The dead zone: Stumbling at the crossroads of party politics, genocide, and postracial racism

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 108, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 459-481

  James, Joy ^a,b  

^a WILLIAMS COLLEGE   (United States)

^b UT ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 68549133340     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2009-003     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. These divergent lines intersect out of necessity. There is a shared condition of "blackness" as alienated and suspect in a white-dominated state and society. The intersection is often jarring, for there is no shared ideological narrative or political will to confront this alienation. I do not assume that the reader agrees that U.S. policies have historically promoted racial genocide. Perhaps, as a friend and colleague has observed, only the "extreme Left" would use this terminology. Even the Kerner Commission report on civil rights and civil disturbances and riots, a report that would be considered "radical" by today's political norms, did not issue that charge. This failure of recognition could be critiqued as part of the ideology of nationalism or as an expression of genocide itself: if it does not exist, then we are innocents. Elsewhere I have discussed the UN Convention on the Prevention and Elimination of Genocide and racial bias in U.S. domestic and foreign policy. See Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
2. William Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951)
3. For analyses of conditions that are relevant to the United Nations' definition of genocide against blacks in the United States, see the following: Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008)
4. Dorothy E. Roberts, The Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002)
5. Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
6. João H. Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); and
7. Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Harlem Moon, 2008). For those who disdain or refuse the term genocide, despite the compatibility of black conditions with the standards of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Elimination of Genocide, one must ask, "What language would you use?"
8. Tragedy fatigue is a term used in 2006 by a BBC correspondent to refer to black Aboriginal men who raped an infant who then had to be stitched together after the assault. The correspondent coined the term to reference genocidal violence inflicted on the indigenous population and the recycling of that violence among the same population generations later. No mention was given to the state's continual violence against Aboriginal Australians. Phil Mercer, "Abuse Rife at Aboriginal Camps," BBC, May 16, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4984986.stm
9. That Bill and Camille Cosby's son was murdered in the 1990s while changing a car tire in Los Angeles (the killer was an Eastern European immigrant) and that Bill Cosby himself has been accused of multiple sexual assaults on women appear to have not penetrated the consciousness of television, university, and community hall interviewers or audiences attending lectures promoting his book coauthored with Alvin Pouissant, Come On, People. See William H. Cosby Jr. and Alvin F. Pouissant, Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007)
10. For additional information on these areas of social decline, see South End Press Collective, What Lies Beneath: Race, Katrina, and the State of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007); Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org (accessed October 28, 2008)
11. and Dorothy E. Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002)
12. "Obama's Speech in Berlin," transcript, New York Times, July 24, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/us/politics/24text-obama.html
13. See also "Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race," National Public Radio, March 18, 2008, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId= 88478467
14. United Nations, "Convention on the Prevention and Elimination of Genocide," A/Res260 A (III), December 9, 1948; available from www.un.org/Depts/dhl/resguide/resins.htm (accessed November 7, 2008)
15. Vargas, Never Meant to Survive, x
16. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905)
17. Hillary Clinton Web site, http://clinton.senate.gov/issues/women/ and http://clinton.senate.gov/issues/civil/ (accessed November 4, 2008)
18. Barack Obama Web site, "Civil Rights," http://origin. barackobama.com/issues/civil- rights (accessed November 6, 2008)
19. "Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Howard University Convocation" (speech delivered at Howard University, Washington, DC, September 28, 2007), www.barackobama.com/2007/09/28/remarks-of-senator-barack- obam-26.php (accessed November 5, 2008)
20. Barack Obama Web site, www.barackobama.com
21. Daniel Henninger, "Obama and Race," Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2008
22. Michelle Obama's more moderate and mollified language and the accompanying visual images increasingly evoke the more comforting image of the fictive Claire Huxtable, who presents the more suitable demeanor of a First Lady, even one who is black. Zillah Eisenstein has written extensively on race, feminism, and controversy concerning Michelle Obama. See Zillah Eisenstein's writings online at www.ithaca.edu/zillah/projects.htm (accessed October 28, 2008)
23. Bruce Dixon, "African America-Mass Incarceration," Black Agenda Report, February 20-26, 2008
24. See the online Sentencing Project reports at www.sentencingproject.org (accessed October 28, 2008)
25. "Text of Cheney-Edwards Debate: Vice President and N.C. Senator Clash in Cleveland," CBS News, October 5, 2004, www.cbsnews.com/stories/ 2004/10/05/politics/main647570.shtml
26. James, The Black Jacobins, x
27. Analyzing the Thirteenth Amendment, which codifies enslavement to the prison industry, I argue this position at length in "Introduction: Democracy and Captivity," in The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, ed. Joy James (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), xxi-xlii
28. For a discussion of "multicultural white supremacy," see Rodriguez, Forced Passages; and
29. Joy James, "Democracy and Captivity."
30. During the 2008 primaries, Brown University's Web site proclaimed that Hillary Clinton led Rhode Island in votes. Brown gained national recognition in 2001 with the appointment of the first black president to head an Ivy League university. "R.I. Survey: Clinton Leads Obama in Democratic Presidential Field," Brown University, September 10, 2007, http://news.brown.edu/ pressreleases/2007/09/clinton-leads-obama
31. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (New York: Feminist Press, 1982)