“Let’s take another example of the powder- versus crack-cocaine distinction, in which the same drug is punished differently at the federal level. Because the two drugs are chemically identical, there shouldn’t be any distinction between how their use and sale is punished. In 2010, the law made it so that these two drugs were punished the same, although the Obama administration isn’t in any hurry to make the abolition of this distinction retroactive so that the mostly black and brown people who are locked up because of it will get released. But the legal abolition of this distinction is not essential for us to look at. What is essential is why that distinction was made in the first place. Wilderson’s work suggests that, for civil society, black people pose a threat that has nothing to do with the chemical content or the social and cultural effects of crack. Simply by being associated with black people, crack is seen as 100 times more threatening than is powder cocaine. The financial and social costs of locking all those black and brown people up and the financial and social costs of allowing all those white people to go free and continue to sell does not really matter to civil society. What the powder- versus crack-cocaine distinction shows is the desire to contain the threat that blackness symbolizes. This is the mark of libidinal economy.
Cops, soldiers, firemen are considered sexually desirable because they become the heroes of civil society. The Oscar Grant shooting. Amadou Diallo was a victim of a extreme kind of violence because of the phobias that converged on his body. What is the exchange? Civil society has an anxiety about crime, and crime is always attached to black in urban areas. Police don’t have to get a monetary award, but they get the gratitude of civil society. How does this play out in ways that don’t have to do strictly with money? The desire for them may not show up in the amount of money they make. Cops get rewarded for their aggression. When the cop slammed dude into the glass at BART. Prison guards, thought of as having the toughest beat on the planet. They get rewarded for being the last line of defense against George Jackson.
Oscar Grant was an accumulation of aggression and phobias. Why are the black people Prince George’s County, Maryland, segregated from white people in their same socioeconomic bracket with the same kinds of high-value real estate, and the same kinds of political-economic values? Living around white people has a value that cannot be explained in strictly monetary terms.
AFDC benefited mostly white single mothers, and enjoyed a long history of support from 1936-the 1960s. It initially excluded black people. By the 1960s, when black people started getting it, attitudes changed toward it, making it seem like it was undeserved and a drain on national prosperity, and by 1984, when Ronald Reagan referred to “welfare queens in Cadillacs,” it was clear that AFDC was “a black thing.” In actual statistical terms, it was still used mostly by white women. But once it became associated with poor black women, it was seen as in need of drastic, radical reforms.”
http://cosmichoboes.blogspot.com
This my good people is what is at stake when we talk about anti blackness and even the politics of respectability…
Civil society has an anxiety about crime, and crime is always attached to black in urban areas.
Civil society has an anxiety about wanton sex and wanton sex is always attached to black in urban areas.
insert teen pregnancies
insert HIV/AIDS
insert just about any “social ill” of america, poverty..all get attached to black bodies even if it isnt necessarily true..that DOES NOT MATTER..
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
Toni Morrison
(via howtobeterrell)
this is one of the realest quotes i’ve read and everyone should read it and know that shit.
(via strugglingtobeheard)