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THERE IS SOMETHING ORGANIC TO BLACK POSITIONALITY THAT MAKES IT ESSENTIAL to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot
establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.
In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class),
but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental antiBlackness.
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The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal
Frank B. Wilderson, III
doing some work and found this article. this is like basically the entire premise of my paper and the point i want to make in response to this book the two reconstructions which discuss the strengths of the second and the failures of the first (first being 1877 times and second being 1964 voting rights time). the second reconstruction is considered a success but there is immense black disenfranchisement still. frank b wilderson breaks down so much shit but ugh, i have to find a way to use this to critique political sociological type stuff -_-
(via
strugglingtobeheard)