedom with Violence.
13. Million, “Resurgent Kinships,” 399.
14. Historically, these privileged groups align with configurations of “whiteness as property”
and the “the white possessive,” yet they are always dynamic, with “multicultural white
supremacy” and “neoliberal multiculturalism” naming two distinct “membership” groups
included in US political hegemony today. Dylan Rodríguez articulates this rethinking of
hegemony as a subset of governance reserved for privileged (white) subjects this way: “Given
the various genealogies and long historical continuities of coercive power that persistently
puncture and disrupt the possibilities for constructing consensual relations of state authority
and popular consent to a modern social order—including but not limited to land displacement
and conquest, settler colonial occupation, ecological and cultural genocide, chattel
enslavement, legal non-personhood, and violently enforced gender normativity—the
consensual basis of ‘hegemony’ has always been overwhelmingly reserved for the
geographies, publics, and privileged collective subjectivities of White Being, including non-
citizen, immigrant, and even ‘undocumented’ white Europeans.” Rodríguez, White
Reconstruction, 20.
15. On liberalism writ large as a set of praxis concepts (private property, the nation-state, and
possessive individualism, etc.) developed historically to manage colonialism, settler
colonialism, and global circuits of capitalist accumulation, see Lowe, Intimacies of Four
Continents; Nichols, Theft Is Property!; Ince, Colonial Capitalism; and Bhandar, Colonial
Lives of Property.
16. See Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents.
17. The authors would like to thank Chandan Reddy for this formulation of the division of
humanity into the political and the administrative. Moreover, wherever “administrative power”
is theorized in this chapter, it should be understood as bearing the imprint of Reddy’s thoughts
and interventions. This chapter is in conversation with other works on “administrative power”
coauthored with Reddy, such as the paper presented by Melamed and Reddy, “Administrating
Today’s Racial Capitalism.” See also Melamed and Reddy, “Using Liberal Rights.”
18. Warner, “Uniform Arrest Act,” 329, 330.
19. Hemmens and Levin, “Resistance Is Futile,” 492.
20. Other proposed changes were the following: to have discretion in giving summons to
appear in court instead of arresting for misdemeanors, to release arrested persons without their
having to go before a magistrate, to keep suspects in detention as long as necessary with a
judge’s orders, and to permit officers to require witnesses to identify themselves by name and
address (he identified the last suggestion as optional). See Warner, “Uniform Arrest Act.”
21. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography,” 228, 229.
22. Nichols, “Colonialism of Incarceration,” 446, 448–49. For more on how the Indian Civil
Rights Act of 1968 and court cases undermine Indigenous sovereignty through criminalization,
see also Cacho, “Civil Rights, Commerce.”
23. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 7.
24. See Melamed, Represent and Destroy.
25. See Cacho, Social Death.
26. Gilmore, quoted by Vulliamy, “Rebellion in Baltimore.”
27. Balto, “ ‘Occupied Territory,’ ” 235.
28. See Karuka, Empire’s Tracks.
29. Bordertown Violence Working Group, Red Nation Rising, 40.
30. Red Nation, “Communism Is the Horizon,” 23.
31. On “grounded relationality,” see Byrd et al., “Predatory Value,” 14.
32. Ritchie, Invisible No More, 55 (emphasis added).
33. Vaisvilas, “American Indians Incarcerated.”
34. Pember, “Driving While Indian.”
35. Vaisvilas, “American Indians Incarcerated.”
36. Pember, “Driving While Indian”; Pember, “Another Reality.”
37. State v. Richard E. Houghton, Jr., 2013AP001581-CR (Wis. 2015).
38. ACLU, Collins et al. v. City of Milwaukee et al.
39. Choudhury, “Stop-and-Frisk Settlement.”
40. Many of the “best practices” in this report, such as data collection on pedestrian and traffic
stops, were not actually happening in the MPD, according to the ACLU lawsuit.
41. La Vigne et al., Stop and Frisk, 47.
42. ACLU, Collins et al. v. City of Milwaukee et al. (emphasis added).
43. Crivello, letter to Fire and Police Commission.
44. Choudhury, “Stop-and-Frisk Settlement.”
45. Crime and Justice Institute, City of Milwaukee Settlement Agreement, 20.
46. Crime and Justice Institute, City of Milwaukee Settlement Agreement, 7, 9.
47. The settlement also stipulated that not more than 15 percent of traffic stops, field
interviews, and no-action encounters should be conducted without reasonable suspicion. Crime
and Justice Institute, City of Milwaukee Settlement Agreement, 13–15, 20.
48. Hashimoto, “Tale of Two Milwaukees.”
49. See Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism.
50. In the greater Milwaukee region, settlers continue to violate the treaty rights and
sovereignty of Wisconsin’s Native nations, even when it comes down again to desecrating and
removing Indigenous burial mounds to make way for golf courses. This is the case with the
ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation illegally disinterred in the building of a third golf course at
the Kohler Resort. See Malewitz, “Discovery of Ancient Human Remains.”
51. For example, in the Illinois Cook County courthouse, almost 95 percent of cases are
resolved through plea bargains rather than trials. Van Cleve, Crook County, 72.
52. Trivedi and Van Cleve, “To Serve and Protect,” 933.
53. Feeley, Process Is the Punishment, 15.
54. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 201–8.
55. We must contextualize white obsessions with “looting” with how powerfully movements
against police violence delegitimize police power by revealing its repressive, counterinsurgent
function. One answer to “Why are white people so obsessed with looting?” is that the
obsession itself stabilizes police legitimacy with an anti-Black criminalization fix while
suppressing white group complicity with oppressive policing and racial/settler dominations in
general. It also fixes looting in a criminal framework, setting up a good protester/bad protester
dichotomy to legitimize and normalize policing the uprisings, marches, etc. (And let’s not
forget that looting is a redistribution of wealth.)
56. Williams, “ ‘Give Them a Cause.’ ”
57. Williams, “ ‘Give Them a Cause,’ ” 250.
58. Glauber, “ ‘This Is Organized Chaos.’ ”
59. At the time of this writing, Nitty has filed a lawsuit against several Milwaukee sheriff’s
officers for targeting him during the protest. TMJ4.com, “Milwaukee Activist Frank Nitty.”
60. TMJ4.com, “Milwaukee Activist Frank Nitty.”
61. On how the US state always represents its excessively cruel violence (police and military)
against racialized groups to be a counterviolence, see Reddy, Freedom with Violence.
62. International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, “US Protest Law Tracker.”
63. Epstein and Mazzei, “GOP Bill Targets Protestors.”
64. Cacho and Melamed, “How Police Abuse the Charge.”
65. Brenes, “Police Reform Doesn’t Work.”
66. One of the authors has firsthand knowledge about how people who run over protesters are
not charged with crimes and how journalistic accounts take police statements as facts. Like the
articles on Van Mayes at Fortieth and Lloyd, this news article that misreports an incident when
she was hit by a driver at a protest is the actual police statement but is not acknowledged as
such. See Danbeck, “Police.”
67. Jorgensen, “Student Activists Ask Mayor”; Anuta, “School Safety Agents.” Supposedly,
the full transition to getting the NYPD out of the schools will be accomplished by 2022. In the
meantime, the NYPD will receive more “training” to redefine its duties.
68. ACLU and Media Justice, Request to Federal Bureau of Investigation.
69. Vielmetti, “Law Targets Rights Activists.”
70. Holmes, “Questions Surround Vaun Mayes’ Arrest.”
71. Vielmetti, “Law Targets Rights Activists.”
72. Jannene, “Protest Organizer Vaun Mayes Arrested.”
73. Jannene, “Mother Connected”; WTMJ News, “More Than 10 Injured.”
74. Fox6 Now Milwaukee, “Police Share Video.’ ”
75. Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice), Twitter, June 29, 2020, 5:45 p.m. https://twitter
.com/MilwaukeePolice/status/1277719873955782663.
76. Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice), Twitter, June 29, 2020, 5:45 p.m.
77. Sánchez and Sears, “4 Sought in Arson.” Another such account was posted by WTMJ
News, which posted the MPD’s statement but titled it “More Than 10 Injured Including
Officers, Firefighter after Shooting, House Fire following Demonstrations on Milwaukee’s
North Side.”
78. Sullivan, “Hub of Human Trafficking”; Holmes, “Harvard of Pimp Schools.”
79. Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission et al., Estimating the Magnitude.
80. Jannene, “Mother Connected.”
81. Jannene, “Mother Connected.”
82. Sullivan, “Hub of Human Trafficking.”
83. Phillips, “Black Girls and the (Im)Possibilities,” 1656.
84. Chernéy Amhara, “Vaun Mayes Holding Press Conference after Unrest near 40th and
Lloyd,” recorded live. Facebook, June 25, 2020. www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v
=326935238311357&ref=watch_permalink.
85. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, personal communication with Jodi Melamed, March 2019. Gilmore
also spoke about “rehearsals for freedom” in her keynote address for the Racial Capitalism
Symposium for the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, March 29, 2019. See Gilmore, “What Is the ‘Racial’ in Racial
Capitalism?”
86. Carson, Vielmetti, and Spicuzza, “Community Activist Vaun Mayes Arrested.”
87. Kelley, Freedom Dreams.
88. Marquita Hartfield, comment on Antwann McBride’s Livestream Facebook, 45:46.
Facebook, June 30, 2020. www.facebook.com/comediansipsippi/videos/3603887212969415.
89. Eva Welch, “For years I have watched.” Facebook, June 30, 2020. www.facebook.com/eva
.deva.52/posts/10157907998966785.
90. Antwann McBride, Livestream Facebook, June 30, 2020. www.facebook.com
/comediansipsippi/videos/3603887212969415.
91. Jannene, “Activists Clean Up.”
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New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
Sánchez, Angélica, and Ashley Sears. “4 Sought in Arson, Shots Fired Near 40th and
Lloyd; Police Say No Evidence to Suggest Missing Girls Were There.”
Fox6now.com, June 26, 2020. www.fox6now.com/news/4-sought-in-arson-shots-
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there.
Schrader, Stuart. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed
American Policing. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.
Seigel, Micol. Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2018.
Sullivan, Zoe. “Hub of Human Trafficking: Underground Sex Trade Thrives in
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/nov/02/hub-human-trafficking-underground-sex-trade-milwaukee.
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/milwaukee-activist-frank-nitty-files-lawsuit-against-the-milwaukee-county-sheriffs-
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Trivedi, Somil, and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve. “To Serve and Protect Each Other: How
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/02/baltimore-rebellion-is-uprising-against-austerity-freddie-gray.
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 SIX · Marisol LeBrón

Policing Solidarity

: Race, Violence, and the University of Puerto

Rico

On February 9, 2011, in the midst of an ongoing student-led strike against

state and university officials’ efforts to shrink and privatize the University
of Puerto Rico (UPR) system, students at the university’s flagship campus in
Río Piedras organized a “pintata,” or paint-in, as an artistic protest against
administrators’ attempts to silence them with police intervention. An event
in which students planned to spend the afternoon painting messages of
resistance on the street in front of the university library ended unexpectedly
as one of the most violent moments of the strike.
With the pintata under way, students became outraged when they spotted
a police officer videotaping the activity. A group of students approached the
officer and asked why they were being recorded when they were not doing
anything wrong and demanded to know what the police planned to do with
the video.1 Almost immediately the situation grew tense, as the students
insisted on answers and more police arrived on the scene. Eventually, one
of the students attempted to take the camera from the officer, and the
situation turned violent. Metal-tipped batons, boots, and fists rained down
upon the protesters, some of whom responded by throwing paint at the
police, turning their dark-blue riot gear white. As students ran to try to
escape the violence, police officers tore through campus trying to catch
them, swinging their batons wildly and hitting anyone in their path. That
afternoon, both blood and paint stained the pavement in front of the
university library. Video and photographic footage shows police officers
using excessive force, deploying pepper spray and other chemical irritants,
unrelentingly beating students with batons, and applying illegal choke holds
and pressure techniques on students.2
The shocking spectacle of police violence that students endured during
the pintata flashed across television and computer screens all over Puerto
Rico. By the time of the pintata, there was already a pervasive sense that
many Puerto Ricans had grown tired of the violence that seemed to be
steadily engulfing the campus since the police had been stationed there in
early December. After the violence of the pintata, the police presence on
campus became dangerous and unacceptable. For instance, an editorial that
appeared in the Puerto Rico Daily Sun, the local English-language
newspaper, the following day compared the police attack on students to “the
acts of the dictatorships we all denounce and reject.” The editorial asked
readers, “Is this to be the new institutional order? Police every 100 feet?
The right to free speech reduced to the 100 square feet between police
officers? Has the UPR become the testing grounds for a new institutional
order?”3
The pintata and the other moments of state violence that punctuated the
two student strikes at the UPR—which occurred from April 21, 2010, to June
21, 2010, and from December 7, 2010, to March 7, 2011, respectively—
were certainly worthy of outrage and condemnation. However, the violence
unleashed on students did not evidence new contours of policing and state
repression, as the editorial team at the Puerto Rico Daily Sun and others
suggested. Instead, both the violence of the state during the UPR strikes and
the range of reactions that it provoked revealed much about where, under
what circumstances, and against whom violence had been rendered
acceptable within contemporary Puerto Rican society. What happened
during the UPR strikes provided many relatively racially and economically
privileged Puerto Ricans a glimpse into forms of state violence that had
become routine in the archipelago’s predominantly Black, low-income, and
Dominican im/migrant communities over the course of the 1990s and early
2000s. In this way, observers perceived patterns of police brutality,
harassment, and surveillance as “new” when enacted against UPR students,
particularly those at the Río Piedras campus, who tended to come from the
middle and upper classes. This unwillingness to see an expansive trajectory
of violent policing in Puerto Rico demonstrates the extent to which much of
the public had normalized police violence against racially and economically
marginalized Puerto Ricans.
The strikes at the UPR put on full display forms of police repression and
violence that had been long tested, deployed, and confined within public
housing and other low-income areas around Puerto Rico. This chapter
explores how police violence against student protesters and their supporters
drew upon strategies of containment solidified, in part, through the policing
of racially and economically marginalized populations during the mano
dura era. “Mano dura contra el crimen” refers to a series of crime-reduction
measures introduced by Governor Pedro Rosselló in 1993, when he
deployed police and military forces within public housing and other low-
income spaces around the archipelago, but primarily across the big island,
during the 1990s in an effort to eliminate drug trafficking. This chapter also
carefully charts how UPR students’ exposure to state violence and repression
created moments of solidarity with racially and economically marginalized
communities that had been criminalized. At the same time, I detail moments
when students sought to leverage their privileged positions to assert that
they were “students, not criminals,” and thus undeserving of state violence.
Students responded to their own experiences of brutality and repression by
either undermining or reifying the structures of anti-Black racism,
segregation, and classism that had animated policing throughout the
archipelago. The strikes at the UPR illuminate how punitive policing, and
mano dura contra el crimen in particular, have created a complicated legacy
that young Puerto Ricans are forced to negotiate as they weigh the benefits
of forging solidarity across race and class differences or adhering to
hierarchies of belonging and exclusion that mark criminalized populations
as disposable.
The Radical Opposition from the Streets

The battle for accessible and affordable public education that occurred at
the UPR in 2010 and 2011 emerged within a context of intense neoliberal
reform, marked by the dismantling of the public-employment sector, the
privatization of public resources, a protracted economic recession, and a
seemingly hard right turn in Puerto Rican politics. In the spring of 2009
Wall Street credit houses threatened to demote Puerto Rico’s credit rating to
junk status. Against this backdrop, on March 9, 2009, Puerto Rico’s
republican and pro-statehood governor, Luis Fortuño, introduced Ley 7, or
Public Law 7, a “special law declaring a state of emergency and
establishing a plan for fiscal stabilization to save the credit of Puerto Rico.”4
Scholars Yarimar Bonilla and Rafael Boglio Martínez note that Ley 7
enabled Fortuño to “ ‘restructure’ public employment in ways that would
otherwise be illegal: unilaterally suspending union contracts, overriding
labor laws in order to dismiss public-service workers, and denying those
who remain employed the job protections guaranteed in their union
contracts.”5 This law was particularly devastating in its targeting of the
public sector, which had emerged as the largest employer in Puerto Rico
following the collapse of the industrial economy during the 1970s.
In early September 2009 the Fortuño administration announced that it
would be laying off more than seventeen thousand public-sector workers in
an attempt to stabilize the economy. Puerto Ricans took to the streets
throughout the month of September to protest the decision. On October 15,
2009, an estimated 200,000 demonstrators flooded the streets of San Juan as
part of a one-day general strike protesting the economic and political
agenda of the Fortuño administration. The one-day Paro Nacional del
Pueblo (People’s National Stoppage) was a manifestation of the widespread
discontent with Fortuño’s so-called economic recovery plan and the
annexationist governor’s attempts to further integrate Puerto Rico into the
US economy despite clear negative consequences for the working class.
Students mobilized against Ley 7 not only in solidarity with public-
sector laborers but also because the law slashed university funding. The
government used Ley 7 to alter the formula used to allocate funds to the
university, with UPR’s percentage of the state budget dropping from 9.6
percent to approximately 8.1 percent. To make up for the shortfall in
funding, university administrators announced that they would be increasing
tuition, decreasing scholastic and athletic scholarships, and doing away with
fee exemptions for university employees and their families.6 Students
argued that these actions by university administrators would make it
significantly harder for many low-income and working-class families,
which were already underrepresented in the student body, to send their
children to study at the UPR. For student activists, Ley 7 and the budgetary
cuts at the UPR were asking the poor and working classes to
disproportionately shoulder the costs of the economic crisis at the same
time that engines of upward social mobility, such as public-sector
employment and public education, were being destroyed.
After the Paro Nacional, students, especially those who would become
active participants in the UPR strikes, lamented the lack of sustained action
and coordination on the part of the labor unions that had helped organize
the massive one-day stoppage. According to student activist Abner Y.
Dennis Zayas, “After the Paro Nacional the labor movement threw in the
towel.… They did absolutely nothing. That, of course, has a series of
explanations, but, in that sense, the radical opposition from the streets
against the policies of the government fell to the student movement.”7 A
number of student activists also understood the university to be a potential
catalyst for a renewed, broad-based social movement against the neoliberal
agenda of the state. Ricardo Olivero Lora, a UPR law student, summed up
this perspective during the first transmission of Radio Huelga, or Strike
Radio, a student-run radio broadcast: “These times are crucial for society
because the current government, in an abusive manner, has launched an
offensive against the working class, to the point that many are in a state of
hopelessness. We want to make this a place where we can return that
hope.”8 Understanding and positioning themselves as a vanguard, students
felt that the struggle at the UPR had the potential to spark larger
mobilizations against the agenda of the Fortuño administration across
Puerto Rican society.9
 In addition, for student activists the university seemed to be an ideal site
to discuss how the crises affecting Puerto Rico hit youths especially hard.
Student activists at the UPR hoped that they could help respond to the
challenges that Puerto Rican youths faced as they navigated Puerto Rico’s
anemic economy: limited upward mobility, rising personal indebtedness,
and a continued reliance on outward migration for decent employment
options. In this vein the student movement posited a reinvigorated public
university as a possible path toward personal and community
empowerment. However, contradictions would emerge over the course of
the strikes as it became apparent that a more affordable UPR would not
necessarily correspond to an accessible and welcoming public university
system for racially and economically marginalized youths.
The Threat of Confrontation

Months of organizing preceding and following the Paro Nacional eventually

culminated in students at the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras (UPR-RP)
campus calling a forty-eight-hour strike on April 21, 2010. Students asked
the administration to stop tuition hikes, reinstate fee waivers, and guarantee
that none of the UPR campuses would be privatized. The students told
administrators that if university officials failed to meet their demands, they
would go on a strike of indefinite duration. The administration failed to take
the students’ demands seriously, and as a result students at the UPR-RP
announced a strike on April 23 to force the administration into negotiations.
The Association of Puerto Rican University Professors and the Brotherhood
of Non-Teaching Employees of the University of Puerto Rico both urged
their members to respect the picket line. By May 4, ten out of eleven
campuses, which are spread out across the big island, had joined the
indefinite strike. Only the Recinto de Ciencias Medicas, the University of
Puerto Rico’s medical school, did not join the indefinite strike, which was a
result of the time-sensitive nature of its scientific investigations and its
work with patients. However, the medical school did hold a brief work
stoppage in solidarity with the other campuses.
The Fortuño administration stationed police on the perimeter of the UPR-
RP campus immediately following the announcement of the strike. The
police remained at the perimeter and did not enter the campus due to the
política de no confrontación, or nonconfrontation policy, an informal
agreement between university administrators and the Puerto Rico Police
Department (PRPD) that prohibited police from intervening in campus
affairs. The nonconfrontation policy had emerged from a long history of
state violence and repression directed at the student movement. Although
the nonconfrontation policy was firmly in place during the 2010 strike, the
threat of police brutality and harassment remained real in the minds of
many students and their supporters. Immediately after the strike was
announced, heavily armed riot police became regular fixtures outside the
campus’s perimeter gates. Police officers looked on as UPR-RP students
created encampments at each of the seven portones, or entrance gates,
controlling access to the university campus. Meanwhile, university
administrators called in additional private security guards to monitor and
control the protesters. Then, on May 13, 2010, during a campus assembly,
students voted to continue the strike. With the strike’s ratification, state
officials and university administrators grew increasingly concerned, and
police became more aggressive in their approach to the strikers and their
supporters.
On May 20, 2010, students took their demands beyond the portones and
joined union leaders, public employees, and others in protesting a political
fund-raiser at the Sheraton Hotel that Governor Fortuño was attending. As
the students had moved beyond the campus grounds, they were beyond the
reach of the nonconfrontation policy. When students and labor activists
attempted to disrupt the fund-raiser, police responded by unleashing
tremendous violence upon the protesters. Images and videos from the
Sheraton showed police punching, kicking, clubbing, and applying illegal
choke holds to students and other protesters. A particularly shocking image
showed the PRPD’s second-in-command, José A. Rosa Carrasquillo, kicking
UPR student José “Osito” Pérez Reisler in the genitals as he lay restrained
and defenseless on the floor.10
Status updates from PRPD officers’ Facebook pages seemed to confirm
that the police went to the Sheraton looking to harm protesters in general,
and UPR students specifically. As Facebook user Alexander Luina, who
identified himself as a member of the PRPD, wrote, “Finally, after 12 days I
can use my baton in this damn strike.”11 Perhaps most disturbing, Facebook
user William Concepcion, who identified himself as a member of the
Fuerza de Choque (the PRPD’s antiriot squad), wrote that “I finally clubbed
somebody today. Fuck, I hope things get crazy so I can empty out this
rifle.”12 After a variety of Puerto Rican news outlets publicized the
Facebook accounts and posts, Police Superintendent Jose Figueroa Sancha
ordered an investigation to determine the legitimacy of the cited Facebook
accounts and status updates. He stood by the actions of the police at the
Sheraton, calling the police “heroes” and denouncing the students for
provoking them.13
 Although university and government officials attempted to paint the
student movement as violent and dangerous following the incident at the
Sheraton, the violent words and deeds of the police led a growing number
of Puerto Ricans to come out to the portones to provide support and
protection. The scores of people joining the strikers in solidarity with their
demands forced university administrators to meet students at the negotiating
table. After two months of protests and with ten of the UPR’s eleven
campuses shut down, the strike came to an end on June 21, 2010.
Administrators met many of the students’ basic demands, including
reinstating canceled tuition waivers, delaying the imposition of tuition hikes
and fees, and protecting student leaders from reprisals.14 The student
movement, and much of the public, regarded the agreement between
strikers and the university as a historic victory for the student movement
and a serious blow to the Fortuño administration’s neoliberal agenda.
However, the victory was short-lived as state and university officials
quickly began to reverse the hard-won achievements of the student
movement.
Proxy Violence

In the aftermath of the successful strike, state officials and administrators

quickly took steps to reverse the gains of the movement. The legislature
added four new appointees to the UPR’s board of trustees in an attempt to
stack the board in favor of the then-current administration and to neutralize
opposition.15 The new board of trustees lost no time imposing an $800
student fee, which would go into effect in January 2011. The university
administration also made substantive cuts to faculty benefits and eliminated
or put on “pause” a number of academic programs across the university
system. Students responded to the university and state officials’ duplicity
with threats that they would once again paralyze the university system with
a strike.
Students at the UPR-RP began a forty-eight-hour stoppage on December 7,
2010, demanding that the administration overturn the imposition of the new
$800 student fee. If the administration did not comply with the students’
demand to repeal the fee, they vowed to once again go on indefinite strike.
In response to the stoppage and a looming second, indefinite strike,
university administrators contracted the private security firm Capitol
Security for approximately $1.5 million.16 On the evening before the forty-
eight-hour stoppage, the firm, on orders from university administrators,
demolished the iconic entrance gates to the Río Piedras campus in an
attempt to prevent student strikers from once again shutting down the
university.
Students did not anticipate the removal of the gates, but they were even
more surprised by the individuals who showed up wearing T-shirts with the
word SECURITY emblazoned in yellow letters on the front. Capitol Security
had hired young, inexperienced men and women from Villa Cañona in
Loíza, a predominantly Black and low-income barrio in a predominantly
Black and low-income municipality, to tear down the portones and act as
security personnel during the stoppage and potential strike. According to
some of the youths recruited to work security at the university, a municipal
employee approached local young people, offering them ten dollars an hour
to “work” at the UPR.17 “They told us: ‘get in the van, we have work for
you.’ No one trained us for that,” remarked a twenty-five-year-old from
Villa Cañona who worked security during the stoppage.18 On an archipelago
with official unemployment statistics hovering above 16 percent and where
the federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour, it is not surprising that
youths from one of the poorest municipalities in Puerto Rico jumped at the
opportunity that Capitol Security presented.19
Youths from Loíza, untrained and without much information about what
exactly they would be doing on the university campus, were brought in, in
lieu of police, to subdue the students. The youths from Loíza represented a
way around the university’s nonconfrontation policy that would allow state
and university officials to violently repress the student movement and
reestablish control without formal police intervention. Although Capitol did
not provide the youths with any form of training for the situation they were
about to encounter at the university, some reported being explicitly told to
use violence against the protesters to maintain order.20 Shortly after the
destruction of the portones, the youths contracted by Capitol Security were
seen “patrolling” the campus, some armed with wooden two-by-fours,
metal pipes, and knives, and getting into verbal and physical confrontations
with protesters. Videos also began to circulate that showed confrontations
between guards and students, which worked to reinscribe the youths
working for Capitol Security as alien and threatening to the UPR community.
These videos often circulated on social media along with a narrative that a
gang of violent thugs hired by the university was threatening students,
which played into a history of racialized and classed representational
practice directed at low-income youths, particularly those from spaces like
Loíza.
Some students understood the young men around campus to be merely
performing toughness because they were actually scared by the situation;
however, other students and members of the public saw their performance
as a very real indicator of the kind of violent pathology allegedly endemic
to spaces like Loíza. These assumptions about poor Black and dark-skinned
youths had been historically solidified through the spectacle of almost two
decades of intensified, targeted police raids in public-housing complexes
and low-income barrios such as Villa Cañona. The enclosure and
militarized policing of economically and racially marginalized communities
marked these spaces as hot zones of violence, or zonas calientes,
characterized by deviance and immorality, which needed to be controlled
and contained through state intervention.
Student activist Giovanni Roberto, himself a young Black man from a
low-income family, heard fellow students using racist and classist language
to describe the youths sent by Capitol. According to Roberto, “In the Fine
Arts porton the interaction between the students and the people contracted
by Capitol Security began to turn increasingly tense. There were people
who wanted to prevent them from removing the portones, and with much
indignation they shouted; they shouted at ‘those people.’ That same night I
started to hear one or another racist or classist comment. ‘Where did they
find these murderers?’ or more blatantly ‘What slum or project did they get
them from?’ ”21 The violent antagonism that emerged between the student
protesters and the youths from Loíza unleashed responses that played upon
prejudices about Loíza, Blackness, and poverty that had long been a feature
of the Puerto Rican popular imagination.
Such responses reproduced the state’s justification for disproportionate
police intervention, like mano dura, in low-income and predominantly
Black areas, which rendered these areas and populations as dangerous and
threatening with a natural propensity toward violence and even the
enjoyment of it. According to Roberto José Thomas Ramírez, the
administration tried to create “an animosity” among UPR students and “the
expectation that they [the youths contracted by Capitol] came to kill.”22
Thomas explained that this narrative would in turn make the student
movement act aggressively toward these low-income youths in a way that
would undercut the movement’s claim of inclusivity and solidarity with the
poor and working classes. The university administration, acting on behalf of
the state, exploited existing prejudices against these young people from
Loíza, based on their racial, spatial, and economic background, and pitted
them against university students in the hopes of frustrating any form of
alliance or solidarity between them.
Students’ and their supporters’ race- and class-based prejudices toward
the young people contracted by Capitol allowed the machinations of the
state and its security apparatus to remain hidden. The racist and classist
interpretations of these tensions functioned to occlude the ways in which
the state was enacting, or at least attempting to enact, violence by proxy.
Because the state could not send the police into the university without
violating the nonconfrontation policy and threatening its legitimacy, it
instead subcontracted security functions to young people from Loíza, many
of whom were themselves intimately familiar with state violence. It is no
mistake that the state conscripted the youths of Villa Cañona and expected
them to mimic the routine violence that they had experienced or witnessed
during police raids in their communities. In 2007 police had occupied Villa
Cañona under the auspices of dismantling the drug points that operated
there. Rather than reducing drug dealing and drug-related violence, the
police occupation of Villa Cañona resulted in dozens of reports of police
brutality and misconduct, prompting investigations from the Puerto Rican
Civil Rights Commission and the local branch of the American Civil
Liberties Union.23
Disturbingly, Benjamin Rodríguez, a supervisor at Capitol Security who
helped to recruit the youths from Villa Cañona as guards during the UPR
stoppage, had played a central part in the occupation and raids that occurred
in Villa Cañona as the PRPD’s then-assistant superintendent of field
operations. According to Villa Cañona community leader Maricruz Rivera
Clemente, Rodríguez “takes the Black people of Loíza like all they’re good
for is to beat people up and they don’t recruit us for other work.” Rivera
Clemente added, “They take them to give the students at the university a
beating. Instead of giving them scholarships so they can be students, they
want them to reproduce the suffering of their communities of origin.”24
Through their recruitment by Capitol Security on behalf of the state, these
youths from Villa Cañona were in some respects made victims of police
violence twice over: first by witnessing and experiencing rampant police
brutality in their community and second through the dehumanizing
expectation that they would enact a similar violence against others as police
proxies. Furthermore, these youths were subjected to the psychologically
violent realization that the only way they would be allowed to set foot on
the UPR campus was as violence workers.25 Many of the young loiceños
reported that the first time they had visited the Río Piedras campus was
when they showed up to take down the portones. This narrative of the
foreclosed space of the university speaks to the incredible inaccessibility of
UPR-RP to many racially and economically marginalized young people.26
Leaders within the student movement struggled with how to respond to
the young guards recruited by Capitol and the racist and classist responses
that their presence on campus generated among some students. Student
leader Giovanni Roberto was incredibly troubled by the racist and classist
sentiments he heard within the student movement. At the same time, he was
disgusted by what he saw as an overt attempt on the part of the
administration to play on racial, spatial, and class cleavages to prevent
solidarity between young people who were experiencing different
manifestations of Puerto Rico’s ongoing economic and social crisis. One
moment in particular crystallized for Roberto the need for the student
movement to reach out to the young people from Loíza in a sincere and
earnest way. On the evening of December 7, at the end of the first day of the
forty-eight-hour paro, or stoppage, while watching coverage on the local
news Roberto spotted a former student of his from the school where he
worked as a teacher in Loíza in 2008: “One of the students from that school
was there, on the other side, on behalf of the administration and the
government. I was disheartened seeing him on the television. I felt rage and
sadness, but I confess that I had no idea how to deal with the situation.”27
Later that night, troubled by what he had seen, Roberto had a long
conversation with fellow student activist Xiomara Caro about how to
respond to the situation. According to Roberto, he and Caro debated
whether one had to be full of “hate—desprecio—toward the system,
towards capitalism, towards what capitalism is, what capitalist systems do
all the time to people” in order to be an activist and effect change or if a
movement needed “a feeling of love, to be united, to have human
connection” to be successful. Roberto notes that in his conversation with
Caro they came to an understanding that a hatred of capitalism and
inequality alone cannot fuel social transformation; rather, social movements
must be driven by solidarity and connection with others feeling the effects
of an oppressive system.28
 This recognition of the importance of love and solidarity in social
movements informed Roberto’s subsequent approach to the youths
contracted by Capitol Security. Roberto added that the racial composition of
the student movement also made him conscious of the need to respond to
the situation with love and understanding for the young people from Loíza
rather than with the class and racial hostilities that university and state
officials hoped to exploit. According to Roberto, “The fact that part of the
movement were white boys” who hadn’t “lived the life that young Black,
mostly male, people live” created an inability for many within the student
movement to identify with the young guards and caused them to instead
react with contempt. He continued, “So when they saw Black people, the
way they were dressing, the way they were acting and talking, I felt that a
lot of people were rejecting them in a negative way. I heard comments and I
felt bad. I felt angry. I’m part of a movement that does not understand this
situation. The situation that causes those young people to be scapegoats, in
a way. Or be divided against other young people.”29
Recognizing his commitment to the student movement and
simultaneously having an intimate understanding of its blind spots
regarding race and class, Roberto worked to conceive of ways to connect
both groups of youths subjected, albeit in radically different ways, to the
violence of the state. At 7:45 on the morning of December 8, after a night of
altercations and vandalism on campus, Roberto addressed the young people
contracted by Capitol in front of students, supporters, and the press. He
began his address to the guards by letting them know that he and the student
movement did not consider them enemies. He said he wanted to clarify for
the guards what exactly the student movement was struggling for and
against. Roberto related to the guards, saying, “Part of my personal story,
and what explains why I am so convinced of what we are doing here, is that
I am also from a poor barrio and I am also Black just like you all. When I
was young, my parents couldn’t find work, just like you all who don’t find
work now. And I lived for many years on cupones [federal assistance]. I
lived until I was sixteen years old on cupones. Until I was sixteen. Almost
my whole life.” Roberto explained that he was on strike in part because
ever since he was a small child, his mother had taught him that everyone
has a right and should aspire to be equal. Continuing, he asked the guards:
“But what’s wrong? In this world we are not all equal. Why is Loíza un
pueblo de negros [a Black town]? Why is Carolina un pueblo de negros?
Why are Dorado and Condado considered pueblos de blanquitos [towns full
of rich whites]? It’s called racism. It’s called institutionalized racism. It’s
been called racism for many years. Decades. They don’t want us to leave.
Those born in Loíza stay in Loíza. Those born in Carolina stay in Carolina.
When we come here to fight every day, it’s so that all of you also have an
opportunity to break that cycle.” Roberto urged the young guards to leave
their posts and join the students in struggling for a more accessible
educational system, and by extension a more equitable society. Students had
in fact taken up a collection offering to pay the youths from Loíza their
day’s wages if they left their security posts and joined them in protest. “I
think that all of you, who today are standing on that side, tomorrow should
be on this side. On this side. Know that what we want is for you all to have
an opportunity to study here. That is what we are fighting for,” he said
before extending his hand to one of the young security guards.30 When the
young guard refused to shake Roberto’s hand, another guard approached
him to shake his hand and then hugged him. After a night of violence
between students and guards, Roberto’s speech to the guards ended with a
remarkable sight: students and guards shaking hands and hugging one
another.
The embraces and words exchanged between the guards and students
represented a utopian moment in which the student movement challenged
the racism and classism within its ranks and constructed connections with
youths whom both the university administration and its students often
excluded from the elite space of the UPR-RP campus. It also represented a
moment when young people who were being pitted against one another
could come together, if only for a brief moment and only symbolically, and
express solidarity. This was all the more impressive when the segregation
that structured these young people’s lives had typically made that incredibly
difficult. The UPR reproduces hierarchies of power and privilege within
Puerto Rican society and as a result places limits on meaningful
connections across race and class differences both on campus and beyond.
The segregation perpetuated by the university, as well as that which marks
Puerto Rican society more generally, makes this display of solidarity
between students and the young loiceños important. On the morning of
December 8, Giovanni Roberto succeeded in cogently outlining for both
students in the movement and the young guards the ways in which the state
benefited from the antagonism between them. Simultaneously, Roberto
challenged UPR students to confront their own racism and classism, which
caused them to lash out against the youths contracted by Capitol. For
Roberto, the student movement needed to shift in order to make itself
relevant in the lives of the economically and racially marginalized youths
who had often been excluded from spaces of privilege such as the UPR.
When I asked student activists about this moment and the decision to
reach out to the young people working for Capitol, they noted that it was in
large part Roberto who pushed the need for the student movement to
express solidarity with young people from Loíza and consider what it would
mean to bring their concerns into the student struggle. Many of these same
students also noted that that moment was possible only because of
Roberto’s own embodiment and experience. A few times, I heard some
version of the remark, “Well, it had to be Giovanni who spoke to the young
people working for Capitol.” Such comments highlight the burden placed
on Roberto to act as a liaison between the student movement and the youths
working for Capitol. Roberto was expected to act as a “bridge leader”
because so few self-identified Black and low-income students were
involved in the student movement as leaders.31 The general makeup of both
the student body and the student movement at the UPR, especially the UPR-RP
campus, helps to explain why student activists may have had difficulty
recognizing their own racial and class privileges and biases as they
interacted with the young people working for Capitol. Roberto’s leadership
during this moment and his willingness to act as a bridge between these two
groups of young people challenged the student movement to consider the
gulf between its rhetoric of inclusivity and its actual exclusivity when
confronted with race and class differences.
However, Roberto’s utopian gesture of solidarity was short-lived.
Capitol’s management personnel replaced the young guards he had
addressed a short while later with a group of older guards in the hopes of
short-circuiting any potential identification or solidarity with the student
movement. According to an executive from Capitol Security, the company
replaced the guards “because they suffered from Stockholm Syndrome,”
implying that the students were somehow the guards’ captors.32 State and
university officials immediately prepared to implement a new security
regime on campus. For the first time in the thirty years since the
implementation of the nonconfrontation policy, police could officially enter
the Río Piedras campus to “reestablish order.” The violence experienced by
students following the installation of the police on campus, and the
circulation of images of that violence via both traditional and social media,
provided for many Puerto Ricans a glimpse of police power and practice
that had long occurred, largely out of public sight, in low-income barrios
and public-housing residenciales.
“In the Flesh”

University administrators and government officials positioned the conflicts

between students and guards, and the acts of vandalism that occurred on the
evening of December 7, as evidence of the need for police to enter the UPR-
RP campus. According to Governor Fortuño, the police would provide
necessary protection for the faculty and students being threatened by a
small, radical fringe terrorizing the campus. In a press conference
announcing the installation of police personnel on campus, Fortuño said,
“The acts of violence and vandalism that all of us witnessed early on
Tuesday were the last straw. The people of Puerto Rico have been more
than patient and university officials more than lenient during this conflict.
Enough is enough.” Attempting to minimize the support that the student
movement had garnered within and outside of the university, Fortuño
added, “The instances of terrorism perpetrated over the past forty-eight
hours have clearly shown that the violent actions of a small minority of
individuals claiming to represent students are promoting an agenda that
really is alien to the vast majority of students at the UPR and has nothing to
do with the issue of the cuota [$800 fee], which they are using as an
excuse.”33
Suddenly, the police officers in riot gear who had been outside the
portones during the first strike and the forty-eight-hour stoppage were
inside the gates to ensure “order.” As has often been the case in Puerto Rico
when police forces occupied a space under the auspices of guaranteeing
public safety, their presence generated greater fear and violence. Police
officers harassed, abused, and arrested students participating in strike-
related activities. The administration placed a ban on political protest on
campus immediately following the stoppage, and as a result police were
able to arrest students for small acts of resistance such as handing out pro-
strike pamphlets on campus.
On December 10, 2010, a group of community leaders representing a
number of barrios and public-housing complexes issued a statement
denouncing the police presence on the UPR campus. These community
leaders, who were active in a number of residents’ councils and community
organizations in low-income communities around the big island, called for
an end to police aggression and announced their solidarity with the student
movement and its goals.34 The statement read, in part: “They’ve cornered
them, they imposed a fee that they can’t pay, they prevent them from
protesting anywhere, they surveil them, they deny them dialogue and
solutions. The police and University administration treat our young people
like animals, like lesser humans, without rights. These students are our
children, our grandchildren, neighbors in our community; they are people
who do not have the money to pay this fee and are seeking a decent public
education for all Puerto Ricans. We’re going to support them, there is no
doubt.” In the statement, organizers linked the brutality experienced by the
student movement to the police repression of their communities, creating
connections and solidarity between their two struggles. They highlighted
the ways in which violent and discriminatory policing, which had been
perfected in low-income communities, was now on full display at the
university, noting that “our communities are familiar with police brutality.
We have experienced in the flesh the discrimination and violation of the
rights of our residents on multiple occasions. In a country where the state
disproportionately abuses its power, there is no choice but to mobilize,
university and community, to address these abuses that are now daily.”35
This expression of solidarity not only condemned the state’s violence
against student protesters but also reminded a public that may have been
sympathetic to the plight of UPR students that such rampant abuse was
quotidian in low-income and racially marginalized communities. In this
way, their expression of solidarity both supported the student movement
and called for an end to police violence on campus, while also drawing
attention to the routine violence experienced in marginalized communities
that often garnered little outrage or solidarity.
For their part, student activists attempted to draw attention to the state’s
use of police violence as a blunt instrument of repression at the UPR and in
public housing in order to connect struggles that were often viewed in
isolation from one another. For instance, following attempts by university
and government officials to paint students and protesters as responsible for
the violence taking place on campus, José García, a student and
spokesperson for the Organización Socialista Internacional (International
Socialist Organization), issued the following call for solidarity to public-
housing residents: “You know who the violent ones are who come to club
people. You know it’s the police. We must remind the country who the
violent ones are.”36 Although students at times glossed over the differences
in power and privilege between themselves and the residents of
marginalized communities, their attempts at solidarity revealed important
parallels with the potential to result in coalitions against state abuse.
Students also looked to the long-standing resistance against the repressive
agenda of the state in public housing and low-income barrios as a source of
inspiration and strength in their own organizing. As Xiomara Caro put it,
“Resistance, where you see it most, is in the caseríos [public housing] …
and what we did in la iupi [UPR] was a resistance.… So there’s a parallel
there because we’re both, in a way, trying to resist what the system is trying
to turn us into.”37
As the second strike progressed, state and university officials attempted
to deepen racial and economic animosities and prevent cross-coalitional
organizing. To do so, they employed the physical infrastructure the state
had created while policing public-housing communities. Following the
administration’s ban on on-campus protests, police took students arrested
for violating the ban to minicuarteles in nearby public-housing complexes.
One of the lasting features of mano dura contra el crimen is an archipelago
of mini-police stations and holding cells built in public-housing complexes.
These minicuarteles were built, much like the perimeter fences around
public-housing complexes, to discourage drug trafficking and ensure a
permanent police presence within public housing. During the second strike,
police arrested students, separated them by gender, and took the men to the
station in the Monte Hatillo public-housing complex and the women to the
station in the Manuel A. Pérez public-housing complex.
The sheer number of arrests taking place at the UPR-RP campus as a result
of the protest ban ensured a steady stream of police, students, and
supporters entering and disrupting the lives of these public-housing
communities. Pedro Lugo, a student activist and reporter for Radio Huelga,
suggested that the police brought arrested students to Monte Hatillo and
Manuel A. Pérez to create conflict and resentment between students and
residents: “The police took them to the project jails because they thought
that the community would reject the solidarity of the supporters that would
show up to support the jailed students.” The presence of community
outsiders entering public housing to support arrested students, along with
the increased police presence, resulted in tensions among students, their
supporters, and community residents. According to Lugo, at one point some
residents threw rocks at students and their supporters to express their
resentment against the growing police presence in their community.
Following the incident, student activists approached residents and discussed
the ways in which police forces were trying to create conflict between them
and asked for their support: “Some people talked to them and they
understood the problem. A couple of days passed without any incidents
with the community, so the police decided not to take them [there]
anymore. The police said that they moved them [to new locations] because
those headquarters have the biggest cells.”38
The communities of Monte Hatillo and Manuel A. Pérez had been
subject to ongoing raids by police forces since the early 1990s; therefore, it
is no surprise that a sudden influx of increased police forces in addition to
community outsiders would lead to tensions and resentment. Knowing this,
it does not take much of a stretch of the imagination to see it as a deliberate
tactic on the part of the police to create conflict between UPR students and
public-housing residents. Did police hope that this tactic of placing
university students in holding cells in public-housing complexes would
make arrested students feel even more isolated, under the assumption that
these two populations were disconnected from and even hostile toward each
other? Did police purposefully attempt to disrupt the lives of public-housing
residents by bringing arrested students, and subsequently their supporters,
to Monte Hatillo and Manuel A. Pérez in order to breed resentment between
these groups? The fact that the police stopped bringing arrested students to
Monte Hatillo and Manuel A. Pérez once residents, students, and activists
were able to reach an agreement with one another suggests that the state had
a vested interest in exploiting and exacerbating racial and class cleavages in
order to once again prevent solidarity between low-income communities
and the student movement. The use of public-housing minicuarteles,
alongside the employment of young men and women from Loíza to act as
police proxies, highlights the vulgar and intentional ways in which the state
has attempted to manage populations through difference.
“¡Fuera, Fuera, Fuera Policía!”

Despite the attempts of state and university officials to use heavily

racialized and classed police violence to prevent cross-coalitional solidarity
with the student movement and its demands, the state’s violence against the
student movement eventually moved thousands of Puerto Ricans to align
themselves with the students and demand an end to the police occupation of
the university. Interactions between students and police at the university
became increasingly violent and frequent as the strike went on. These
incidents of regular police brutality, harassment, and arrest peaked with the
pintata on February 9, 2011, that began this chapter. Immediately following
the pintata, professors and employees of the UPR announced a twenty-four-
hour work stoppage in solidarity with the students in light of recent
events.39 Then, on February 12, 2011, approximately ten thousand Puerto
Ricans marched through the streets of Río Piedras in solidarity with the
students, calling for a complete withdrawal of the police from campus. A
constant refrain shouted throughout the march was “¡Fuera policía, fuera!”
(Get out, police, get out!) and “¡Fuera, fuera, fuera, policía!” (Out, out, out,
police!). On February 14, heeding these calls, the Fortuño administration
ordered the police removed from campus.
Although the second strike did not officially end until March, many
Puerto Ricans outside the student movement understood the removal of the
police from campus to be the effective end of the strike at the UPR.40 As
students and their supporters worked to force the government and university
to reinstate the nonconfrontation policy and get the police to leave campus,
the student movement suddenly became reduced to a movement against
police brutality. In this way, victory for the student movement, in the eyes
of many supporters, became contingent upon the removal of police from
campus rather than the protection of the university against privatization or
the cultivation of efforts to create a public education system accessible to all
Puerto Ricans.
For some student activists, the focus on removing the police from
campus, though necessary, inadvertently resulted in their larger questions of
economic and social justice losing urgency in the face of immediate bodily
danger and harm. Thus, when the police left campus, the strike was
considered over despite the fact that students found themselves, in many
ways, in a similar position to the one they had been in when the strike
began. Reflecting on how the second strike ended, Xiomara Caro noted, “In
retrospect, one of the criticisms, … at least internally, is that it became an
issue of police brutality. We sold out to everyone else.”41 According to
Waldemiro Vélez Soto, this shift in attention fragmented the student
movement and confused the public about the demands of the strike: “It was
a mistake. For example, if the demands were accessibility, a university open
to the people, the poor, workers, etcetera … then victimizing ourselves
because of police abuse is moving us on to another issue. It gives emphasis
or impetus to that issue when that was never the primary issue when we
started this struggle. You confuse the people because suddenly it becomes a
principal demand. Then, when the police leave, then the strike is considered
over, no?”42 Giovanni Roberto made a similar point: “I think one of the
problems was [that] one of the main goals was to get the police out of
campus, which was never the main goal for us [in the student movement].
But for the people who supported us, in some way, they established that as
the main topic. And that was a mistake in my opinion.” According to
Roberto, the shifted focus onto police violence allowed for the subject of
the student movement’s initial concern—a shrinking and increasingly
inaccessible public university system—to continue unaddressed as long as
overt physical violence ceased: “We should reject the whole politic that the
administration was doing in the university. If we [just] concentrate on the
security policy, the whole thing is going to continue.”43
In this way, although police brutality became a rallying point of
solidarity for Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and diaspora, some students
within the movement saw this emphasis on ending police brutality as
foreclosing or displacing what they understood as more important
conversations about austerity, public resources, and social access. That
police violence was perceived as a distraction from the “real” issues of the
student movement highlights the difficulty students had at times
decentering narrow student concerns in favor of broader issues affecting
nonstudent populations, especially those living in racially and economically
marginalized communities. For Puerto Ricans who found themselves under
assault almost daily by police repression, standing up against the violence
aimed at UPR students could have represented a point of connection and
solidarity, even if they might not have identified with issues such as halting
tuition and fee hikes. Including an end to police brutality and repression as
a central plank of the second student strike, especially given the students’
expressed desire to build a more expansive and inclusive student movement
following the interactions with the young guards working for Capitol, could
have had the potential to bring el barrio and la iupi together across racial,
spatial, and classed divides to challenge the agenda of the state.
Violent criminalization by the state represented a point of commonality
between UPR students and Puerto Ricans who lived in so-called zonas
calientes. However, at times students attempted to challenge their
criminalization without also challenging the underlying logics of
criminalization that ensnared so many beyond the university’s gates.
Perhaps one of the most common refrains heard during protests and seen
written on signs was “Somos estudiantes, no somos criminales” (We are
students, we are not criminals). Another common slogan was “Luchar por
una educación pública de excelencia no es un delito” (Fighting for a quality
public education is not a crime). These slogans rejected the state and
university administration’s attempts to criminalize protest and dissent, yet
they also reinforced the idea that students, unlike “real” criminals, are
undeserving of violence at the hands of the state. In formulations like these,
students were undeserving of violence because they were students and not
common criminals, which implicitly sanctioned state violence against those
involved, either by choice or by lack of choices, in the informal economy.
Appealing to hierarchal notions of belonging and worth within Puerto
Rican society, students missed opportunities to make connections with other
populations experiencing criminalization and to challenge the implicit
understanding that people who are designated criminal are violable and
expendable. As Latina scholar Martha Escobar points out in another
context, such “decriminalizing motions turn into violent acts themselves” as
the innocence of some is secured at the expense of others. In other words,
appeals to tropes of innocence and merit reinforce the idea that there are
real criminals who are deserving of the violence visited upon them at the
hands of the state and their fellow citizens.44 By dismissing the centrality of
challenging police violence to the student movement and appealing to
privileged notions of students’ inherent “goodness,” student activists missed
an important opportunity to build a coalition around mutual experiences of
criminalization. This kind of coalition building might have allowed the
student movement to make stronger and more lasting connections to
racially and economically marginalized communities.
Building Coalitions in the Shadow of the State

Although students struggled with how to express and forge solidarity across
difference, the strikes of 2010 and 2011 nonetheless enabled necessary
connections between the student movement and residents of economically
and racially marginalized communities, who are often excluded from the
UPR. During my discussions with a number of the individuals who had
participated in the 2010 and 2011 student strikes, many of them expressed a
genuine desire for the UPR to become a more inclusive and accessible space
that did not reproduce the pernicious forms of segregation that mark Puerto
Rican society more generally. This was particularly true for those students
who themselves hailed from low-income and lower-middle-income
neighborhoods. The elite status ascribed to the UPR, as well as students’ own
desires for economic security through upward mobility, sometimes made
meaningful and lasting coalitions with the communities that regularly
experienced police violence difficult. And sometimes these displays of
solidarity on the part of students did not resonate with racially and
economically marginalized communities, nor were they always
reciprocated. Nonetheless, the fleeting displays and expressions of
solidarity between students and low-income communities that occurred
during the strikes had lasting transformational effects on many of the
individuals involved and challenged the scope of the student movement and
its demands. These moments of tension and solidarity, though fraught,
illuminated a common struggle against various spatial, racial, economic,
and political inequalities endemic to state violence and the state-sanctioned
use of policing as a solution to crisis.
NOTES

1. In “Carpeteo Redux” I discuss this moment in relation to the long history of targeted
political repression and harassment of political dissidents in Puerto Rico.
2. Video footage of police intervention and brutality during the pintata can be seen in this two-
part video report for Diálogo, the UPR student newspaper: Editores Diálogo, “9 de febrero
motín en UPR-RP,” and “Motín en UPR-RP—9 de febrero de 2011 (2da parte).”
3. “Editorial: The Police Must Leave Campus.”
4. “Ley especial declarando estado de emergencia fiscal.” Translation by author.
5. Bonilla and Boglio Martínez, “Puerto Rico in Crisis.”
6. Bonilla, “Caribbean Youth Battle.”
7. Abner Y. Dennis Zayas, interview by the author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, March 8, 2012.
Translation by author.
8. “Radio Huelga: Conéctate a la resistencia.” Translation by author.
9. José Laguarta Ramírez makes a similar point when he notes that, following the Paro
Nacional, “widespread discontent and vocal protest failed to materialize into significant
resistance, in part as a result of the weakness, fragmentation, or cooptation of the leadership of
the traditional labor movement (itself a result of ongoing neoliberalization since the 1980s). In
this context, UPR students were increasingly seen as (and imagined themselves to be) the last
redoubt of popular opposition.” See Ramírez, “Struggling to Learn,” 34.
10. For footage from the protest at the Sheraton, see “Motín en actividad de fortuño por huelga
en la UPR—parte 1” and “Motín en actividad de fortuño por huelga en la UPR—parte 2.” For
more on José “Osito” Pérez Reisler, see Serrano, “Demanda por patada testicular.”
11. Quoted in Sepúlveda, “Inundan Facebook las expresiones de supuestos policías.”
Translation by author.
12. Quoted in Sepúlveda, “Inundan Facebook las expresiones de supuestos policías.”
13. Sepúlveda and Bauza, “Superintendente ordena investigación.”
14. Stanchich, “University of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory.”
15. Stanchich, “University of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory.”
16. Stanchich, “More Violence in Puerto Rico.”
17. See Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias”; and Roberto, “De cuando el
barrio entró a la UPR.”
18. Quoted in Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias.” Translation by author.
19. Giovanni Roberto makes this point clear in “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.”
20. Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias”; Roberto, “De cuando el barrio
entró a la UPR.”
21. Roberto, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.”
22. Roberto José Thomas Ramírez, interview by the author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, March
2, 2012. Translation by author.
23. For more information on the police occupation of Villa Cañona and the violence that
followed, see the short documentary “El color de la justicia [2008].”
24. Quoted in Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias.” Translation by author.
25. Huggins, Haritos-Fatouros, and Zimbardo, Violence Workers.
26. Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias.”
27. Roberto, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.” Translation by author.
28. Giovanni Roberto, interview by the author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, January 31, 2012.
29. Roberto interview, January 31, 2012.
30. “Giovanni Roberto—Discurso a Guardias Capitol—UPR 2010.” Translation by author.
31. Historian Lauren Araiza defines bridge leaders as individuals within organizations or
groups who cross divides to build coalitions that did not occur spontaneously with other
organizations or groups. As she notes, “But even with all of the necessary ingredients in place,
individuals were needed to serve as catalysts. Bridge leaders had to recognize the potential in
forming a coalition and convince their colleagues of its merits.” For more, see Araiza, To
March for Others, 9, 170.
32. Hernández, “Police Takes Over Campus.”
33. “Fortuño Afirma Policía Restableció Orden en la UPR.” Translation by author.
34. The leaders represented Cantera in Santurce, the Luis Llorens Torres public-housing
residence, Sonadora in Aguas Buenas, Piñones in Loíza, Mariana in Humacao, San Antonio in
Caugas, and Los Filtros in Guaynabo.
35. Del Mar Quiles, “Condena unánime”; translated by the author.
36. Quoted in Bauza, Díaz, and Cobián, “Calma en la UPR.” Translation by author.
37. Xiomara Caro, interview by the author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, March 7, 2012.
38. Pedro Lugo, personal correspondence with the author, December 9, 2013.
39. Diaz Alcaide, “Se van a paro los profesores de la UPR.”
40. The end date of the second strike is debatable. Some suggest that the strike did not end
until May 2011; however, for many the end of the strike was marked by an incident in which
UPR-RP chancellor Ana Guadalupe and the chief of campus security were assaulted by
protesters on March 7, 2011. Although many students claim that the individuals who assaulted
the chancellor and chief of campus security were not actually affiliated with the student
movement and were police operatives, this moment soured the public’s support, and the
movement had difficulty mobilizing in the assault’s wake.
41. Caro interview, March 7, 2012.
42. Waldemiro Vélez Soto, interview by the author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, April 26, 2012.
Translation by author.
43. Roberto interview, January 31, 2012.
44. Escobar, Captivity beyond Prisons, 63.
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“Editorial: The Police Must Leave Campus.” Puerto Rico Daily Sun, February 10, 2011.
Escobar, Martha D. Captivity beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina
(Im)migrants. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.
“Fortuño Afirma Policía Restableció Orden en la UPR y Se Quedará Mientras Sea
Necesario.” Primera Hora, December 9, 2010. www.primerahora.com/noticias
/gobierno-politica/notas/fortuno-afirma-policia-restablecio-orden-en-la-upr-y-se-
quedara-mientras-sea-necesario.
“Giovanni Roberto—Discurso a Guardias Capitol—UPR 2010.” YouTube, December
10, 2010. http://youtu.be/xXzpbYB7Ndo.
Hernández, Juan A. “Police Takes Over Campus after Stoppage.” Puerto Rico Daily
Sun, December 9, 2010. https://www.prdailysun.com/news/Police-takes-over-campus
-after-stoppage (no longer available).
Huggins, Martha K., Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo. Violence Workers:
Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities. Berkeley:
 University of California Press, 2002.
LeBrón, Marisol. “Carpeteo Redux: Surveillance and Subversion against the Puerto
Rican Student Movement.” Radical History Review 128 (2017): 147–72.
“Ley especial declarando estado de emergencia fiscal y estableciendo plan integral de
estabilización fiscal para salvar el crédito de Puerto Rico.” Ley Núm. 7 del año 2009
(P. de la C. 1326).
“Motín en actividad de fortuño por huelga en la UPR—parte 1.” primerahoravideos,
YouTube, May 21, 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=04TIgF6Cj_U.
“Motín en actividad de fortuño por huelga en la UPR—parte 2.” primerahoravideos,
YouTube, May 21, 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSimXwuJWfA.
“Radio Huelga: Conéctate a la resistencia.” Desde Adentro, May 2, 2010. http://
rojogallito.blogspot.com/2010/05/radio-huelga-conectate-la-resistencia.html.
Ramírez, José Laguarta. “Struggling to Learn, Learning to Struggle: Strategy and
Structure in the 2010–11 University of Puerto Rico Student Strike.” PhD diss., City
University of New York, 2016.
Roberto, Giovanni. “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.” Socialismo Internacional,
October 26, 2013. https://latrincheraobrera.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/de-cuando-el-
barrio-entro-a-la-upr.
Sepúlveda, Karol Joselyn. “Inundan Facebook las expresiones de supuestos policías
‘orgullosos’ de macanear estudiantes de la UPR.” Primera Hora, May 21, 2010.
www.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/nota
/inundanfacebooklasexpresionesdesupuestospoliciasorgullososdemacanearestudiante
sdelaupr-388928.
Sepúlveda, Karol Joselyn, and Nydia Bauza. “Superintendente ordena investigación por
expresiones desacertadas de policías.” Primera Hora, May 22, 2012. http://www
.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/nota
/superintendenteordenainvestigacionporexpresionesdesacertadasdepolicias-388999.
Serrano, Oscar J. “Demanda por patada testicular.” Noticel, May 16, 2011. www.noticel
.com/noticia/104753/1346977531000.
Stanchich, Maritza. “More Violence in Puerto Rico as University Student Fee Is
Imposed.” Huffington Post, December 15, 2010. www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-
stanchich-phd/more-violence-in-puerto-r_b_810628.html.
Stanchich, Maritza. “University of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal
Civil Rights Backlash.” Huffington Post, July 7, 2010. www.huffingtonpost.com
/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html.
 SEVEN · Brian Jordan Jefferson

Programming Colonial Racial

Capitalism

: Encoding Human Value in Smart Cities

Forms of humanity are separated (made “distinct”) so that they may be

interconnected in terms that feed capital. [Ruth Wilson] Gilmore elsewhere
names this process “partition” and identifies it as the base algorithm for
capitalism.
JODI MELAMED, “RACIAL CAPITALISM,” 2015

The so-called smart city has been touted by technology firms, urban
officials, and academics as a means of making property assessment, public
health, sanitation, and security more efficient. Although city spokespeople
and tech companies hail the trend as the coming of urban utopias, an
increasing number of urbanists are drawing attention to the inequalities
generated through smart governance.1 However, in most of these works
racial inequities are viewed as effects of the process. Here, the deepening
impoverishment and marginalization of minority populations are cast as a
function of cities replacing low-wage, minority labor with the global
technical elite. The lens of colonial racial capitalism helps reveal how these
inequities might not be mere surface effects but rather are operational logics
written in the very source code of smart governance.
This chapter explores how racial difference is encoded in smart city
software, which is increasingly extended to indigenous hinterlands. It turns
attention to academics, administrative officials, international specialty
groups, and technology firms that design software to assess the value of
geographic locations and the groups that populate them. Two technologies
are examined—property-assessment software and waste-management
software—through academic studies, government reports, international
organizations’ white papers, and private-sector publications.2 The chapter
shows how the differential valuation of nonwhite people and places is not
only a result of smart governance but also a constitutive logic. It illustrates
how smart governance not only results in racial inequality but is literally
programmed to produce it.
The first section of this chapter reviews how racial inequities are often
understood in smart urbanization literature. It directs attention to how
inequalities in these works are explained mostly as consequences of
economic restructuring. The section then considers how recent works on
racial capitalism can expand this explanation, namely by viewing racial
nonequivalence as an input in the production of social space, not just an
output. Sections two and three analyze computerized property-assessment
software and waste-management software, respectively. These cases show
how cities use these tools to assign specific populations and areas different
levels of value in ways commensurate with racial and colonial logics. It also
explores the central role of on-ground struggles in the spread of smart
technology. In each case, the chapter investigates how opposition to the
proliferation of these tools generates new avenues for abolitionist
mobilization.
Smart Tech and Racial Inequality

Toward the end of the last millennium, a rising chorus of city officials
praised self-monitoring and reporting technology (SMART) as a means of
managing economic, political, and social issues arising from urban
mutations.3 There is an extensive body of work in urban theory on such
issues, especially those arising from urban amassments of global corporate
power, environmental degradation, intensifications of economic inequality,
and overpopulation. These studies show the vast repertoire of smart tech
that has been embraced by city officials as remedies for these problems.4
Other scholars trace the inequalities engendered by these technological
solutions, including the new forms of excluding and profiling already-
marginal urban groups.5 Some in this vein highlight how post-Fordist
modes of urban accumulation rely on relocating the manufacturing
industries that black and Latina/o workers historically depended upon. The
new geographies of flexible production, unthinkable without IT
infrastructures, have thus left entire communities functionally obsolete.
Critics warn that inequality will be an unavoidable consequence of smart
city policy and administration.6 But what if these deepening inequalities
were not merely effects but also the means of urban transformation? What if
uneven redistributions of wealth, power, and poverty were necessary
conditions for IT-driven forms of capital accumulation?
Colonial racial capitalism provides conceptual resources to answer these
questions. The framework is fine-tuned to magnify how the state and tech
companies combine to reproduce racial divisions and exploitation under
auspices of smarter governance. As various scholars working within the
tradition of racial capitalism have shown, the state has been fundamental in
securing nonwhite land, labor, and lives for the benefit of agricultural,
mercantile, industrial, and real estate capitalists. Exploring state-capital
relations in the context of smart cities offers a window into the IT sector’s
position within this wider history, thus opening new vistas for future
research from the colonial racial capitalist perspective.
Redlining Software

“If the accumulation of capital,” Marxist geographer Neil Smith argues,

“entails geographical development and if the direction of this development
is guided by the rate of profit, then we can think of the world as a ‘profit
surface’ produced by capital itself.”7 Although Aihwa Ong has shown how
the image of capitalism as a global undifferentiated surface is a chimera of
political economic metatheory, the desire to establish such a surface
nevertheless persists and has literally materialized in a number of property
technologies.8 Widely popularized in the 1970s, computer-assisted mass-
appraisal software (CAMA) analyzes property market data to determine
values for landed property markets. This software is promoted by city
spokespeople and technology firms as an example of technology’s ability to
produce neutral, scientifically based assessments of land in both urban and
rural settings. It generates simulations of cities in which buildings, facilities,
and land lots are depicted as pure exchange values. Sometimes their use
values are coded according to predefined land uses. In China, CAMA has
recently been merged with geographic-information systems to create three-
dimensional models of properties for users to explore values as if they were
in an open-world video game. Since the 1980s, major cities across the
world have adopted some version of this software.
The global explosion of property-assessment technology over the past
three decades has been propelled to a large extent by US-based firms such
as Cisco Systems, Environmental Systems Research Institute, PropertyInfo
Corporation, and Tyler Technologies. Many of these firms have combined
forces in the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO), which
provides consultation, software packages, and technical assistance to
government agencies for CAMA-related matters. The spread of the software
has also been reinforced by the United Nations (UN), which has encouraged
cities to adopt the software to accommodate transnational real estate
markets.9 But whereas urban decision makers are embracing the technology
as a way to circumvent prejudicial valuations, property submarkets are
always already structured by long-standing group-based inequalities.10
Therefore, the architects and promoters of CAMA have had to navigate the
uneven terrain of property markets lest they disturb entrenched power
relations.
Public officials, international organizations, and technology firms each
publicize CAMA as a way for cities to maximize administrative efficiency
and economic growth. This is especially evident in cities in postcolonial
countries, where the software is promoted as a means of modernizing
cadastral systems to join global property-finance markets. The software is
also often touted as a way to address market volatility born of extraordinary
population growth in such countries. The UN has been one catalyst behind
CAMA’s global spread, praising its ability to forge worldwide “valuation
standards [that] define the matters to be taken into account in valuation
practice primarily when dealing with valuations for private sector activities
such as mortgages, investment and accounting. Such standards are
increasingly international in character reflecting the growing awareness of
the strong links between valuation standards and [real estate] financial
markets, and globalisation.”11
Real estate professionals have also embraced CAMA as a response to the
planetary detonation of real estate capital. Only through the software,
according to many, can professionals capitalize on “economic globalization
[that] creates new opportunities in real estate market, product and
service.… Real estate professionals have to re-orientate themselves so that
they can move up the service value-ladder and avoid being marginalized
under intense competition in a global market.”12
Whether through government officials, international organizations, or the
private sector, efforts to circulate property-appraisal software appear to be a
matter of adapting to the vicissitudes of the global marketplace. In fact,
some CAMA packages analyze market data to generate dynamic models of
property markets. For residential properties, the most common data pertain
to a property’s condition, cost of construction, internal features, land use,
land value, location, type of construction, quality of materials, and size.
Market-activity data are also analyzed to determine a type of property’s cost
value. For instance, the average selling price of a category of property and
its number of sales over a defined period of time are coded in most early
CAMA programs as value determinant.13 There is no lack of variety when it
comes to CAMA products. Some estimate the selling price of properties by
analyzing sales transactions over time; others analyze past events in
property markets to solve current problems; others mimic the reasoning of
human assessors to make their own value determinations.
For the past decade, these types of software have been promoted by tech
firms working in postcolonial countries as a means of generating public
revenue to manage urban growth. In many South and Southeast Asian
cities, assessment software is used to manage problems spawned by issues
such as residential market volatility caused by rapid population increases.14
Singaporean experts have devised valuation algorithms for similar
purposes.15 In Malaysia, assessment software is promoted to value
commercial properties for tax-levying purposes in order to repair and
expand overburdened infrastructure.16 Computerized valuation has been
advertised in similar ways in Latin America, which economists are quick to
point out often lacks revenue-productive property-tax systems.17 This has
become especially problematic given the continued expansion of megacities
and their corresponding public-service needs. Associations and firms based
in the United States, such as the Appraisal Institute, Fugro Geospatial, and
O’Connor Consulting, and the Russian-based Top Systems, have
spearheaded efforts to introduce algorithmic property valuation throughout
the region. It has also been pushed in Mexico as a way of generating
property-tax revenue to address strains on public services incurred by urban
sprawl.18
Property, Tech, and Social Differentiation

Although computerized valuation represents urban environments as grids of

exchange value, it would be shortsighted to assume that physical properties
are the only things that function as value determinant. Most CAMA
applications encode traditional metrics as indicators of value: average rent,
home-ownership rates, median family size, median household income,
and/or population density. In such instances, group-based characteristics are
independent variables, whereas cost values are dependent. In some Asian
and Latin American cities, computer-based cadastres are linked to drones to
identify and monitor economic, physical, legal, environmental, and social
characteristics of land parcels and the people who occupy them.19
Therefore, such appraisals do not determine exchange value in a
sociological vacuum; they inherit and reproduce social differentiations.
The link between social difference and property appraisals in CAMA is
obscured by the technology’s staunchest promoters. In fact, ethno-racial
inequalities have been sold by city officials as reasons for embracing
computerized property valuation. In New York City, CAMA’s rise was
spurred by coalitions looking to combat discriminatory property
assessments in the early 1980s. Before the rent gap was achievable,
residential properties in the “poorer, more debilitated boroughs” were
assessed up to 250 percent more than those in the wealthier districts.20 City
officials explain how these overassessments increased property taxes for
low-income minorities, which in turn decreased their eligibility for public
aid.21 This prompted the Department of Finance into a “computer crusade to
eradicate the discrimination” against minority home owners perpetuated by
human assessors. The department teamed with the Appraisal Institute to
design a location value response surface model that, in addition to typical
assessment variables (e.g., age, cost of construction, size), also coded
“value influence centers” such as businesses, high-end shopping districts,
and other amenities as positive values.22 The absence of these amenities in
poor communities led to lower property values. Many companies pitched
the software as a corrective to the subjective biases of assessors.23 Such uses
of difference to legitimize the marketplace enact what Melamed terms
“multicultural neoliberalism,”24 for it codes free markets as mediums of
ethnic and racial inclusion. In this discourse, multiculturalism and economic
freedom are positively correlated. As such, the extension of market control
into minority communities inside wealthier Western countries and across
economically liberalizing areas of the global South is construed as a means
to increase intragroup equality.
More recently, the nexus of race, property, and information tech has been
identified in “platform urbanization” rhetoric. Sara Safransky explores a
Detroit-based community development investment fund’s use of market-
value assessment (MVA) software in efforts to slash public services.25
Ostensibly designed to combat redlining, MVA identified “risky” areas
primed for disinvestment. Safransky details the factors used to determine
risk built into the software: building code violations, credit scores,
education, employment, housing vacancies, presence of subsidized housing,
prime/subprime loans, and racial makeup, among others. Thus, MVA,
employed in the 2010 Detroit Works initiative, generated dis/investment
maps that remarkably resembled the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s
infamous residential security maps from the 1930s. In San Francisco, Erin
McElroy illustrates how proptech enables racial dispossession via
automated landlordism, planning, property management, and zoning. She
specifically illustrates how computer-driven evictions, speculation, and
residential surveillance abet larger gentrification processes that displace and
geographically marginalize poor, black San Franciscans. McElroy also
notes how the dispossessed appropriate similar technology to develop
community-based housing-justice strategies.26
In addition to social difference, its corollary, regional difference, was a
key theme used to legitimize CAMA’s rapid spread. In these cases,
indigenous groups find themselves subjected to the ever-encroaching
specter of private landed property, which is defined over and against their
material well-being. Cities in Australia, British Columbia, Canada, New
Zealand, and Queensland adopted CAMA to value agricultural lands being
absorbed into urban sprawls. AGJD Consulting, ESRI, and IAAO have all
advocated strongly for municipalities in Canada, Namibia, Sierra Leone,
and South Africa to embrace CAMA to value rural lands outside of
cadastralized urban centers. The implementation of CAMA in many similar
cases proceeded through developmentalist discourses that cast rural and
indigenous landscapes as backward. To assuage the indigenous groups in
these farmlands, government officials have characterized appraisals as a
way to help them “grow and develop towards the goals of self-sufficiency
and economic development.”27
But the absorption of indigenous lands into global property markets is no
mere equalizing process. On the contrary, it thrives on differentiation. Many
critics of the algorithmic assessment of indigenous farmlands argue that it
reflects efforts by metropolitan governances to shift tax burdens from urban
centers to rural farmlands.28 This claim stems from the fact that, thanks to
intercity competition over foreign investment, most tax-exempted land uses
are commonly located in urban centers. Population density is often coded as
having the strongest correlation with value; high density means high value,
and vice versa. Moreover, critics argue that the assessments reinforce the
rural’s subordinate relation to the urban. By coding farming as a taxable
land use on the one hand and urban characteristics as a tax-exempted land
use on the other, the former’s value to the latter is activated anew. Indeed,
proponents of CAMA routinely emphasize the need to generate revenues by
taxing these farmlands to fund programs associated with urban growth.29
This highlights the ongoing nature of accumulation by indigenous
dispossession, which works in part through the illusion that indigenous
lands are outside the capitalist system.30
In terms of global regions, algorithmic valuation is similarly publicized
by international investors, nongovernment organizations, and public
officials as a means of modernizing the global South. Through
administrative software, advocates frame entrance into global markets as a
“predetermined route” for all nation-states and thereby reproduce colonial
relations.31 Such arguments have been made for implementing CAMA in
central European, east African, eastern European, and Latin American cities
and rural areas to avoid being left behind in the rapidly changing global
economy.32 This narrative also extends to countries that were never
colonized. The introduction of CAMA in Chinese cities was praised as
instancing one more example of China “starting from behind, absorbing
knowledge from more advanced economies, [and] adapting to local
needs.”33 Smart tech therefore feeds on global South/North differentiations,
if only in the rhetoric of its salespersons.
Automated Wastelands

Smart governance does not only play a part in determining the economic
values of landscapes; it also plays a part in determining how pollutable they
are. Since the late 1960s, municipal authorities across the world have
slowly embraced computer-aided forms of waste-disposal optimization and
landfill site selection to manage explosions of waste in expanding cities.34
In 2006, 619 million tons of solid waste were produced in cities in
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
countries, with US cities producing more waste than all European Union
(EU) cities combined. Software designed to determine ideal locations and
sizes of landfills, waste-to-energy plants, and trash incinerators has been
one way of addressing this “global epidemic of urban waste.”35 But these
locations were partially determined through colonial understandings of
social and regional difference, which influenced the design and deployment
of waste-optimization software.
It may seem fitting to interpret the spread of algorithmic waste
management simply as a technical response to population growth. In the
1990s many municipal agencies in Western cities began turning to database
management, decision support, geographic information, and spatial
statistics software to cut costs of waste management. During this time, US-
based companies such as Computer Support, Ivy Computer (now Trash
Flow), and Soft-Pak were key vendors. Another key player was the Irish-
based firm AMCS, which provided waste-management software throughout
Australasia. According to experts, a key innovation in these applications
was the way that they applied principles of private property and economic
growth to municipal solid waste (MSW) management.36 Early MSW
management applications were designed to minimize waste collection,
transport costs, disposal costs, and waste-truck routes using economic
evaluations.37 Inventory cost, the number of required vehicles, and transport
times were analyzed to determine the route’s efficiency and suggest optimal
pickup crew sizes, landfill destinations, pickup frequency, and truck sizes.
Early MSW management software was designed to find ideal locations for
new waste facilities based on exclusively economic variables.38 Most waste-
optimization software is used to evaluate scenarios exclusively through the
lens of cost-benefit analysis.39 Many proponents of the software place
emphasis on economic efficiency over environmental and social
considerations. For some models, the profit of developers, investor
dividends, and the economic impact on surrounding areas are among the
most heavily weighted variables.40 Newly industrializing countries across
sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Asia have turned to software firms
such as the Chinese-based EdgMachine and the Spanish-based Repsol for
MSW management software. In Chinese municipalities, for instance, solid-
waste software and wastewater-management software have been developed
using methods from pollution-loss theories originally made to evaluate
economic losses.41 Here cost of disposal, loss of production, and traveling
expenditures are identified by officials as the most important
considerations. In India, state officials recently launched the Smartnet
initiative, which enables relations between IT firms and more than a hundred
special-purpose vehicles that oversee smart-city development. Through this
public-private exchange, dozens of municipalities have assigned MSW
disposal to private contractors, which determine waste-facility construction
based on economic impact, cost-effectiveness, and land use, among other
factors.42
Beyond city settings, waste-management software has been extended to
nonurban landscapes. Focusing on rural villages in northern Egypt, S.
Anwar and colleagues prescribe a model which suggests that transporting
MSW from cities to remote rural areas is far more cost-effective than
removing it from remote areas.43 And in addition to disincentivizing MSW
transport, algorithmic waste disposal can enroll nonurban territories as
“operational landscapes” for urban waste outputs, making them into
dumping grounds for conspicuous urban consumption. This is the typical
result in waste-disposal applications that code distance from cities as
positive values in waste-facility siting.44 In both examples, the function of
waste tech is to differentiate the pollutability of areas based on their
economic significance, thereby exposing low-value landscapes to hazardous
waste in a differential manner.
Waste Tech and Social Differentiation

Cost-effectiveness is not the only consideration in the software-aided

management of urban waste. The environmental racism endemic to
industrialization continues to manifest in different ways.45 Waste-
management tech arrived in US cities around the time of various exposés of
environmental racism. During the late 1980s, when Computer Solutions,
GEOWARE, and Trux Software began selling MSW management software to
municipal agencies throughout the United States, several reports brought to
light the extraordinary higher rates at which low-income minorities were
exposed to toxic-waste facilities.46 The category of race was confirmed as
the strongest predictor of exposure to abandoned toxic-waste sites, lead
poisoning, and municipal toxic-waste facilities in US cities. Activists
attributed this to the fact that these groups resided in areas with low
property values, which made it acceptable to pollute them from an
economic point of view. Poor nonwhites’ lack of political power to resist
toxic siting near their homes was also emphasized as a contributing factor.
But what was often overlooked is the fact that distance from toxic facilities
is a racialized privilege that would be reproduced through various tools,
including software.47
Close analysis of several landfill-siting software applications reveals
their function in unevenly distributing exposure to waste. For starters, low
levels of home ownership, household median income, and residential
property values are coded as positive indicators for facility siting.48 Waste-
facility-siting models use risk-benefit analysis to determine “acceptable
levels” of hazardous exposure in poor, predominantly minority
communities.49 Furthermore, when determining waste siting according to
profitability, working-class black, immigrant, and indigenous communities
are invariably in disadvantageous positions to voice their grievances.50
These conditions combine instrumental rationalities of the state with
industrial forms of death and dehumanization. Placed into its political
context, the software used to determine who gets exposed to such harms
performs what we might call necrocomputation.
 Such a failure to incorporate considerations for differential toxic
exposure also characterizes software for assessing the so-called social costs
of waste facilities. Instead of coding group-based inequality as a social cost,
these typically measure a facility’s effects on land uses.51 By coding social
costs as such, group-differentiated exposure to waste is blocked from
measurement. The US federal government has redacted studies using
geographic-information systems to map group-based disparities in
hazardous-waste exposure.52 The software can therefore help reinforce the
“history of excluding people of color from the mainstream environmental
groups, decision-making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies.”53
The many “Not in My Backyard” movements that have coalesced in
cities that have adopted the software applications should therefore come as
no surprise.54 This is far from unexpected given that racialization, Nikhil
Pal Singh observes, is always accompanied by “spatial and signifying
systems that stigmatize and depreciate one form of humanity for the
purposes of another’s health, development, safety, [or] profit.”55 Were MSW
management software to include data on group-based differentials, it would
run the risk of disrupting the privilege of not being exposed to toxic waste.
Indeed, clashes between the spread of computerized waste management and
minority populations have coalesced in several European cities. Critics of
data-driven waste management in cities of the European Union direct
attention to a general lack of consideration of environmental
discrimination.56 Discussions about the ways that immigrants are
disproportionately exposed to incinerators, industrial and nuclear sites, and
waste-management facilities are consistently absent at international
conferences and in academic research and corporate literature.57 This is
despite the growing preponderance of “waste markets” in the heavily
minoritized urban fringe and in rural areas.
In addition to racial differentiation, the spread of waste tech is
differentiated geographically, most notably through socio-spatial categories
established through colonial doctrines. Much like computerized appraisal,
computerized waste management exhibits a consistent tendency to
devalorize rural areas to the benefit of urban centers of accumulation. So
where the appraisal algorithms off-load tax burdens onto rural territories,
optimization algorithms off-load garbage. This is pronounced in cities in
rapidly urbanizing East Asian countries looking to disentangle urban-rural
land uses on the grounds that Western planning theory deems mixed areas
ineffective.58 To compound matters, beyond issues of land use the centrality
of cost-benefit analysis often leads to conclusions that in areas with
“dispersed, small populations, the collection and transport of recyclate to
processing centers presents potentially important environmental and cost
disincentives—it may be that direct landfilling of waste with minimal
recycling is the [best option].”59
Global regional difference has also worked as a selling point for
technology firms in postcolonial countries. As Denise Ferreira da Silva has
shown, differentiating global regions on the grounds that they are
categorically outside of and behind Western Europe/United States
civilization helps justify extensions of Western power.60 Firms such as
TransAct Energy Corporation, Veolia Environnement, and WRATE have thus
touted waste-management software throughout the global South as a means
of catching up to the global North in refuse-disposal practices. Public and
private advocates of waste-management software working in the global
South insist that these countries do so to “learn from the experience of
industrialized countries to solve serious pollution problems.”61 As Ayona
Datta demonstrates, smart-city rhetoric is the latest iteration of colonial
powers trying to remake global South governances in the image of the West
by using technoscientific modernization as a pretext.62 Indeed, the World
Bank has rigorously promoted waste-management technologies in the
global South as a way of increasing private-sector activity in state decision
making such as in the West.63 Intergovernmental support for these firms was
codified in the UN’s 1992 Rio Declaration of Environment and
Development, which articulated a vision for mobilizing commercialized
technology to achieve low-cost disposal services in poor countries.64
Advocates for waste tech in poorer global South countries also emphasize
the fact that these nations rely heavily on the informal sector, which is
argued to be irregular and inefficient, thus desperately in need of
technological upgrade.65
Programming Racial Difference

The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to

homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and
dialectical differences.
CEDRIC ROBINSON, BLACK MARXISM, 1983

Like any mode of capital accumulation, accumulation through smart

governance proceeds in part through positing social, hence geographic,
nonequivalencies. The implementation of computerized property and waste
tech moves through long-standing structures of group-based inequalities,
extending them in time and space, transforming them, creating in the
process novel contradictions and forms of resistance. The centrality of
profiling is made clear in computer-assisted property appraisal. Trevor
Ngwane illustrates how property regimes have long served as mechanisms
for racializing space, expressed in submarket differentiations.66 CAMA
software reproduces these submarkets under the heading of putative finer
districts, comprising high levels of home ownership, median household
incomes, and proximity to amenities, among other factors, on one hand and
“inner-city” submarkets determined by the preponderance of old buildings,
residences with low square footage, and low home sale values on the
other.67 The profiles, which map onto residential segregation, are then used
as rationalizations for placed-based (dis)investment and tax abatement. This
preserves existing disparities in property value, thus ensuring that minority
neighborhoods maintain their relative valuelessness. In fact, lowering the
values of minority submarkets, which always precedes gentrification, was
the point of establishing algorithmic appraisal in New York, which was
legitimized through multicultural rhetoric.
Computer-assisted waste management similarly generates spatial profiles
in ways that naturalize the logics of the market and contribute to “group-
differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” given its toxic import.68
And it can do so only by encoding spatial and hence social differences.
Municipalities also attempt to raise revenues from rural areas by coding
them as distinct from cities in order to fund urban projects. This casts the
rural as a resource for dealing with urban growth, though only through
reproducing the nonurban. Technology firms similarly benefit from the
production of regional difference by casting its commodity as a medium
through which postcolonial hinterlands can close the development gap with
Western countries.
Smart governance reflects the extent to which forms of capitalist
governance, computerized or not, rely on establishing notions of group-
based inequality prior to and through the accumulation process. As Adam
Bledsoe and Willie Wright argue, the enshrinement of racial inequality is
one of several tactics of justifying the racialized effects of this process.69
And the tactic is deployed on a global scale. It is therefore important to
stress that the planetary profusion of smart governance encounters,
organizes, and disposes of humans and environments in ways that are
prefigured by colonial racial classifications. This adds another dimension to
the observation that contemporary urbanization is “variegated, uneven,
volatile, contradictory, and emergent[and] assumes specific forms across
divergent spatiotemporal contexts.”70 Specifically, we see that
differentiation is not only an output of urban transformations but also an
input, which offers deeper insights into where, why, and how economies of
space are changing alongside socio-technological mutation.
Beyond the Algorithm

Scrutinizing smart governance from the perspective of racial capitalism

reveals the extent to which it is prefigured by and creates new forms of
racial dispossession and disparity. These findings highlight the need for
algorithmic abolitionist thinking that calls the types of norms and values
behind smart governance to the fore. Such a point of view maintains that it
is not enough to chronicle the unequal effects of the rise and spread of
technologically administered populations. Such inattention to the social
forces at work behind smart governance has led to some theoretical
missteps. For one, in addition to chronicling how the spread of the smart
city can reproduce established social inequalities, one must also scrutinize it
in terms of whether or not the reproduction of long-standing social
inequalities is one of its driving objectives.71 One thing that smart
urbanization shows is that data-driven governance is employed in many
instances to preserve if not expand inequity. This is most obvious in the
way that racial taxonomies prefigure algorithmic practices in border patrol,
law enforcement, and/or national security. The slow and uneven rolling out
of smart technologies of governance does not signify the birth of a fully
automated mode of statecraft, operating beyond the grasp of human control.
Such phantom-like agency is an ideological mirage that renders invisible
those who benefit from the application of computing technology to
governance. Nor does it signify, as Zuboff suggests, the end of racial
supremacy as an organizing principle of political and economic power.72 On
the contrary, from the standpoint of racial capitalism, algorithmic
governance is the latest vector of white supremacist political economy.
It is therefore vital to understand the constitutive function that racial
differentiation performs in creating conditions for smart modes of
governance. As the cases explored above demonstrate, the algorithmic
apparatuses of such cities are specifically designed such that they devalue
specific areas and make them unequally susceptible to disinvestment and
despoilment. In many instances, the key function is to legitimize the
harmful practices required to increase profit rates, which are to begin with
already ethno-racialized, gendered, nationalized, regionalized, and
sexualized. An abolitionist view would direct attention to the extent to
which such deployments of software technology permeate society.
Moreover, the perspective is sensitive to the fact that the use of algorithms
to differentiate populations and places according to their value can
potentially generate new solidarities and ways of producing social space.
The people and places that are identified by algorithms as economically
devalued or exposed to pollution are revealed to share one common
characteristic—they are relatively valueless from the vantage point of
current configurations of global accumulation. This is not merely an issue
of class: some of these groups are proletarianized; others are not. But what
they all hold in common is that they have been differentiated by
governances as less valuable, however defined. Acknowledging this
provides a basis for coalition building between the various algorithmically
devalued populations, which offers new opportunities for resisting the racial
violence so central to the evolution of the capitalist mode of production.
NOTES

1. Kitchin, “Continuous Geosurveillance”; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, “Maintenance of Urban

Circulation.”
2. This essay relies on extensive analysis of four types of documents to understand and cross-
verify these dynamics. The academic studies analyzed here were taken from journals where
experts design mathematical models for property assessment and waste management for the
expressed purpose of encoding them in software. The essay also analyzes reports on such
software from international organizations. Technical reports and promotional material from
technology firms that design and sell property evaluation software are also examined. Finally,
conference papers and white papers from professional property-assessment and waste-
management associations are also subjected to discourse analysis.
3. Townsend, Smart Cities, 93–114.
4. Graham and Marvin, Telecommunications and the City; Amin and Thrift, Cities.
5. Graham, “Software-Sorted Geographies,” 570; Cardullo and Kitchin, “Being a ‘Citizen,’ ”
1–5.
6. Vanolo, “Is There Anybody Out There?” See also Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New
Epistemology?,” 151–58.
7. Smith, New Urban Frontier, 157.
8. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception.
9. “Rural Property Tax Systems.”
10. Ranganathan, “Thinking with Flint,” 17–19; Bonds, “Race and Ethnicity I,” 1–5.
11. “Rural Property Tax Systems,” 39.
12. Liu et al., “What We Do,” 470.
13. McCluskey, “A Critical Review,” 5.
14. Erbam and Piumetto, Making Land Legible.
15. Leng, “Mass Appraisal.”
16. Kamarudin and Daud, “CAMA Application.”
17. Sepulveda and Martinez-Vazquez, “Explaining Property Tax Collections.”
18. Peña et al., “Planning Support Systems,” 30.
19. Erbam and Piumetto, Making Land Legible.
20. Laberis, “Property Appraisal System.”
21. DePalma, “Reassessments Hit Homeowners Hard,” 10.
22. The city later entered into a four-million-dollar contract with Vision Appraisal Technology
in 2007 and a twenty-million-dollar contract with Tyler Technologies a decade later.
23. McCluskey and Franzsen, “Land Value Taxation”; Harris, “ ‘Assessing’ Discrimination,”
1–10; “Guidance on International Mass Appraisal,” 1–5.
24. Melamed, Represent and Destroy.
25. Safransky, “Geographies of Algorithmic Violence,” 200–205.
26. McElroy, “Property as Technology,” 16–18.
27. “First Nations Agriculture Needs Assessment.”
28. Bahl and Linn, Urban Public Finance.
29. Peña et al., “Planning Support Systems”; McCluskey and Franzsen, “Land Value
Taxation.”
30. See, for instance, Goldstein, “Reproduction of Race.”
31. Tomba, “Differentials of Surplus-Value,” 33.
32. Acuto, “Global Science for City Policy”; Geho, “Evaluation,” 235–40.
33. Nunlist, “Virtual Valuation,” 10.
34. Gottinger, “Computational Model.”
35. TEC, “Transact Energy Introduces Z.E.W.O.P.”
36. Chang and Pires, “Systems Analysis for the Future.”
37. Elsaid and Aghezzaf, “Framework for Sustainable Waste Management.”
38. Petts, “Municipal Waste Management.”
39. Morrissey and Browne, “Waste Management Models.”
40. To be sure, many waste-management designers began going beyond the matter of
landfilling and exploring alternative practices toward the turn of the century. Some models
were developed to consider a wider variety of options, including waste reduction, when
calculating economic and environmental impact. But the administrative scale needed to
implement these models has stymied their integration into government agencies. See Davy,
“Fairness as Compassion”; and Tralhão, Coutinho-Rodrigues, and Alçada-Almeida,
“Multiobjective Modeling Approach.”
41. Su et al., “Inexact Multi-objective Dynamic Model.”
42. Sumathi, “GIS-Based Approach.”
43. Anwar et al., “Optimization of Solid Waste Management.”
44. Siddiqui, Everett, and Vieux, “Landfill Siting.”
45. Dillon, “Race, Waste, and Space.”
46. Bullard, “Race and Environmental Justice”; “Toxic Wastes and Race”; “Rio Declaration.”
47. Pulido, “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II.”
48. Petts, “Municipal Waste Managment”; Zurbrügg, “Assessment Methods for Waste
Management.”
49. Heiman, “Waste Management and Risk Assessment.”
50. Chavis, “Foreword,” 3–6.
51. Jung et al., “Landfill Site Selection.”
52. For instance, the US Environmental Protection Agency removed such reports from its
website during the administration of President Donald Trump.
53. Chavis, “Foreword,” 3.
54. Sasao, “Estimation of the Social Costs.”
55. Singh, Black Is a Country, 223.
56. See Martuzzi, Mitis, and Forastire, “Inequalities, Inequities, Environmental Justice.”
57. Harper, Steger, and Filčák, “Environmental Justice and Roma Communities.”
58. Hiramatsu et al., “Municipal Solid Waste Flow.”
59. Petts, “Municipal Waste Management,” 826–27.
60. Ferreira da Silva, “1 (Life) ÷ 0 (Blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞.”
61. Hiramatsu et al., “Municipal Solid Waste Flow,” 951.
62. Datta, “New Urban Utopias of Postcolonial India”; Datta and Odendaal, “Smart Cities.”
63. Hiramatsu et al., “Municipal Solid Waste Flow.”
64. Cointreau-Levine, “Private Sector Participation.”
65. Contrary to the proclamations of many Indian officials who promote algorithmic waste
management, Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy, in “The Afterlives of ‘Waste,’ ”
demonstrate that the informal sector has in some circumstances been more efficient in waste
disposal than have municipal and private services.
66. Ngwane, “Xenophobia and Capitalist Urbanisation Processes.”
67. Figueroa, “GIS Technology Improves Delineation”; Laberis, “Property Appraisal System.”
68. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28.
69. Bledsoe and Wright, “Anti-Blackness of Global Capital,” 12.
70. Brenner, “Debating Planetary Urbanization,” 1–5.
71. Vanolo, “Is There Anybody Out There?”
72. Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
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III  Aesthetics
REIMAGINING THE SITES OF CULTURAL MEMORY
 EIGHT · Iyko Day

Nuclear Antipolitics and the

Queer Art of Logistical Failure

We broke the earth and now we fall through time.

because marching on a line we thought was forward
only called up the urgency of the abyss.
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, M ARCHIVE, 2018

Several days after the August 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, my

grandmother Hideko Kono entered the city to search for her husband and
twelve-year-old son. She had evacuated months earlier to another town with
her three younger children and received news of the bombing from her
eldest son, Shigemi, who was fourteen years old and had survived the blast.
By the time she reached Hiroshima, her husband, Michitoshi, had already
died in the hospital, and she was unable to recover the body of her twelve-
year-old son, Hiromi. In the collection of Tanka poetry recounting her
experience of the devastation, my grandmother wrote with finality, “In
Hiroshima / All living things have ended.”1 Seventy-one years later, during
President Obama’s 2016 visit to Hiroshima—the first such visit by a sitting
US president—his speech made no apologies for ending all living things in
Hiroshima. Instead, the meaning of Hiroshima was safely delimited to the
moral quandaries of technological modernity. “In the image of a mushroom
cloud,” he asserted, “we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core
contradiction … [that] our ability to set ourselves apart from nature … also
give[s] us the capacity for unmatched destruction.” Hiroshima’s lesson, he
summarized, was that “technological progress without an equivalent
progress in human institutions can doom us.”2
 This essay sets out to challenge the technological universalisms invoked
by Obama that fold Hiroshima into a morality tale of scientific progress,
one that resonates contemporary narratives of the Anthropocene, an epoch
in which humankind has achieved a disastrous level of geologic agency
through its pursuit of technological modernity. The atomic bombing of
Hiroshima is often periodized as the onset of the Anthropocene, initiating
an irreversible surge in global human activity often characterized as the
Great Acceleration.3 I question the normativity of this periodization as well
as what I view as the scalar politics embedded in the symbolism of the
atomic bomb. In challenging nuclear universalisms, I pursue alternative
forms of representation that do not rely on visual transparency to contest the
ahistorical nature of global memory culture, which Katherine Lawless
describes as the tendency to “translate historical forms of exploitation into
universal narratives of suffering.” In the case of Hiroshima, this means
concealing the “slow violence of nuclear energy regimes by reducing
nuclearity to the moment of explosion.”4 Shifting attention away from the
spectacularity and radical uniqueness of nuclearism, I probe the largely
unseen, banal violence of uranium mining undertaken on Indigenous lands.
From the vantage point of the extracted and irradiated wastelands of nuclear
modernity, I argue that technopolitics structure a postwar transformation of
global power relations. In this case the antipolitical frame of technopolitics
reveals the coordinated expansion and technological intensification of
imperial state power that is secured through its simultaneous
depoliticization. Hence, relations previously constructed around the
colonizer and the colonized have since been reconstituted as depoliticized,
technopolitical relations shaped by nuclear modernity. These technopolitical
arrangements maintain imperial power structures in the aftermath of global
decolonization movements insofar as power relations between the colonizer
and colonized have been transformed and reproduced as relations between
the nuclear and non-nuclear.
Transparent visibility structures what Lisa Yoneyama refers to as a
“nuclear order of knowledge,” one that limits the meaning of the atomic
bomb to periodization: ending World War II and beginning the Cold War.5
The visuality of nuclearism enables what Manu Vimalassery [Karuka],
Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein describe as “colonial
unknowing,” whereby the slow violence of uranium mining is otherwise
effaced by the spectacular violence of Hiroshima.6 A large part of this
unknowing occurs through the largely invisible, colonial sites of uranium
mining. What is obscured from this order of knowledge is how the Belgian
Congo and the Canadian Northwest Territories supplied the majority of the
uranium for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima, as well as
the plutonium that was used in the bomb that exploded over Nagasaki.
High-grade uranium from the Belgian Congo’s Shinkolobwe mine was
shipped to New Jersey and enriched in Canada, along with uranium from
the Great Bear Lake region of the Northwest Territories. Thus, in playing
with the homonyms nonsite/nonsight, I explore the ways in which colonial
capitalism designates Indigenous lands as nonsites of nuclear modernity,
making them available for what Traci Brynne Voyles calls “wastelanding.”
As she elaborates in her important work on uranium mines on Navajo lands,
“the ‘wasteland’ is a racial and spatial signifier that renders an environment
and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable.”7 These are sites that are deemed
unproductive, backward, and peripheral to the technological superiority of
the global North but are nevertheless mined for resources while toxic waste
is dumped or left abandoned.
Another difficulty in reordering our knowledge of Hiroshima is rooted in
postwar geopolitics and the Cold War. Shaped by the US occupation of
Japan and in the shadow of the Cold War, public commemoration of
Hiroshima in Japan and the US has largely served to obscure or evacuate its
historical context and political significance. Japan’s postwar economic
ascendancy has largely deflected US responsibility for the human cost of
the atomic bombs. As Yoneyama has shown, what is obscured by the
Hiroshima museum’s universalizing message of peace are the atrocities
Japan committed in its quest for imperial power in Asia, Japan’s postwar
Cold War alliance with the United States, and a larger context of global
warfare.8 As Benedict Giamo summarizes, “Hiroshima has become a facile
trope for atomic victimization and pacifism.”9 Moreover, global pleas for
nuclear disarmament and “No More Hiroshimas” altogether elide the
existence of Japan’s many nuclear reactors while overlooking the sixty-
seven nuclear tests conducted on the Marshall Islands over a twelve-year
period, the largest of which was equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima-sized
bombs.10
Although the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Park assails
visitors with messages of peace and appeals to a world free of nuclear arms,
these messages are undermined by Japan’s embrace of nuclear power
technology. Under the guise of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace”
campaign in 1953, Japan’s early adoption of nuclear power was compelled
through secret collaborations between US foreign intelligence and
conservative Japanese politicians and the business elite. Before the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown in 2011, Japan had sixty
nuclear reactors, the largest number in Asia, and had plans to generate 50
percent of all power from nuclear energy by 2030.11 Although Japan has
since been forced to scale back, shutting down twenty-seven reactors and
limiting nuclear power to 20–25 percent of total energy by 2030, the truth is
that a nuclear-free future is nowhere to be found on Japan’s time horizon.
The contradictory morality that surrounds nuclear energy and nuclear
weapons is a refraction of a deeply embedded imperial regime of energy
extraction. The antipolitical character of energy technopolitics similarly
animates Japan’s continual refusal to be accountable to the victims of its
fascist imperial regime in Asia, as much as the United States continues to
justify the atomic bombing by claiming it saved lives and ended the war.
In the United States the visual spectacle of a ballooning mushroom cloud
remains the primary symbol of nuclear destruction that both aestheticizes
and anesthetizes many Americans’ engagement with the event, whereas the
larger plutonium bomb that exploded over Nagasaki three days later has
largely been relegated to an afterthought. Correspondingly, much of the
historiography of the atomic bomb has focused on the technological and
political ingenuity of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project.
Gabrielle Hecht refers to this bias as a form of nuclear exceptionalism that
remains focused on First World electricity and military production,
geographically delimited to the Cold War superpowers and Europe. She
calls us to “witness the obsession with the historical minutiae of ‘the
decision to drop the bomb,’ the endless stream of biographies of Manhattan
Project scientists, and the insistence on the uniqueness of moral dilemmas
posed by atomic activities.” Following Hecht’s reflection that “standing in
an African uranium mine makes the contingent character of nuclearity
much more visible,” I attempt to disrupt the self-evident character of
nuclearism by situating Hiroshima in a history of colonial capitalism rooted
in energy extraction, from coal and oil to uranium.12 Finally, by exploring
these questions through an analysis of visual art by the Hiroshima-based
artist Takahiro Iwasaki, I explore the racial and colonial dimensions of the
atomic unconscious that probe the structural rather than the spectacular, and
the violent social relations embedded in and required by energy
infrastructures. Without such a materialist perspective, as Lawless notes,
“we are left with the false radiance of a moral revolution whose advocates
sit on the winning side of nuclear history and whose discourses serve the
interests of postcolonial capital.”13 Iwasaki’s sculptures refract the haunting
“urgency of the abyss” that condition the extractivism required for war and
energy.14
Fueling Primitive Accumulation

In a 2019 interview with Rachel Ablow, Elaine Scarry attempts to account

for the pervasive misconceptions about nuclear weapons and to grapple
with the question “Why is it so hard to think about nuclear war?”15 Most
people are unaware that 93 percent of nuclear weapons are owned by the
United States (6,500) and Russia (6,850), whereas the remaining are owned
by seven other nuclear states: France (300), China (280), UK (215),
Pakistan (140–150), India (130–140), Israel (80), and North Korea (10–20).
None are owned by Iran or Iraq.16 Scarry responds to Ablow’s question with
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s aphorism “You can wake a man who’s asleep, but
you can’t wake a man who’s pretending to be asleep.” The implication here
is that if the population is pretending to be asleep, “we are morally culpable
… complicit with the genocide that’s standing in the wings waiting to
happen.”17 Although it may be true that most people are unconscious of the
scale and distribution of nuclear weapons, the inability to be awakened to
these facts is shaped by the way neoliberal technopolitics intersect with
global energy-extraction regimes.
In order to explore the conditions that shape a nuclear unconscious, this
section delves into the “hidden abode” of uranium production as it exists in
relation to coal and oil energy extraction. By tracking the continuities and
discontinuities between these energy regimes, I propose that we can begin
to answer the question posed to Scarry. What becomes clear in the evolution
of these unrenewable energy sources is the parallel evolution of
increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian modes of political
organization. The shift from coal to oil eroded the power of organized labor,
whereas uranium extraction encouraged the creation of extremely
exploitative labor regimes in a variety of settler colonial, postcolonial, and
neocolonial settings. Much of this antidemocratic shift was attributable to
the materiality of coal and oil and their unique systems of extraction and
distribution. The Janus-faced nature of uranium, branded as either
exceptional (as a source of apocalyptic destruction or energy salvation) or
banal (as an unremarkable source of radiation that is found everywhere,
more common than tin and five hundred times more bountiful than gold),
has made possible the most-authoritarian technics that sustain a nuclear
unconscious.18 Unlike coal, which requires minimal if any processing after
it has been mined, uranium ore must enter a complex system of processing
and refining in order for it to be usable as reactor fuel or as a weapon.
Given the properties of uranium, nuclear energy and weapons production
are most amenable to highly centralized, authoritarian systems of control.
Nuclear power is incongruous with any notion of an energy commons, and
its technopolitical operations involve the suppression of democratic and
egalitarian forms of political organization.
If we shift our focus away from the spectacle of nuclear destruction, our
understanding of the colonial and imperial significance of uranium is best
understood through the historical evolution of coal and oil extraction. To
make this clear, I apply Karl Marx’s theorization of primitive accumulation
to demonstrate how shifts in energy regimes provide an important window
on the racial politics of extractivism, dispossession, and labor exploitation
that animates the colonial entanglements of nuclear modernity. Marx’s
conceptualization is particularly useful for approaching historical transition
as a contingent and often unfinished and indeterminate process. In his
original formulation, Marx presented “so-called primitive accumulation” as
a challenge to nineteenth-century bourgeois economists who saw the
European transition from feudalism to capitalism as the historical
emancipation of serfs from feudal domination—liberated as “free laborers.”
What Marx elaborates is the incredible violence of this transition, which
entailed the mass expulsion of the peasantry from communal lands and the
wholesale destruction of villages. Far from an emancipation, Marx explains,
this “history of expropriation is written in the annals of mankind in letters
of blood and fire.” In other words, direct extra-economic force is a
requirement of capital, from the commercial transformation of land into
agriculture to the genesis of industrial capitalism. These movements
depended on brute force and “bloody legislation.” Outside of Europe, in
Africa, the Americas, and Asia, colonial dispossession and enslavement
were the primary operations of primitive accumulation: “The discovery of
gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of indigenous populations of that continent, the beginnings of the
conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve
for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize
the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings were
the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”19 Violent racial and
gendered conquest, not emancipation, thus characterized the historical
transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Rather than tying the violence of primitive accumulation to historical
moments of transition, I incorporate both Rosa Luxemburg’s and Cedric
Robinson’s important reformulations of Marx’s framework in order to
establish how imperialist racial violence is endemic to capitalism. What
Luxemburg demonstrates is that capitalism’s ongoing survival depends on
the ongoing, violent primitive accumulation of noncapitalist spheres—
regions “outside” the capitalist relation. She explains that “capital cannot
accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organizations. Only the
continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organizations
make the accumulation of capitalism possible.”20 For Robinson, who
challenges the linear developmentalism of Marx’s account of transition,
European feudalism never vanished but rather continues to haunt
capitalism. He writes that “capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution
(negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social
relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and
economic relations.”21 Whereas Luxemburg clarifies the structural violence
required by capital accumulation, Robinson discusses how feudalism
continues to shape capitalism. In other words, conquest in the Americas was
less a “prehistory” of capitalist modernity than its fundamental expression,
a world order that requires the continual conversion of noncapitalist social
relations into market ones through the violence of slavery, imperial
expansion, and genocidal dispossession.
Although Marx’s rendition of primitive accumulation suggests that land
expropriation transformed the peasantry into wage laborers, the story is
different outside Europe. As Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard
clarifies, “The history and experience of dispossession, not
proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the
historical relation between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian [and US]
state.”22 Importantly, it is the colonial capitalist state—not capitalists per se
—that executes the violence of primitive accumulation that “hasten[s], as in
a hothouse, the process of transformation.”23 As William Clare Roberts
explains, because the state is a parasite of capital, it is “the state [that]
executes and enforces expropriations that capital needs but cannot itself
carry out.”24 From this view, the extra-economic violence of primitive
accumulation is simultaneously structure and stage, both a structural
requirement and a temporal precondition for capital to accumulate. These
reconstructions of Marx’s framework clarify how the state exercises extra-
economic violence, defined as an amalgamation of military, administrative,
legal, and debt-trapping tactics that form the preconditions of spatial
accumulation through land expropriation, extraction, and abandonment.
Thus, extra-economic predation, fraud, and violence form the fundamental
economic irrationality of capitalism that takes the state form.
In the most violent apartheid states, such as Israeli Occupied Palestine,
the transparency and normativity of settler colonial state violence recall
Marx’s characterization of colonial capital accumulation as “dripping from
head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt.” Outside of these horrific
sites of state terror, however, primitive accumulation occurs against the
backdrop of liberal democratic governance without the repressive force of
militarized state violence. State violence may not function as a regulative
norm that oversees the process of colonial dispossession, but these
operations have not simply withered away, autopiloted by the “silent
compulsion of economic relations.”25 We are left, then, with a gap that
mediates colonial structures of domination that Coulthard describes as
“neither ‘blood and fire’ nor the ‘silent compulsion’ of capitalist economies
[that] can adequately account for the reproduction of colonial hierarchies.”26
As a partial response, I propose that this gap is enabled by colonial
technopolitics, an antipolitical mode of governmentality that, as James
Ferguson puts it, “expand[s] the exercise of a particular sort of state power
while simultaneously exerting a powerful depoliticizing effect.” The
nuclear industry is perhaps an exemplary form of the “antipolitics
machine”: “depoliticizing everything it touches, everywhere whisking
political realities out of sight, all the while performing almost unnoticed its
own preeminently political operation of expanding state power.”27
The Colonial Power of Logistics

By placing uranium extraction on a continuum that includes coal and oil

extraction—rather than the Manhattan Project—we open a view of how
technopolitics functions as a form of colonial power originally embedded in
logistical supply chains in the twentieth century. This section builds on the
work of Timothy Mitchell, who tracks the way shifting labor relations in the
coal and oil industries affected broader movements toward and away from
democratic politics.
Until the 1800s, the energy required to sustain human life came almost
entirely from renewable resources: solar power was converted into grain for
food, into grasslands to raise animals, into forests to provide firewood, and
into wind and water power for transportation and machinery. Because these
renewable energy sources are widely distributed, human settlement tended
to be dispersed along rivers, near pastures and woods. The emergence of
coal energy in the early 1800s shifted these social relations dramatically,
initiating a brutal stage of primitive accumulation. The switch to coal
enabled the concentration of population in cities because people no longer
needed to live in proximity to pastures and woods for energy. The growth of
cities and the need for mass production created a demand for raw materials
and new markets that were sustained through the brutality of colonialism
and slavery. As Mitchell explains, “In acquiring lands for sugar and cotton
production in the New World, Europeans had relied on the total
dispossession of the local population and the importing of slave or
indentured workforces.”28 In other words, the energy that powered industrial
modernity and progress went hand in hand with the primitive accumulation
of Indigenous land and African bodies.
By the nineteenth century, coal extraction also enabled forms of labor
mobilization and social empowerment. Because of the “dendritic networks”
of coal production, branches of production and distribution were
interconnected with railways, dockworkers, and ships.29 Because coal
miners were literally beyond the view of any above-ground company
overseer, which also gave miners increased autonomy and authority in their
subterranean work, the general strike became a powerful weapon for
organized labor, which could assert leverage over distribution choke points.
Seizing the political power of the strike that could paralyze critical energy
nodes of the nation, coal miners led the demand for higher wages, better
living conditions, safety, and expanded democracy. Between 1881 and
1905, coal miners struck three times more than workers in other industries.
This period also saw an unprecedented level of interracial labor-union
mobilization and communist organizing in the US South. In Robin D. G.
Kelley’s study of the remarkable record of labor activity in Alabama, where
55 percent of the coal miners were Black, the period between 1881 and
1936 saw 603 strikes, more than half of them taking place between 1881
and 1905. Despite employers’ racist tactics, violence, and exploitation of
convict labor, Kelley notes that “during both the 1904 and 1908 coal
miners’ strikes, black workers were in the majority.”30 The concessions of
large industrial firms and oligarchs to allow expanded forms of white
welfare democracy and universal suffrage ultimately weakened interracial
working-class mobilization. And despite the advances made by interracial
coalitions in coal mining, it also remains true that labor mobilization, in and
of itself, could never dignify the sheer misery, danger, and environmental
costs of extractive labor. As Jasper Bernes aptly puts it, “The infrastructure
of the modern world is cast from molten grief.”31
The postwar shift from coal to oil presented a countervailing force to the
democratic gains won by organized labor. Although Marx does not
explicitly delineate the forms of abandonment that are tied to primitive
accumulation, the expansion of US imperial power in the shift to oil
initiated the long and steady decline of coal—and the abandonment of
communities tied to coal mining and coal-fired power plants. Coal-
generated power currently constitutes less than a quarter of US electricity
and continues to fall precipitously. The shift to oil represented a massive
geopolitical reorientation in energy extraction and distribution.
The shift to oil is rooted in postwar labor suppression. In war-devastated
Europe, US planners found a way to defeat the power of coal miners by
converting Europe’s energy system from coal to oil. Europe’s lack of oil
fields necessitated shifting energy production out of Europe entirely to the
Middle East. The United States sent materials to the Persian Gulf to
construct a pipeline from eastern Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean, which
delivered large quantities of oil into Europe. Despite labor strikes in
different oil-producing regions around the world, the material properties of
oil and physical location of its extraction diminished the power of organized
labor. At the point of extraction, oil extraction prompted a different
organization of labor. In contrast to coal, oil was extracted through pressure,
which required a smaller workforce that worked above ground, under the
constant supervision of managers. The distribution of oil diverged from coal
as well. Because coal is heavy, requiring labor-intensive underground
mining, it remained primarily a localized source of energy, with very little
of it crossing oceans. The relative lightness of oil, on the other hand,
enabled its distribution by sea, reducing labor needs and eliminating the
power of organized labor to strike to create choke points in the energy-
distribution system. The movement of oil across oceans also meant that
labor regulations could be circumvented. As Mitchell explains, shipping
companies could escape labor laws because “transoceanic shipping
operated beyond the territorial spaces governed by the labor regulations and
democratic rights won in the widespread coal and railway strikes.”32 Unlike
the dendritic branches of the coal supply chain, oil flowed unpredetermined
in a grid-like pattern in which multiple pathways were available to avoid
choke points. Unlike coal transported by rail, oil tankers could quickly be
rerouted toward alternative sites, away from sites overtaken by striking
laborers or industry nationalization movements. Of course, the cost of this
increased flexibility was environmental devastation caused by oil spills.
If capitalism constructs social relations defined by scarcity, the birth of
the transnational oil corporation functioned as a quintessential long-distance
mechanism for limiting the supply of oil, “transforming post-war carbon
energy abundance into a system of limited supplies.” Beginning in 1943,
the United States began issuing payments to Saudi Arabia to restrict the
production of oil, which the US presented as vital to its national security
interests during World War II. Scarcity was also manufactured by
expanding US demand for massive amounts of energy. This was achieved
by replacing six-cylinder engines with V8s in US automobiles, whereas
white urban flight was enabled by commuter freeways and the construction
of suburbs. As Mitchell recounts of the significance of postwar
automobility, cars “helped engineer something larger—carbon-heavy forms
of middle-class life that, combined with new political arrangements in the
Middle East, would help the oil companies keep oil scarce enough to allow
their profits to thrive.”33
To summarize, the militancy of coal miners was partially based on the
autonomy and expertise that miners were able to exercise underground prior
to mechanization and on their ability to exploit the vulnerability of coal’s
dendritical supply-chain network. In contrast, because workers in oil
extraction remain above ground, power was distributed upward to
managers, engineers, and marketers. The expansion of technical “expertise”
through research and development energy sectors and marketing divisions
further diminished any expertise or autonomy associated with the oil-
extraction worker. Transoceanic shipping dramatically expanded the
networks of distribution and enabled the evasion of national labor and tax
regulations. The ability of oil tankers to make last-minute route changes
also made it possible to avoid regions of labor militancy.
In order to secure these arrangements in the unequal distribution of
power—in terms of both energy and labor—an entire imperial infrastructure
of extra-economic violence was built into this structure. The sale of
enormous quantities of arms from the United States to suppress labor
dissent and populist uprisings was put in place by Washington to secure the
flow of dollars and Arabian oil. Looking back, as Mitchell observes, “if the
emergence of the mass politics in the early twentieth century, out of which
certain sites and episodes of welfare democracy were achieved, should be
understood in relation to coal, the limits of contemporary democratic
politics can be traced in relation to oil.”34 The physical properties and
geopolitics of coal and oil had a major impact on the power of labor and its
democratizing potential. As we see in the shift from coal to oil, the
production of technological expertise generally diminished the power of
workers involved in extractive labor. The control of oil by fewer and fewer
“experts,” the deployment of military violence to secure arrangements for
the production of oil, and the imperial ruse of “national security” coalesced
into a denialist US imperial ideology that consigned the label of
“undemocratic” and backward to non-Western oil-producing nations.
It is on this terrain of accumulative violence and the increasing
disempowerment of labor that we can approach uranium as source of both
military and electrical power. Unlike coal, which requires minimal if any
processing once it is extracted, oil and uranium require significant
processing, again distributing labor power upward into the hands of
technical experts: managers, engineers, and scientists. In order for uranium
to be used as a weapon or for fuel, its extracted form must undergo multiple
stages of processing. Uranium is first mined as ore, processed into
yellowcake, and then converted into uranium hexafluoride. From this point,
if you need to construct a bomb, uranium hexafluoride is enriched to 90
percent; alternatively, if you need to produce fuel, uranium hexafluoride is
enriched to 3.5 percent. Prior to enrichment, each stage of preparation
produces tailings, the low-grade uranium waste that is cast off.
If the social relations of oil extraction and distribution disempowered
labor and manufactured scarcity to empower and enrich the transnational
corporate class, the social relations of uranium extraction distribute power
upward in even more unscrupulous ways. Although fuel and energy supply
chains have long been central to military campaigns and national security,
the dual purpose of uranium heightened the level of authoritarian,
technocratic control over its extraction and distribution. Whereas state-
supported oil corporations negotiated scarcity through monopolistic and
cartel arrangements such as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC), uranium was placed under US monopsony power. In the
immediate aftermath of World War II, US efforts to preserve its status as the
only nuclear superpower that could subdue the spread of communism
involved monopolizing the supply of uranium through the formation of a
uranium monopsony. In 1946 Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act,
which gave the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) the power to act as the
sole buyer and regulator of uranium ore, which effectively controlled the
production and pricing of uranium. As Stephanie Malin explains,
“Monopsonies create power dynamics that mirror those of monopolies …
[whereby] the single purchaser of a commodity controls the terms of trade
and largely shapes markets for the commodity, dictating prices for goods
and often determining how they will be used or redistributed.”35 Such were
the autocratic conditions for the postwar roller coaster of accumulation and
abandonment that has ravaged uranium-extraction sites and poisoned
mining communities in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, sacrifice zones
exploited to benefit the development of military and energy technology.
Uranium is the ideal motif for Western imperial power because of its
interweaving of economic and military domains of power. As part of the
production of Cold War technocratic expertise, the race for uranium was
veiled in secrecy and highly classified state operations. Secrecy and
monopolistic and monopsonistic logistical controls over the supply chain
are at the root of technopolitical authoritarianism, particularly in shaping
and shifting the ideology of nuclearity. As a renewed mode of primitive
accumulation after Hiroshima, Western states exploited their “highly
classified” technopolitical authority to quell socialism and movements for
decolonization, such that “the Atom bomb [could act] as a substitute for
colonial power.”36 In the United States the AEC’s monopsonistic control over
the industry predictably led to the overproduction of uranium, which
resulted in ruinous devaluation. Millworkers, prospectors, and independent
miners described the commission as a “dictatorship in a democracy.” As
communities dependent on the uranium boom were completely abandoned,
left to contend with the industry’s long-term effects of toxic contamination
and illness, the United States shifted to making large purchases of uranium
from Canada and overseas.37
Nuclear Neoliberation

Beyond the corruption of uranium’s commodification within the United

States’ imperial war-finance nexus discussed above, the nuclearity of
uranium was also subject to highly ideological technopolitical
manipulation. The United States could not monopolize the supply of
uranium given that lower grades of uranium were widely available, so
uranium’s secret power diminished—along with its nuclearity. Beginning in
the 1960s, by shifting emphasis toward the financial axis of the war-finance
nexus, uranium was born again as an ordinary commodity that wasn’t
“nuclear” until it had undergone substantial processing. No longer subject
to monopsonistic control, uranium was neoliberated, subject to the invisible
hand of the market. The “Atoms for Peace” campaign rebranded uranium as
a source of peaceful energy that would spur economic development in Third
World nations. In 1968 the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons invoked human-rights language to declare that the peaceful use of
nuclear power was a fundamental right that was essential to developing
areas of the world. Yet the “free market” was an imperial ruse for the
politics that governed uranium’s market. As Hecht outlines, “Invoking the
‘free market’ validated a political geography in which imperial powers
could continue to dominate former colonies after independence.”38 Here
monopsony-driven pollution and the free-market protection emerge as two
sides of the same imperial coin for maintaining power over natural
resources. In this light, the depoliticization of uranium through so-called
market liberalization was chiefly an antipolitical operation: depoliticizing
uranium in order to maintain and expand Western imperial control over it.
Despite centuries of documented hazards associated with uranium
extraction, part of the antipolitical technical authority of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was to completely extricate uranium ore as a
nuclear source, exempting extraction zones from any regulatory protections,
inspections, or safeguards. Uranium was not deemed “nuclear” unless it had
already undergone significant conversion and processing. Excluding
uranium mines and the workers, the IAEA classified a “principal nuclear
facility” as a “reactor, a plant for processing nuclear material irradiated in a
reactor, a plant for processing nuclear material irradiated in a reactor, a
plant for separating the isotopes of a nuclear material, a plant for processing
or fabricating nuclear material.” As a result, as Hecht explains, “By the
1970s … the nuclearity of uranium ore and yellowcake had plummeted.”39
What this classificatory operation accomplishes is to racially and colonially
segregate the technologically modern nuclear industry on one hand and a
primitive mining industry on the other. Thus, the harm of uranium mining
was diminished to the harms of mining in general, not the radioactive harms
associated with the nuclear industry. Buttressed by the postwar ideology of
peaceful economic development and human rights, Western imperial
authorities expanded their command of uranium-extraction sites while
rendering workers disposable, beyond the scope of “nuclear protection.”
The coloniality of nuclear discourse comes clear, as Hecht discusses, in the
fact that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was premised on the discovery that
Iraq had obtained “yellowcake from Niger” and was therefore “nuclear.”
Yet neither Niger nor Gabon nor Namibia was ever reported as “being
nuclear,” even though these nations accounted for more than one-fifth of the
uranium that fueled power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan
that year.40 Nevertheless, “yellowcake from Niger” was automatically
linked to weapons of mass destruction, as was the central justification for
the war.
The technopolitical production of “nuclear” modernity effectively erased
racialized, Indigenous labor through the legitimation of an imperial scale.
Here scale emerges not as an objective or neutral orientation but as a deeply
politicized mode of analysis and praxis. Connecting uranium production to
the previous discussion of coal and oil extraction, then, we observed how
the latter industries saw a progressive disempowerment of labor. In the case
of uranium mining, however, extractive labor not only is disempowered but
disappears altogether from the technopolitical scale of nuclear modernity—
even as that labor is subject to the exploitative forces of imperial
governance from which it is erased and obscured. This means, for instance,
in the former French colony of Gabon, the mines from which uranium is
extracted to fuel France are not subject to European regulatory or safety
standards. Yet, in a neocolonial sleight of hand, when Gabon’s uranium
crosses borders to French processing plants, that uranium becomes
ultramodern and thus “nuclear,” and only then subject to international
regulation. As Hecht observes, “When Gabon’s uranium became nuclear
fuel, it switched nationalities, enabling France to assert national energy
independence through nuclear power.”41 Here France’s continued
“postcolonial” control over Gabon’s resources reproduces the colonial
relation that both exploits and erases the Indigenous African labor that
motors the metropole.
Disappearing Scales

The practice of scalar segregation, what Johannes Fabian would refer to

as the spatial “denial of coevalness,”42 is an imperial operation that
maintains the continued wastelanding of racialized and Indigenous lands—
lands that are taken off the map of nuclear modernity and its regulatory
protections yet are subject to market laws. As a testament to the erasure of
one of the world’s richest sources of uranium, the Shinkolobwe mine in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tom Zoellner notes that “Shinkolobwe
is now considered an official nonplace.”43 Shinkolobwe’s disappearance is a
legacy of Western imperial control over the region, one that began under the
brutal regime of King Leopold II of Belgium, who expropriated the Congo
as his own private estate from 1885 to 1908. Leopold acquired the “Congo
Free State,” a nation seventy-five times larger than Belgium itself, during
the European scramble for Africa under a humanitarian ruse of ending the
Arab-controlled slave trade. Once in power, Leopold turned the country into
a massive forced-labor camp occupied by his security corps, the ruthless
Force Publique, which severed hands, kidnapped, murdered, and raped the
Congolese to coerce high yields of rubber extraction. Historian Adam
Hochschild estimates that ten million Congolese were killed under
Leopold’s “humanitarian” regime.44 Never once setting foot in the Congo,
Leopold amassed a billion-dollar personal fortune from the thousands of
tons of rubber sap tapped by forced Indigenous labor, which was then
exported to feed the many industries requiring rubber, including cars,
bicycles, and telephone wires. Upon his death in 1909, the government of
Belgium took over, leaving mostly intact the king’s regime of forced labor
administered by the Force Publique, which now operated on behalf of
monopoly companies, the largest of which was the Union Minière de Haut
Katanga. In the region of Katanga, large quantities of bismuth, cobalt, tin,
zinc, and eventually uranium were extracted by local Congolese workers
under a system of debt slavery. When sought-after radium was discovered
in a uranium-rich hill in Katanga in 1915, the mining company forced
“more than a thousand African laborers to dig into what would turn out to
be the purest bubble of uranium ore ever found on earth.”45 With the
discovery of nuclear fission in 1938, uranium was transformed from a
worthless waste product to a prized commodity. When the Nazis invaded
Belgium, the Union Minière moved its headquarters to New York and
transferred 1,250 tons of uranium to Staten Island, where it would sit in
obscurity for more than two years before being sold to the Manhattan
Project. During the war, under a shroud of secrecy to evade Axis powers,
Congolese workers labored around the clock to send hundreds of tons of
uranium to the US every month. In many ways, it was the exploited
Congolese workers who were directly if inadvertently responsible for
installing the United States as the new global hegemon. Isaiah Mobilo, chair
of the Congolese Civil Society of South Africa, aptly observes that in
assisting the United States in the race to build an atomic bomb,
“Shinkolobwe decided who would be the next leader of the world.”46
The colonial counterpart to Shinkolobwe was the Eldorado mine in
Canada’s Northwest Territories, on the shores of the Great Bear Lake in the
appropriately named Port Radium. Between Shinkolobwe’s and Eldorado’s
2,500 and 1,000 tons of excavated uranium, respectively, these mines
produced the majority of uranium used in the burgeoning nuclear industrial
complex of the United States. In Port Radium, Sahtu Dene “coolies”
transported sacks of radium and ore from the mine onto barges that would
eventually be refined in Ontario for use in the Manhattan Project. Despite
government knowledge of the harmful effects of radiation exposure,
workers labored unprotected while radioactive waste contaminated their
lake, and the mine was left unremediated for decades. They worked without
knowledge of their participation in the Manhattan Project. In the midst of
the Canadian government’s continual denial of responsibility for the
postwar cancer epidemic, the Sahtu Dene sent a delegation to Hiroshima to
apologize to ethnic Korean survivors of the atomic bombing. As Indigenous
peoples who were also devastated by their exposure to nuclear radiation and
environmental contamination, their trip to Hiroshima exposed the
corresponding racist logic of imperial violence that undergirded the lethal
exploitation of Sahtu Dene laborers and the annihilation of nonwhite
peoples in Japan. Their presence in Japan violated the impersonal political
abstraction intended by what filmmaker Raoul Peck describes as “killing at
a distance.”47 President Harry S. Truman’s comment two days after the
bombing of Nagasaki diverted responsibility on the grounds of the
inhumanity of the racial enemy: “When dealing with a beast, treat it like a
beast. It’s totally unfortunate, but it’s still the truth. Indeed, there is no more
to say.”48 In stark contrast to the apology offered by the Sahtu Dene to
victims of the atomic bombing, the long-standing imperial logic of the
United States justified accumulation by nuclear atrocity.
After the war, pollutable Indigenous land in the Congo and the
Northwest Territories became “protectable” and thus subject to new rounds
of imperial governance, from the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice
Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the newly independent
Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the massive expansion of state
control over the Northwest Territories in Canada to pave the way for
nonrenewable resource development.49 The cancers that devastated
communities in the Northwest Territories and in Katanga were actively
disconnected from radiation exposure from mining and transport labor.
Cancer, after all, is part of the epidemiological infrastructure of modernity:
it is a “First World” disease. Of cancer-ridden African mining communities,
Hecht observes that “many researchers have assumed that Africans simply
don’t live long enough to contract most types of cancer.”50 In 2005 the
Canadian Deline Uranium Table’s report—which contracted parts of its
study to nuclear industry scientists—refuted any connection between spikes
in cancer rates and heightened exposure to radiation when the Port Radium
mine was open from 1942 to 1960. Instead, the report blamed the victims
by attributing elevated cancer rates to the racially pathologized behaviors of
smoking and drinking. The memory of past tragedy was sanitized and
replaced with a future of economic prosperity through uranium mining.
Then, after having opposed all future uranium mining until past issues
related to the Port Radium mine were resolved, in 2008 the Dene-controlled
Deline Land Corporation signed an amended agreement with the mining
corporation Alberta Star granting it full authorization to permit the
company’s iron, oxide, copper, gold, and uranium exploration and drilling
activities. Port Radium’s rhetorical rebirth out of the wasteland of tragedy
into a site of resource development demonstrates, as Yoneyama observes,
the “uneven burden that the nuclear complex has placed on racialized and
indigenous communities.”51 These technopolitical modes of social coercion
serve to further dispossess Indigenous communities under the colonial
subterfuge of modernization. This adds meaning to the way that colonial
dispossession is interlinked with the erasure and disposability of exploited
Indigenous labor, amplifying the significance of Kelley’s point that “they
wanted the land and the labor, just not the people.”52
The Queer Art of Logistical Failure

The question posed to Elaine Scarry about why it is so hard to think about
nuclear war raises issues of perception and representation. One of the ideas
I’ve attempted to present in this chapter is that the very question of the
“nuclear” is always/already bound up in the imperial production of energy
infrastructures, technologies, and geographies that rely on the disposal and
disavowal of exploited Indigenous labor in the nonsites of energy
extraction. The ongoing primitive accumulation of Indigenous lands in the
Northwest Territories and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is placed
beyond “nuclear” representation. Insofar as nuclear power secures modern
imperial power, it bears some resemblance to capital itself, as that which
“organizes history but is unrepresentable within it.”53 When uranium is
situated alongside the extraction of coal and oil, we see the progressive
disempowerment and disappearance of labor and the rise of authoritarian
social relations to manage the supply and distribution of energy resources.
These operations require the coordinated imperial maintenance of resource-
rich former colonies, settler colonies, and neo-colonies. What we see is that
the energy supply chain itself has become so deeply entangled in Western
imperial militarism that uranium is far from exceptional—it is merely the
most recent source of energy to shape contemporary geopolitics and the
global supply chain. As Deborah Cowen explains, supply-chain
management in the post–World War II era is the direct legacy of military
logistics and strategy. In other words, corporate and military logistics
became increasingly enmeshed in the transition to oil and the rise of
petroleum warfare. Cowen underscores that “logistics is no simple story of
securitization and distribution, it is an industry and assemblage that is at
once bio-, necro-, and antipolitical.… The banal and technocratic
management of the movement of stuff through space has become a driving
force of war and trade.”54 In many ways, circulation, as distinct from
production and consumption, has taken on particular importance in the
totality of capital, even as it remains a sphere whose representation is as
banal as a shipping container—a far cry from the mysteries of the hidden
abode of production or the fetishism of commodities. In this light the
shifting nuclear status of uranium emerges as an appropriate symbol for the
seemingly commonplace but in fact highly politicized circulatory
operations of the global energy supply chain.
Returning again to the question of why it is so hard to think of nuclear
war, this concluding section delves into a consideration of the scalar
representation of energy infrastructures, particularly the role that the
concept of the Anthropocene has played in visualizing global energy
infrastructures at grand, panoramic scales: massive landfills, marble
quarries, tailings ponds, and coal mines. A visual archive that exemplifies
this scale is renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s
Anthropocene project, which includes a series of photographs and film
collaboration with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas De Pencier. However,
rather than providing a cognitive mapping of society’s relation to capitalist
totality, his large-scale topographic photography may instead reflect what
Cowen describes as the “bio-, necro-, and antipolitical” operations of
logistics itself. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle connect these scalar
aesthetic features to the “art of logistics,” clearing a path to trace capitalist
linkages between photographs of military and environmental ruin. Drawing
on the military-inspired framework for the optimal circulation of goods, the
visual culture of logistics similarly emphasizes symmetry, minimalism,
smoothness, and flow. These are ultimately aesthetic modes of obfuscation
and disarticulation, which Toscano and Kinkle describe as “chains of
dissociation.”55 Drawing on Allan Sekula’s critique of the sale of military
aerial photography on the art market as the “unqualified beautification of
warfare” in postwar cultures,56 logistical aesthetics enables a depoliticized,
detached gaze that “appears symptomatic of a certain affinity between
‘cold’ modernism and military antihumanism.”57 Specifically, what aerial
images of war landscapes and energy wastelands have in common is that
their “paradoxically photogenic character stems in many ways from its
inadvertent mimesis of a modernist, minimalist geometry whose rules of
representation are already deeply incorporated into the grammar of artistic
form.”58 The aesthetic effect of collapsing documentary impact into
modernist visual modalities is that, as Sekula observes, “a landscape
possessed of humanly made features can be translated into the realm of a
nonreferential abstract geometry.”59 Hence, expansive panoramic views of
ecological ruin, often without people, convey an aesthetic grandeur that
effectively dehumanizes the human-altered landscape. This is the effect of
what Toscano and Kinkle refer to as a “bad abstraction” that ensues from
the “depersonalizing symmetry and scale over exploitation, friction, or
indeed waste and consumption of energy, human and machinic.”60 Thus, the
human-altered logistical landscape is curiously absent of any human trace,
which corresponds to the way the anthropogenic discourse relies on an
abstract, racially unmarked “humanity” as the primary driver of ecological
disaster. In this sense, visions of the Anthropocene universalize humanity
through its visual absence.
Large-scale topographic photography of ecological ruin may then
reinforce the idea that geological rather than historical time is what really
matters, because it envisions capital as a spatialized form devoid of human
labor. Toscano observes that in human-absented depictions of capitalist
environmental ruin, there is a haunting sense that dead or past labor—not
living labor—is the central subject of contemporary capitalism: “The
quantitative past represents past labor precisely by erasing its very traces.
And yet this drive to extinction is also behind the overpowering of our
praxis and our imaginations by dead labor—or capital spatialized and
experienced as the absence of labor, the absence of ‘us.’ ” The
marginalization and forgetting of living labor resonate strongly with the
disempowerment, disposability, and erasure of Indigenous extractive labor,
giving new significance to the omnipresence of “dead labor” in the visual
culture of human-absented, human-altered landscapes. Here Toscano
emphasizes the immense quantity of past labor that “dominates the present”
and how the invisible circuits of capital are “spatialized as the absence of
labor.”61 However, such scalar representations of space make visible the
quantities of past dead labor but not as past, not as history. In other words,
we see quantities of the past congealed in fixed capital but in a manner that
“forgets the qualitative past, the existential nature of the work, its origins
and contexts, ‘the traces of labour on the product,’ in favor of the
quantitative present.”62 Toscano notes that “the disappearance of the past is
also the form of its massive unconscious presence.”63 Like the
aestheticization of war photography, our abiding attraction to human-
altered, human-absented, logistical landscapes reflects a “closure of the
space of politics and experience by capital, nation, and the state”64 and a
forgetting of history and of the qualitative past. A world in which the ratio
of dead labor dramatically overwhelms living labor is expressed as the
absence of humanity in the wastelands of capitalist circulation. Contrary to
an aesthetics of cognitive mapping, logistical landscapes perform an
unmapping of our relation to social totality.
By highlighting the radioactive nonsites of nuclear modernity, my
objective has been to suggest that nuclear war and environmental
devastation are entangled in the evolution of energy extraction, shaped by
the technopolitical operations of primitive accumulation. In addition, the
practice of imperial scale enables the material disarticulation and erasure of
human labor that mirrors the “chains of dissociation” embedded in the
military art of logistics. As a counterpoint to the “ruin porn” offered by
cultural practitioners of the Anthropocene, the miniature sculptures and
dioramas by Hiroshima-based artist Takahiro Iwasaki present alternative
insights on energy infrastructures in the shadow of nuclear modernity. In his
2011 Out of Disorder (Cosmo World) series, in the collection of the
Yokohama Museum of Art, miniature landscapes are constructed entirely
out of detritus: hair, towels, toothbrushes, fibers and threads from old
clothing. The miniature rendering of transmission towers, power plants, and
industrial cranes in fiber and hair speaks to the heightened instability and
fragility of Japan’s energy infrastructure in the aftermath of Fukushima,
presented as dioramas that serve as contact zones of nuclear past and
present. Through his reuse of refuse that draws in themes of intimate,
gendered histories and what Jack Halberstam refers to as the “queer art of
failure,”65 Iwasaki’s artwork recasts sites of ecological abandonment as rich
sites of accumulated bodily forgetting. His artwork implies that the
recognition of the phantom-like objectivity of capital begins with the
memory of a qualitative past. This offers an aesthetic that is distinct from
the visual culture of the Anthropocene, where representations of ecological
disaster are oriented toward an absent future rather than a human past.
 The small scale of Iwasaki’s sculptures requires that the viewer engage
with multiple views, enabling what he calls a bird’s-eye and a frog’s-eye
view of each landscape. As such, the effect is not a distanced panorama but
rather a close encounter with the lightness and intricacy of the sculptures
themselves, once again reinforcing the qualitative past of artistic craft
involved in making the sculptures. The melancholic tone evoked by the
sculptures is related to the reuse of materials, such as remnants of kimono,
that have been cast off—a subtle reminder of their failure to function as the
use values for which they were originally intended. However, the failure
highlighted in their reuse is also what illuminates what is otherwise
imperceptible in the commodity form. In a passage from Capital, Marx
elaborates on how the only way we can perceive the past labor congealed in
our products is when they fail or alert us to their imperfections: “It is by
their imperfections that the means of production in any process brings to
our attention their character of being the products of past labour. A knife
which fails to cut, a piece of thread that keeps snapping, forcibly remind us
of Mr. A, the cutter, or Mr. B, the spinner.”66 Failure therefore counteracts the
chains of logistical dissociation, here highlighting the material connections
that constitute the qualitative human past embedded in our products and
environment. This resurrection of the qualitative past overrides the spatial
forms that emphasize the quantitative present. Moreover, in the use of
discarded materials, the sculptures’ emphasis on the failure to be useful (as
originally intended) represents a queer human temporality that resists
absorption into the abstract temporality of the commodity form. Thus,
Iwasaki’s sculptures offer a representation of social totality that harnesses
the discarded past to imagine a repurposed future. Found materials are
intricately and meticulously reanimated as energy landscapes and open up a
view of dead labor’s social past.
FIGURE 8.1.   Takahiro Iwasaki. Out of Disorder (Cosmo World). 2011. Hair, dust. Collection of
Yokohama Museum of Art. ©Takahiro Iwasaki. Courtesy of ANOMALY.

Iwasaki’s investigations into energy and waste are linked to Hiroshima’s

atomic past. In particular, his incorporation of dust and hair references his
hometown of Hiroshima, a city reborn “out of the ashes” of the atomic
bomb. Hair also takes on deathly symbolism because hair loss was one of
the effects of exposure to nuclear radiation. One of the repeated motifs that
occupy Iwasaki’s small-scale landscapes is the Ferris wheel (see figure 8.1),
which is constructed out of black hair. Iwasaki was first inspired to build a
miniature Ferris wheel in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power
plant disaster. When the tsunami landed, Iwasaki was in Yokohama as the
electrical outage turned everything dark. He was walking past an
amusement park and was stirred by the immobilized Ferris wheel. A
symbol of postwar determination of industrial development, the amusement
park and its sudden de-animation in this moment became an index of
decadent ruin. The Ferris wheel’s construction out of hair reconceptualized
the nuclear meltdown as the second coming of Hiroshima, its spiderweb
features evoking tensile infrastructures of death. In Iwasaki’s sculpture, its
microscopic scale holds within it a larger universe of disordered social
relations. Yet in the resurrection and reanimation of bodily detritus, his
sculpture also initiates a reappropriation of forgotten time against the
technopolitics of imperial accumulation.
NOTES

1. Kono, “Genbaku no Uta.”

2. Obama, “Text of President Obama’s Speech.”
3. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene.
4. Lawless, “Mapping the Atomic Unconscious,” 41.
5. Yoneyama, “Hiroshima Re/Traces.”
6. Vimalassery, Pegues, and Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing.”
7. Voyles, Wastelanding.
8. Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces.
9. Giamo, “Myth of the Vanquished.”
10. Nixon, Slow Violence.
11. World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Japan.”
12. Hecht, Being Nuclear, 13.
13. Lawless, “Mapping the Atomic Unconscious,” 49.
14. Gumbs, M Archive, 140.
15. Ablow, “Interview with Elaine Scarry,” 112.
16. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2021.
17. Ablow, “Interview with Elaine Scarry,” 113.
18. Zoellner, Uranium, 49.
19. Marx, Capital, 875, 896, 915.
20. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, 416.
21. Robinson, Black Marxism, 10 (emphasis added).
22. Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, 13.
23. Marx, Capital, 916.
24. Roberts, “What Was Primitive Accumulation?,” 544.
25. Marx, Capital, 926, 899.
26. Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, 15.
27. Ferguson, Anti-politics Machine, 21, xv.
28. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 17.
29. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 38.
30. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 5.
31. Bernes, “Between the Devil and the Green.”
32. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 38.
33. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 38.
34. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 254.
35. Malin, Price of Nuclear Power, 35.
36. Hecht, Being Nuclear, 23.
37. Malin, Price of Nuclear Power, 40, 41.
38. Hecht, Being Nuclear, 33, 34.
39. Hecht, Being Nuclear, 33.
40. Hecht, Being Nuclear, 13.
41. Hecht, “Interscalar,” 131.
42. Fabian, Time and the Other.
43. Zoellner, Uranium, 2.
44. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost.
45. Zoellner, Uranium, 5.
46. Quoted in Swain, “Forgotten Mine.”
47. Peck, Exterminate All the Brutes.
48. Truman, “Harry S. Truman’s Decision.”
49. Coulthard, “From Wards of the State?,” 65–66.
50. Hecht, Being Nuclear, 42.
51. Yoneyama, “Hiroshima Re/Traces.”
52. Kelley, “Rest of Us,” 269.
53. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 3.
54. Cowen, Deadly Life of Logistics, 4.
55. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 190.
56. Quoted in Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 205.
57. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 209.
58. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 204.
59. Quoted in Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 205 (emphasis mine).
60. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 127.
61. Toscano, “World,” 114, 116, 113.
62. Jameson, quoted in Toscano, “World,” 113.
63. Toscano, “World,” 116.
64. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 232.
65. Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure.
66. Marx, Capital, 289.
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Native Studies, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, 56–98. Durham, NC:
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Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.
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Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade.
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DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University
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Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York:
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Ferguson, James. The Anti-politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
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Museum.” American Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2003): 703–28.
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Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge:
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Hecht, Gabrielle. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste,
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Colonial Africa. Boston: Mariner, 1999.
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Kono and Ariel Sulllivan. Nagano, Japan: Mokuseisha, forthcoming.
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 NINE · Laura Pulido

Erasing Empire

: Remembering the Mexican-American War in

Los Angeles

To the brave men and women [who] with trust in God faced privation and death in
extending the frontiers of our country to include this land of promise.
INSCRIPTION, FORT MOORE PIONEER MEMORIAL, 1957

The title of a recent book, How to Hide an Empire, invites us to explore the
historical geography of the United States, its national identity, and how we
map the past.1 Besides framing the United States as an empire, the title
implies ongoing attempts to obscure such processes. Scholarly efforts to
rethink the past and present were energized in 2020 when activists began
removing statues honoring colonizers and white supremacists en masse.2
The topplings sparked a vibrant public discussion: How do we understand
the United States as a country that began as a business venture and replaced
Indigenous peoples by any means necessary? What does it mean that the
United States conquered hundreds of nations but disavows an imperialist
identity? What is the significance of centuries of racial slavery and our
refusal to grapple with its ballast? In this moment, cultural memory and the
history of racial capitalism merged.
This essay explores the cultural memory associated with the Mexican-
American War as one chapter in the history of racial capitalism.
Imperialism is fundamental to US capitalism and history but is rarely
acknowledged. The United States has largely eschewed an imperialist
identity in order to distinguish itself from European modes of empire.
Instead, it has crafted an identity as a nation of immigrants in order to avoid
having to contend with a past steeped in slavery, conquest, and racial
violence. When imperialism is acknowledged, it is limited to late
nineteenth-century conquests “abroad” and framed as benevolent and
anomalous. This strategy overlooks US imperialism toward Native nations
and Mexico while sanitizing the past.3
Imperialism and settler colonization were the means by which the United
States acquired its territory and were crucial to the development of
capitalism.4 These were racialized processes that were enabled and justified
by white supremacy. I define white supremacy as a set of attitudes, values,
and practices emanating from the belief that white people and Europe are
superior to people of color and non-European places.5 Although white
supremacy includes violence and hatred, far more pervasive is the
insistence that whites are of greater value than nonwhites. Lisa Marie
Cacho reminds us that value is a relational category: value is produced only
in relation to something else.6 Thus, the devaluation of one group is
predicated on the overvaluation of another. Regardless of words and
sentiments, the actions of Europeans, including Spanish, French, and
English colonizers, have consistently reflected the belief that white lives are
of greater value than those deemed nonwhite (itself a shifting category).
Because they are considered to be of greater value, whites’ needs and
desires have consistently taken priority over those deemed “nonwhite.”
Imperialism has been overlooked in analyses of contemporary
capitalism, as the editors explain in this book’s introduction. Aside from
such traditions as world systems theory, histories of capitalism tend to
privilege countries, metropoles, and free labor while processes in the
periphery receive less attention. Nonetheless, imperialism enabled the
development of capitalism by providing critical elements, including semi-
proletarianized labor, crops, resources, and land.7 Although earlier scholars,
such as Frantz Fanon, understood imperialism as racialized, the racial
capitalism framing allows more robust analyses. Central to this is Brenna
Bhandar’s work on racial property regimes. Bhandar argues that
colonialism and modernity were predicated on twin processes: the
production of racial subjects and private property ownership. Key to this
development was the “ideology of improvement,” which legitimated
particular forms of property and ownership—those stemming from English
common law—while delegitimating others. In short, racial ideology
justified the taking of land that did not adhere to sanctioned forms and
giving it to settlers who would “improve” it. The ideology of improvement
embodies one of the driving logics of settler colonization and imperialism:
“It is the systematic devaluation or pathologization of non-Anglo-European
land and property relations that form the driving rationale for territorial
aggression and cycles of accumulation fueled by expansive and ongoing
forms of dispossession.”8
Given its history as a settler empire, the United States, like all nations,
forged a national identity and narrative that justify its actions. Thus, we
celebrate pioneers, pilgrims, and plantations while “forgetting” the social
relations that initially produced them. Forgetting, of course, is a form of
remembering, one that is central to hiding an empire.9 In this essay I
examine how historical sites commemorating the Mexican-American War
(1846–1848) in Los Angeles County erase empire while affirming US
innocence and benevolence.
The Mexican-American War and Imperialism

In the United States, outside of Chicana/o/x studies, the Mexican-American

War is a “forgotten war.”10 Propelled by manifest destiny in the 1840s, the
United States offered to purchase land from Mexico. Mexico refused.
Unable to accept “no,” President Polk sent troops into disputed territory,
knowing it would provoke a response from Mexico. The United States
subsequently invaded Mexico, won every major battle, and acquired over
half a million square miles. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in
1848, and the United States paid Mexico $15 million to compensate it for
the loss of half its territory.
The war was divisive in the United States precisely because it was
imperialist and racist.11 More than fifty thousand men volunteered, greatly
outnumbering regular militia. Support in the South was strong because the
planter class hoped to expand slavery, but there was opposition in the
Northeast. Many public intellectuals considered it a racist, imperialist
landgrab and believed that its justification was manufactured. Indeed,
Henry David Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience in response to the war.
Even some proponents of manifest destiny opposed it because of the
“undesirable” character of Mexicans: “Annexation of the country to the
United States would be a calamity. Five million ignorant and indolent half-
civilized Indians, with 1,500,000 free negroes and mulattoes …”12 Despite
such sentiments, presidents Polk and Tyler understood that the majority of
the United States supported western expansion, so they pursued the war.
As an imperialist act, the war contributed to capitalist development in
several ways, including Pacific access, territorial expansion, and solidifying
the white nation. A major US goal was continental reach, specifically
coastal access, which figured prominently in the nation’s imagined racial
geography. In 1862 Wisconsin senator James Rood Doolittle described one
vision: “Emancipation with colonization [back to Africa], homesteads for
white men in the territories of the temperate zone, homesteads for colored
men in the tropics, with a railroad to the Pacific to bind together our eastern
and western empire.”13
 Coastal control allowed the United States to ward off encroaching
European powers and enabled trade by eliminating the need to sail around
las Américas. Control of the Pacific was essential to the development of
California (at this writing, the fifth-largest economy in the world), global
trade, and military operations. Currently, almost 60 percent of US global
trade flows through the twin ports of Los Angeles.14 Indeed, it is difficult to
imagine the contemporary United States without the Pacific Coast.
A second and closely related goal was the land itself, specifically
525,000 square miles of Mexican territory. Prior to the war, Mexico’s
border reached as far north as Oregon and as far west as Colorado. The land
offered mineral wealth, the possibility of a transcontinental railroad, and
homes for settlers. It is difficult to overstate the significance of the railroad
to capitalist development: Not only did it transport goods across the
country, but it facilitated global trade.
More pressing than the railroad, however, was land for white settlers.
The push for westward expansion came from both Washington, DC, and
white settlers themselves, though not always in unison. White settlers not
only wanted land but, as they pushed the boundaries of the frontier, also
sought to be reincorporated into the white US nation. This dynamic created
an oscillation between settlers acting autonomously and state-sanctioned
expansion.15 Texas epitomizes this dynamic.
Although settler colonization is a demographic project, the process of
western settlement intersects with racial capitalism in various ways. For
example, offering millions of acres to settlers precluded the United States
from having to address mounting class and regional tensions.16 Or consider
slavery: geographic expansion was vital to the slave economy, and many
southerners considered western expansion essential. Indeed, a major
impetus for the Texas Revolution (1836) was Texans’ desire for slavery,
which Mexico had outlawed (1829).17
A third contribution of the war to racial capitalism was the consolidation
of the Anglo-Saxon race.18 Reginald Horsman argues that prior to the war,
whites were more fragmented in the racial hierarchy. The war was pivotal in
uniting whites as Anglo-Saxons in opposition to Mexicans, Indigenous
peoples, and African Americans. Because the United States was a
consciously white nation until World War II,19 conquering nonwhite peoples
posed a problem: how do such peoples fit into a white nation?
Although the United States wanted Mexican territory, it did not want its
people. Indeed, the war racialized Mexicans and, by extension, other
Latina/o/x peoples. The popular press supported the war, and magazines
and newspapers portrayed Mexicans as racial mongrels, greasers, dirty, and
morally unfit for independence.20 Such attitudes helped justify conquest
under the guise of “uplifting” Mexico. Consequently, the United States
debated what portion(s) of Mexico to take based on its population. One
option was a complete takeover, but this was rejected because of Mexicans’
“undesirability.” In the end, the United States took half of Mexico’s
territory but only 1 percent of its population.
The treaty and annexation altered the racial formation of the United
States in profound ways.21 Concerned for its people in the newly conquered
territory, Mexico negotiated various protections, including land, religious,
and citizenship rights, as well as legal whiteness. Knowing the United
States was a white supremacist country, Mexico sought to safeguard ethnic
Mexicans by having them declared legally white. Although it is
understandable why Mexico would insist on whiteness, it’s important to
realize that Mexico, as a former Spanish colony, was itself a white
supremacist country with a long history of anti-Blackness and anti-
Indigeneity.22 The treaty actually marked the intersection of two distinct but
overlapping white supremacist racial formations. Consequently, declaring
Mexicans to be white did offer some protections, but it also reproduced
white supremacy. Laura Gómez has argued that conferring whiteness on
Mexicans created a potential “wedge” population, with deep implications
for Indigenous nations and African Americans.23 Nevertheless, the veneer
of whiteness afforded only limited rights, including partial citizenship in
Arizona and New Mexico. Indeed, both states were denied statehood for
years because of their large Indigenous and Mexican populations.
In short, white supremacy was integral to the Mexican-American War,
including its formulation, execution, justification, and treaty negotiations.
Likewise, the war played a profound role in the development of US and
global capitalism.
Remembering the Mexican-American War

Arguably, current struggles over how the United States remembers white
supremacy began in 2015, when Bree Newsome climbed a South Carolina
flagpole and dismantled the Confederate flag.24 Thus began a public
struggle around “memory work,” the deliberate process of engaging with
the past by considering its ethical and normative dimensions.25 Cultural
memory denotes how we choose to represent the past, including who, what,
and where is commemorated, the nature of such representations, and what is
silenced. Hegemonic forms of cultural memory, such as celebrating
Confederate soldiers and pioneers, not only build the white nation but also
act as barriers to transformative memory work.
Historical places are sites of cultural memory and potential memory
work. Experiencing the connection between where something occurred and
what happened there can produce a potentially transformative experience.
Places can produce visceral experiences leading to a reframing of historical
events, as seen in Holocaust memorials and the Whitney Plantation
Museum.26 Both are designed to foreground what was previously erased.
Given its history of settler colonization, genocide, slavery, and empire,
the United States has crafted a cultural memory that denies its true origins.
Denial is central to settler empires because the truth would require the
nation to fundamentally rethink its origin story and identity, a prospect that
is deeply threatening to many. Instead, US cultural memory is characterized
by “forgetting”: “American culture is not amnesiac but rather replete with
memory, [and] cultural memory is a central aspect of how American culture
functions and how the nation is defined. The ‘culture of amnesia’ actually
involves the generation of memory in new forms, a process often
interpreted as forgetting. Indeed, memory and forgetting are co-constitutive
processes; each is essential to the other’s existence.”27 Thus, forgetting is
never innocent but always performs important work. If the Mexican-
American War is “forgotten,” we must ask why. Michael Van Wagenen
contends that forgetting eases the US conscience of having to remember an
unfair and racist war. I argue that “forgetting” erases empire, white
supremacy, and racial violence writ large. The Mexican-American War is
but one instance of forgetting. Conversely, when it is remembered, it is
characterized by white innocence and benevolence. Walter Hixson calls
such virtues “good works” and argues they are part of settler fantasies and
necessary to create a serviceable past.28
Transition narratives are key to the US cultural memory of the Mexican-
American War. These are discourses that explain shifts in racial property
regimes. As Laura Barraclough writes, “Transition narratives reframe the
experience of conquest in a way that recuperates the legitimacy of the
colonizing force and its social and cultural precepts, thus securing
hegemonic rule in conquered territories through appeals to a shared
heritage.”29 The effectiveness of transition narratives is evident in their
hegemonic nature: we are largely oblivious to them. Taken as a whole,
historical markers overwhelmingly reflect hegemonic narratives that affirm
white innocence.
Narrating the Mexican-American War in Five Scenes

Although the Mexican-American War covered a vast area, the fighting was
concentrated in several places, including Matamoras, Mexico City,
Veracruz, and what is now Arizona, Texas, and California. Los Angeles
played a crucial role. Not only was the last battle fought there, but Mexico
surrendered and the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were
negotiated there. Consequently, one might expect to see numerous
monuments and markers commemorating the war. There is a total of five.30
However, more important than the number is how the war is represented.
The sites employ three strategies to erase empire. First, sites focused on
the military dimensions of the war are devoid of any social context. Second,
the violence of the war is largely evacuated, including widespread violence
against Mexican civilians. Third, the ethical dimensions of the war,
including its fabricated rationale, the attack on Mexican sovereignty, and its
imperialist nature, are never mentioned. Rather, the ethical superiority of
the United States is highlighted because it compensated Mexico $15 million
for the loss of land (i.e., good works). The US desire for continental
dominance is portrayed as inevitable and unproblematic, whereas the
racialized nature of the war is unspoken. Instead, the cumulative narrative is
one of manifest destiny, in which expansion, US military prowess, and
Anglo-American culture are valorized and conquest is inevitable and
beneficial to all.

BATTLEFIELDS

I begin with two battlefields. However, I first wish to reflect momentarily

on the memorialization of battlefields themselves. Although such places are
obviously fundamental to any war, the Mexican-American War included
pervasive and extreme violence against civilians.31 Because such warfare is
illegal and morally difficult, it undercuts tropes of uplift and benevolence
and is never mentioned. Hence, memorializing battlefields is an act of
erasure because it implies that the violence was limited to formal military
engagements. It was not.
 The first site is the Battle of the Rio San Gabriel, located in Montebello,
about ten miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. It exemplifies both a
military focus and the significance of landscape. This site sits on a bluff on
the western side of the San Gabriel River that affords an excellent view of
the eastern San Gabriel Valley. On the bluff is a cannon covered by a shelter
overlooking the river (see figure 9.1). At the site the strategic nature of the
river becomes readily apparent. This is significant in a place such as Los
Angeles, where the terrain has been bulldozed and paved, making it
difficult to discern the pre-urban geography of the region. This particular
portion of the San Gabriel River has not been concretized (although there
are spillways on both sides), and one can clearly see the landforms and
appreciate why a battle was fought here.
The photo suggests a pastoral view of Los Angeles, but the area is, in
fact, surrounded by industrial parks, multi-unit housing, and major
roadways. It is only because the riverbed is part of the region’s flood-
control system that it still exists intact.
FIGURE 9.1.   Battle of the Rio San Gabriel (California Historical Landmark 385). Author
photograph.

Both the narration and design of the site foreground military dimensions
of the war. The plaque reads: “Near this site on January 8, 1847 was fought
the Battle of the Rio San Gabriel. Between American forces commanded by
Capt. Robert Stockton, US Navy Commander-in-chief, Brig. Gen. Stephen
W. Kearny, US Army, and Californians commanded by General Jose Maria
Flores.” There is no context for the war, why the two countries were
fighting, or even the outcome of the battle. For those not familiar with
California history, there are no clues as to what happened and why. Given
the careful curation of the site and its durable features, we must assume that
the erasure of empire was also deliberate.
The next site is La Mesa Battlefield. Located in an old industrial section
of Vernon, several miles south of downtown, it sits on a north/south railroad
easement, enabling one to glimpse the vastness of the Los Angeles plain
(see figure 9.2). In 1847 Mexico mounted its last battle of the war, the
Battle of Los Angeles, from here. Mexican soldiers marched into Los
Angeles proper and were outgunned by US forces. This defeat was the basis
for their eventual surrender. The marker consists of a tall pole, which likely
once flew a flag, and a plaque at its base, which has been vandalized. In
addition to the abandoned condition of the site, its location is problematic:
there is no precise address. I had to park at the closest intersection and
search for it on foot. It is impossible to know what transpired at the site
without previous knowledge.
Because of the marker’s location and defacement, Vernon built a new
marker at its city hall in 2018. The plaque reads: “During the United States
Occupation of California in the Mexican-American War, La Mesa served as
a campsite for the Californio forces under General Castro in the summer of
1846. The last military encounter of the California front was fought here on
January 9, 1847. Also known as the battle of Los Angeles.” Once again, the
text addresses only the military dimensions of the battle. Despite Vernon’s
replacement marker, the abandonment of the original marker suggests a
general disregard for the memory of the war.

FORT MOORE PIONEER MEMORIAL

Fort Moore is not an officially recognized site but a public art installation.
The memorial is a bas-relief honoring the raising of the US flag and is
dedicated to the US soldiers who fought in the war (see figure 9.3). Besides
the raising of the flag, the sculpture depicts scenes of US settlement. Fort
Moore is located on the northern edge of downtown Los Angeles. Although
thousands of cars pass it daily, few likely know what it is, given the
relatively unknown history of the war, the site’s disrepair, and its location
near a freeway and away from foot traffic. Fort Moore refers to the hill on
which the memorial is built. The fort was built in the aftermath of the war,
and one of Los Angeles’s first lynchings occurred there. Today the hill is a
parking lot, with the sculpture serving as its front.32 The memorial itself has
several components, including the bas-relief, a dedication pillar, and a pool.
When I first visited the site in 2016, the pool was rusty and abandoned, but
by 2020, it had been refurbished.
FIGURE 9.2.   La Mesa Battlefield (California Historical Marker 167). Photograph by Audrey
Mandelbaum.

Fort Moore is distinctive because unlike the previous sites, it provides

some context for the war. The monument has limited text and images of
soldiers, pioneers, and Anglo-American settlers. The scenes represent the
evolution of the region from US conquest to the 1950s, when the sculpture
was completed.
The monument valorizes US conquest, culture, and history. Underneath
the primary image, of soldiers raising the flag, is text that reads, “On this
site stood Fort Moore built by the Mormon Battalion during the War with
Mexico. This Memorial honors the troops who helped to win the Southwest.
The flag of the United States was raised here on July 4, 1847 by United
States Troops at the first Independence Day celebration in Los Angeles.”
Flag raising, of course, is one of the most iconographic symbols of
conquest.
FIGURE 9.3.   Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, Los Angeles. Photograph by Audrey Mandelbaum.

Adjacent to the flag-raising scene are three smaller images. First is a

quasi-bucolic scene of a pioneer with a cow, covered wagon, house, and
trees. The caption states: “On ranchos where herds of cattle ranged pioneers
built homes and planted vineyards and orange groves.” Because cattle are
associated with the Mexican era and oranges are distinctly American, the
sequencing illustrates Bhandar’s ideology of improvement.33 Anglo settlers
believed that Mexicans were lazy, cattle ranching was unproductive, and
irrigated agriculture was an improvement.
The next two images highlight technology and overcoming nature. The
transportation scene features a white settler, a stagecoach, and a railroad. As
the text notes, “The Prairie Schooner stage and iron horse brought many
settlers who made Los Angeles a city.” Because settler colonization is about
replacing Native population(s), how they arrived is deemed important.
Anglo settlers believed that Mexicans, like Indigenous peoples, would
simply disappear: “That the Indian race of Mexico must recede before us, is
quite as certain as … the destiny of our own Indians.”34
 The final image features the power grid and one of the water-transfer
projects that allow Los Angeles to support millions beyond its natural
carrying capacity. The scene includes a nuclear, heteropatriarchal family,
underscoring the extent to which Anglo settlement is dependent on the mass
manipulation of nature: “Water and power have made our arid land
flourish[;] may we keep faith with the Pioneers who brought us these gifts.”
Technological innovation, a form of goodness associated with manifest
destiny, was especially valued in the 1950s during the Cold War.
Despite their limited role in the war, the Mormon Battalion looms large.
Van Wagenen has suggested that Mormons lobbied for inclusion, including
raising funds for the memorial.35 Given their history of facing persecution,
Mormons are dedicated to historical preservation and use cultural memory
to ensure that their contributions to the nation, especially settlement, are
recognized.36 Although Mormon participation in the war was minimal, it
illuminates the scope and complexity of US expansionism. In 1839
Mormons were forced to flee Illinois and elsewhere because of religious
persecution. Upon crossing the Rockies, Mormon leader Brigham Young
declared Salt Lake Valley as their new home. However, given the
difficulties of moving a population more than two thousand miles, various
groups became stranded. Needing assistance, they asked the US Army for
help. The army responded by requesting five hundred volunteers to form a
battalion for the war. In exchange, the soldiers’ wages would be diverted to
support the larger Mormon exodus. Young agreed to such terms, hoping that
the arrangement would offer positive public relations, help shield the
Mormons from further persecution, and provide needed resources. Here we
can see how the US military leveraged religious discrimination to extend its
empire, actively displacing Native persons and Mexicans in the process.
Consequently, the Mormons were involved in at least two dispossessions:
the Native peoples of what is now Utah, including the Ute, Shoshone, and
Paiute, and both Native peoples and Mexicans in southern California.
Mormon contributions to building a wagon trail in the Southwest are
celebrated as part of manifest destiny in the inscription on the sculpture:
“The march to Santa Fe and the opening of the first wagon road to the
Pacific helped end the isolation of the west and inspired the Gadsden
Purchase of 1888.” Roads, as a form of transportation, are essential to
conquest, settlement, and expansion. Despite the fact that many wagon
roads were built on Native trails, only the Mormons are mentioned. This is
yet another way of “forgetting” the fact that other peoples had lived in the
region for centuries. Also significant is the West’s depiction as isolated,
which reflects an imperialist perspective. Presumably, isolation was not a
problem for Native peoples. Indeed, they probably longed for the
“isolation” of the pre-Hispanic era.
Fort Moore performs significant ideological work. First, it uncritically
celebrates territorial conquest. The true motives for the war are never
mentioned but are implicitly referenced, as “extending the frontiers of this
country.” This indicates a powerful sense of entitlement and righteousness.
Not only did the United States feel entitled to this land, but its expansion is
seen as an unquestioned good. Neither Native peoples nor Mexicans are
mentioned, so presumably the memorial is speaking to white settlers—the
central subjects of the US nation. Once again, “the performance of good
works” is essential to the transition narrative and settler fantasies.37 Second,
the memorial ignores previous peoples, both Indigenous and Mexican, and
posits US actors as the only ones with agency. Anglo-Americans
supposedly built Los Angeles, despite the fact that the Spanish conquered
the area in 1771 and the Tongva had lived in the region for at least five
thousand years prior to that. This is especially egregious when one
considers the importance of water to the region and the profound
knowledge and labor invested by Spanish, Mexican, and Indigenous
peoples in harnessing water. Dismissing previous water infrastructure and
technology not only erases previous civilizations but also reinscribes
Anglo-Americans as the sole bearers of technological progress.

NEGOTIATING PEACE

The final two sites represent the conclusion of the war: the Catalina
Verdugo Adobe and Campo de Cahuenga. They center negotiations, the
treaty, and troop withdrawal, all of which are equated with peace. Mexican
and US representatives negotiated elements of the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo at the Catalina Adobe in Glendale. Supposedly, the representatives
sat underneath a massive oak tree (roble de paz, or peace tree) and
conducted their work. The site has been converted into a bucolic, lush 1.3-
acre park that offers picnic spaces and an inviting place to visit. The site’s
buildings and landscaping are carefully tended and evoke the “Spanish
fantasy” myth.
Coined by Carey McWilliams, the myth refers to Anglo-Americans’
efforts, beginning in the late nineteenth century, to portray the Mexican and
Spanish eras as idyllic in order to promote the region and fashion a usable
past. The Spanish fantasy myth can be seen in plays, festivals, architecture,
and historical preservation.38 There are at least two crucial power dynamics
at work in the myth. First, it overlooks the devastation that the mission
system brought to the Native peoples of the region. Consider that more than
six thousand Indians are buried at the San Gabriel Mission, just east of Los
Angeles. The fact that many died from disease does not make their deaths
any less connected to colonization—Europeans brought displacement,
disease, and death.39 The second power dynamic associated with the myth is
the act of curation itself: Anglo-Americans appropriating and reconfiguring
Native, Mexican, and Spanish history. Historically, they have done so to
articulate a distinct regional identity and to sell the region, a form of
boosterism. For example, an old carreta (cart) has been repurposed as a
planter (see figure 9.4). Likewise, ollas and metates (water jugs and
grinding pads) are strategically placed around the garden as decorative
items. Such placements underscore the faux nature of the site: ollas and
metates were/are everyday tools that Mexican and Indigenous peoples have
used for centuries. Here, they are severed from their normal context and
have become part of the Spanish fantasy myth, echoing earlier examples,
including Charro Days, Ramona, and the Mission Play.40 Although the site
does acknowledge Mexico in a sanitized and romantic way, there is almost
no information on the substance of the treaty and why there was a war.
The final site is Campo de Cahuenga. This is the largest, most elaborate,
and most developed site devoted to the war, and it is the only one that offers
a counternarrative (albeit off-site). Campo de Cahuenga is California
Historical Marker 151 and Los Angeles Cultural Historic Marker 29.
Because it is situated across from Universal Studios (Los Angeles’s top
tourist destination), it is the only historic site which regularly attracts
significant numbers of visitors. The site consists of a carefully tended
adobe, an archaeological dig, picnic tables, and a small museum dedicated
to telling the Anglo-American version of the war, especially its conclusion.
A handout titled “Meet me at the Campo!” lists the many historical events
associated with the site:
The Campo de Cahuenga is the birthplace of California and the place
where the dream for a continental United States (Manifest Destiny) was
realized. It is also a monument to peace, where the agreement leading to
the end of the Mexican-American war was signed. It is a monument to
the unification with the United States, as one of the first Overland
Stagecoach Stations in California. Finally, it has played an important role
in American history, having served as a Union fortress and garrison
during the American Civil War, giving it a significant place in the history
of the great American struggle to become a United States of America.
Indeed, the Campo is one of the most historic sites in America.
FIGURE 9.4.   Catalina Verdugo Adobe. Photograph by Audrey Mandelbaum.

Such an uncritical celebration of manifest destiny signals an earlier era of

historical preservation and the work of amateur docents. Certainly, a
professional contemporary team would offer a more balanced view. But it is
precisely the site’s community-based nature that reveals its hegemonic
nature. In fact, the majority of historical sites are developed and managed
by amateurs. It is only the largest and most significant sites, such as
Monticello, or those managed by the National Park Service, that employ
professional staff and are more inclusive.
Campo de Cahuenga is known as the site of Mexico’s “capitulation,”
which is an ambiguous word meaning “surrender” and ostensibly used in
order to avoid having to reference an actual war. The site features a series of
large panels that explain why the United States entered the war and
explaining the outcome. Hence, it is the only historical site that narrates in
detail why the war occurred. It is steeped in manifest destiny. For instance,
the panels state that the United States entered the war because other
colonial powers, namely England and France, desired California, and the
United States could not let anyone else own it. Accordingly, it asked
Mexico to sell it, but Mexico declined. At that point, “hostilities” ensued.
Here, the United States is framed as vulnerable and acting reasonably,
rather than as an empire committed to economic and territorial expansion.
Indeed, such actions were considered entirely reasonable under the Monroe
Doctrine.
Another panel, focused on the war itself, stated that at one point
“Californios were resisting the US’s forces.” This struck me as odd: if the
US and Mexico were at war, how could the Californios be seen as
“resisting” US forces? Resisting implies that control and domination have
been asserted—to resist is to challenge acknowledged authority. In reality,
Mexicans were defending their land and people. I asked a docent about this
interpretation, and a discussion ensued. One docent suggested that there
was tremendous chaos at the time and that “resistance” really meant
“chaos.” Another explained that the Californios were resisting Mexico
because Los Angeles was a forgotten outpost and harmed by Mexican
policies. Still, she acknowledged that there was some “rebellion” against
the Americans. In a rather stunning moment, another docent said, “It’s not
like they were at war.” Realizing the implausibility of such a statement,
someone from the San Fernando Historical Society suggested that perhaps
the docent didn’t think there was a war because a battle was not actually
fought at Campo de Cahuenga. This conversation shows some of the mental
gymnastics that are required to reconcile hegemonic narratives with facts
and rational analysis.
An even deeper form of denial and disconnect occurred when a woman
with a group of teens asked if any of them knew what capitulation means.
No one volunteered an answer, but one girl responded that “I am only
interested in US history.” This is yet another remarkable assertion: Is
Campo de Cahuenga outside of US history because it is also Mexican
history, and therefore “foreign”? If it is not US history, how did Los
Angeles become part of the United States? Does she believe that only
Anglo-Americans are the bearers of US history? Regardless of the logic
undergirding her statement, the idea that Los Angeles is outside of US
history effectively erases empire by simply eliminating transition narratives.
The absence of such narratives leads to the conclusion that it was always so.
Campo de Cahuenga is the only historical site in Los Angeles where the
conquered “talk back.” Almost everything was in English, but there was at
least one bilingual brochure. However, it was not commensurate with the
English one. The English version referenced the “American Acquisition
Period,” while the Spanish version called it “el pería/oodo de la Conquista
Norteamericana” (the period of North American conquest). The Spanish
version foregrounds power and domination, through conquista, whereas the
English version employs the neutral acquisition.
But the real place where Mexican/Chicana/o/x and Indigenous voices
can be seen is at the Metropolitan Transit Authority train stop. Universal
Studios is on the Red Line, a rail line running from downtown Los Angeles
to North Hollywood. The train station is below ground and, like most stops,
features public art. The installation is called Tree of Califas, by artist
Margaret García and architect Kate Diamond (see figure 9.5).41 The project
features four massive pillars telling the history of the region and specifically
the war. The story is told chronologically through brightly painted ceramic
tiles on each pillar from Indigenous and Mexican viewpoints. The first
pillar is devoted to Spanish conquest, Indigenous people, the mission
system, and Mexico. There are some rustic scenes, but García shows the
enslavement of Indigenous peoples, indicating their coercion and
oppression by the Catholic Church, and explains that Mexico promoted
secularization in order to acquire mission lands. The second pillar explores
the initial battles of the war, and the third depicts key figures in the war,
including women. The tiles underscore the violence and force associated
with the war, reminding us that this was, in fact, an actual war. Numerous
tiles feature guns, swords, bloody bodies, and severed limbs. The final pillar
focuses on Mexico’s surrender.

FIGURE 9.5.   Tree of Califas. The legend reads: “Robert F. Stockton. Stockton threatened the
citizens with dire punishment should they fail to cooperate with the new government.” Source:
Author photograph.

Tree of Califas marks the Chicana/o/x/Mexican presence in two ways:

first by offering a counternarrative of the war and second in the art itself.
The aesthetic is deeply Chicana/o/x, as seen in its palette, materials,
bilingual text, and Mexican iconography, such as calaveras, cactus, and
religious symbolism. Although the mosaic is not on the grounds of Campo
de Cahuenga, it is a genuine effort to complicate the story.
On the Significance of Cultural Memory

I wrote this chapter amid fierce national debate regarding cultural memory
and the racial past. While this engagement is an essential first step, I worry
it is only scratching the surface, as much of the activism seems to center on
individuals. Activists advocating for the removal of monuments
commemorating colonizers and enslavers routinely state that they are
offensive, painful, and unwelcoming. Many argue that such figures should
not be honored, while others insist that the values such men embody no
longer represent the US, or at least what we should aspire to. Building on
such concerns, scholars have documented the degree to which white
property-owning men are commemorated and argue for more equitable
representation.42
Perhaps this focus on individuals—both whom we honor and how we
respond to their being honored—should not be surprising, given the
individualistic nature of US culture. Nonetheless, such a focus eclipses the
opportunity to fully grasp the processes, including racial capitalism,
colonization, and imperialism, that created this territory and country. Rather
than focusing on individuals, we would do well to interrogate the actual
landscapes within which these processes were produced and embedded.
Studying the commemorative landscape of events like the Mexican-
American War offers a window into a much larger set of power relations.
As the geographer Pierce Lewis wrote, “The landscape is our unwitting
autobiography.”43
 NOTES

Research for this essay was made possible by a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
1. Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire.
2. “Monuments and Memorials Removed.”
3. On denying empire, see Jacobson, “Where We Stand”; Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of
United States Imperialism; Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire; Williams, Tragedy of
American Diplomacy; and Karuka, Empire’s Tracks.
4. Recent analyses of US empire include Frymer, Building an American Empire; Ran, Two
Faces of American Freedom; Saler, Settlers’ Empire; Patnaik and Patnaik, Capital and
Imperialism; and Hixson, American Settler Colonialism.
5. Against equating white supremacy and colonization, see Byrd, Transit of Empire.
6. Cacho, “Racialized Hauntings.”
7. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism; Patnaik and Patnaik, Capitalism and Imperialism.
8. Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property, 7; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; see also Launius and
Boyce, “More Than Metaphor,” 168. On contracted conceptions of capitalism, see Singh,
“Race, Violence”; and Glassman, “Primitive Accumulation.” Regarding slavery, see Baptist,
Half Has Never Been Told.
9. Sturken, Tangled Memories.
10. Van Wagenen, Remembering the Forgotten War. The war and its aftermath were central to
early Chicanx studies: Acuña, Occupied America; Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo; Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans; De
Leon, They Called Them Greasers; Pitt, Decline of the Californios; Ramos, Beyond the Alamo;
Gómez, Manifest Destinies; Monroy, Thrown among Strangers. Subsequent work highlighted
gender and interracial formations: Almaguer, Racial Faultlines; Chávez-Garcia, Negotiating
Conquest; Castañeda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics”; Benavides, “Californios! Whom Do
You Support?”; González, Refusing the Favor.
11. On regional and class tensions, see Streeby, “American Sensations.”
12. Streeby, “American Sensations,” 4.
13. Quoted in Frymer, Building an American Empire, 149.
14. Port of Los Angeles. “By the Numbers.”
15. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History; Wilm, Settlers as Conquerors.
16. Streeby, “American Sensations”; Grandin, End of the Myth; Ostler, Surviving Genocide.
17. Burrough, Tomlinson, and Stanford, Forget the Alamo. Mexico also invited US settlers to
move to Tejas in 1821 to help dispossess Native peoples.
18. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny.
19. Melamed, Represent and Destroy; Winant, World Is a Ghetto.
20. Rivera, Emergence of Mexican America, chapter 2.
21. Gómez, Manifest Destinies.
22. On Mexican white supremacy, see Martínez, Genealogical Fictions. On Mexican anti-
Indigeneity, see González, This Small City; and Guidotti-Hernandez, Unspeakable Violence.
On overlapping racial formations, see Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given.
23. Gómez, Manifest Destinies.
24. Holly and Brown, “Woman Takes Down Confederate Flag.”
25. Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory; Sturken, Tangled Memories; Gómez-Barris, Where
Memory Dwells.
26. Modlin et al., “Can Plantation Museums?”; de la Loza, Pocho Research Society Field
Guide. On place and cultural memory more generally, see Till, New Berlin; Foote, Shadowed
Ground; DeLyser, Ramona Memories; and Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials. Of
particular note is Project Reset, a major initiative to rethink southern tourism based on
antiracism. See www.tourismreset.com.
27. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 2.
28. Van Wagenen, Regarding the Forgotten War. On goodness and white innocence,
respectively, see Hixson, American Settler Colonialism; and Inwood, “ ‘It Is the Innocence.’ ”
29. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 11.
30. The war is ancillary to a few other sites in Los Angeles.
31. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, chapter 5.
32. On Fort Moore, see Brown, “Fortifications and Catacombs.”
33. Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property.
34. Quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 118. See also Pitt, Decline of the
Californios.
35. Van Wagenen, Remembering the Forgotten War, 169.
36. For example, see Ensign Peak Foundation.
37. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 20–22.
38. McWilliams, North from Mexico, chapter 2. Studies of the Spanish fantasy myth include
Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe; Kropp, California Vieja; Carpio, Collisions at the Crossroads,
chapter 1; and DeLyser, Ramona Memories.
39. For detailed discussion on disease and Native peoples, see Edwards and Kelton, “Germs,
Genocides.”
40. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe; Kropp, California Vieja; DeLyser, Ramona Memories.
41. Metropolitan Transit Authority, “Tree of Califas.”
42. Monument Lab, National Monument Audit.
43. Lewis, “Axioms for Reading.”
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IV    Rehearsing for the Future
 TEN

Racial Capitalism Now

: A Conversation with Michael Dawson and

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

This conversation took place on March 30, 2019, at the end of the Racial Capitalism
conference organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Most of the essays in this volume were presented at
the conference, and this closing exchange between the two keynote speakers reflects
on the conference presentations and their own role as scholars and activists in
defining the field. The conversation concludes with their thoughts on the shifting
ground of struggles against racial capitalism now. This discussion was facilitated by
Brian Jordan Jefferson and Jodi Melamed.

BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON:    Thank you, everyone, for coming out, and
again I want to thank the Unit [for Criticism] and Susan Koshy for her
stewardship and putting this together and of course the co-organizers,
especially Lisa Cacho, for doing that presentation. And then a very
big thank-you and round of applause for Sarah Richter and Alyssa
Bralower, the graduate research assistants, for all their hard work.
This is the last panel and will cover a lot of things I think a lot of us
are looking forward to: “Racial Capitalism Now.” We are delighted to
have professors Michael Dawson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore here to
talk about how we think about racial capitalism going forward and to
put this into a contemporary context. I, and perhaps others in this
room, might not have been in academia if it wasn’t for their writings,
 so I’d like to thank them. Today we are going to see what happens
when we put two great minds together. I’m excited myself, but before
we start, Jodi would like to give a little anecdote to get the ball
rolling.
JODI MELAMED:  I want to say ditto to everything Brian just said in terms
of their importance for bringing so many of us in the room here. And
I did want to say that in addition to knowing both of them as
legendary scholar-activists, I also know them both to be incredible
conversationalists. I wanted to share one anecdote about each of
them. The first is about Ruthie coming to Milwaukee in 2006 for a
community conference at America’s Black Holocaust Museum, which
is coming back this year—the funding is there, which is amazing. I
believe the talk itself was about two hours, and there were about four
hundred to five hundred people there, mostly not students, mostly
folks from around central Milwaukee. The official Q&A was about two
and a half hours long, and then there was an unofficial three-hour
Q&A. Ruthie did not leave until every person who wanted to talk to
her had had their time. It was amazing. I was dead on my feet—I
don’t know how she did it. And then Michael convened an amazing
racial capitalism workshop in Tuscany over the summer, and after a
day of generously listening to and shaping, maybe, about six papers
from morning until night, we were tired and I went to sleep, but
Michael remained in deep conversation with the faculty and the
graduate students there until three in the morning for three nights in a
row. So we’ve got some great conversationalists here who are also
very, very generous. Let’s give them one round of applause to get
started. Now our plan is to get them talking to each other, but we do
also want, especially to the end, to open it up to questions from all of
you. Brian and I have some questions to kind of keep prodding them
to get things going, but maybe before and moving into the topic of
“Racial Capitalism Now,” I was thinking about how both of you share
California. So maybe this is a New Yorker’s question, but I was
thinking about how both of you share California as a formative site of
your thinking and activism, and I wonder how you would narrate your
 journey from those California times to your present thinking and
concerns. I think that’s a good place to start.
MICHAEL DAWSON:  OK, I’ll go first.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  I’m older, but he was there first. [Laughter.]
MICHAEL DAWSON:    If you’re not going to play fair. I ended up in
California as an undergraduate, and partly I also wound up in
California because I started becoming interested in becoming an
activist, in high school, particularly with the assassination of Dr.
Martin Luther King. And fortunately I am now old enough to where
being a Dawson doesn’t mean anything, but being a Dawson in
Chicago in the 1960s, 1970s—or for that matter the ’40s or ’50s—
although I wasn’t around then, meant that you were part of the ruling
political machine in the city. And there is no way that a Dawson could
be an antiwar activist, a Black Power Leninist. Nobody would trust
me because everyone would think I was a police agent. So I had to go
far enough away to school to where that name didn’t ring too many
bells, except maybe with the faculty.
I organized for about fifteen years and dropped out of school,
worked in Silicon Valley, and started trying to understand why the
Black Liberation movement was falling apart and, as Ruthie knows, it
fell apart spectacularly and violently in the Bay Area. There was one
summer where the Panther Party split—an organization that a lot of
us at the time who were not members looked to. But it’s also the same
summer that an organization in Detroit, League of Revolutionary
Black Workers, also split. So some of the major organizations that
were trying to understand the intersection of white supremacy and
capitalism in the United States were on the ropes in serious ways.
Some of my work has thought about this. Some of the wounds were
very much self-inflicted, but obviously the state was very much
centered on trying to dismantle Black insurgency in the United States
and globally. A lot of processes we saw were defensive actions in San
Francisco in the 1970s. We saw Black neighborhoods disappear as
gentrification began; at the same time that Black neighborhoods were
disappearing, neighborhoods like Nihonmachi, the Japanese
 American neighborhood, were also gentrified, and those residents
were also displaced. In the Bay Area there were active discussions
and struggle between Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American
activists trying to understand the different processes of—the word
that Ruthie hates—racialization, but more precisely racial oppression,
racial subordination.
I was trying to understand through the massive changes in the
labor force at that time, massive changes in industry, technologies that
had just begun to take off in Silicon Valley. And one thing that people
forget about the Silicon Valley story is that it did not start with
overprivileged teenagers hacking computers in their garages. It started
with major corporations backing the Vietnam War, and Stanford was
part of that. Stanford Engineering was part of that, and all the first
wave of companies in Silicon Valley were also part of that. So we
were trying to understand the relationship between imperialism, racial
oppression at home, and capitalism, and the changes that were
coming so rapidly we didn’t have a handle on them. So how I got here
today was very much as these movements and organizations started
fracturing and coming apart, is when I finally did go back to school, it
was to try to understand what had happened, what type of situation
we were actually in. One of the tenets I have is that we did a lot of
study of the Soviet Union, we studied China, we studied Guinea-
Bissau, we studied a lot of different places, but we didn’t study the
United States very well. So trying to understand the political economy
and the politics of the places we were trying to organize in was
something I had been working on and something that, once again to
throw it back to my roots, was thinking about political economy and
race through this lens of what is now racial capitalism.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  My trajectory is a bit different. I was born and
grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and I came to political
consciousness as a kid because my parents were organizers and
activists both in the traditional Race people way but my father was
also quite a Left firebrand. He organized unions; he took over the
New Haven chapter of the NAACP to use it as a respectable front to do
all kinds of other things. They lost their charter but gained the things
he was fighting for. So that was the context in which I came to
consciousness, but then through all kinds of reasons that I won’t share
this evening, I wound up in California for the second time after
bouncing through briefly in 1970—I was in the Bay the summer of
1970 during that long recession—bounced back to the East Coast,
finished college, went to drama school and said, “The theater is not
for me,” and bounced back to the West Coast, where I met this guy
[points to partner in the audience] and wound up spending a very,
very long happy time there.
Like Michael, I was out of school for a long time—about
seventeen years between when I finished my MFA and going back to
school to do a PhD. In that time—we are talking about the late ’70s
until the early ’90s—I watched with some amazement the entire
landscape changing. So the things that Michael just spoke about were
extremely evident, and anybody like Cheryl [Harris] who is from Los
Angeles knows, that the contradictions in LA are right on the surface.
You don’t have to peel back one single layer to see them, even though
because of the beguiling way that the mostly low-rise neighborhoods
extend, it’s hard sometimes to wrap our minds around the kinds of
things that are abstractly represented, for example, in that last map
that Cheryl showed us of the concentration of certain kinds of more
recent predatory lending. So it was in the context of those changes,
pretty much through then to the structural adjustments that kicked in
in the late ’70s and forward, that I started to do what led me to do
what I talked to you about yesterday, that led me to do what I did,
which is the reason you all know me.
I’ll just say that this process of becoming involved in all different
kinds of struggles for social justice, some of which involved students
just getting access to higher education. And I will mention that two of
the most famous Black Panther Party member assassinations were the
assassinations of John Huggins and Bunchy Carter at UCLA, and what
few people recognize is that the reason they were on campus that day,
on a Saturday in January, was to argue about curriculum. They were
 students. They were arguing about curriculum and the direction Black
studies ought to take. And Michael talked this morning about where
Black studies went, which is not where it was intended to go at all.
So, as you know, the FBI said the Black Panther Party is the most
dangerous thing and it was dangerous not because they had guns,
because everybody had guns. It wasn’t the guns. It was the platform
and the program and things like people arguing about curriculum,
working with white people, etc., etc., etc. That’s what made the party
such a dangerous thing even though, as Michael said, it had internal
contradictions that it also could not seem to resolve. The rest I think is
kind of written up in my book, so I’m going to leave it there.
JODI MELAMED:  Michael, do you want to respond to that?
MICHAEL DAWSON:  One thing I would say: Black studies did in important
ways have its start in California, and it came out of revolutionary
movements in both northern and southern California, and there was a
rich ideological debating ground—as we got into a little bit earlier
today—mostly due to students. One of the most dangerous things, I
think, about both the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the
Black Panther Party was their ability to make alliances across serious
contradictions across racial and ethnic groups. If you ever get a
chance to see the movie Finally Got the News, it’s very much worth
watching about the Detroit organizing. When I came back in
December of 1969 for winter break, it was shortly after the
assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, and the
city was on edge. The Panthers had organized across street youth
organizations; they had organized hillbillies in one part of the city;
they were working with Puerto Rican revolutionaries—Fred Hampton
came out of the steel mills; that’s where his family was from—and so
people were trying to develop a type of analysis that could lay the
basis for long-term alliances, solidarity, and organizing, and that’s
what was squashed pretty definitively.
But I think one of the things we shouldn’t do, though, which is a
danger probably more of my generation than of much younger people,
is to romanticize that period. The level of homophobia and violence
 against women, for example, within the Panther Party was quite large.
If you talk to a lot of the women cadre who survived that experience
and who have written about it. So we have to learn from the mistakes
of the past and realize that we are in new times, but history is still
with us, as Cheryl [Harris] pointed out through Baldwin. So a lot of
what happened during those times we are living with today.
BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON:    One of the questions I wanted to ask given
the type of work that you do and the disciplines that you are in and
the times that you began your careers: what were some of the
struggles or experiences that you had in doing work on what we now
call racial capitalism? I have a political science degree, and I know
[the discipline] is not the most hospitable place for racial theory. And
I know my current discipline, geography, was not always as
hospitable and may be not even now to this type of work. People of
my generation might take it a little for granted that you can do this
type of work, but how were your experiences?
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:    Well, I’ll be happy to start responding to that,
and I think that you [points to Michael] were in a similar situation to
me: we were not traditionally aged students. And I, for one, decided
what I wanted to study, and I didn’t decide that I wanted to study and
write about prisons—that wasn’t my goal. I wanted to learn very
systematically how to think about things through political economy. I
saw that as a huge gap in my knowledge. I could have done it in these
reading groups that I talked about yesterday and as an autodidact or
collecto-didact I was doing it, but also in my household we needed at
least one pension to see us through our old age because we neglected
having children to become a burden to.
MICHAEL DAWSON:  That’s what children are for?
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  Yeah!
MICHAEL DAWSON:  Oh shoot! I got it wrong!
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:    I can’t believe that’s news. So, having no
children, I had to get a job. To get a job, I had to find something that I
would enjoy doing as much as [my partner] Craig enjoyed what he
did, which was, at the time, bookselling, and that didn’t carry any
type of pension other than Social Security. And as you all know, I’m a
know-it-all, so know-it-alls are pretty well equipped to become
teachers, and I love to teach.
So, I went back to school, and in looking around at different kinds
of programs I announced to people whose advice I sought that I
wanted to study political economy. I said it to Cedric Robinson, and I
said it to different people. I said it to Clyde Woods, and Clyde said,
“Political economy of what?” That is so typical Clyde, and I said,
“That’s a good question. Let me think.” At the time I was an adjunct
at UCLA teaching in African American Studies, and Clyde was doing
an independent study with me; he was a PhD candidate at UCLA,
talking through with me his ideas about the blues epistemology and
planning in the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission.
So I looked around, and I thought, Where can I do this? I looked at
economics departments, and I realized I would die of old age before
they would authorize me to do what I wanted to do, and I looked at
some sociology programs, and there were a couple that looked
somewhat likely. Somebody suggested planning, so I looked at a
couple of planning departments, and in thinking about planning I
rolled off to the Union of Radical Political Economists’ summer
camp, which is held in a camp. You know, you sleep in those bunks
with the plastic mattress covers that squeak all night, and I met this
really great regional economist called Ann Markusen, and I thought, I
want to be able to do what she does! And I thought I would apply to
Rutgers, where she taught at the time, and shortly after my summer
camp experience, Craig and I made our way—every few years—to
the Rethinking Marxism Conference at UMass Amherst, and we did
what we do when we go to conferences: usually he goes one way, and
I go another, and then we get back together later and share what
we’ve learned. And we did that. We got back together, and he said,
“You’re going to Rutgers, but you’re not going into planning, you’re
going into geography.” And I was really taken aback because I hadn’t
taken a geography course since I was twelve years old, but I was also
intrigued because in my geography textbook, figure this, during the
 Cold War in 1962, my geography textbook that was written by a Yale
geographer and somebody else, had an entire section on socialist
development and five-year plans. And I thought this makes perfect
sense, I’m going to be a Communist. By the time I got to school, to
answer the question, I knew that all I wanted people to do was to
teach me really, really well how to do the things they knew how to do.
I didn’t come to just repeat what I already knew, as Marisol [LeBrón]
said over dinner last night, but I also was not at all cowed or fearful of
meeting their requirements, [or] of constricting the things that
interested me and the methods that I wanted to use and the questions
that I wanted to ask by fitting into a discipline. Perhaps, I might say, I
chose a multidiscipline discipline to fulfill my ambitions.
MICHAEL DAWSON:  I ended up in political science much more by default.
I had been an African American studies undergraduate and an
engineering major, and by the time I was thinking about graduate
school, there were no African American studies graduate programs at
the time, so I had to find a discipline. I wanted to study political
economy—sound familiar [looks toward Gilmore]? And I looked at
economics, and I had an econ teacher at Berkeley who said, “We’ll
kill you.” He said, “You’re really good, and I would love to have you
as a student, but you will not survive our discipline.” I thought this
sounds like the type of advice that I should really listen to. So I did,
and then I talked to another one of my teachers, Leon Litwack, in
history, and he said, “History might be good. What do you want to
work on?” and I said, “I want to work on the history of civil rights
and the Black Power Movement.” And he said, “That’s not history.
That’s too recent.”
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  Didn’t pass the twenty-five-year rule?
MICHAEL DAWSON:  Yes. So, I said, what else can I do? And then because
I’m a partly lazy geek, I said OK, where can I study the type of Black
movements I’m interested in and Black politics and play with
numbers? Ah! Political science. And so that’s where I ended up.
Political science, I knew, was going to be hard because unlike
sociology at the time, those who did [political science] often
 concentrated on institutions like the courts. I think we were the first
generation of political scientists to study politics from below with a
variety of methodologies. I mean it used to be called “Government,”
and they said we don’t study politics, we study governance, and we
were not interested in that. We were interested in subverting
governance. We had to pretty much invent first the field of Black
politics and then, with a lot of other people, the field of race and
politics.
I did have the luxury in graduate school of studying political
economy because I had a committee that was fairly high-powered,
very high-powered actually: a Keynesian political economist, and a
Marxist urban political economist, and a rational choice theorist all
working with me. But then when I got to the University of Michigan,
I was told by the graduate secretary, “Nobody does political economy
here. Only Communists do.” So I partly went down the public opinion
route as a way to say, “Well, I’m going to get to political economy
eventually, but I know we know very little about Black political
movements and how Black people think about the world, so I’ll start
there.” And that was legible to the people I was working with, and
then we had to invent a new field.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  And, actually, invention is one of the things that
I take very seriously. And I won’t say I have invented a field, but I
have definitely trained now several generations of scholars who are
doing things that scholars with geography degrees and American
studies degrees were not doing before: asking questions differently
and figuring out ways to combine methods to answer those questions
and to manipulate the methods so that they could be expansive
enough to answer the kinds of questions that we want answers for.
And I’m very pleased by that, and sometimes I even feel proud about
it, even though I also fear sometimes … [shakes head] … I just fear.
MICHAEL DAWSON:  One thing I should make clear is that we didn’t invent
the field of Black politics. People had been studying that in HBCUs for
a generation, going back to Ralph Bunche and people at Howard,
Morehouse, and elsewhere. The race and politics field, though, had
 been defined as the racial attitudes of white citizens of the United
States, and we said, “That’s not race and politics. That’s not how you
study it.” So we did change that to refocus it to the politics and
movements of people of color, and one thing we started doing was
bringing scholars from HBCUs into better-resourced universities.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  Were you at Michigan with Cedric?
MICHAEL DAWSON:  No.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  No. You didn’t overlap?
MICHAEL DAWSON:  No.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:    This is the best story in the world. Cedric
Robinson went from his first job, which was at SUNY Binghamton, to
his second job—I think it was his second job—at the University of
Michigan in political science. He arrived there, and there was maybe
one Black student in the PhD program. He said, “Well!” and they
said, “There aren’t any. We looked.” And he said, “Give me the
admissions resources. We’ll be right back.” So, confident that Cedric
Robinson couldn’t find somebody who didn’t exist, they let him and
his little cadre of graduate students go out looking. They looked, and
they looked, and they looked, and they got thirty Black students to
apply to the PhD program at the University of Michigan. They were
all admitted because the university was convinced they wouldn’t
come. And they all said yes. Turns out it was twenty-nine Black
students and an Irish American kid who had gone to Howard, and the
assumption was, on the part of Michigan, that if you go to Howard,
you must be Black. It was twenty-nine plus one.
MICHAEL DAWSON:    That was one of the reasons I took the job at
Michigan, because there was a long tradition of Black graduate
students studying race across the social sciences.
JODI MELAMED:    You have both been amazing, insightful, decades-long
critics of many different kinds of Lefts—reformist Lefts of all kinds.
It strikes me that part of the utility of the racial capitalism concept
rubric gathering us in hermeneutic, is that it lets us do those in a
different way. I was wondering if you might say a few words—this
could be in the vein of What is the reformist Left we need to think
 about now? It might be What is the contradiction or negation of the
negation that we need to produce? And it might be in the vein of what
can we use racial capitalism—the kinds of skills, questions, and
hermeneutics that we are developing under racial capitalism—to do
what needs to be done? So anywhere you want to run with those.
MICHAEL DAWSON:    There are two parts to the question. I’ll probably
cheat and start with the slightly easier part of it, and that is the
question of what should we be criticizing in various parts of the
reformist and I think non-reformist Left today. I think the sad part is
that a lot of what we are criticizing today is what we were criticizing
fifty years ago. Well, I wasn’t in the movement fifty years ago, but it’s
the same type of struggles that Harry Haywood, for example, talks
about in the early Communist Party in the United States. The same
type of struggles that in the middle 1960s that various Black
revolutionaries had to think about or had to fight—well, by that time
the Communist Party—the ideal that Black liberation and movements
of people of color in the United States are revolutionary in their own
right. They are not particularistic. They are not a distraction from the
real revolutionary struggle. They are not dividing the working class—
the working class has been divided since slavery. [Regarding the
continuing struggle over that ideal,] for example, one of my
colleagues in political science, who shall remain unnamed, has said
that antiracist struggles, including struggles against the murder of
Black people by the police, are by definition and in any form a
neoliberal diversion from the true class struggle. It is insane.
The ideal that, in the other direction is that all we have to think
about is race: everything is Black-centric—that we don’t have to
think about not just allies or but what are the other forms of
oppression and domination both within and across Black
communities. Those are still struggles that we have to carry out
within the Left within various forms of political organizations. I’m
relatively hopeful that the organizations that have been developing
this decade are taking those struggles as central, those questions as
central. They don’t have answers yet, but they say they don’t have
 answers, and they aren’t quite as arrogant as some of my friends were
when we were in our twenties. But I think they are asking some of the
right questions.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  What do I think? I think several things. One, that
if we seriously want to enliven, and make useful, and keep useful the
concept of racial capitalism, we have to get over thinking that what
it’s about is white-people capitalism. There is white-people
capitalism, but that’s not all of capitalism. And I think, as I started my
talk with yesterday, that if we have learned anything from Robinson’s
book Black Marxism, it’s that capitalism and racial practice
codeveloped because the racial practice was already there and it had
nothing to do with Black people. Do you understand? Nothing to do
with Black people. Now, the fact that today we can detail in panel
after panel and paper after paper how capitalism requiring inequality
and racism enshrining inequality actually happen is important, but it
isn’t pushing the limit of how racial capitalism operates in general.
And I think that if we wish to get out of any kind of particularistic
trap, we must learn how to combine the specificity of the kinds of
things we talked about here together for two days with the general
trend of capitalism in the world today.
And it’s all racial. Whether there are white people involved or not.
Kimberly [Hoang,] correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt C. K. Lee
would say “racial capitalism” anywhere in her work—I know Cindy,
and I think her work is fantastic. The work that is happening with the
spread of the release, as it were, as Vijay Prashad puts it, of China,
South Africa, Brazil, and India from the old Third World project, the
release of those enormous political economies into the world has
created new relations, as we know, of imperialism, of colonialism,
and so forth. They have nothing to do with Europe and the United
States. Although Europe and the United States are not off the hook.
It’s not like either/or. It’s not like they are bad guys, and now we are
not; that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is there is a world
movement of racial capitalist relations. Those relations do not all
emanate from the global North, from the Anglo-European, North
 American centers of power—economic and military power—and they
matter, and they remain racial. If all the white people disappeared and
capitalism stayed, it would remain racial. It remains racial.
So the problem is that we have to get rid of capitalism. And all of
the “wait and wait and try every little thing” is that even though we
know that if certain kinds of social and hierarchical relations and
certain kinds of relations of practice can syncretize with capitalism, it
means that capitalism can go away and what we are calling racism
could remain. So getting rid of capitalism means transforming the
world into a new series of economic, political, and cultural relations.
Or as Stuart Hall puts it, “redressing,” which is to say reorganizing
the global maldistribution of symbolic and material resources. Bit by
bit by bit by bit. So I worry that even when we are talking about
capitalism, we get stuck in a specificity and imagine that it is the
entire world of capitalism that we must fight against, and that then
makes for a slippery slope into thinking that the only thing to be fixed
is racism, as though racism can get fixed on its own.
MICHAEL DAWSON:  One thing I would add, and I guess this is a type of
specificity but a very general one right now. I’ve been fascinated by
some of the talks and papers that were presented on this issue today,
and I think we need a much better understanding of financial
capitalism, which is the capitalism that governs the world today in all
parts of the globe. Part of understanding financial capitalism with
respect to racial capitalism in particular is understanding how racial
subordination works. Just as Saidiya Hartman, who was invoked by
several of us over the last few days, detail the shifts in various types
of political economy between slavery and early Jim Crow, what’s
been the shift into financial capitalism and how does this change the
way that racial subordination, as just one phenomenon, takes place?
For example, I used to work for a guy named Larry Summers, some
of you may have heard of him, and he wrote a paper that was very
well regarded in economics, where he makes an argument that the
global North, and maybe China and maybe Japan, should ship all their
toxic waste to Africa because it’s the comparative advantage between
 countries. He’s still very much focused on the global North as a
concept because he still thinks Europe rules. Africa should be happy
to receive the toxic waste and a little bit of money, and “we”—being a
very specific “we” in this case—can get rid of the stuff that is
poisoning our land, air, water, and people. That’s a small example to
think about how financial capitalism works globally in this era, but
it’s a type of analysis we don’t have enough of, and we don’t have a
basic understanding of financial capitalism in this era.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:   And, actually, picking up from that—and y’all
can see that Summers memo online and I think he used the term
“ineluctable logic”? To put toxicities that will shorten people’s lives
in the places where people’s lives are already shorter. It is an actuarial
imagination. You know the first actuarial tables in the United States
were developed where? Does anybody know? What workers?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Slavery?
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  No! Goodness no! The Irish digging the canals
in upstate New York! And they actually had the shortest lives, those
Irish workers, of anybody, because they weren’t capital, which the
slaves were. So the Irish were actually living shorter lives. Yep. That
was the foundation for actuarial tables in the antebellum United
States.
But in any event, considering then the vulnerabilities of the surface
of the Earth and the people who inhabit the surface of the Earth,
something that we have invoked in various ways, given our uninvited
guestship here on this bit of the surface of the Earth, makes me think
of two major issues that we haven’t discussed deeply but have come
up in various ways in our talks here. One has to do with climate
change and the environment and the other has to do with landgrabs.
Climate change and the environment are issues that many people in
this room are concerned about, and we already know, as several
people said in presentations, that climate change significantly affects
people who are more vulnerable in the first place, whether because
they live in coastal cities or for other reasons are vulnerable to
drought and other kinds of disasters. And we all know, because we’ve
been taught this over and over again, there is nothing natural about a
natural disaster, they are all social and political as well.
As you might recall, for a while Ecuador had one of those benign
autocrats, Carrera, at the head of the government, and Ecuador wrote
a new constitution conferring absolute and inviolable rights to the
land as well as to various Indigenous communities and so on and so
forth. It was not in any way perfect, but it was a really surprising
document to have been produced in the twenty-first century
anywhere. One of the things that Carrera’s government tried to do
was to offer to the wealthy of the world an opportunity to pay
Ecuador to leave the oil in the ground. They tried to actually
financialize a moral gesture. This goes back to the moral and ethical
things we’ve been trying to talk about. Nobody wrote a check.
Nobody wrote a check, so the oil came out of the ground. These are
things that are enormous and enormously important problems that
people, who are not necessarily nice people like Carrera, have tried to
figure out resolutions to that are not resolvable within the logic of
capitalism as differentiated as that logic actually is across the surface
of the Earth. That’s something that is obviously essential because I
think that it is clear that new regimes of articulation and new forms of
—I’m going to use that word that I hate—racialization will emerge
because of climate change and the ways that people will be pushed
and pulled from where they are at to where they need to go, which is
to say to high ground or to somewhere there is water. That’s one
whole series of issues that are also quite vibrant issues in the United
States or here in North America.
And the second has to do with land grabbing, and land grabbing is
a very constant growing problem on the Earth’s surface. And places
that have land scarcity but a lot of money like Saudi Arabia, and
places that have a lot of land but also a whole lot of people like the
People’s Republic of China, are both involved in taking control.
Effective ownership is effective control. So we will say taking
ownership, without being able to define it specifically, of land in
many places in order to produce food, or in central California, in
 order to grow hay for the show horses of Saudi elites or to grow
certain kinds of crops for export from central California to China.
Landgrabs are also a feature of the investment strategy of TIAA-CREF
[Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America–College
Retirement Equities Fund], which many people here will be
dependent on when they retire, and TIAA-CREF has been identified as
participating in the dispossession of people, making peasants landless,
dispossessing Indigenous people in many parts of the world. We had a
small conference about this at my center at CUNY a few years ago, and
there were reports and so on and so forth that have come out about
that.
MICHAEL DAWSON:    One of the topics that we touched on several times
today but we didn’t discuss as centrally is the question of democracy
and how capitalism is allergic to democracy. One example that fits
into those themes that we’ve been talking about during this
conference is drawn from the work of Hannah Appel, who is an
anthropologist at UCLA. She is studying, among other things, the type
of contracts that American corporations and British corporations are
writing in Africa that essentially indemnify them against democratic
change or environmental protection in those countries. In other words,
they are saying, “You have to guarantee us a certain output (whether
it’s extraction volumes of minerals or energy resources or what have
you), and it doesn’t matter if you have a change in government or if
the people in your country decide that this is not a good policy for
them. You have to indemnify us for twenty-five, thirty years.” One of
the strategies that American corporations are pursuing in other parts
of the world is to make sure and guarantee that democracy will not
matter when it comes to their ability to expropriate.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  There’s a guy who’s got a relatively new institute
or foundation or whatever it’s called. I think his name is Nicolas
Berggruen. Anybody here heard of him? His outfit is now behind a
very high wall somewhere in the greater Bel Air area of Los Angeles.
Berggruen is one of those people, like the people Kimberly Hoang
was describing, who doesn’t live anywhere. Meaning he can live
wherever he wants to, in hotel room after hotel room, anywhere on
the surface of the Earth. He makes tons of money doing something.
He set up a research foundation that is extremely wealthy and funds
pilot projects to change how governments work, and for a while Craig
Calhoun ran this thing. I mean somebody you all know ran it, but
Craig left and went to Irvine, I think. One of Berggruen’s ideas has
been that at the highest level, assuming that nation-states remain
nation-states, the federal or national government should be one that
reproduces itself the way that boards do in corporations. All right, so
it should be self-reproducing; democracy has nothing to do with it,
it’s only a matter of technical expertise. But lower down, sort of to
keep everybody feeling like they are participating, if you can touch
somebody, then you have a democratic relationship, so that we can be
democratic if I can touch Michael.
There are numerous, numerous white papers written and published
on the Berggruen website[, and] all kinds of people have been
consultants to this foundation, including [former US secretary of
state] Condoleezza Rice and [former California governor] Jerry
Brown. And some of the realignment of a variety of different
governmental functions that have happened in California in recent
years, although based in California on the realignment of mental
health care during the [Ronald]Reagan governorship, but the more
recent realignment that happened when Jerry Brown was in his
second round of being the governor, were pilots that were rather
seriously thought through and theorized within the context of that
foundation. So everybody in the United States who worries about
criminal justice stuff likes to point a finger shivering at ALEC
[American Legislative Exchange Council] and what ALEC has done.
ALEC has done some things, but there are a whole lot of other think
tanks and political scientists, excuse me [points to Dawson], on all
kinds of faculties around the country, who are having enormous
influence on the official way that the official changes in governance
and governmental structure are unfolding, and that is one of them.
BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON:  We were going to open it for questions, but I
have one quick question myself. I’ll open it up to questions, but I’ll
ask the first one.
MICHAEL DAWSON:  Is that a type of democracy? [Laughter.]
BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON:  You’ve both talked a lot about teaching and
students and your experience in sending people off into the world,
and I was just wondering what trends you see with your students
today and thinking back to when you were in school, and what excites
you about what you see with graduate students and undergraduate
students today—and if anything concerns you.
MICHAEL DAWSON:    Well, one trend which is positive but one that is
anxiety-producing, at least for my graduate students, is that when I
was in graduate school you would go into the discipline you were
trained in. The great majority of my students who take academic
careers are not ending up in political science departments. They are
ending up in gender studies departments, in Chicano studies, in Black
studies, and I think American studies, in some cases. So, on the one
hand, as someone who was trained as an undergraduate in a
multidisciplinary environment of Black studies and noticing that
multidisciplinary approaches give them more freedom to ask the types
of questions that they want to, this is something I think is quite
positive.
It does mean that, and this is the negative side, that political
science and the social sciences, in general, are becoming less friendly
to the type of work we are doing. So it is not just a matter of choice;
it’s a matter of trying to find some type of relatively reasonable space
where people can do their work. One of the other really strong, really
positive strengths, even [St. Clair] Drake said, “Dawson has to make
a choice between being an activist and a student.” And I said, “You
didn’t!” But both the undergraduates and graduate students I’m
working with see that as a nonstarter, and, in general, that’s what they
want to do. We aren’t going to tell them not to do their activism; now
we can help them figure out how the two can complement each other
and should complement each other. But once again I’ve found that
 student activism is very much tied to their intellectual and political
projects. That is very positive.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:  I completely agree with you. My students have
gone off into such a wide variety of departments. I still can’t believe
it. I have more students teaching in English departments than any
other kinds—American studies, planning, geography, sociology, and
so on. And as Michael said, not only do I not discourage people who
come to study with me from doing their activism, my whole job, my
whole mission, is to figure out how to put things together for them to
pursue something so that they can produce some kind of knowledge
that’s useful for the struggles that they are involved in. And those
struggles usually change because the temporality of doing a PhD—
even though it might be five years, six years, seven years—and the
temporality of certain kinds of struggles in social justice are not the
same. One can set out to do a doctorate that’s going to be useful for
this struggle, but that struggle is going to be altogether different by
the time that person’s done, and yet there is going to be useful
knowledge produced.
One of the things that I do with PhD students that I highly
recommend to those of you who teach PhD students or those of you in
the room who are doctoral students and still in coursework, is I teach
studio courses and—this I learned from the great Ann Markusen—I’ll
set out a problem, a general problem. A few years ago, it was
policing. We used a database from the Guardian where they counted
all the people killed by cops in the United States, and I highly
recommend people look through it because things that people say
about police killings and the raw, empirical facts of police killings are
not identical in most cases. So we chose five places in the United
States where people were more likely to be killed by cops than
anywhere else, and Albuquerque was one of them. It’s a really, really
deadly place, and if you are a Native American person, it is a really,
really, really deadly place. I think it’s one in five homicides in
Albuquerque is a cop killing an Indigenous person. One in five
homicides. So students get together, they plan a research project, they
 do it in conjunction with people on the ground wherever this place is,
who might be doing some work around this project. They go out and
they do the research, and they use the skills they are developing as
researchers to make the project come into being. So I have students
who do GIS [geographic information systems]. I don’t do it, so they do
it. So they figure out how to use GIS. Other people do ethnographies,
so they figure out how to use that and so on and so forth. Whatever
their methods are, they can perfect them in the class. They work as a
group, so they have to cooperate. Grades are not an issue for me—if
you do your work, you’ll do fine. Then we have “clients,” which is to
say the social justice movements of greater New York come at the end
of the semester, and we present our work and get a critique. This is a
really good thing to do. Among other things, it makes it very obvious
that the classroom is not walled off from the street but rather is
continuous with the street and with the community. It also means that
we are held to some very high standards for the kind of work that we
do because we don’t just report it to each other, but we also report it
to people we don’t know, and it’s also really exhilarating to do work
that quickly and do it well.
BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON:  We can open it up to Q&A.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:    Thank you both for all your information and
everything you’ve shared with us today and all the remarks over the
past couple of days. I had a couple of questions, and they are both
very different, so I guess you can choose. Talking about how we use
our work and the things that we do in making the classroom a place
that is not mysterious or opaque, what are some of the places outside
of academia where we can take our skills and take our work and make
it shareable and intelligible and useful? And my other question is,
how do we expedite all that needs to happen to save people from the
environmental degradation and threats that we are facing while also
not de-emphasizing the humanity that is at stake and just make it
about the environmental? Because I feel so many of the things we are
facing are so imminent and they’ve been happening and they are
going to keep happening, but we’ve also got these very real threats to
 lives that are not always directly alway relatable to the environment,
but it all comes full circle. So whichever one of those you want to
attend to.
JODI MELAMED:    Because we only have ten minutes, if we could take
about three more questions and let them respond in the group.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I’d like to extend that first question that you had and
the role of higher education institutions. I think Marisol LeBrón had
talked about how racial capitalism works within the spaces that we
are having these conversations in. What do we do now in these
situations where a lot of labor is going to be required and not so much
in the future? What are your thoughts on the role of racial capitalism
within the university structure?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:  First, thank you so much for your history of work,
and thank you so much for being here. History certainly has told us
that big transformations happen when people are coming together. I
would like your advice, suggestions on communication within,
between, together, and what strategies would you recommend? There
are people in biology and people in communication who are talking
about communication just being a driving force of change. And the
other is what would you suggest for helping us together create
visions, possibilities for the future, because I think that when we can
do that together, we have the opportunity to work toward and, well,
create shared goals if possible and work toward them?
MICHAEL DAWSON:  I’m going to start in the middle, I guess. Well, one of
the questions was how do we think about universities specifically, but
also more generally in a changing economy where technology is
taking jobs away, how do we think about work? How do we think
about how we function? I think in part—this is also related to the last
question as well, the visions for the future—what we have to do is to
put everything on the table. You have to put family, you have to put
work, and it’s not necessarily about getting a better job or protecting
the jobs we have, but you have to reimagine work itself and how that
gets shared and how we get rewarded. Is it a bad thing that we have
more leisure time? We’ve been trained to think—and I know I’m
 guilty of it—that if we aren’t working every second of the day that we
are messing up, but how do we think about how life itself should
look? And that means we are reimagining basic institutions from
work to family and, of course, to education as well. I think we were
talking a little bit about this at lunch, about the need to, from the
bottom up, have people imagine what type of world they want to live
in, as opposed to the top-down models we had during a good part of
the twentieth century. The one caveat we have to think through, and
one of the areas that I think progressive movements have failed is the
question of organization, is how we organize ourselves sufficiently to
be able to take ideals from the bottom up and implement them as
platforms for struggle without becoming autocratic, without
becoming too bureaucratized, without becoming too centralized,
without becoming antidemocratic. One of the other areas where I
think there has to be an extraordinary amount of experimentation, in
addition to the various types of economic forms we want to
experiment with, is with organizational forms for struggle.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE:    Definitely. Well, thank you all for your final
questions. I think the best way to think about universities is as
crossroads, and that is what they are. Universities exist to enable the
reproduction of certain kinds of relations, but they are contradictory
because they actually cannot guarantee that kind of reproduction,
however much they are designed to do so. So what we know over
history, for example, is that over the early part of the twentieth
century, many of the most influential thinkers and organizers who
were parts of cadres that brought about revolutions in their colonized
places, met in universities—and I don’t mean that the university
therefore is some sort of necessary precondition to being a
revolutionary—but they did. They met, they combined because of the
segregated housing rules, and they all lived together, which was the
case of all the colonized people who were being trained to be part of
the professional-managerial class of the Portuguese empire. They all
lived around the corner from my apartment in Lisbon because they
weren’t allowed to live with the other students. So [Amílcar] Cabral
and [Agostinho] Neto and others they got together, they had
underground study groups, and they planned their revolutions in
school and with other people. So universities as crossroads is an
important thing. Figure out who you can learn from, and if you read
[Frantz] Fanon carefully, you can see that some of the formations that
Fanon tells us to take seriously, we can understand universities
through those other formations such as the military, which I don’t
recommend, but it is another place where people who otherwise
wouldn’t meet each other can meet. That’s the first thing.
Second of all, obviously universities have resources, even
modestly resourced universities, such as the University of Illinois,
[and] where I teach—CUNY. Whereas Michael teaches in Chicago,
which is fabulously wealthy, and you can fly 350,000 miles to do
your research, which is great. But now we are going to be able to use
that research for other things. It wasn’t like Chicago planned to use
that money against but rather for. The second thing is that education is
crucial and there are all sorts of different ways that people become
educated, and Finally Got the News is a great film that shows people
who finally did some grassroots collective education. I participate
with people who all over the world do things like pop-up universities,
and they do charettes so people will get together and kind of design
the world that they want to live in as part of the struggle against a
particular thing. So we are trying to stop that toxic-waste incinerator,
but part of that is to open consciousness by doing some work that gets
beyond the idea that the only thing that we can do (maybe) is to stop
that, but rather we can design a whole world. But to get to that world
we are going to have to stop it. That’s a completely different way of
being in the world, which would also require different kinds of
organization and organizational strategies.
The third thing I want to say is discourse is a real problem and,
specifically, the ways that certain types of commonsense
consciousness congeals around all different types of problems. When
one says “prisons” in the USA, nine people out of ten hear “private
prisons.” They are not private, but that’s what people hear. When one
says “prisons” in the USA, nine people out of ten hear “labor.” That’s
not what it’s about. That’s a little bit of what it’s about, but it’s mostly
not what it’s about. So discourse is a real problem—how to get people
to think again what they thought they already knew are things that we
have the time and relative luxury to try to figure out with different
kinds of communication systems, and mobilization, and images and
so forth. And I think that the artist [Cameron Rowland] that Cheryl
[Harris] is working with is one of the people who can make us just
stop and think again, which is important. And the final thing I want to
say is that as I was listening to some of the more dire things that all of
us were talking about these two days, my mind just kept wandering to
the fact that in the mid-1930s—’35 or ’36, I forget what year—there
was this conference in Paris on fascism. So three years after Hitler
was elected and Mussolini had long been in charge in Italy, and you
know things were happening in Japan and so forth, there was a
conference on fascism, and one of the people who participated in that
conference was Walter Benjamin, who famously took his own life
when he realized he couldn’t get across the border and get away, get
out of the snare of being sent back to the Third Reich. And sometimes
I feel like these conferences that we are having are conferences like
that one, where things are already terrible and they are about to get so
much more terrible, and we do have to talk about it, but I wonder, and
I fear—this is why I said I fear earlier—that somehow we might lose
the urgency that we actually should all be incited into feeling
completely by being together. One of the reasons I worry about us
reciting the horror instead of rehearsing freedom is that we can recite
the horror all the way into the camps, that reciting the horror doesn’t
keep us away from the camps. Whereas knowing we are rehearsing
the freedom urgently because—I’m a Brechtian—there is this epic
that’s unrolling, and we don’t know where it’s going to end, but
everything that we do—including holding this symposium—is
happening in the context of everything we are talking about. We are
here not in a university but here in society and in the social order. And
 I really thank everybody again for organizing this so that we can have
these exchanges.
MICHAEL DAWSON:    One thing I would add to that is, I think, that
rehearsing the horrors is often what we are trained to do. But one of
the things I was thinking and then I realized I was thinking incorrectly
was that we need some victories, but the problem is we don’t
communicate our victories; we don’t share the victories; we don’t put
them in the proper context, and that’s one thing that the civil rights
movement did very well. You have a little victory here, and other
people across the state or in some place else would hear about it.
That’s how you build successful movements, and that’s what we also
need to do. We also need to start talking about what does work. Not
just what’s wrong, but what does work, and that way what does work
make that as widely available as the horror stories that are justly
capturing our attention as well.
 CONTRIBUTORS

JOANNE BARKER (LENAPE) is professor of American Indian studies at San

Francisco. She is the author of Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural
Authenticity (2011) and Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist (2021),
and the editor of Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and
Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (2005).
JODI A. BYRD is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and
associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell
University. Byrd is the author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous
Critiques of Colonialism (2011), and their work has appeared most recently
in Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly and in Joanne Barker’s
Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
(Duke University Press, 2017).
LISA MARIE CACHO is an associate professor of American studies at the
University of Virginia. Cacho’s scholarship interrogates the ways in which
human value is both ascribed and denied relationally along racial, gendered,
sexual, national, and spatial lines. Her book Social Death: Racialized
Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (2012) won the
John Hope Franklin award in 2013 for best book in American studies. Her
most recent publications can be found in the Boston Review, Social Text,
and American Quarterly. Currently, she is writing a book examining police
killings in the United States.
MICHAEL DAWSON is John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science at the
University of Chicago, where he serves as the founding director of the
Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. His recent books, Behind
the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (1994) and Black
Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies
(2001), won multiple awards, including the Ralph Bunche Award from the
American Political Science Association for Black Visions. Dawson has
published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces and
is currently finishing an edited volume, “Fragmented Rainbow,” on race
and civil society in the United States, as well as a solo volume, “Black
Politics in the Early 21st Century.”
IYKO DAY is Elizabeth C. Small Associate Professor of English at Mount
Holyoke College. She is currently chair of gender studies and critical social
thought and a faculty member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American
Studies Program. Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization
and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016),
and she coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality
for Temple University Press.
RUTH WILSON GILMORE is professor of earth and environmental sciences, and
American studies, and the director of the Center for Place, Culture, and
Politics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She also serves on the executive
committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the
Americas and the Caribbean. Cofounder of many grassroots organizations,
including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and
the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of
the prizewinning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in
Globalizing California (2007) as well as Change Everything: Racial
Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (2022), Abolition Geography (2022),
and a collection (coedited with Paul Gilroy) of Stuart Hall’s writing on race
and difference (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
ALYOSHA GOLDSTEIN is professor of American studies at the University of
New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of
Community Action during the American Century (2012), the editor of
Formations of United States Colonialism (2014), both published by Duke
University Press, and the coeditor of For Antifascist Futures: Against the
Violence of Imperial Crisis (2022). He has coedited special issues of South
Atlantic Quarterly, Theory and Event, Social Text, and Critical Ethnic
Studies and is completing a book on US colonialism, racial capitalism,
genealogies of Black and Native dispossession, and the politics of law and
redress in the colonial present.
CHERYL I. HARRIS is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the UCLA School of Law. She is the
author of groundbreaking scholarship in critical race theory, including
“Whiteness as Property” (Harvard Law Review), and her work has also
engaged issues of race and Indigeneity. She received UCLA Law School’s
Rutter Prize for excellence in teaching in 2018, and from 2019 to 2020 she
was a Fellow in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton. Current projects
include the revision of the late Derrick Bell’s seminal text, Race, Racism
and American Law (1970), as well as work on the relationships among race,
debt, and property.
KIMBERLY KAY HOANG is an associate professor of sociology and the director
of global studies at the University of Chicago. A central focus of her work
is understanding the gendered dynamics of deal brokering in Southeast
Asia’s emerging markets. She is the author of Dealing in Desire (2015),
which won several prestigious book awards, and Spiderweb Capitalism
(forthcoming). Her prizewinning articles have appeared in a wide range of
journals, including the American Sociological Review, Social Problems,
Gender and Society, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON is an associate professor of geography and
geographic information science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign. His works explore computing technology, capitalism, and the
state. He is author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the
Digital Age (2020).
SUSAN KOSHY is an associate professor of English and Asian American
studies and director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Sexual
Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (2004), which won the
Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. She is coeditor of
Transnational South Asians (2008) and a special feature in PMLA on
“Monolingualism and Its Discontents” (2022). Her articles have appeared in
PMLA, American Literary History, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Boundary
2, Differences, Diaspora, Social Text, and several anthologies. She is
completing work on a book manuscript titled “Manifest Diversity.”
MARISOL LEBRÓN is an associate professor of feminist studies and critical
race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is
the author of Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (2021)
and Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico
(2019), as well as the coeditor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico
before and after the Storm (2019). She is also one of the cocreators and
project leaders for the Puerto Rico Syllabus, a digital resource for
understanding the Puerto Rican debt crisis.
JODI MELAMED is an associate professor of English and Africana studies at
Marquette University. She is the author of Represent and Destroy:
Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011) and has
published in a wide array of journals and editions. She is a coeditor (with
Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy) of a special volume of
Social Text on “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race,
Capitalism” (Spring 2018). Her articles have appeared in American
Quarterly, Boston Review, and Critical Ethnic Studies. She is currently
coauthoring a book with Chandan Reddy titled “Operationalizing Racial
Capitalism: On Liberalism as Command Power.”
LAURA PULIDO is the Collins Chair of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies
and Geography at the University of Oregon, where she studies race,
environmental justice, and cultural memory. She has written numerous
books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano
Struggles in the Southwest (1996); Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical
Activism in Los Angeles (2006); and A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with
Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng) (2012). She has received numerous
honors, including the Presidential Achievement Award from the
Association of American Geographers and Ford and Guggenheim
fellowships.
 INDEX

Page locators in italics refer to figures.

abandonment, capitalistic, 265–66, 269

Ablow, Rachel, 261
abolition, 99; debt after, 101–6, 116n29; emancipation, compensated, 93, 100, 116–17n29,
117n30
“aboriginal title,” 40
abstraction, 15, 315; “bad,” 276; of debt, 95, 97, 100; and nuclear power, 273, 276, 278; of
violence, 14, 17, 21, 95, 97, 273
accumulation: and carceral threat, 91–92; and debt, 95–98, 100, 102, 111–12; through
dispossession, 3–5, 7, 66–67; liberal epistemes, 164; in Milwaukee, 187–89; by nuclear
atrocity, 273; race and reproduction, pivot with, 61–66; through smart technology, 233–34,
239, 242–46. See also primitive accumulation
Act for the Government and Protection of the Indians (1850), 52, 104
Acts to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes, 36, 37–38
“Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen” (Mississippi), 104–5
actuarial tables, 323
administration/administrative power, 14–15, 191–95; administrative consent order (ACO), 108;
infra-legal mechanisms of, 9, 15; “it-gets-done (if-it-can-get-done)” power, 164, 170–71;
law-administration-force continuum, 165, 175, 184; policing as, 15, 18, 19–20, 139–40,
162–70, 182, 184; resisting narratives of, 191–92; “separation of powers,” 165–66;
“therapeutic” apparatuses of, 167, 170, 187
Adoption Act of 1955 (New Zealand), 68
adoption and removal of Indigenous children, 14, 16–17, 61, 68–72, 77, 79n29. See also
Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA)
Adoption Resource Exchange of North America, 69
Africa, 61–63, 262, 323; European scramble for, 271–72; indemnification in US and British
contracts, 325; South Africa, 1, 5, 25n1, 61–62, 78n6
African Americans/Black people: Black geographies, 98, 106–12, 120nn55–56; dispossession
of after slavery, 14, 17, 98–101; and foreclosure crisis, 34–35, 75; partition of heirs’
property/tenancy-in-common, 14, 16–17, 61, 73–77. See also Black politics
Alberta Star mining corporation, 274
Albuquerque, as deadly for Native Americans, 328
Alexander, Neville, 62
algorithms, 21, 232, 236–46, 249n65; algorithmic abolitionist thinking, 21, 245–46. See also
property-assessment software; smart technology; waste management software
Alito, Samuel, 70
allotments, 48–49; General Allotment Act (1887), 16, 36, 45, 48, 61, 73
Althusser, Louis, 64
Amendments to the US Constitution: Fourth, 174; Thirteenth, 46, 91, 101–2, 115n14;
Fourteenth, 36, 46, 49–53, 105; Fifteenth, 47. See also Constitution, US
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 173–74, 215; Wisconsin, 173–74
American Indian Movement, 69
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 326
Amin, Samir, 8
Anderson, Jay, 179
Anglo-Saxon race, consolidation of, 288
Annual Emeryville Shellmound Protest, 34
Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Department of the Interior (1900),
73
Anthropocene, 258, 275–77
Anthropocene project (Burtynsky), 275
anticapitalism, 5–6, 20
anticolonialism, 3, 5–6, 24, 61, 69, 133; Vietnamese protectionism, 139–41, 147, 152
antipolitical framework, 22, 258, 260, 264, 270, 275
antiracism, 167, 321
apartheid, 1, 61–62, 263–64
Appel, Hannah, 325
Appraisal Institute, 237
appropriation, 63–67, 72–73; curation as, 297; of freed people’s labor, 90–91; racialization
required for, 65–66, 100
Araiza, Lauren, 229n31
Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 138
Asian global market capitalization, 131, 137, 137–40, 138
assassinations, 315, 316
asset-stripping, 92, 94, 111
Association of Puerto Rican University Professors, 210
atomic bomb, scalar politics of, 258, 271–74, 276
Atomic Energy Act, 268
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 268–69
“Atoms for Peace” campaign, 259, 269. See also nuclear power
austerity, 92, 98
Australia, denial of Indigenous sovereignty, 72
authoritarianism, and uranium mining, 261–62, 268–69, 274–75
automobility, 267

Baichwal, Jennifer, 275

Balibar, Etienne, 64
Balto, Simon Ezra, 168–69
Barker, Joanne, 7
Barraclough, Laura, 290
Baudrillard, Jean, 55
Belgian Congo, 258–59, 271–72
Benjamin, Walter, 332
Berggruen, Nicolas, 325–26
Bernes, Jasper, 265
Beste, Raymond, 181
Bhabha, Homi, 151
Bhandar, Brenna, 285, 294
Biden administration, 185–86
biopolitical, the, 67, 72, 76, 275
Black Codes, 17, 104–5
Black geographies, 98, 106–12, 120nn55–56
“Black Identity Extremists,” fabrication of, 185
Black Marxism (Robinson), 1, 62–63, 114n11, 243, 321
Black Panther Party (BPP), 313, 315–16; Milwaukee, 180–82, 186
Black politics: Black Consciousness Movement (South Africa), 1, 61–62; Black Liberation
movement, 313; Black Lives Matter (BLM), 93–94; Black Radical Tradition, 63; Black
revolutionary movements, 315; field of, 319. See also African Americans/Black people
Blake, Jacob, 186
Bledsoe, Adan, 244
boarding schools, 68–69
bond issuance, 108–9, 111–12, 118n34
Bonilla, Yarimar, 208–9
border imperialism, 176
bordertowns, 169
“bridge leaders,” 219, 229n31
Briggs, Laura, 70
Brotherhood of Non-Teaching Employees of the University of Puerto Rico, 210
Brown, Jerry, 326
Brown, Michael, 93–94
Brown, Ruth Nicole, 162
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 135
Buffington, Robert, 103
Bunche, Ralph, 319
Burawoy, Michael, 132
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 38, 48, 69
Burke Act (1906), 48
Burnett, Peter H., 52
Butchers’ Benevolent Association, 53–54
Byrd, Jodi, 4, 65

Cacho, Lisa Marie, 19–20, 67, 154n13, 285

Calhoun, Craig, 325
California, 50–53, 91, 103–4; Californios, 299; and Compromise of 1850, 104; Los Angeles,
286, 290, 291, 293, 314–15; realignment of governmental functions, 326. See also Mexican-
American War
Cambodia, 134–35
Campbell, John A., 53
Canada, 34, 68; foreign direct investment, 136–39, 147, 149; uranium mining, 259, 269, 272–
73
Canadian Deline Uranium Table report, 273
capital: geography of, 234, 270; global private and state, 152; inequalities required for, 7, 90;
legal and illegal economies of, 187–89. See also capitalism
Capital (Marx), 63, 278
capitalism: and abandonment, 265–66; Asian global market capitalization, 131, 137, 137–40,
138; and circulation, 11, 140, 164, 166, 275, 277; as colonial relation, 4–5, 7; democracy
undermined by, 22, 37, 55, 162–63, 169, 178, 325–26; dispossession as core feature of, 8,
60; exchange, exploitation, and expropriation, interdependence of, 8, 10, 13; extra-economic
force as central to, 8, 22, 262–63, 267; financialized, 7, 13, 18, 20–21, 170, 322–23; global,
3, 51–52, 131–33, 152, 288; imperialism as enabler of, 285; naturalization of racial
tendencies, 2–3, 97; as racial capitalism, 1–2; real estate, 170, 175, 235; stages, theory of, 2,
5, 8, 25–26n14, 263; twin processes of, 285; violence, relation to, 7–9, 12, 20; white-people,
2, 321. See also capital; colonial racial capitalism; racial capitalism
capital-positing and capital-preserving violence, 8–9, 12, 20
Capitol Security (Puerto Rico), 213–20
care work, 64, 193
Caro, Xiomara (student activist), 216–17, 222, 224
Carrasquillo, José A. Rosa (police officer), 211
Carrera, Rafael, 324
Carter, Bunchy, 315
Carter, Jimmy, 135
Central Pacific Railroad Company, 50
Chakravartty, Paula, 96–97
Charron-Chenier, Raphael, 119n47
charters, 41–42, 44–45, 49
Chauvin, Derek, 160
checkerboarding, 48–49
Child Welfare League of America, 69
China, 133–35; property-assessment software, 234, 239; US rivalry with Vietnam, 138–39,
152
Chochenyo Ohlone, 34–35
Choudhury, Nusrat, 174
cities, 232; European Union, 242; growth of, 264–65; state-capital relations in context of, 234.
See also property-assessment software; smart technology; waste management software
citizenship, 47–48, 50, 102–3, 288
Civil Disobedience (Thoreau), 286
Civil Obedience Act, 186
Civil Rights Act of 1866, 105
Claims Resolution Act (2010), 48
Clark, Mark, 316
climate change, 323–24. See also wastelands
coal extraction, 22, 260–62, 264–66, 268
coercion, 299–300; administrative, 162, 164; compulsion of economic relations, 8–9, 66–67,
264; and debt, 92–94; extra-economic force, 8, 14, 22, 262–63, 267; of labor, 17, 94, 97–
 104, 117n30, 120n61, 271–72, 274; race, relation to, 92–98. See also violence
COINTELPRO repression, 185
Cold War, 259, 269
collective life, 4, 11, 48–49, 98, 159–60
Collins, Booker, 181
colonialism: atom bomb as substitute for, 269; capitalism as a colonial relation, 4–5, 7; First
World/Third World divide, 2, 131–32, 151; franchise, 6, 13; neocolonialism, resisting, 151–
53; Vietnam and legacies of, 133–35, 147. See also colonial racial capitalism; settler
colonialism
colonial racial capitalism, 6–7; administration as dominant form of, 15; and charters, 41–42,
44–45, 49; communities damaged by, 24; and emerging markets, 142, 153–54; framework
of, 7–14; informal economies, 188–91; liberalism as central to, 163; logistics of, 18, 264–69;
necropolitical logic of, 72, 112; policing as enforcement of, 167; and smart technologies,
232, 234; and social reproduction, 10, 13; and waste disposal, 239. See also
administration/administrative power; capitalism; police violence; policing; racial capitalism
“colonial unknowing,” 15, 22, 258–59
“colorblind” law, 70, 95
“Combating Public Disorder” law (Florida), 183–84
commemorations, 15, 21–23, 259; of battlefields, 290–92; and cultural memory, 284–85, 289–
90, 295, 299, 301. See also Mexican-American War
commodities: debt as, 95, 97; racial subordination as, 17–18, 95
commodity form, 22, 278
Communist Party, USA, 320–21
Communist Party of Vietnam, 136, 139, 142
Community Collaborative Committee (Milwaukee), 174
computer-assisted mass-appraisal software (CAMA), 234–38, 244
Concepcion, William (police officer), 212
conceptual art, 88–89, 89, 112–13n1, 113n4, 113–14n6
Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their
Lands (Robertson), 41
“consent,” 102, 163
Constitution, US, 36, 42; contract clause, 42–44; Fugitive Slave Clause, 98, 100; “Indian
tribes” in, 37. See also Amendments to the US Constitution
containment strategies, 208
contract clause, US Constitution, 42–44
contracts: and debt peonage, 102, 116–17n29, 117nn30–31; between Flint and Detroit Water
Sewer District (DWSD), 107–9, 111–12; restrictions on states, 36, 42–44, 48, 50, 56n23
convict leasing and chain gangs, 17, 89, 89–91, 97–98, 102, 105, 115n15
corporations: as “artificial beings,” 45; centralization and entitlement to access tribal lands,
41–45; corporate-federal collusion, 54, 57n32; Fourteenth Amendment rights, 36, 46, 49–53;
global ownership structure, 148, 149; introduction to, 35–37; legal definitions of, 6, 16, 36.
See also tribes
Coulthard, Glen, 4–5, 25n11,14, 60, 263–64
Cowen, Deborah, 274–75
credit, 93, 96–97
“creditworthiness,” 96–97
criminalization: of BIPOC life, 11, 90, 114–15n13, 168–75; of community defenders and those
they defend, 187–91; contemporary laws against protest, 182–84; of debt, 95, 97, 114–
15n13, 116n25, 119n48; of “disposability,” 166–68, 170–71, 176, 183, 185, 187, 191, 208;
of Indigenous peoples, 166–67, 172; of peaceful assembly, 182–83; plea bargains, 177,
198n51; and police discretion, 169–76, 197n20; Public Law 280, 69, 172; regulation of
pregnancy, 65; of resistance, 24; “resisting arrest,” 177, 179–82, 183; role of in world
system, 162; of self-defense and activism against police violence, 176–87; separation
between criminal control and conquest, 166–67; and sexual exploitation of Black women
and girls, 189; sorting people for capitalist care or destruction, 19, 162–63, 168. See also
violence
criminal justice system, structure of, 176–77
cultural memory, 22, 284–85, 289–90, 295, 299, 301
curation, as appropriation, 297
Curtis Act (1898), 48

Datta, Ayona, 243

Dawson, Michael, 15, 23–24, 311–32
Day, Iyko, 21–22
death, premature, 19, 21, 77, 160–61, 167, 176; criminalization of defenders against, 187–91;
as expectation, 166; and waste management software, 241–42, 244
debt, 14, 17–18, 88–128; abstraction of, 95, 97, 100; and accumulation, 95–98, 100, 102, 111–
12; after abolition, 101–6, 116–17n29; as asset, 95–96; asset-stripping, 92, 94, 111; and
Black geographies, 98, 106, 120n56; and bond issuance, 108–9, 111–12, 118n34; and
collectivities, 98; as commodity, 95, 97; “creditworthiness,” 96–97; criminal legal, 95, 97,
114–15n13, 116n25, 119n48; emancipation, compensated, 93, 100, 116–17n29, 117n30; and
enslavement, 98–101; as essential structure and relation, 93–98; as extraction, 95, 106, 112;
and Flint water crisis, 17, 98, 106–12, 122n84; foreclosure, 48, 120n59; fugitives as runaway
capital, 100; incarceration through, 90–91; neoliberal reliance on, 95, 97, 106, 119n42; “new
debtors’ prisons,” 95; “pay to stay” fees, 92, 94; predatory inclusion, 96, 119nn46–47;
predatory lending, 103, 120n53, 315; racial subordination as commodity, 17–18, 95. See also
dispossession; incarceration
debt peonage: Black, 17, 94; convict leasing and chain gangs as, 17, 89, 89–91, 97–98, 102,
105, 115n15; Indigenous, 14, 17, 97, 100–101; Mexican, 102–3; outlawed, 94–95, 118n39
decolonization, 4, 15, 25, 60, 151, 160, 178, 258, 269
Deer, Sarah, 68
dehumanization, 12, 216, 241, 276–77
Deline Land Corporation, 274
democracy, 193, 265; Atomic Energy Commission’s undermining of, 269; bank and
multinational corrosion of, 33, 35–37; capitalism and undermining of, 22, 37, 55, 162–63,
169, 178, 325–26; nation-state as self-reproducing, 325–26; as performance that conceals,
55; welfare, 265, 267
Democratic Republic of the Congo, 271
Deng Xiaoping, 136
Denning, Mark, 159–60, 195n2
De Pencier, Nicholas, 275
depoliticization, 22, 166, 184; of nuclear power, 258, 264, 270
Detroit, Michigan, 315–16; bankruptcy and water crisis, 110–11, 123n90; market-value
assessment software used, 237–38
Detroit Water Sewer District (DWSD), 107–12
developmentalism: and Flint water crisis, 106, 111; and nuclear energy market, 269–70;
reconfiguration of, 3, 131–33, 154n3; and smart technology, 238–39, 243; three racial truths
of, 2–3
Diamond, Kate, 23, 300, 300–301
difference: management of, 15, 163–64, 223; programming racialized, 3, 243–45; regional,
238, 239, 243, 244; and smart technology, 2, 21, 232–33, 236–39, 241–45
“discovery,” doctrine of, 40, 67–68
disposability, 9, 11, 72; criminalization of, 166–68, 170–71, 176, 183, 185, 187, 191, 208;
Puerto Rico, 208
dispossession: accumulation through, 3–5, 7, 66–67; adoption and removal of Indigenous
children, 14, 16–17, 61, 68–72, 77, 79n29; as core feature of capitalism, 8, 60; dispossessive
inheritance, 72–76; land as site of, 11–12; landgrabs, 324–25; as ongoing, 5–6, 16, 25n11,
35–36, 60–61, 239, 263, 274, 286; and property-assessment software, 238–40, 245. See also
corporations; debt; primitive accumulation
Doi Moi program (Vietnam), 136
“Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police,” 178, 191
Doolittle, James Rood, 287
Drake, St. Clair, 327
Du Bois, W. E. B., 101
Duchamp, Marcel, 113n4
due process, 46, 47, 50–51, 75–76, 90, 116–17n29
Dussel, Enrique, 2
Dutch East India Company, 42

East India Company (England), 42

ecology, 17
“economy of illegalities,” 119n48
Ecuador, 324
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 259
Eldorado mine (Canadian Northwest Territories), 272
emancipation, compensated, 93, 100, 116–17n29, 117n30
emergency manager system, 106–9, 111, 122n84, 122n86, 123n90
emerging and frontier markets, 131–58; and colonial racial capitalism, 142, 153–54; foreign
direct investment (FDI), 18, 136–38, 137, 138, 140; mining sector, 134, 141–51, 153;
neocolonialism, resisting, 151–53. See also global financialization; Vietnam
England, 42, 114n11
enlivening, targeting of, 20, 160–61
epistemology, 54
equal protection clause, 47
equal protection of corporations as persons, 49–53
erasure: amnesia, culture of, 289; archival, 10, 15; of dead/past labor, 276–78; forgetting of
imperialism, 286, 289–90; of Indigenous, Black radical, and subaltern epistemologies, 11,
14; of Indigenous labor in uranium mining, 270–74; memorialization of battlefields as, 290–
 92; of non-Anglo technologies, 296; settler replacement of Indigenous populations, 284,
294–95; by social justice movements, 54; three strategies for, 290; of war, 290, 292–93, 299
Escobar, Martha, 226
European civilization, 2; “racialism,” 62–63, 114n11
European Union cities, 242
expropriation, 3–4, 6–14, 25n14, 262; of noncapitalist social forms, 9, 63, 66–67, 263
extraction: coal, 22, 260–62, 264–66, 268; debt as, 95, 106, 112; extractive zones, 10–11, 270;
oil, 260–62, 264–68; of racialized labor, 10–11, 25n14, 97–99, 101–3, 112; of renewable
resources, 264. See also nuclear power; uranium mining
Fabian, Johannes, 271
failure, 277–79
Fanon, Frantz, 151, 285, 330–31
fascism, Paris conference on (mid-1930s), 332
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 185–86, 315
Federici, Silvia, 65
Feeley, Malcolm M., 177
Ferguson, James, 264
Ferguson, Missouri, 93–94
Ferguson, Susan, 64
Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 2–3, 96–97, 243
feudalism, 1, 62, 262, 263
Fifteenth Amendment, 47
Figueroa Sancha, José (Police Superintendent), 212
filius nullius (“nobody’s child”), 16, 67–72
Finally Got the News (movie), 315, 331
financial crisis (2008), 7–8; and Flint water crisis, 110; foreclosure crisis, 33–37, 54, 75;
subprime loan crisis, 15, 17, 96–97; weakness of Western economies after, 137
financialized capitalism, 7, 13, 18, 20–21, 170, 322–23
Firpo, Christina, 68
Fletcher, Robert, 44
Flint, Michigan, water crisis, 15, 17, 98, 106–12; emergency manager system, 106–9, 111,
122n84, 122n86, 123n90; grass-roots activism, 109–10; white distancing, dynamic of, 107
Flint Democracy Defense League, 88, 109, 112
Floyd, George, 11, 19, 160, 178, 179
Flynn, Edward, 173
Forbes, Jack D., 52
Force Publique (Belgium), 272
foreclosure, 48, 119n46, 120n59
foreclosure crisis (2008), 33–37, 54, 75
foreign direct investment (FDI), 18–19, 136–38, 137, 140
Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa (Legassick and
Hemson), 62
Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, 23, 284, 292–96, 294
Fortuño, Luis, 208–12, 220
Foucault, Michel, 119n48
Fourteenth Amendment, 105; rights of corporations, 36, 46, 49–53
Fox6 Milwaukee, 188
fractionated inheritance laws, 16, 48–49, 61, 72–76
France, 133–34, 271, 299
franchise colonialism, 6, 13
fraud, US government, 33, 37, 41; democracy as cover for, 55; land speculation by wealthy
officials, 43–44
Frazier, Darnella, 160
freedmen, and due process clause, 50
“freedom dreams,” 193, 195
free markets, 126, 163, 237, 269–70
French Indochina, 134
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 99, 100, 104
Fugitive Slave Clause (US Constitution), 98, 100

Gabon, 270, 271

Gadsden Purchase (1888), 295
Gandhi, Mohandas K., 261
García, Margaret, 23, 300, 300–301
General Allotment Act (1887), 16, 36, 45, 48, 61, 73
Genesee County, Michigan, 107–9
genocide and genocidal policies: adoption policies as eliminatory appropriation, 72;
depopulation of Indigenous peoples, 101; against Indigenous peoples of California and
Nevada, 52–53; police killings in Albuquerque, 328; sterilization campaigns against
Indigenous women, 68
gentrification, 238, 244, 313
geographic information systems (GIS), 234, 328
geography of human settlement, 264–65
Georgia, 42–44, 46
Giamo, Benedict, 259
Giap, Vo Nguyen, 134
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 2, 13, 90, 91, 94, 115n11, 115n18, 115n20, 232; conversation with
Dawson, 15, 23–24, 311–32; on criminalization, 11, 166, 168
global capitalism, 3, 51–52, 131, 152, 288
global financialization, 62; corporate ownership structure, 148, 149; foreign direct investment,
18–19, 136–38, 137, 138, 140; offshore structures, 133, 136, 141, 148, 152–53; tax issues,
142, 145–47. See also emerging and frontier markets
Global South, 6–7; and property-assessment software, 236, 239; racial capitalism perpetuated
in, 18–19; and waste management software, 240, 243
Golden Gulag (Gilmore), 91
Goldstein, Alyosha, 258
Goldtooth, Tom B. K., 33, 37
Goldwater Institute, 70, 71
Gómez, Laura, 121n71, 288
Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 10–11, 18, 153
Gonzales, Antonio, 179
“good works,” narrative of, 286, 289, 290, 295–96
Gore, Ellie, 10
governmental structure, 326
Gramsci, Antonio, 64
Gray, Freddie, 168
Great Acceleration, 258
Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA), 110–12
Griffin, Demetrius, 195
“grounded relationalities,” 65
Guadalupe, Ana (UPR-RP chancellor), 229n40
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, 257
Halberstam, Jack, 277
Hall, Stuart, 64, 322
Hamilton, Dontre, 179
Hammer, Peter, 107
Hampton, Fred, 316
Han Dynasty, 133
Harris, Cheryl I., 17, 314, 315, 316, 331
Hartman, Saidiya, 93, 114n12, 117n30, 322
Harvey, David, 66–67, 79n27
Hawaii, 51, 54
Haywood, Harry, 320
Heaggan-Brown, Dominique, 186
Hecht, Gabrielle, 260, 270, 271, 273
heir’s property, 14, 16–17, 61, 73–77
Hemmens, Craig, 165
Hemson, David, 62, 78n6
Hiroshima, 22, 257–60, 273, 277–78
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Park, 259
Hixson, Walter, 289
Hoang, Kimberly, 18–19, 321, 325
Ho Chi Minh City, 140
Hochschild, Adam, 272
Holocaust memorials, 289
Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, 238
Horsman, Reginald, 288
House Concurrent Resolution 108, 69
Huggins, John, 315
human sacrifice, violence as, 166, 171
human-trafficking economies, 187–90
Hu Pegues, Juliana, 258
Hurricane Katrina, 75

“I Have a Dream” (King), 88

Immerwahr, Daniel, 284
immigrants, 241–42; displacement of Indigenous peoples by, 53; migrant labor, 3, 8, 62, 64,
169; United States as “nation of,” 284–85
imperialism: border, 176; capitalism enabled by, 285; denialist ideology of, 267–68, 284–85,
289; dependent on community divides, 35; empire as unit of analysis, 9; erasure/forgetting
of, 286, 289–90; French, 271; inter-imperiality, 23; Japanese, 259–60; Mexican, 23, 53;
“new,” 67; as racialized, 285; Spanish, 51–52; of United States, 33, 35–36, 53–54, 67, 139,
176, 267–69, 284–87, 289–92, 295, 299; uranium as motif for, 269. See also settler
colonialism
impersonal politics, 273
improvement, ideology of, 285–86, 288, 294
incarceration, 10–11; of Blacks, 90, 114n8, 114–15n13; convict leasing and chain gangs, 17,
89, 89–91, 97–98, 102, 105, 115n15; and debt, 90–91; dehistoricization and depoliticization
of, 166; of Indigenous people, 172; “pay to stay” fees, 92, 94; “savings” for state, 92, 107–8,
116n22; of social justice workers, 24; state reliance on labor from, 91–92, 117n31, 118n37;
and surplus labor, 91, 94, 115–16n20. See also debt
Ince, Onur Ulas, 8–9
Indian Adoption Project (IAP), 69
Indian Appropriations Bill (1871), 48
Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), 15, 61; settler colonial backlash against, 68, 70–71. See also
adoption and removal of Indigenous children
Indians. See Indigenous communities and peoples; Indigenous lands; Indigenous nations;
treaties with Indigenous peoples between 1778 and 1871; tribes
Indian Territory, 46
Indigenous communities and peoples: adoption and removal of Indigenous children, 16–17,
61, 68–72, 77, 79n29; Albuquerque police killings of, 328; cars targeted by police, 171–72;
considered irrelevant, 47, 51, 54; criminalization of, 166–67, 172; and debt peonage, 14, 17,
97, 100–101; denied right to testify in court, 52; enslavement of, 100–101, 120n61,
121nn64–65; and General Allotment Act, 16, 36, 45, 61, 73; genocidal policies against, 52–
53, 68, 72, 101, 328; labor of, 100–104, 120n61, 270–74; lives of as threat to settler control,
169; Mexican identification as survival strategy, 52–53; in Milwaukee, 159; Mormon
displacement of, 295–96; “nature” used to justify dispossession of, 2–3, 17; and Occupy
movement, 34–35; Public Law 280 used to criminalize, 69, 172; resistance by, 5–6, 11, 159,
183; settler replacement of, 284, 294–95; sovereignty, 16, 39–40, 48, 71–72, 159;
termination and relocation policies, 69; trade rights, 16, 36, 38, 41–42, 44–45, 49; uranium
mining, erasure of, 270–74; and vagrancy laws, 104–5, 121n75; women, 34, 68, 189. See
also Indigenous lands; Indigenous nations; treaties with Indigenous peoples between 1778
and 1871; tribes
Indigenous Environmental Network, 37
Indigenous lands, 4–5; checkerboarding, 48–49; and criminalization, 166–67; and enslavement
of Native peoples, 101; fractionated inheritance laws, 16, 48–49, 61, 72–76; held in trust,
48–49, 69, 73–74; as nonsites, 22, 259, 271, 274; property-assessment software and
dispossession of, 238–40; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 103; uranium mining on, 258
Indigenous nations: Cherokee, 42, 43, 46; Chickasaw, 42, 46; Chochenyo Ohlone, 34–35;
Choctaw, 42, 46; Creek, 42, 46; Ho-Chunk, 160, 198n50; Illinois, 39; Lac du Flambeau
Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, 172; Leech Lake Ojibwe, 160; Menominee, 160;
 Piankeshaw, 39; Potawatomi, 160; Sahtu Dene, 272–73; Seminole, 46; Tongva, 296. See
also tribes
individualism, 72, 301
inequalities, 1–2; adoption policies reliant on, 69–70; caused by smart technologies, 232–34;
and global elite, 131–32; group-based, 7, 65, 235–37, 242, 244; as inputs into production of
social space, 233; required for capital, 7, 90; and social differentiation, 236–39, 241–43. See
also social relations
informal economies, 188–91
inheritance, 16–17; African American tenancy-in-common, 61, 74–75; dispossessive, 72–76;
fractionation of Native landed property, 16, 48–49, 61, 72–76
International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO), 235
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 270
International Center for Non-Profit Law, 183
international law, US violations of, 39–40
intestacy, 74–75
Iraq, US invasion of, 270
Irish workers, upstate New York, 323
Iwasaki, Takahiro, 22, 260, 277–79, 278

Jacobs, Margaret, 68
Japan: fascist imperial regime obscured, 259–60; Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
meltdown, 259, 277, 278; Hiroshima, bombing of, 22, 257–60, 273, 277–78; Nagasaki,
bombing of, 259, 260, 273; nuclear power technology, 259–60, 277. See also Hiroshima
Jefferson, Brian Jordan, 21
Johnson, Thomas (plaintiff), 39, 41
José García (student activist), 221–22

Karegnondi Regional Water Planning Group, 108

Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), 108–9, 111
Karuka, Manu Vimalassery, 169, 258
Katanga (Congo), 272
Kearney, Douglas, 11
Kelley, Robin D. G., 1, 62, 160–61, 265, 274
Keystone XL Pipeline, 34
Kim, Hun, 140–41
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 88, 313
Kinkle, Jeff, 275
knowledge, 327; criminalization of, 11; imperial-colonial narrative, 54; Indigenous, 296;
nuclear order of, 258
Kono, Hideko, 257
Korea, 147
Ku Klux Klan, 46

LaBaron, Genevieve, 10
labor: appropriation of freed people’s, 90–91; coercion of, 17, 94, 97–104, 117n30, 120n61,
271–72, 274; dead/past, 276–78; incarcerated, 89, 89–92, 115–16n20, 117n31; Indigenous,
100–104, 120n61, 270–74; migrant, 3, 8, 62, 64, 169; outside “work” framework, 92, 115–
 16n20; racialized extraction of, 10–11, 25n14, 97–99, 101–3, 112; surplus, and
incarceration, 91, 94, 115–16n20; uranium mining, 261–62, 268, 270–74; work/rest pattern
of colonial racial capitalism, 193
labor movements, 117n31, 265–66, 314; Puerto Rico, 208–11, 227–28n9
land: “aboriginal title,” 40; agency of, 12; artistic visions of, 15; cash-crop economies and
enslavement, 101; checkerboarding, 48–49; landgrabs, 324–25; as life, 4; partition of heirs’
property/tenancy-in-common, African American, 14, 16–17, 61, 73–77; “power of
alienation,” 40–41; “public lands,” 50; relationality of, 6, 11–12; reservations broken into
parcels, 48, 53; “right of way” laws, 46, 50; rural, and property-assessment software, 238–
40, 242, 244; sales and treaties with Indians, 38; and speculation companies, 41–44;
“surplus,” 48–49; trust titles, 48. See also Indigenous lands; landscapes; ownership;
property; public space (stolen land); wastelands
landscapes: commemorative, 15, 23, 291, 301; economic value of, 21, 239–41; energy and
logistical, 22, 276–78; rural and Indigenous as backward, 238. See also wastelands
Latin America, computerized valuation in, 236–37
law: “colorblind,” 70, 95; domain of, 9; English common law, 285; international, US
violations of, 39–40; law-administration-force continuum, 165, 175, 184. See also
administration/administrative power
Lawless, Katherine, 258, 260
League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 313, 315
LeBrón, Marisol, 20, 318, 329
Lee, C. K., 321–22
Left, reformist, 24, 320–21
Legassick, Martin, 25n1, 62, 78n6
Lelinski, Thomas, 181
Le Loi, 133
Leopold II of Belgium, 271–72
Leveler (Extension) Rings for Manhole Openings (Rowland), 89, 89–93
Leverette, Earl Walter, 181
Levin, Daniel, 165
Lewis, Pierce, 301
liberalism: as capitalist worlding praxis, 20, 162–64, 185, 191; “freedoms,” 162–63; liberal
rights regime, 18, 93; as thick, enduring episteme, 163–64
Litwack, Leon, 318
logistics, 18, 264–69; chains of disassociation, 275, 277, 278; queer art of logistical failure,
274–79
“looting,” white obsessions with, 198n55
Lora, Ricardo Olivero (student activist), 210
Los Angeles, 286, 290–91, 314–15; lynchings, 293. See also commemorations; Mexican-
American War
love: importance of for lasting change, 217; resistance as, 162, 177–78, 192–95
Lugo, Pedro (student activist), 222–23
Luina, Alexander (police officer), 212
Luxemburg, Rosa, 8, 63–64, 67, 78n12, 262–63

Magrath, C. Peter, 42
Malesky, Edmund, 140
Malin, Stephanie, 268
Manard, Jeff, 53
Manhattan Project, 260, 272–73
manifest destiny, 103, 286, 290, 295–99
Manifesto of the Azanian People, 61–62
“mano dura contra el crimen” (Puerto Rico), 208, 215, 222
Mao Zedong, 134–35
Markusen, Ann, 317, 327
Marshall, John (Chief Justice), 39, 42
Martínez, Rafael Boglio, 208–9
Marx, Karl: challenges to thinking of, 1, 3, 66; on past labor, 278; production/reproduction,
view of, 63–64; on “silent compulsion of economic relations,” 66. See also Black Marxism
(Robinson); primitive accumulation
mass politics, 267
Mayes, Vaun, 186–95
McBride, Antwann, 194–95
McClinton, Clare, 88, 109, 112
McCulloch, Neil, 140
McElroy, Erin, 238
McIntosh, William (defendant), 39, 41
McKittrick, Katherine, 120n55
McMillan, Uri, 113n5
McWilliams, Carey, 296
Melamed, Jodi, 7, 11, 18, 19–21, 232
memory, cultural, 22, 284–85, 289–90, 295, 299, 301
Metropolitan Transit Authority (at Campo de Cahuenga site), 23, 300
Mexican-American War, 6, 102–3, 284–307; Anglo-Saxon race, consolidation of, 288; Battle
of the Rio San Gabriel, 291, 291–92; Campo de Cahuenga, 23, 296, 297–300; Catalina
Verdugo Adobe, 296–97, 298; counternarrative of, 300–301, 301; and debt, 103; goals of,
287; as imperialist, 286–88; La Mesa Battlefield/Battle of Los Angeles, 292, 293; Los
Angeles, role in, 286, 290–93, 291, 293, 294; Mormon Battalion, 295–96; narrating in five
scenes, 290–301; negotiating peace, 296–301; and public commemoration, 21–23, 289–301;
as racist, 286–88; remembering, 289–90; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 52, 103, 286, 288,
290, 296; violence against civilians, 290–91; and white supremacy, 285, 288, 289. See also
commemorations
Mexicans, classified as whites, 52, 288
Mexico: borders prior to war, 287; imperialism of, 23, 53; slavery outlawed (1829), 287; War
for Mexican Independence, 102
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), 108
Michigan Municipal League, 123n90
Middle East, and shift to oil, 266–67
military aesthetics, 275–76
Miller, Samuel Freeman, 54
Milwaukee (settler-named), 20, 159–60; Black Panther Party, 180–82, 186; block-party
protest, 191–95; human-trafficking economies and capital accumulation, 187–89; police
 violence in, 160, 168–69; Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homeland, 160; Sherman
Park 2016 uprising, 186–87; uprisings, 20, 159–60, 179
Milwaukee County Courthouse and County Jail, 192–95
Minh, Ho Chi, 133
minicuarteles, 222–23
mining industries: coal extraction, 260–62, 264–66; oil extraction, 260–62, 264–68; Vietnam,
134, 141–51, 153, 154n14. See also uranium mining
mission system, 297
Missouri Compromise of 1850, 104, 116–17n29
Mitchell, Timothy, 264–67
Mobilo, Isaiah, 272
modernity, 22–23, 164, 167; military aesthetics, affinity with, 275–76; nuclear, 257–59, 262,
271, 273–74, 277; twin processes of, 285
Mohanty, Chandra, 131, 154n3
monopoly power, 268–69
monopsony power, 268–69, 269–70
Monroe Doctrine, 299
Moore, Shirley Ann, 104
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 72
Morgan, Jennifer, 64–65
Mormon Battalion, 295–96
mortgages, 120n59; backed by enslaved persons, 99–100; subprime loan crisis, 15, 17, 96–97;
and tenancy-in-common property, 74–75
multiculturalism, neoliberal, 167, 170, 196n14, 237

NAACP, 314
Nagasaki, 259, 260, 273
Nagle, Rebecca, 72
Nast, Heidi, 4
National Association of Black Social Workers, 70
National Forum (South Africa), 61–62
national security rhetoric, 135, 245, 267–68
nation-state, 9, 19, 42, 169, 239, 325–26
Native Lands Act (South Africa, 1913), 62
naturalization: of inequalities, 1–2; of racial tendencies, 2–3, 97
nature, manipulation of, 294–95
Nazis, 272, 332
necrocomputation, 242
necropolitical logic, 72, 112, 275
neocolonialism, resisting, 151–53
neoliberalism, 4, 15, 18, 66, 152; carceral forms of, 92; debt as central to, 95, 97, 106, 119n42;
multicultural, 167, 170, 196n14, 237; nuclear, 269–71; in Puerto Rico, 208, 210, 212, 227–
28n9
neoslavery, 92
Netherlands, 42
neutrality, claims of, 15, 21, 164; and debt, 90, 95, 96
New England Mississippi Land Company, 43–44
New Orleans, Slaughterhouse lawsuits, 49–53
Newsome, Bree, 289
New York City, 237, 244, 247n22
New Zealand child removal policies, 68
Nguyen, Nhi Ba, 153
Nguyen, Tu, 139–40
Ngwane, Trevor, 244
Nhat, Nguyen Duc, 140
Nichols, Robert, 5, 166–67
91020000 (Rowland), 89, 89–92, 115n18
Nitty II, Frank (Frank Sensabaugh), 182, 192–95, 198n59
Nixon, Rob, 17
noncapitalist social forms, expropriation of, 9, 63, 66–67, 263
nonsite/nonsight, 22, 259, 271, 274, 277
Noonan, Jacqueline, 123n90
nuclear power, 257–83; as antipolitical/depoliticization of, 22, 258, 264, 270, 275; atomic
bomb as substitute for colonial power, 269; and colonial power of logistics, 264–69;
international regulation, 270–71; Manhattan Project, 260, 272–73; nuclear exceptionalism,
260, 261, 274; nuclear neoliberation, 269–71; nuclear unconscious, 261; periodization of,
257–58; and primitive accumulation, 261–64, 265, 269, 274, 277; scalar politics of atomic
bomb, 258, 271–74, 276; slow violence of, 258; technopolitics, 22, 258, 260, 261, 264, 279;
weapons, 260–62, 268–75, 277. See also uranium mining
Obama, Barack, 138, 257–58
Occupy Oakland, 33–35
“Occupy Talks: Indigenous Perspectives on the Occupy Movement, The” symposium, 37
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, 15, 33, 54–55
O’Connor, Reed, 71
offshore capital structures, 133, 136, 141, 148, 152–53
oil extraction, 260–62, 264–68
Omnibus Act (1910), 48
1 percent, 33, 54–55
one-third world and two-thirds world, 131–33, 154n3
Ong, Aihwa, 234
Organización Socialista Internacional, 221
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 268
Out of Disorder (Cosmo World) (Iwasaki), 22, 277–79, 278
ownership, 61, 285; aboriginal titles, 40; global structure of corporations, 148, 149; partition
of heirs’ property, 14, 16–17, 61, 73–77; possession held in abeyance, 76; trust titles, 48. See
also land; property

pacifist politics, 259

Pan Africanist Congress, 1
pandemic of 2020, 24
Paro Nacional del Pueblo (People’s National Stoppage), 209, 210
“partition,” 232
Patrick, Monica Lewis, 110
peaceful assembly, attempts to criminalize, 182–83
Peck, John, 44
Peck, Raoul, 273
Pember, Mary Annette, 172, 173
People’s Army of Vietnam, 134
Pérez Reisler, José “Osito” (student activist), 211
Perkins, Selcy, 189–90
persons, 45–53; equal protection of corporations as, 49–53
Phillips, Jasmine, 190
Piper, Adrian, 112–13n1, 113n4, 113–14n6
Podesta Group, 138–39
police violence: and antiracism, 167; containment strategies, 208; criminalization of self-
defense and activism against, 176–87; as depoliticized counterviolence, 183, 199n61;
doubled victimization, 216; Guardian database on, 328; “Indian killers,” police as, 169;
killing with impunity, 19, 162–69; Milwaukee, 160, 168–69; normalization of, 198n55, 207;
policing as violence work, 19, 161–71, 175, 177–78; recursivity of with law, 166, 175, 184;
“resisting arrest,” 177, 179–82, 183; “saturation patrols,” 174; at University of Puerto Rico,
206–8, 211–16, 219–27; uprisings against, 20, 93–94, 159–60, 178–79; as visible hand of
collective settler violence, 160. See also administration/administrative power; violence;
violence work
policing: as “above the law,” 166; as administrative power, 15, 18, 19–20, 139–40, 162–70,
182, 184; and debt, 93; defunding efforts, 184–85, 199n67; discretion, used to criminalize,
169–76, 197n20; discretion as “not random,” 173–74, 176; flexibility of, 169–71; illegal
arrest, 165, 181; law-administration-force continuum, 165, 175, 184; “law and order,” 165,
167, 171, 183, 187, 188, 191; narratives of, 182, 191; and prosecutors, 166, 177;
“reasonable” mistakes, 172–73; “reasonable suspicion,” 166, 172–75, 181, 198n47; specific
activity of, 167; stop-and-frisk programs, 173–76; on the street and in real time, 167–68,
170; “transparent,” 15; Uniform Arrest Act, 165–66, 185, 197n20; as visible hand of the
market, 21, 161
Polk, James K., 286
Pol Pot, 134–35
Pope, James Gray, 115n14
Port Radium (Canada), 272–73
possibility, conditions of, 4, 7
post-Allotment period (1887–1934), 16
postcolonial countries, 151; cadastral systems, 21, 235, 236–37, 238. See also smart
technology; Vietnam
Prashad, Vijay, 322
predatory inclusion, 96, 119nn46–47
predatory lending, 103, 120n53, 315
primitive accumulation, 4–5, 8–9, 18, 25n1, 25n11, 25–26n14, 66, 262; abandonment, forms
of, 265–66, 269; and coal energy, 264–66; fueling, 261–64; and nuclear power, 261–64, 265,
269, 274, 277; as ongoing, 5, 8, 14, 63–64, 67, 262–63, 269, 274, 277; “so-called,” 4, 8, 14,
61, 63, 66–67, 262. See also accumulation; dispossession
privileges and immunities clause, 54
Process Is the Punishment, The (Feeley), 177
progress narrative, 164, 257–58, 265, 296
property: chattel slavery as system of, 99; debt as, 95; English common law forms of, 285; as
exchange value, 234, 236–37; global markets, 238; individual, regime of, 73–74; liberal
concept of, 93, 97; racial property regimes, 285, 290; transfer of vs. transformation into, 5;
Vietnamese market, 140; whiteness conflated with, 95, 97. See also land; ownership
property-assessment software, 15, 21, 232–33; computer-assisted mass-appraisal software
(CAMA), 234–38, 244; dispossession through, 238–40, 245; and gentrification processes,
238, 244; and real estate professionals, 235; as redlining software, 234–36; and rural land,
238–40, 242, 244; submarkets, 235, 244; and taxation, 238–39, 244; US firms, 234–35, 236;
“value influence centers,” 237. See also smart technology
prosecutors, 166, 177
“public lands,” 50
Public Law 280, 69, 172
public space (stolen land): celebration of BIPOC social life on, 192–95; criminalization of BIPOC
activities on, 168–69, 171. See also land
Puerto Rican Civil Rights Commission, 215
Puerto Rico, 20, 206–31; disposable populations, 208; labor movement, 208–11, 227–28n9;
Ley 7 (Public Law 7), 208–9; mano dura era, 208, 215, 222; Monte Hatillo and Manuel A.
Perez public-housing communities, 222–23; Paro Nacional del Pueblo (People’s National
Stoppage), 209; police violence against marginalized groups, 207–8, 221–22; public
employment, 208–10; racialized and classed representational practice, 213; Villa Cañona
(Loíza), 213–16; zonas calientes, 214
Puerto Rico Daily Sun, 207
Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD), 211–12
Pulido, Laura, 21–22, 23
queer art of failure, 277–79

race: accumulation and reproduction, pivot with, 61–66; coercion, relation to, 92–98; multiple
views of, 152; not synonymous with skin color, 2
racial capitalism, 285, 314, 316; Black women, dependence on, 9–10; capitalism as, 1–2;
colonial capitalism as, 7; and reformist Left, 320–21; in relation to reproduction, 61;
scholarship on, 320–22, 329; social reproduction of, 60–87; South African origin of term, 1,
5, 25n1, 61–62. See also colonial racial capitalism
Racial Capitalism conference (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2019), 311
“racialism,” 62–63, 114n11
racialization, 4, 23, 162–64, 242, 313, 324
Racial Justice Program (ACLU), 174
racial property regimes, 285, 290
racism, 193; as core feature of capitalism, 1–2, 61, 63, 76, 90, 93, 114n11; environmental, 241;
institutionalized, 218; in Puerto Rico, 208, 218–19; without capitalism, 322
Radio Huelga (Strike Radio), 210
railroads, 46, 50–53, 287
Ramírez, José Laguarta, 228n10
Ramírez, Roberto José Thomas, 214
real estate capitalism, 170, 175, 235
Reconstruction period, 14, 17, 45, 46–49
Reddy, Chandan, 6, 18, 196n17
Red Nation Rising (Bordertown Violence Working Group), 169
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, 139
regional difference, 238, 239, 243, 244
regulatory opacity and transparency, 140–41, 144
renewable energy sources, 264
reproduction: accumulation and race, pivot with, 61–66; adoption and removal of Indigenous
children, 16–17, 68–72, 77, 79n29; always-contingent politics of, 65; “productive” work vs.,
10; simple and expanded, 63. See also social reproduction
Republicans, and Yazoo Land Act of 1795, 43
Reséndez, Andrés, 100, 121nn64–65
resistance: algorithmic abolitionist thinking, 21, 245–46; block-party protest, 191–95;
decriminalization of self-defense, 162, 179–80; effectiveness of small acts, 192; by
Indigenous communities and peoples, 5–6, 11, 159, 183; by the land, 12; living life as, 168;
love as, 162, 177–78, 192–95; as loving action, 162, 177–78, 192–95; Milwaukee uprisings,
20, 159–60, 179; to narratives of colonial racial capitalism, 163–64, 191–92; to
neocolonialism, 151–53; pintata (“paint-in”), 206–7, 224; possibilities for, 13–14; redressing
capitalism, 322; revolutionary movements, 180–82; social justice movements, 24, 54–55,
328; victories, communicating, 332; to violence work, 19–20, 176–87. See also University
of Puerto Rico student strikes; uprisings
Rethinking Marxism Conference (UMass Amherst), 317
Reyes, Wayne, 160
Rhodes, Alexandre de, 133
Rice, Condoleeza, 326
“right of way” laws, 46, 50
rights: equal protection of corporations as “persons,” 49–53; liberal rights regime, 18, 93; trade
rights, 16, 36, 38, 41–42, 44–45, 49
Rio Declaration of Environment and Development (1992), 243
riots, redefinition of, 183
Ritchie, Andrea, 171
Rivera Clemente, Maricruz, 215
roads, 295–96
Roberto, Giovanni (student activist), 214, 216–19, 225
Roberts, Dorothy, 65
Roberts, William Clare, 263
Robertson, Lindsay G., 41
Robinson, Cedric, 1, 23–24, 114n11, 243, 262–63, 317, 319–20, 321; “racialism,” 62–63
Rodríguez, Benjamin, 215–16
Rodríguez, Dylan, 196n14
Rosselló, Pedro (governor), 208
Rowland, Cameron, 89, 89–93, 113n4, 113–14n6, 115n18, 331
rubber, coerced production of, 272
Safransky, Sara, 237
Sahtu Dene laborers, 272–73
Sandefur, Timothy, 71
San Francisco, computer-driven dispossession, 238
San Gabriel Mission, 297
San Gabriel River, 291
Saudi Arabia, US payments to, 267
savings, vs. profit, 92, 107–8, 116n22
Scalia, Antonin, 88, 90
scandal, 54–55
scarcity, manufactured, 266–68
Scarry, Elaine, 261, 274
Schermerhorn, Calvin, 99
scholarship: Black studies, 25–26n14, 315, 327; feminist social reproduction theory, 64–65;
and graduate students, 326–28; Indigenous studies, North American, 4–5; political
economy/science, 317–19, 326–27; racial capitalism, study of, 320–22, 329
Seamster, Louise, 119n47
Seigel, Micol, 195n7
Sekula, Allan, 275, 276
settler colonialism, 13, 15–17, 77, 120n59; apartheid states, 1, 61–62, 163–64; children, taking
and trafficking of, 68; denial as central to, 289; dispossessive regimes of accumulation, 3–5,
7, 66–67; “good works,” narrative of, 286, 289, 290, 295–96; improvement, ideology of,
285–86; initial conceptions of, 62; mission system, 297; reactionary backlash against
reforms, 68, 70–72; replacement of Indigenous populations, 294–95; of South Africa, 1, 5,
61–62; transition, narratives of, 289–90, 296, 299; of United States, 7, 60–61, 285–87. See
also colonialism; imperialism; Mexican-American War
sex-trade economies, 189–90
Shariff, Nayyirah, 109, 110
Shesky, Rusten, 186
Shinkolobwe (Democratic Republic of the Congo), 271
shipping, 266
Shoemaker, Jessica, 74
Silicon Valley, 313–14
Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard), 55
Singh, Nikhil, 65, 242
Sino-French War, 133
Sino-Vietnamese War (Third Indochina War), 135
Slaughterhouse cases, 49–51
slavery: afterlives of as ongoing in United States, 67, 92, 101–2, 114n12; in Belgian Congo,
272; children, market in, 68; and debt, 98–101; dispossession after, 14, 17, 98–101;
financialization of enslaved Black body, 100; Indigenous peoples, enslavement of, 100–101,
120n61, 121nn64–65; Mexico outlaws (1829), 287; neoslavery, 92; surrogacy/slavery nexus,
65; Texans’ desire for, 287
slow violence, 17, 22, 258
smart technology, 15, 232–54; accumulation through, 233–34, 239, 242–46; beyond algorithm,
245–46; market-value assessment (MVA) software, 237–38; “platform urbanization” rhetoric,
 237; programming racial difference, 3, 243–45; and racial inequality, 233–34; regional
difference, 238, 239, 243, 244; self-monitoring and reporting technology (SMART), 233; and
social differentiation, 21, 232–33, 236–39, 241–45; used to combat discrimination, 237;
value determinants, 236–37. See also property-assessment software; technopolitics, colonial;
waste management software
Smith, Neil, 234
Smith, Sylville, 179, 186
Snyder, Rick, 107, 122n84
social justice movements, 24, 54–55, 328
social media, 24, 212, 214, 220
social movements, 47, 210, 217, 330
social relations: and “forgetting,” 286, 289, 290; inequalities as inputs into, 233; production
and conservation of, 64; scarcity as defining feature of, 266–68; of uranium, 268. See also
inequalities
social reproduction, 9–10, 60–87; and 1887 General Allotment Act, 16; as dialectical relation,
76–77; as embodied, 10; feminist theory of, 64–65; “productive” work vs, 10. See also
reproduction
“society,” Westernized, 6
solidarity, 206, 217, 246; building coalitions, 226–27; with community leaders, 220–21; of
Puerto Ricans with students, 20, 223–24
South Africa, 1, 5, 25n1, 61–62, 78n6
sovereignty: and allotment policy, 73; denationalization of state, 151; Indigenous, 16, 39–40,
48, 71–72, 159; US, as counter-sovereignty, 169; Vietnam’s reassertion of, 19
Soviet Union, 135, 136
Spain, 51–52, 101
Spanish-American War, 51–52
“Spanish fantasy” myth, 296–97, 298
spatial dynamics, 2; Black geographies as wasteland, 98, 106, 120n55; of capitalism, 63;
denial of coevalness, 271; erasure of dead or past labor, 276–78; smart governance
algorithms applied to, 21, 242, 244
speculative logic, 143, 151
Standing Rock uprisings, 183
Stanford University, 314
“state of nature,” 39
statues of colonizers, removal of, 284, 289, 301
Stop and Frisk: Balancing Crime Control with Community Relations, 173
strikes, 265–67. See also University of Puerto Rico student strikes
structural adjustments, 315
student movements. See University of Puerto Rico student strikes
subprime loan crisis, 15, 17, 96–97
Summers, Larry, 323
supply-chain management, 274–75
Supreme Court decisions, 56n12, 56n23; Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 88; Adoptive
Couple v. Baby Girl, 70; Brackeen v. Bernhardt, 70–71; Cobell v. Salazar, 48; Dred Scott v.
Sandford, 116n29; Fletcher v. Peck, 36, 42, 44; Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 36, 39–42;
 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 36, 45–46, 50–51, 53;
Slaughterhouse cases, 49–51; Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 36, 44–45
surplus labor, and incarceration, 91, 94, 115–16n20
“surplus” lands, 48–49, 73, 91
“surplus” populations, 3, 8, 11, 94, 115n18
surplus value, 63
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 96, 119n46, 120n56
Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America-College Retirement Equities Fund
(TIAA-CREF), 324–25
technopolitics, colonial, 258, 261, 279; as antipolitical/depolitical, 22, 258, 260, 264, 270, 275;
“highly classified” authority, 269. See also smart technology
terra nullius, 16, 67–68, 296
Theft Is Property! (Nichols), 5–6
Thirteenth Amendment, 46, 91, 101–2, 115n14
Thomas, Clarence, 70
Thoreau, Henry David, 286
Toscano, Albert, 275, 276–77
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000), 190
transitions: of African Americans from chattel to constitutional citizens, 102–3; to carceral
neoliberal forms, 92; from coal to oil to uranium, 22, 261–68, 271, 274–75; from convict
leasing to chain gang, 89–90, 115n15; police budgets rerouted, 183–84, 199n67; settler
narratives of, 289–90, 296, 299; shift to oil, 266–67; socialist, in Vietnam, 136. See also
Mexican-American War
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 19, 138–39
treaties with Indigenous peoples between 1778 and 1871, 36, 37–40; Cherokee removal treaty
of 1835, 43; and Indian Appropriations Bill of 1871, 48; international law violated by US,
39–40; and land-development companies, 41, 42–43; suspension of, 39–41, 45; US violation
of, 39–40, 52
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 52, 103, 286, 288, 290, 296
Treaty of Paris (1783), 39
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968), 269
Tree of Califas (Garcia and Diamond), 23, 300, 300–301
tribes: considered irrelevant in constitutional law, 47, 51; as corporations with limitations, 54;
introduction to, 35–37; legal contortion of Indigenous nations into, 41; legal definitions of,
6, 16, 36; and persons, 45–53; rearticulated as legal and economic structure, 45; as sovereign
nations, 39. See also corporations; Indigenous communities and peoples; Indigenous nations
Trivedi, Somil, 177
Trudeau, Justin, 139
Truman, Harry, 273
Trump, Donald, 19, 138–39
Trump administration, 185
Trung sisters, 133
trust titles, 48
Turner, John Kenneth, 101
Tyler, John, 286
Uniform Arrest Act, 165–66, 185, 197n20
Uniform Partition of Heirs Property (2010), 75–76
Union Miniere de Haut Katanga, 272
Union of Radical Political Economists, 317
United Nations, 235
United States: afterlives of slavery as ongoing in, 67, 92, 101–2, 114n12; Army’s leveraging of
Mormons, 295–96; child removal policies, 68; China, rivalry with, 138–39, 152; corporate-
federal collusion, 54, 57n32; denialist imperial ideology of, 267–68, 284–85, 289; and
forced Congolese labor, 272; forgetting of social relations, 286, 289, 290; genocidal policy
against “Indians,” 52–53, 68, 72, 101, 328; global capitalism, plunge into, 51, 52;
imperialism of, 33, 35–36, 53–54, 67, 267–69, 284–87, 289–92, 295, 299; Iraq, invasion of,
270; manifest destiny narrative, 103, 286, 290, 295–99; and oil extraction, 266–67;
Reconstruction period, 45, 46–49; sacrifice zones for uranium mining, 268–69; settler
colonialism of, 7, 60–61, 285–87; southern economy, 91; statehood denied to Arizona and
New Mexico, 288; state restrictions on contract-making, 36, 42–44, 48, 50, 56n23; treaties,
violation of, 39–40, 52; treaties between 1778 and 1871, 36, 37–38; white settlers, 287. See
also Amendments to the US Constitution; Constitution, US; fraud, US government; treaties
with Indigenous peoples between 1778 and 1871
unity fires, 159–60
universalisms, 258, 259, 276
Universal Studios, 297, 300
universities, as space for revolutionaries, 330–31
University of Puerto Rico (UPR): ban on political protest on campus, 220–22; board of trustees,
212–13; hierarchies of power at, 218; installation of police on campus, 219–23; medical
school, 211; police removed from campus, 224; police violence at, 206–8, 211–16, 219–27;
política de no confrontación (nonconfrontation policy), 211, 213, 219, 224; proxy violence
at, 212–20
University of Puerto Rico student strikes, 20, 206–31; April 21, 2010 to June 21, 2010, 207,
210–12; December 7, 2010 to March 7, 2011, 207, 213–20, 224, 229n40; arrests of students,
222–23; community leaders’ statement, 220–21; fragmentation of student movement and
missed opportunities, 224–26; private security guards called in, 211; radical opposition from
streets, 208–10; social media images, 212, 214, 220; solidarity with Puerto Ricans, 20, 223–
24; student reification of policing structures, 208, 214–15, 226; student reification of racist
and classist concepts, 208, 210, 214–19, 225–26
unknowing, colonial, 15, 22, 258–59
uprisings: criminalization of, 182–83; Milwaukee, 2020, 182; against police violence, 20, 93–
94, 159–60, 178–79; Standing Rock, 183. See also resistance
uranium: enrichment of, 268; as motif for imperial power, 269; “nuclearity” of, 270; as
“peaceful,” 259, 269–70; rebranded by “Atoms for Peace” campaign, 259, 269; social
relations of, 268; tailings, 268
uranium mining: in Belgian Congo and Canadian Northwest Territories, 258–59, 271–72;
cancers caused by, 273–74; Indigenous labor, erasure of, 270–74; labor regimes, 261–62,
268, 270–74; parallel with authoritarianism, 261–62, 268–69, 274; sacrifice zones, 268–69;
sanitized memory of, 273–74; uranium as source of military and electrical power, 268. See
also mining industries; nuclear power
urbanization. See smart technology
USS Maddox, 134

Vagrancy Act, 104–5

vagrancy laws, 104–5, 121n75, 122n80
value, as relational category, 285
Van Cleve, Nicole Gonzalez, 177
Van Wagenen, Michael, 295
Vélez Soto, Waldemiro (student activist), 224
Vietnam, 133–54; annual economic growth, 137; approvals and licensing, 145–46, 150; China
and US as rivals in, 138–39; corruption alleged in, 147, 149–50; “cowboy days” of, 143–45;
Doi Moi economic program, 136; elections, 144–45; foreign direct investment in, 18, 136–
38, 137, 138, 140; government officials, negotiations with, 143–47; government’s
perspective, 147–51; legacies of colonialism, 133–35, 147; mining sector, 134, 141–51, 153,
154n14; as modern “El Dorado,” 142–43; postwar market economy, 136–38, 137, 138; as
protectionist anticolonial state, 139–41; Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, 134. See also
emerging and frontier markets
Vietnam War (Second Indochina War), 134, 313–14
violence, 2, 6–9, 118n34; abstraction of, 14, 17, 21, 95, 97, 273; capitalism’s relation to, 7–9,
12, 20; capital-positing and capital-preserving, 8–9, 12, 20; decriminalization as, 226;
decriminalization of self-defense, 162, 179–80; against “deserving” groups, 14, 208, 226;
enlivening of BIPOC, targeting of, 20, 160–61; as human sacrifice, 166, 171; against middle-
and upper-class students, 20, 207–8; proxy, 212–20; romanticization of, 23; slow, 17, 22,
258; social, 167; sorting people for capitalist care or destruction, 19, 162–63, 168. See also
coercion; criminalization; police violence; violence work
Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Blackhawk), 53
violence work, 19–20, 161–71, 175, 177–78, 195n7; killing with impunity, 19, 162–69; by
loiceños, 216; in real time, 167–68, 170; recursivity of, 166, 175, 184; resistance to, 19–20,
176–87. See also violence
visual art, 15, 22, 260; aerial images of war landscapes and energy wastelands, 275–76; “bad
abstraction,” 276; conceptual, 88–89, 89, 112–13n1, 113n4, 113–14n6
Voting Rights Act, 122n86
Voyles, Traci Brynne, 259
“wages for housework” movement, 64
Waite, Morrison, 51
Wall Street, 54–55, 208
war: battlefields, 290–92; erasure of, 290, 292–93, 299; Sino-French War, 133; Sino-
Vietnamese War, 135; Spanish-American War, 51–52; Vietnam War, 134, 313–14; “war
capitalism,” 13; war-finance nexus, 269. See also Mexican-American War
Warner, Sam B., 165, 197n20
Washington, George, 42
wastelands, 18, 239–41; aerial images of, 275–76; Black geographies as, 98, 106; Flint,
Michigan, as, 106–7; nonurban territories, enrolling of, 240–41; “Not in My Backyard”
movements, 242; nuclear, 6, 22, 258–60, 271–74, 276; wastelanding, 18, 259, 271; “waste
markets,” 242
waste management software, 15, 21, 232–33, 239–43, 248n40; cost-benefit analysis, 240, 243;
and informal sector, 243, 249n65; and rural land, 240, 242; and social differentiation, 241–
43; US firms, 240, 243. See also smart technology
Water You Fighting For?, 109
Way, Heather, 75
Ways, Melissa, 109
Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 65
welfare democracy, 265, 267
We the People of Detroit, 110
White, Jesse Lee, 181
whiteness, 95, 132, 196n14, 288; “looting,” obsession with, 198n55; territorialized, 170;
“white empathy” as path to Black liberation, 193; white-people capitalism, 2, 321
white supremacy, 23–24, 285, 288, 313; benevolence and “good works,” narrative of, 286,
289, 290, 295–96
“Why Black Marxism, Why Now?” (Kelley), 160–61
Williams, Yohuru, 180–81
Wilson, Darren (police officer), 93, 179
Wilson, James, 43
Wisconsin: State v. Houghton, 172–73
Woods, Clyde, 24, 92, 317
working class, 63, 95, 209–10, 215, 321
World Bank, 243
worlding praxis, 161–64, 185, 191
World Trade Organization (WTO), 136–37
Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 151
Wright, Willie Jamaal, 244

Yazoo Land Act of 1795, 43

Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic—The Case of the Fetcher v. Peck (Magrath), 42
Yazoo River area (Georgia), 42–43
Yoneyama, Lisa, 258, 259, 274
Young, Brigham, 295
Zatz, Noah, 92, 115–16n20, 116n25
Zayas, Abner Y. Dennis (student activist), 209
Zoellner, Tom, 271
Zuboff, Shoshana, 245
Zuccotti Park (Liberty Plaza), Manhattan, 33–34