the 'citizen'

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter stands as a testament to the evolution of black civil organization being championed and centering the experiences of the most vulnerable populations within the racial community. Black Lives Matter follows in this transformation of traditional revolutionary politics. The movement holds no official leader, there is no central spokesperson, the chapter structure disaggregates cohesive choice in political action, and centers the needs of black women, trans folx, queer people, and the disabled. “BLM’s #WhatMatters2020 will focus on issues concerning racial injustice, police brutality, criminal justice reform, Black immigration, economic injustice, LGBTQIA+ and human rights, environmental injustice, access to healthcare, access to quality education, and voting rights and suppression,” is the what matters of “black lives matter.” While noble and expansive this movement is one that seeks to reckon the aforementioned extensions of the ‘citizen’ to the periphery of black folks whose existence is the basis of state antagonism. As further solidification, the movement is registered as an “Inc.” which is to prove their status as a formal organization and their choice of maintaining activism through legitimate, valid forms of civil disobedience. Moreover, the recent protests while understood by many in a variety of evaluations of radical to reformist, the usurpation of the once publicly denouncing call of ‘Black Lives Matter” is being used as prop for capitalist commodity share, political spectacle, and perverse form of cultural presentation. What radical principle, even if truly representing a revolutionary aim be properly commodified? While recuperation is rampant post-political demonstration, this particular form of rampant movement of this concept from a fringe leftist rallying call for black nationalists, this definite co-option of these principles as in commercials, products, political staging, and other representations of state show of power is profoundly a case for the inability of this concept to any longer to be seen as revolutionary. Inhabiting the Foucauldian notion of the plurality of resistances Black Lives Matter effectively and consistently appeals to the importance of intersectional political aims. Yet, the basis of their work can only be understood as raising awareness through state sanctioned means of dissent, with the ultimate goal of becoming full subjects of a more inclusive ‘citizen’ not far from its oppressive origins. 

Disturbingly, the maintenance of an overarching theme as the salient representation of all of its chapters and those who take its affirmation, even in spectacle or advertisement, adheres all associated bodies to the totality of Black Lives Matter. Such a universalist approach is limiting and fails to realize the importance of entropic organizing that builds upon itself, does not enforce Foucault’s notion of bureaucracy as anti-revolutionary. Recognition of the inherent contradiction of this form of revolution of the ‘citizen’ for non-white folks, and other productions of state antagonism asserts that there is no making of the ‘citizen’ for these members of society under a state system. “To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power,” is impossible as the very inception of the movement of Black Lives Matter was the death of someone deemed ‘criminal,’ ‘threatening,’ and having no ability over their own mortality. This devoid of power in the state system disallows any member of periphery, especially black folks to be  “posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.” The death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor affirm in their relinquishing of the explicit ability to live, and the lifetime of socializing them into positions that solely erode their choice, agency, and autonomy. In this recognition, it can be understood that from birth the life of the antagonist of the state is in a process of slow, burning death. No battle against for criminal justice, equal rights, voting rights, employment, etc., will ever accomplish the feat of extending itself fully, as the shortness of this right to its ‘citizen’ is only accessible as a status with the death of periphery. What rights would there be to extend if black and brown folks already had them? There is no existence of the prison, welfare, pharmaceutical exploitation, without the overrepresented in prisons, unemployment, fatal medical conditions, and all those other measurements of life? 

Such questions further prove that the ‘citizen’ is not only impossible for the black community, but is the parallel counterpoint to which the rights are maintained as a privilege separate from that which is to not have the rights or privileges: the second-class status of black persons. As the inception point and greatest measurement of sustained death within the productive life-death binary, slavery was the ultimate institution of  economic enterprise that required and needed a carceral apparatus to continually dehumanize the motives and facets of the international, capitalistic regime. Arun Saldahna, quotes theorist Christina Sharpe’s assertion that “blackness is a hole in human ‘being’ itself, the reduction of a part of humanity to thinghood.” This notion of the limiting humanity of the black body under this system defines blackness as a fabrication antithetical to whiteness and through this fabrication the human self is eroded until it fully assumes its role as a thing. No ‘thing’ could be a person or member or ‘citizen’ of the society in any push of policy, activism, protest, or resistance. Sharpe is understood by Saldanha to continue in this line of thought, abstracting this event of mass colonization followed by racialized, chattel slavery “not as a past event but the anchor of the structure of (Euro- American) society, which is in itself ‘antiblack’ in that it is premised on the total suppression of black subjecthood.” Formulating the entire international system, as quoted by Robinson, as inherently ‘anti-black’ establishes an indisputable reality of the axiology, epistemology, and ontology of white supremacy as merit for ‘citizen,’ and the whole of the totality of the currency of access or agency to life being a racial production. Under this global system the status of rights, legitimacy, humanity, and value of existence is predicated on one’s distance and distinction from blackness. This exponentially separating paradigm cements black people and blackness as the source product of the state, and where it does not exist or make itself known, as the power to subjugate others to a definition of life over death. 

Moreover, the inability for Black Lives Matter to ever serve as an adequate movement to liberate the impossible and nonsensical welcoming of the periphery into the center’s ‘citizen.’ Invoking the paramount experience of those active in this work, the compelling account of the Cincinnati chapter of Black Lives Matter affirms the lack of transformative principle of the movement,  we can no longer use or identify with the name Black Lives Matter — a rally cry that still has meaning, even if perverted by those pushing it as a brand… The continuous shift towards electoral and liberal Democratic Party politics and away from revolutionary ideas is too great. The consequences for Black, brown, and poor people are too great.” The criticism is not solely the commodification of black death for corporate gains and political legitimacy, it is the perversion and life of what Black Lives Matter stands for that is cause for greater concern. Following both the conception of the Spectacle and evolution of ‘diavolution,’ Brighenti describes this form of radical capitalism as such, “Revolutionary images and symbols are routinely expropriated to nostal- gic militants and appropriated by advertisement and merchandizing, becoming part of the ongoing deterritorialization and subsequent reterritorializations which constitute the quintessential movement of capitalism.” The Cincinnati chapter continues in the vein of espousing the co-optive nature of the branded notion of “Black Lives Matter” functioning in traditionalist and structuralist manners, similar to former revolutions but more importantly, how this practice is similar to state action: “BLM is a small fraction in a larger pie of the Black liberation movement, nationally. There are many organizations and individuals doing work with no affiliation to BLM and with many different names. All the powerful sacrifices of autonomous families and groupings around the country are continuously attributed to works of BLM.” Cincinnati’s belief in the plurality and multiplicity of movements as sovereign is an important reality to affirm here, as it further functions to uphold the importance of entropic, non-centralized motions of resistance.