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Presentness
No full textTypically, the structures of consciousness in how we experience time—or the broader phenomenological question of temporality—divide said experience into past, present, and future. These distinctions are not self-evident; rather, they are shaped by politics, institutions, society, economy, and so forth. Indeed, in his expressed engagement with historical materialism, Walter Benjamin claims that history—as one such structuring of temporality—is neither ideal nor causal, discrete nor universal, determined by the past nor exclusive to the future. Rather, it is a living process of present-future-pasts folding in on themselves. And a “real state of emergency”—recall that he wrote Theses on the Philosophy of History in early 1940 in France, where he was living in exile, having escaped Hitler’s Nazi regime—lays bare this fold of history, for its temporality is one that disrupts the anticipatory relation to the future as a type of progress and with it also the normalization of injustice as a necessity in history.
The critical temporality Benjamin proposes resists the notion that the past can be understood exclusively in the precise moment in which it is recognized (frozen as an eternal image). In other words, historical moments are often naturalized, petrified as objective elements of our reality, and this reification—or estrangement from the totality—mirrors the logics of commodity fetishism. The task, in turn, is to illuminate how history is not a congealed “thing” and thus release its existence as process so that we may see ourselves in the totality of history rather than merely as its reified products. This critical temporality is an imperative that makes clear our agentive relation in creating the possible. This active sensing of the temporal, as it were, is where I turn my attention. I offer this meditation on presentness as an epistemological horizon, drawing on my work on both the ephemerality of performance and its politicized relationship to the US-Mexico border
Recognition and Reparations Reconsidered: Lessons from Germany
No full textRacial justice in the United States, and indeed throughout the Americas, can be achieved only by addressing and rectifying the wrongs done in the past to the descendants of African slaves. This is so because under conditions of free market competition, past inequalities and disparities in wealth and asset holding tend to be reproduced and even reinforced in the present. As the US economist Fred Hirsch has shown, under free market conditions, there is no catching up with those who entered competitive markets earlier or with more assets. The benefits of addressing past wrongs with policies of material reparations and symbolic recognition can be understood by comparing the United States to Germany, which has not only paid reparations to Holocaust survivors and the descendants of Jewish slave laborers but also outlawed any public display of any symbols glorifying the horrors enacted in the past
Unexpectedness: “What the Music Could Be”—Revisiting the Unexpectedness of Jim Pepper
No full textThe concepts of expectation, anomaly, and unexpectedness that Philip J. Deloria developed in Indians in Unexpected Places (2004) have shaped a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects. In the process, those terms have changed the ways it is possible to think about American Indian representation, cosmopolitanism, and agency. This article revisits my own work in this area and provides a short survey of related scholarship in order to reassess the concept of unexpectedness in the present moment and to consider the ways my deployment of it might change in order to better meet the needs of my students. To begin a process of engaging intergenerational perspectives on this subject, the article concludes with an interview with Dr. Jacob E. Perea, dean emeritus of the Graduate College of Education at San Francisco State University and a veteran of the 1969 student strikes that founded the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University
Automated Border Control: Criminalizing the “Hidden Intent” of Migrant Embodiment
No full textI argue that we are entering an automated era of border control that I label a border-biosecurity industrial complex. Funded in great part by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), scientific research and automated surveillance technologies promise the state innovative and supposedly unbiased solutions to the challenge of border control and security. This article spotlights a border surveillance technology called AVATAR (Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessment in Real-Time).
Analyzing this technology, which was funded by the DHS and developed by faculty at the University of Arizona’s National Center for Border Security and Immigration (BORDERS), allows me to assess how the emphasis on novel technologies to detect terrorists unleashes the search for ubiquitous surveillance devices programmed to detect deviant behavioral and physiological movements. I offer a wider view of this technology-in-the-making by analyzing how university research in aerial defense, the psychology of deception, the life sciences, and computer engineering influences the development of surveillance devices and techniques.
I explore how, during a posthuman era, automated technologies detect and racialize “suspect life” under the guise of scientific neutrality and supposedly free from human interference. Suspect life refers to the racial bias preprogrammed into algorithms that compute danger or risk into certain human movements and regions such as border zones. As these technologies turn the body into matter, they present biological life as a more scientifically verifiable truth than human verbal testimony, moving border control from the adjudication of law through the subjective interview to the automated body that speaks a truth more powerful than a complex story can tell
Sustainable Spaces, Sustained Mass Incarceration: Environmental Protection as Racial Violence in the Design of Juvenile Incarceration
No full textThough scholars of racial capitalism have separately analyzed mass incarceration and environmental racism as state-sanctioned racial violence, few have put these two seemingly disparate topics of study in direct conversation. Yet tracking “sustainability” in the designs of an environmentally friendly juvenile detention facility reveals that state-subsidized corporate mechanisms of environmental protection are fundamental to racialized mass incarceration in the United States. In the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center in San Leandro, California, building designers constructed a juvenile court, social services center, and jail that all met the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold Standard for sustainable construction practices put forth by the US Green Building Council. In this carceral space, however, the ideals of sustainable building design obfuscate the role of racial capitalism in sustaining the punitive regulation of Black and other nonwhite youth through incarceration
The Pennsylvania Prescription Drug Monitoring Program: Reducing the Misuse of Prescription Opioids
Get PDFIn 2016, 4,642 Pennsylvanians died from a drug overdose and 85% of these deaths were due to an opioid overdose (U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy 2017). With a 37% increase in deaths from 2015, the Commonwealth’s response to this epidemic has come from several fronts. One valuable resource has been the modernization and implementation of Pennsylvania’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). PDMPs are state-run programs that record dispensing of most controlled substances and provide this data to physicians and pharmacists (among others) to inform their practice about possible opioid use disorder by a given patient. This article discusses the role of Pennsylvania’s PDMP in patient care and law enforcement to reduce opioid overdoses in the Commonwealth. Recent evidence is discussed that demonstrates the effectiveness of state-run PDMPs and their impact on opioid misuse and prescribing patterns. It is important to note that additional research into the effectiveness of PDMPs in preventing opioid-related morbidity and mortality is needed
Prophets and Profits of Racial Science
No full textIn this response to Terence Keel and John Hartigan’s debate over the social construction of race, I aim to push the discussion beyond the terrain of epistemology and ideology to examine the contested value of racial science in a broader political economy. I build upon Keel’s concern that even science motivated by progressive aims may reproduce racist thinking and Hartigan’s proposition that a critique of racial science cannot rest on the beliefs and intentions of scientists. In examining the value of racial-ethnic classifications in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, I propose that analysts should attend to the relationship between prophets of racial science (those who produce forecasts about inherent group differences) and profits of racial science (the material-semiotic benefits of such forecasts). Throughout, I draw upon the idiom of speculation—as a narrative, predictive, and financial practice—to explain how the fiction of race is made factual, again and again.
Race and the Epigenetics of Memory
No full textIn my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions.