Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America (Religion and Race) 1793626790, 9781793626790

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Politics of Death in the Arche of the American Experience
2 The Necropolitics of Social Death and Statecraft
3 Beyond the Death-Bound-Subject
4 Necropolitics and Juridical Power
5 The Eschatological Production of Mass Incarceration
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Necropolitics

Religion and Race Series Editors Monica R. Miller, Lehigh University Anthony B. Pinn, Rice University The local/global connections between religion and race are complex, interrelated, ever changing, and undeniable. Religion and Race bridges these multifaceted dimensions within a context of cultural complexity and increasing socio-political realities of identity and difference in a multi-disciplinary manner that offers a strong platform for scholars to examine the relationship between religion and race. This series is committed to a range of social science and humanities approaches, including media studies, cultural studies, and feminist and queer methods, and welcomes books from a variety of global and cultural contexts from the modern period to projects considering the dynamics of the “postmodern” context. While the series will privilege monographs, it will also consider exceptional edited volumes. Religion and Race seeks to impact historical and contemporary cultural and socio-political conversations through comparative scholarly examinations that tap the similarities and distinctions of race across geographies within the context of a variety of religious traditions and practices. Titles in the Series Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America, by Christophe D. Ringer A Qualitative Study of Black Atheists: “Don’t Tell Me You’re One of Those!,” by Daniel Swann Hope to Keep Going: Caring for the Mental Health of Black Men, by Nicholas Grier Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968, by Jonathan Chism Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion, by Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States, by Eric Weed The Power of Unearned Suffering: The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Theodicy, by Mika Edmondson

Necropolitics The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America Christophe D. Ringer

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ringer, Christophe Darro, author. Title: Necropolitics : the religious crisis of mass incarceration in America / Christophe D. Ringer. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2020] | Series: Religion and race | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036288 (print) | LCCN 2020036289 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793626790 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793626806 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Discrimination in criminal justice administration--United States. | African American prisoners. | African Americans--Effect of imprisonment on. | Religion and culture--United States. | Marginality, Social--United States. Classification: LCC HV9950 .R554 2020 (print) | LCC HV9950 (ebook) | DDC 261.8/33608996073--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036288 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036289

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 2 3 4 5

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The Politics of Death in the Arche of the American Experience The Necropolitics of Social Death and Statecraft Beyond the Death-Bound-Subject Necropolitics and Juridical Power The Eschatological Production of Mass Incarceration

21 35 67 91 115

Conclusion: Beyond the God of Necropolitics

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Selected Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many. I am grateful for the faculty and staff of Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS). CTS continues to be a rare environment that values excellence in scholarship as well as commitments to social justice. I’m also thankful to the CTS students whose passions continue to inspire and questions continue provoke. The project began in Nashville, Tennessee, at Vanderbilt University. I owe a debt of gratitude to my advisor Victor Anderson who demanded my best through our many “creative exchanges.” In addition, Volney Gay, Ellen Armour, Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Lewis Baldwin contributed to shaping this project and encouraged me to follow my questions. Many thanks to this community that also shaped me in many ways including Emile Townes, Herbert Marbury, Melissa Snarr, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Jimmy Byrd, Marie McEntire, Sha’Tika, Charles Bowie, Asante Todd, Tamura Lomax, Michael Brandon McCormack, Keri Day, Monique Moultrie, Nichole Phillips, Amy Steele, Tamara Lewis, Tyson Lord Gray, Angela Cowser, Jin Choi, Andrew Krinks, Dante Bryant, Malik Saafir, Woodrow Lucas and many others. Finally, the support and experiences gleaned from serving Howard Congregational (UCC) during that time have also shaped my thinking in numerous ways. I also want to thank Michael Gibson for showing interest in the project and finding a home for it at Lexington Press. And much appreciation to Mikayla Mislak and Becca Beurer for shepherding the project along and to Anthony Pinn and Monica Miller for placing this project in the Religion and Race series. Thank you to the peer reviews who made this a stronger work. And a big thanks to Jeremy Rehwaldt for the editorial assistance. Thank you Sekou Franklin and Lisa Guenther for providing additional avenues for vii

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thinking about the relevance of this work. Thank you to Rhonda Brown for the incredible cover art. A big thank you to Michael Fischer Jr. for his critical comments and suggestions on chapter 5. To the organizations that continue to labor for a vision of a world beyond mass incarceration day in and day out: A Just Harvest, Community Renewal Society, and Workers Center for Racial Justice and the Coalition to End Money Bond. Thank you for all that you do. Thank you to Trinity United Church of Christ and Rev. Otis Moss III for providing spiritual sustenance week in and week out. To my mother Phyllis Ringer-Taylor who always knew “I could do it.” I am truly grateful for all you have done in my life. To my fathers Darryl Ringer and Hycel B. Taylor II, I miss you both dearly. A big thank you to David Ringer for taking an interest in his little brother. To my cousin Paul “Del” Butler, thank you for modeling fierce scholarship and social action. To my fam, Legertha Butler Walton, Kimberly Butler, Judith Bailey, Thomas Anthony Holloway, and Timothy Allen, for always being a cheering squad. Finally, to my wife, Kimberly Peeler-Ringer, who lived with this project for years and in different cities. Thank you for your love, encouragement, patience and for being on this life journey with me.

Introduction

On October 16, 1995, I was standing at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in the midst of a sea of people at the Million Man March. Amid the many speakers that day was the Rev. Jesse Jackson. With his characteristic oratorical brilliance, he informed a national and potentially global audience of the racial disparities lodged in the punishment structure for crack and powder cocaine. As American citizens, we could no longer claim ignorance of the fact that possession of five grams of the form of cocaine known as crack warranted a mandatory five years in prison, whereas it would take five hundred grams of powdered cocaine to receive the same sentence. At that moment, America held just over one million people in state and federal prisons. I was confident that the widespread exposure of such an arbitrary and unjust sentencing structure would impact the War on Drugs and the rates of incarceration. I was profoundly mistaken. As of 2020, nearly 2.3 million people reside in America’s jails and prisons. 1 In addition, 4.5 million people are on probation, bringing a total of seven million persons under criminal justice supervision. 2 This book is an investigation into the emergence and persistence of mass incarceration in American life. The questions that animate this book began while I was attending the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. During that time, I had the opportunity to visit Danville Correctional Center and hear the experiences of the men there. As I listened, many of their stories prompted me to think about the systemic nature of the War on Drugs. Hearing how some of them were providing labor for companies they could not work for when released raised more questions. And hearing the heartbreaking story of a father whose son arrived at the facility gave me a sense that our communities were caught in a larger social issue I couldn’t piece together.

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At the time I was also struggling with the powerful worship experience of the black church in which I was raised where “God Is Control.” However, that control did not appear to line up with many of the social problems facing black communities. I eventually found my way to Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, essentially on a search to try to find connections between theology and social justice. During that time I also had an opportunity to do my field education at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison. There were many experiences there that affected me in deep ways. Seeing someone being lowered into a baptismal pool with chains on their hands and feet or watching the Passion of the Christ with men on death row stretched me. I also was still asking how this became normal. And, if religion had any resources for me to understand it such a process. After acquiring more questions than answers, I stuck around for graduate school. At the time I also served as the pastor of a local church, Howard Congregational (UCC). Over time, a number of members opened up to me about their experiences with family members who were incarcerated. In addition to their pain, there was also genuine puzzlement and agonizing questions about how those dear to them ended up in the system. In addition, I also had an opportunity to visit local jails and engage in activism around private prisons and “ban the box” campaigns. The research for this book began as an effort to piece through what seemed to be an ever-expanding issue with more tentacles than one could hope to comprehend. The research for the book began with trying to understand what drives mass incarceration. My hope is that this book has contributed something to that end. The explanation of the rise of mass incarceration has been addressed by various disciplines ranging from law and sociology to cultural studies. 3 The result has been a rich debate that has occasioned phrases such as “The New Jim Crow,” “Neo-slavery,” “Prison Industrial Complex” and the power of the 13th Amendment. I do not take such debates to be trivial. How we understand what kind of social issue mass incarceration is has a significant impact on how we address it. These various descriptions indicate a need to clarify what kind of social formation mass incarceration is from those it resembles from previous historical eras. This book enters into this conversation from the standpoint of religious studies to discern the aspects of mass incarceration that are historically perennial and those that are contingent. I will argue that the religious depth of American culture is a racialized hope that secures the future and flourishing of predominantly white communities by sacrificing black life through criminalizing and animalizing in times of crisis. As such, this book departs from the familiar “slavery to prison” narrative and begins with an analysis of execution sermons. It is here that the religious and cultural logic of mass incarceration reveals itself as the religious depth of American culture. Moreover, this religious and cultural logic is co-present in

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the workings of the American political economy marked by global capitalism that is our religious situation. To evidence this claim, this book’s method cuts across several strands of thought in religious studies and critical theory. METHODOLOGY The Arche of Our Religious Situation: Charles H. Long and Paul Tillich In his groundbreaking book Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, distinguished historian of religion Charles H. Long advances new understandings of religious consciousness. Moving beyond Mircea Eliade’s account of religious consciousness as arising in the interaction and exchanges with the natural world, Long argues that the realities of Western expansion, colonialism, mercantilism, slavery and genocide constitute a new arche. The arche of the American experience is its religious sense, its “depth and resource,” the unrepeatable generative moment that when touched provides for new beginnings. 4 This powerful depth dimension of the American experience, the arche, simultaneously conceals its violence toward blacks and Native Americans. 5 As such, the American narrative is often told as a matter conquering, expansion, and exceptionalism. For Long this story “hides the true experience of Americans from their very eyes” and the “inordinate fear they have of minorities is an expression of the fear they have when they contemplate the possibility of seeing themselves as they really are.” 6 This depth that is hidden manifests itself or is revealed in moments of cultural crisis. Such moments represent a repetition of the original compromise over slavery, the meaning of black freedom and freedom within the American political community. And such moments are reoccurring. The key moments of crisis where the arche is disclosed can be discerned in the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Civil War (1860s) and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements (1960s and 1970s). 7 At each historical juncture he argues that the “American Revolution is aborted and clever priests of our national language and apparatus, skillful in the ways of ritual purity and manipulation, come upon the scene to ensure the repetition of the American ritual.” I argue the mass incarceration of predominantly black and brown people reveals the arche, the repetition of the compromises and generative violence of American political community. This presents a particular methodological challenge: how to justify the relevance of the religious meanings that constitute the arche of America’s founding for mass incarceration. The argument presented here does not trace the presence of the arche through every cultural crisis in American history. Rather, I want to show key moments that provide evidence of enduring religious meanings that are critical

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to our understanding of the rise of mass incarceration. Moreover, such understandings are important for developing an adequate religious critique and response. And developing such a response would be consistent with what Long calls a theology of freedom. The possibility of a theology of freedom drawn from the American experience is dependent upon three criteria. 8 First, America must free itself from its superiority complexes in relationship to Asia and Africa as well as its inferiority complex in relationship to Europe. 9 Thus, the American experience itself is sufficient to ground an American theology. This possibility also rests upon America’s capacity to appreciate the contributions of non-Europeans to its own heritage. The second is the emphasis upon the immediacy of the American cultural experience through which theological issues are discussed. 10 Long’s concern is that if American theologians solely draw from the European sources, a profound disconnect arises with the concrete religious communities in which they either participate or are for whom they are charged to prepare leaders. The third is the meaning of a visible black community in America that is consistently rendered invisible in the discussion of American religion. 11 For Long, the presence of the black community means more than a need to address issues of race as a moral or political dilemma. Rather, the presence of a black community represented a history that American religious historians and theologians had concealed from themselves. Long’s reflections were written in the aftermath of the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In addition, his argument that “murder, relentless and impassive, has been a perennial trait of American experience,” is often rendered silent in the story of America. 12 For Long, this is the demonic side of the American experience and its persistent relationship to the black community raises critical interpretive and theological questions. In Long’s thematizing of the formative aspects of religious understanding in the American experience, the Puritans and the Jeffersonians are ideal types. 13 He argues that the Puritan “errand in the wilderness” “was in following the biblical paradigm of a place of retreat from the world for prayer and reflection upon divine meanings” and a paradise that was “overflowing with divine meanings.” 14 In addition, this is the place where the American aborigine was encountered as a “wilderness creature that, like the wilderness itself, must be conquered.” 15 I argue that this deep religious sense is an influential part of an American imaginary that ties the future of the political community, the “City on the Hill,” with the subjugation of those considered to be in the wilderness or the state of nature. The Puritan religious meanings within the arche of the American experience formed a powerful complex of meanings that linked God, cosmos, race, crime, society, eternal life and eternal judgment. The religious and cultural meanings I argue survive and mutate, form-

Introduction

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ing a web of meaning that necropolitics recruits to legitimates mass incarceration. The American prison population is a product of governance supported by social agreements of the American political community. It is the preeminent means through which individuals are physically constrained and concealed from interacting with the social world. More importantly, as Angela Davis argues, the American political community has relied on prisons to conceal from its view profound social problems. 16 I argue the mass incarceration of predominantly black and brown people reveals the arche, the repetition of the compromises and generative violence of American political community. At this point I want to explicate another concept that is central to this book, our religious situation. In The Religious Situation, renowned Protestant theologian Paul Tillich attempts to discern the unconscious faith that would give rise to fascism, the Third Reich and World War II. Tillich himself was profoundly shaped by his own mental exhaustion and hospitalization while serving as a chaplain during World War I. In addition, he witnessed the collapse of the German empire and the revolution of 1918 driven by an “explosive mixture” of nationalism, democracy and socialism. The fruit of the revolution was the fledgling Weimar Republic that was born of mutual compromises, defeats, concessions and contested legitimacy. These events occasioned Tillich to think about the underlying dynamics of society, the most basic situation that is presupposed in our daily endeavors. As such, our religious situation is not always easily transparent to those who live within it. Tillich here is worth quoting at length. The religious situation is: an unconscious, self-evident faith, which lies at a deeper level than the apparent antithesis of belief and unbelief, which both arise out of it and are both equally rooted in it. This unconscious faith, which is not assailed because it is the presupposition of life and is lived, rather than thought of, this all determining, final source of meaning constitutes the actual religious situation of a period. We must attempt to penetrate through to this faith. 17

The “Spirit of Capitalist Society” is a religious symbol for discerning the ultimate and most fundamental attitude toward the world. It is a symbol that is both concrete and universal as global capitalism is the structure of social relations that sustain life and give it meaning. For Tillich, the religious situation as expressed through science, art, politics, economics and ethics is the “creative self-interpretation” of a period. 18 It is precisely this account of our religious situation that is often neglected in interpreting Tillich’s well-known method of correlation. Finally, the “Spirit of Capitalist Society” as a symbol of our religious situation is best discerned through the society in which one lives.

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Tillich’s primary critique of the “Spirit of Capitalist Society” is that it represents the spirit of self-sufficient finitude. Self-sufficient finitude is the diagnosis of a society that relentlessly shuts out the eternal in its cultural forms. The eternal defined as the unconditioned is the depth of all meaningful reality, that which “transcends the process of mere becoming” and “support the times but is not subject to them.” 19 To discern the unconditioned is to discern the generative forces of the present through which the future emerges from the past. The primary sign of this self-sufficient finitude is the sacrifice of revolutionary forms of thought that point beyond the present social order to instrumental reason that has the present social order as its end. From a religious perspective, Tillich would eventually describe the social relations that emerge from this self-sufficient finitude as demonic as capitalist society liberated human life from religious and political absolutism only to be subordinated to a worldwide economy. Tillich’s concept of the demonic as a creative power that simultaneously creates and destroys cultural forms is well known. 20 However, its critical import is that the demonic also provides a phenomenological basis for a religious interpretation of global capitalism. One of the most enduring accounts of global capitalism was articulated by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s reading and critique of Karl Marx. Schumpeter argued that internal logic of global capitalism is an ongoing process of creative destruction. Schumpeter’s theory broke with the economic orthodoxy that focused on perfect competition within the market, and argued that relentless competition for markets through innovations revolutionizes from within, simultaneously creating and destroying economic structures. 21 Furthermore, the history of military intervention to facilitate this process leads Tillich to interpret this as the demonic face of the Leviathan. Hobbes’s Leviathan now belongs to capitalist economy and not to politics. 22 Finally, Tillich’s account of our religious situation contributes valuable insights into recent work in the field of theology, ethics and political economy. Jung Mo Sung’s Desire, Market and Religion serves as one example of a theological critique of capitalism. In this account, Sung argues that idolatry as a theological concept displays the process in which global capitalism is absolutized and demands human sacrifices in exchange for redeeming promises. Specifically, he argues that idolatry refers to the sacralizing and absolutizing of its laws without demonizing mercantile relations as such. 23 Sung navigates with nuance the difference between sacralization and demonization revealing an important point. Although idolatry and the demonic may share certain qualities, they remain phenomenologically distinct. The demonic is a finite social structure that distorts acts of the will, whereas as idolatry is a willful worship of a finite object. Thus, Sung’s use of idolatry fails to account for negative effects of global capitalism within the social structures, institutions and agreements that occasion its religious significance. In addition, idolatry also fails to the account for those persons who do not absolutize

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or hold capitalism sacred but for whom the market emerges as matter of life and death or ultimate concern. This is the significance of Tillich’s claim that the religious situation is that which is both self-evident and yet, lies deeper than belief and non-belief. Finally, Tillich’s claim that our religious situation is discerned through the political community in which we live is still relevant today. Global capitalism has now achieved a dominance and reach unseen since the time The Religious Situation was published. This has also occurred as the nation-state is emerging as the primary form of political community in the world. As such, the opportunities and social miseries of global capitalism are experienced through the particular histories of those political communities. Thus, the religious situation provides a starting point to grasp economic forces that are globalizing without being homogenizing. And it is here that I want to integrate insights from the work of Charles Long and Paul Tillich. This book argues that mass incarceration is the product of the simultaneity of our religious situation and the arche, the religious depth of American public life. As such, “American political economy” is a religious symbol capturing this simultaneity or co-presence of our religious depth and religious situation, the racialization and criminalization of blacks and global capitalism. 24 At this point, I want to reiterate Long’s insight regarding the pervasiveness of murder in the American experience and situate my argument with the discourse of necropolitics, or the politics of death. ENGAGING NECROPOLITICS Achille Mbembe is a philosopher, political scientist, historian and critical theorist. He is also a central figure in developing the concept of necropolitics. Mbembe’s theoretical reflections on necropolitics began in his 2003 article “Necropolitics” and has expanded into a full-length volume Necropolitics. 25 Mbembe’s book is a wide-ranging work that traces the workings of necropolitics on a planetary scale, pointing towards its movements, influences and trajectories allowing his theories to remain open lines of thought rather than a closed system. A central question animates the text, which is “If ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we found a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude?” 26 Mbembe’s book tracks a “raw element and a dense force” he describes as “the planetary-scale renewal of the relation of enmity and its multiple reconfigurations” 27 that actively subverts this vision of common vulnerability. More specifically, he argues that war has become our pharmakon that has “let loose gruesome passions that are increasingly pushing our societies to exit democracy.” 28 This book accepts Mbembe’s “sketched hachures” and “rapid gestures” 29 as provocations towards discern-

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ing the planetary nature of necropolitics through American political community. My intent is that this work will have an apocalyptic quality of unveiling that impacts our practical reasoning regarding our social and political arrangements. To appreciate Mbembe’s theoretical intervention, I want to recall key aspects of Michel Foucault’s account of sovereignty and biopolitics as well as their critique by philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The French social theorist Michel Foucault famously described the transformation of sovereignty from the “ancient right to take life or let live” to “the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” 30 This power is constituted through two poles, the anatomo-politics of the human body and the biopolitics of the population. The former operates on the body as a machine through various disciplines that optimize capacities as for integration into various systems of economic control, and the latter operates on the species body and the attendant features of life processes such as reproduction, morality, longevity, health and disease. In particular, the regulations of the population are the techniques of governance. It is important to note Foucault’s goal of articulating a concept of power beyond the model of the lawgiver that negates, represses, denies and prohibits. Rather, biopolitics conceives of power as productive and generative. If juridical power was invoked in response to individual acts, biopolitics concerns itself with individual lives. A key point for this argument is that for contemporary societies juridical power is embedded within biopolitics, becoming a technique of governance. A key aspect of governance is the question of sovereignty. In an interview, Foucault argued that philosophical engagements with the concept of sovereignty are often rooted in the historical experience of monarchy during the Middles Ages. 31 In this political form the monarch as a sole person held the power to settle conflicts and wars between feudal powers. 32 In subsequent historical eras representations of power included repressive and prohibitive aspects of law as well as the sovereign. As a result, political theory continues to be fixated with the person of the sovereign and the problem of sovereignty. 33 He states, “What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty or, therefore, around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head. In political theory that has still to be done.” 34 To be sure, it is not that such matters are unimportant. Rather, Foucault wants to acknowledge that the state does not exhaust the field of power relations and owes its functioning to existing power-relations. And it is this mutual imbrication of the state and formations of power related to “body sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology” that often fall out of view. 35 I want to argue that Foucault attempts to “cut off the king’s head” through the idea of governmentality. In Security, Territory and Population, Foucault develops a genealogical account of governmentality. The term is meant to capture “the ensemble

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formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.” 36 More importantly, governmentality is explicitly designed to challenge the idea of the state as a unitary entity. Rather, governmentality captures the composite nature of the modern state where the population is its object and reason for being. The key point is that the discourse of governmentality allows one to conceptualize the mutually constitutive relationship of state and population without recourse to monarchal images of the sovereign. Never one to shy away from inventing a new phrase, Foucault coined this the “governmentalization of the state” that has allowed the state to survive. And it also serves as a primary space of political struggle. 37 The question of sovereignty however has not disappeared, rather, it is co-present and circulates through state and population. This is a critical point of contention for philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben registers a concern regarding the relationship between Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and “techniques of politics.” The former being an individual’s transformation of themselves in relation to a field of power, and the latter being the way that life itself is taken into politics. He argues that “the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear . . . so much so that it has been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power.” 38 Moreover, he questions the legitimacy of failing to develop a unitary theory of power in light of societies profoundly shaped by spectacle. 39 Thus, Agamben positions the biopolitical body itself as that which is produced by sovereign power. 40 Drawing on his own genealogical account of sovereignty and biopolitics stretching into Greek antiquity, this production is constituted by the difference between life and bare life. The latter being that which is common to all living things, and the former belonging to a particular person or group. However, a central concern is the way modern states suspend their own laws through a state of emergency and exercise the power of life and death over bare lives, or those lives no longer protected by law. This is the state of exception. The concentration camps erected at the time of Hitler’s election represent the paradigmatic example of when the state of exception becomes the norm for a population. 41 More importantly, for Agamben the camp and its horrors are no relic of the past. Rather, he theorizes it as our nomos—the normative political logic in which we still live. This is a critical point for understanding Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics and the argument I pursue here. Achille Mbembe takes Agamben’s rendering of biopolitics and sovereignty as a point of departure to interrogate the conditions under which the power to wield life and death are constituted. Specifically, he wants to ques-

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tion if the concept of biopolitics is sufficient to articulate the “relation of enmity” between persons put to death and their murderers. 42 In particular, he is concerned when such deaths occur under the pretense of war. Mbembe reminds us that war is also a means of achieving sovereignty (and that politics is a form of war). 43 In contrast to sovereign power being disclosed through the production of the biopolitical body, necropolitics establishes sovereignty through “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” 44 (italics original). Through the analytic of necropolitics, Mbembe argues that modernity ushers in multiple forms of sovereignty (and biopolitics) that includes the camp, the plantation, and the colony. Moreover, our inattention to these forms privileges the idea that sovereignty is the sole product of body comprised of equal individuals “capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.” 45 Finally, Mbembe raises the possibility that war and its horrors may be the nomos of our world. At this point I want to tease out key points from this brief engagement with Foucault, Agamben and Mbembe for the arguments in this book. To confront the religious situation of mass incarceration in America, I take the discourse of necropolitics and situate it within the relationship of biopolitics and governmentality. In this account sovereignty is not abandoned or displaced. Rather, as Foucault argues, sovereignty, discipline and governance are bound together as cumulative effects of history that still have “population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism.” 46 Reframing necropolitics within this relationship brings into view the rationalities of governance within mass incarceration that subject a population to both social and actual death. In addition, I argue such logics are disclosed in attending to the formation of those subject to necropolitics. Mbembe’s account of necropolitics is “planetary” in scope and historical breadth ranging from the “repopulation of the earth” through the slave trade and colonization to the present. This book investigates necropolitics within a particular political community over time to account for the emergence of mass incarceration in the U.S. Mbembe also acknowledges the role of myth in democracies that conceal their originating violence and displace it to places such as the plantation, the colony, the camp and the prison. 47 This book unveils the particular originating myths in America and their perennial representations that return in moments of crisis to mediate political exclusion and oppression. Here it is worth examining a key figure in the religious and theological engagements with necropolitics. Theologian Mark Lewis Taylor has offered the most sustained and insightful engagement with Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics. Taylor employs necropolitics to redefine our understandings of the “public” that is often taken for granted in public theology, public philosophy and critical social theory. He also uses necropolitics to theorize the “political” defined as

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“a mode of being affected by our socially and historically mediated ontological constitution.” 48 Space does not allow for a full treatment of the methodology in these works. However, on my reading, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America is a trenchant theological critique of the public through the relationship of police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty. His recent The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World is a wide-ranging theoretical account of the theological that critiques traditional guild “Theology.” Moreover, this rich text discerns the presence of the theological within the political, which marks the ways those subject to formations of necropolitics find ways to resist, challenge and potentially overcome such systems. 49 Here, I want to briefly place this work in relation to Taylor’s most explicit engagement with necropolitics. In an edited volume on public theology, Taylor uses necropolitics to frame the U.S. public as constituted by four regimes of racialized social control. 50 These include mass incarceration, the migration regime, indigenous land confiscation and the imperial regime. 51 A primary task of public theology is to “admit that theology faces necropower in the United States, and then to ask how theology might name that power, critique it, and nurture communities resisting it.” 52 In this respect, public theology contributes to challenging the ways social practices “generate and organize death and dying” and render entire populations.” 53 I am painfully aware that these four regimes are mutually reinforcing. In focusing on one of them, I articulate the dialectical relationship between the historical permutations of social death (the political) and rationalities of governance that occasion mass incarceration (the public). This narrower focus simultaneously opens up a broader range of sites to analyze such as popular culture, personal memoirs, public polices, political speeches and ethnographic accounts. In focusing on this particular regime, this book aims broaden our understanding of necropolitics and its relationship to religious and theological studies. 54 ENGAGING NEOLIBERALISM Neoliberalism is a contested term among scholars. More importantly, as a global reality, the contours of its meaning shift according to geographics, cultures, social sectors, historical periods and academic disciplines. And to complicate matters, neoliberalism now travels in popular culture as a political epithet marking deep ideological differences. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall insightfully argues that neoliberalism reinvests ideas from classical liberalism that are deeply sedimented in everyday life with new meanings drawn from market rationalities. 55 As such, the term is critical for the genealogical tracing of the cultural logics relevant to the emergence of mass incarceration. This book attends broadly to the way neoliberal logics interact with subjec-

12

Introduction

tivity, religious meaning, social institutions, practices of governance, political economy and culture. To reiterate, I argue that neoliberalism is the current instantiation of global capitalism, the structure of relations that occasion the social and cultural forms that give life meaning. I want to argue that neoliberalism marks our religious situation or the taken for granted realities that condition everyday life. This means that religious institutions, religious practices and our understanding of religious experiences are also impacted by its logics. Theologian and ethicist Keri Day rightly argues that religious ideas and practices both fuel and contest cultural logics of neoliberalism. 56 Day’s religious engagement recognizes and draws on Foucault’s claim that neoliberalism as a form of governance secures its legitimacy through individual liberty rather than opposing it. This is a critical point as this work discloses the neoliberal aspects of necropolitics in the lives of those subject to mass incarceration. In addition, scholars such as political theorist Wendy Brown have also noted the co-presence and mutual reinforcement of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. 57 This work contributes to such conversations by analyzing how theological and religious meanings that participate in neoliberal governance as they relate to mass incarceration. I also employ this term to track specific changes in political economy. The interpretation of “American political economy” as a religious symbol embraces ideas often found in monikers such as “late capitalism,” “advanced capitalism,” “post-Fordism” and “postindustrial society.” I interpret these terms as tracking deindustrialization, revolutions in information communication technology and the unity of culture and economy beyond a duality of “base and superstructure.” My account of American political economy does not represent a hard break between industrial and post-industrial society. Rather, mass incarceration discloses the co-presence of market deregulation and the regulation of populations as well as the rise of a prison industrial complex that creates a vast array of jobs, products and services. In addition, my deployment of the term neoliberalism indicates public policies, ideologies and modes of governance that support deregulation, liberalization of trade and the privatization of public good and services. 58 This work also contributes to studies that investigate how neoliberalism transforms our understanding of punishment itself. Neoliberalism has been a critical entry point for scholars wrestling with the conundrum of the extraordinary expansion of jails, prisons and policing in an era that extolls the virtues of small government. The curious simultaneity of the “invisible hand” of the market and the “iron fist” of the carceral state 59 within the context of necropolitics is a critical part of the story of mass incarceration. Moreover, it is directly related to how neoliberal logics attempt to shape and form our subjectivity. In particular, neoliberalism entails a shift from a creature who engages in exchange to one that engages in competi-

Introduction

13

tion. 60 This neoliberal subject, homo economicus, is in direct contrast to homo juridicus, the legal subject of classical liberalism. The consequence is that an economic rationality of costs and benefits and investments and returns is used to secure a wide range of ends from parenting to crime. 61 This will prove to be an important plank in the neoliberalism revision of the criminal subject in ways that legitimate mass incarceration. In “Criminology: The Birth of a Special Knowledge,” political philosopher Pasquale Pasquino argued that in the nineteenth century a new object of penal science emerged, homo criminalis. 62 In the eighteenth century penal justice was centered around law, crime and punishment. There was no crime without a violation of the law. Homo penalis is the subject of a social contract, representing the potential in all people and emerges with the violation itself. 63 This understanding was challenged by the “positive school of legal theory,” which revolved around two poles, the criminal and society. Thus, a shift occurs in the object of knowledge from homo penalis to homo criminalis. Homo criminalis commits a crime not due to a moral error or calculation but rather from an evil nature. Pasquino states, “If crime amounts in classical law to a sort of accident of the mind, a confusion of representations, the new legal theory will regard the criminal as an excrement of the social body, at once a residue of archaic stages in the evolution of the species and a waste-product of social organization.” 64 The criminal in this new penal theory does not offend the sovereign monarch but society. Society will be the new source of the right to punish. 65 This new understanding of homo criminalis is accompanied by a reversal in the relationship of law and society. Pasquino argues that each society produced its own mythology, culture and even its criminals in order to defend is existence and self-understanding. 66 Together homo economicus and homo criminalis are central what many scholars describe as neoliberal penality. Political theorist Andrew Dilts rightly discerns that homo economicus, the entrepreneurial self, is radically responsible for their actions while homo criminalis is understood to be irresponsible by nature. 67 I argue that a key aspect of legitimating mass incarceration is the representation of blacks as animals and criminals within a neoliberal framework. The effect is to simultaneously appeal to the fears of blacks as irrational and uncivilized while simultaneously cultivating feelings of resentment by representing criminals as those who rationally choose not to play by the rules of the economic game. To articulate this point also means engaging in a critique of cultural representations. I hold that technologies of mass communication and media representations are constitutive forces in global capitalism in general and American political economy. In particular, media technologies have been profoundly influential in shaping the social perceptions that legitimate and rationalize necropolitics. As such, cultural representations are a significant factor in how

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Introduction

American citizens understand what happens in our criminal justice system, jails and prisons, in what sociologists call the “backstage of society.” 68 Moreover, cultural productions are also sites where the meaning of our society is negotiated and contested. George Lipsitz rightly argues, “Politics and culture maintain a paradoxical relationship in which only effective political action can win breathing room for a new culture, but only a revolution in culture can make people capable of political action.” 69 This also includes cultural products created by those who exist within the structures of social death in the era of mass incarceration. The title of this book gestures towards the influence of Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis and Jordan Camp’s recent Incarcerating the Crisis. Camp forcefully argues that a primary factor in the rise of mass incarceration and the formation of the neoliberal state are the “fears and anxieties produced” by economic upheavals that were “transformed into racist consent to security, law and order.” 70 However, it is precisely this “transformation into racist consent” that requires explication. I argue that this process is often inadequately summarized as a “theory of backlash” 71 that fails to articulate its perennial character as a religious crisis regarding the meaning of a black population in America. As Charles Long discerned, in such a religious crisis it is often those “clever priests of our national language and apparatus, skillful in the ways of ritual purity and manipulation” 72 that are able to accomplish such transformations. And in this case the religious crisis discloses the necropolitics of blacks as animals and criminals threatening the well-ordered society legitimates the emergence of neoliberal governance in American life. ORGANIZATION As stated, I contend the persistence of mass incarceration is rooted in our social agreements that legitimate and rationalize its ongoing existence. I employ social phenomenology 73 to critique the structures of meaning and motivation that sustain such agreements in spite of the large amount of evidence of the far-reaching harms of mass incarceration into everyday lives. 74 As such, I trace the deeply sedimented and often unconscious meanings that both motivate and rationalize mass incarceration in profound contradiction to the stated intentions of criminal justice systems resulting in a demonic and distorting force in American life. Moreover, as previously stated, discussions of mass incarceration are framed in reference to prior historical periods, namely slavery and Jim Crow. Social phenomenology provides a method of distinguishing between these enduring structures of meaning and their permutations within institutional expressions over time. Chapter 1 argues that the persistence of mass incarceration is rooted in the depth of the American experience. To reiterate, the topic of mass incarcera-

Introduction

15

tion inevitably raises questions and debates about its relationship to slavery, the convict-lease system and Jim Crow. I employ Orlando Patterson’s concept of social death to examine the cultural logic of mass incarceration through several historical conjunctures. I argue that this cultural logic is powerfully present in the execution sermons of the early Puritans in New England. This chapter demonstrates the animalization and criminalization of blacks that legitimated political exclusion played a central role in the how America as a political community understands its fate. Moreover, an execution sermon by the divine Rev. Cotton Mather serves as a lens to analyze the relationship between blackness, criminality, freedom, death and the fate of the well-ordered society. The religious and cultural significance of execution sermons represent how American culture associated black freedom with criminality and death. Chapter 2 traces the representations of blacks as animals and criminals genealogically to demonstrate their role in rationalities of governance in times of crisis. Representations such as the “Myth of the Black Rapist,” “the Cocaine Crazed Negro,” “Crackheads,” Ronald Reagan’s “human predators” and John DiIulio’s “super-predators” reveal a deeply sedimented cultural logic solidifying the relationship between blackness, criminality and preserving the well-ordered society. Moreover, these representations within the rationalities of governance constitute a form of necropolitics that rationalizes and legitimate mass incarceration. Finally, this chapter analyzes the public theology of Michael Novak and its role in mediating such representations in governance in general and in Reaganism in particular. Another form of evidencing the necropolitics of mass incarceration is to examine the subjectivity of those caught within its grip. Chapter 3 examines the lives of Stanley “Tookie” Williams and Mumia Abu-Jamal to disclose the contradictions of a political economy predicated on social death and the threat of death. To provide conceptual continuity in the account of necropolitics, I employ Abdul R. JanMohamed’s image of the death-bound-subject as found in his reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son. I use this image to interpret the memoirs of Williams’s and Abu-Jamal’s Blue Rage, Black Redemption and Live from Death Row, respectively, as a profound witness to the rise of mass incarceration within our religious situation. In addition, I argue that the memoirs of Williams and Abu-Jamal challenge and expand key aspects of JanMohamed’s work. More specifically, their religious significance is their respective pathway to affirm life from within the structures of social death. Finally, I argue these memoirs serve as a mode of political agency and resistance as they speak to the U.S. as a political community. Chapter 4 gives an account of how our religious situation mediates between mass incarceration and juridical power. I argue necropolitics creates a powerful circuitry of representations that legitimate the mythology of “black-

16

Introduction

on-black crime,” the racialization of drugs and broken windows policing that disproportionately subject blacks to juridical power. A key aspect of this argument is an analysis of the meaning of basketball star Len Bias’s death. An almost forgotten chapter, this was a critical moment that concretized white fears resulting in public policies rooted in vengeance rather than justice. To further explicate this claim, I employ the television show The Wire to render visible the role of jails and prisons within a neoliberal political economy. This analysis also calls for attending to the religious and theological significance of racialized popular sovereignty and its influence upon juridical power in mass incarceration. Chapter 5 draws on the imagery of hell found in Christian traditions as the use of time and place as an instrument of punishment. I argue that from a phenomenological perspective, mass incarceration is quite literally, hell on earth. As such, necropolitics represents the eschatological production of mass incarceration. I use the term “production” here to signal the simultaneity of anti-blackness and political economy that disproportionately sacrifices the flourishing of marginalized black and Latinx communities through dispossession of our common good. The chapter also addresses afro-pessimism, abolition and empire as it relates specifically to mass incarceration. NOTES 1. Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, 2019, Prison Policy Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html. 2. Ibid. 3. Representative texts that engage in an explanation of mass incarceration include Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2010), William J. Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael Javen Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), Loic Waquants’s Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), Jordan T. Camp’s Incarceration the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), John F. Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), Heather Schoenfeld’s Building the Prison State: Race & The Politics of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), Marie Gottschalk’s Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). In religious studies Lee Griffith’s The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press, 1999), and Christopher Marshall’s Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), T. and Richard Synder’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001) critique of the inequities of America’s criminal justice and provide biblical and theologically arguments for restorative justice. Lewis Taylor’s The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001) interprets mass incarceration as analogous to the punitive practices of imperial Rome. Taylor’s work establishes a framework to interpret the life of Jesus as a model of resisting state terror. James Samuel Logan’s Good Punishment: Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) also provides a critique of the socioeconomic and

Introduction

17

political currents that fueled mass incarceration. In addition, Logan’s text offers an account of good punishment rooted in Christian social ethics and the practice of healing memories. Amy Levad’s Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration (Grand Rapids, Fortress Press, 2014) mines the liturgical and sacramental resources of the Catholic of penance and reconciliation to support efforts toward restorative justice and rehabilitation. These valuable contributions all represent a religious response to mass incarceration, but do not offer a religious perspective as to its emergence and persistence. Rima L. Vesely-Flad’s Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives and the Struggle for Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017) begins this work through an analysis of the contribution of theology to black bodies being interpreted as dangerous and impure. 4. Ibid., 150–151. The importance of Long’s concept of the arche is that it represents the American instantiation of our religious situation of global capitalism. For more on Long’s arche see the “Introduction” in Jennifer I. M. Reid, Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003) and the “arche of globalization” in the “Introduction” of David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 163. 7. Ibid., 165. For a similar reading of this phenomena interpreted as “silent covenants” see Derrick A. Bell, Silent Covenants (New York: Oxford University Press US, 2004), and “racial tremors, quakes and shocks” see Jesse Jackson and Frank E. Watkins, A More Perfect Union (Lanham: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2001). 8. Long, Significations, 145–146. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 147. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 163–164. 14. Ibid., 164. 15. Ibid. 16. Angela Y. Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” Colorlines, September 10, 1998, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racismreflections-prison-industrial-complex. 17. Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation (Ann Arbor: Meridian Books, 1956), 39–40. 18. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 19. The Religious Situation, 35. 20. Paul Tillich, Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1936), 76. 21. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 81. 22. Paul Tillich, The World Situation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1965), 8. 23. Jung Mo Sung, Desire, Market and Religion (London: SCM Press, 2007), 71. 24. My account of “American Political Economy” as a religious symbol is a synthesis of three strands of thought. The first is my agreement with Paul Tillich’s phenomenologically inflected claim that the workings of global capitalism and intuited through the actual society in which one lives (see Religious Situation, 27). The second, is drawn from Alfred Schutz’s claim that symbols are rooted in the structures of apperception that couple aspects of everyday life with an idea that transcends everyday life (see The Problem of Social Reality: Collected Papers, Vol. 1, 286). As such as a religious symbol, “American Political Economy” serves as a means to discern and interpret the co-presence or simultaneity of capitalism in American life and the religious depth of the arche of anti-blackness as defined by Charles Long is moments of crisis in American public life. 25. The essay “Necropolitics” appears in Public Culture V 15(1): 11–40 with a revised version appearing in chapter 3 of Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 66. 26. Ibid., 5.

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27. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 1–2. Although space does not allow for a full treatment here there is a broader conversation to be noted regarding the politics of representing social conflict in binary terms the way Mbembe draws on Schmitt’s friend–enemy relation as well as Fanon’s Manichean interpretation of the settler–native relation. See, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991): 457–470. 28. Ibid., 3. 29. Ibid., 2. 30. Foucault and Hurley, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 138. 31. Paul Rainbow and Nikolas Rose, eds., The Essential Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1994), 309. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (New York, Picador, 2004), 108. 37. Ibid., 109 38. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 5. 39. Ibid., 6. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 166–169. 42. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 66. 43. Ibid. Although space does not permit a full treatment, it is important to note that Brady Thomas Heiner makes a persuasive argument that Foucault’s genealogical method as well as his account of biopolitics and “politics as war” in his lectures between 1971 and 1976 are deeply indebted to his study of the Black Panther Party. See Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City, 11, no. 3 (December 2007): 313–356. 44. Ibid., 68. 45. Ibid., 67. 46. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 107–108. 47. Ibid., 27. 48. Mark Lewis Taylor, The Theological and the Political (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011). 49. Ibid., 9. There are times in my analysis where my use of the terms “religious” and “theological” approximate Taylor’s. In particular, I find resonance with how Taylor uses the “theological” to interpret cultural products. However, my argument here is not as concerned with the critique of “guild Theology” as it with engaging themes found within public religious that help disclose the logics of mass incarceration. It is my contention that such as method contributes to forms of practical reasoning necessary to dismantle mass incarceration. 50. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Beyond Only Difference: Necropolitics, Racialized Regimes, and U.S. Public Theology,” in Harold J. Recinos, ed., Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 235. 51. Ibid., 327. Taylor’s analysis of these regimes is also an important contribution to the critiques and revisions of the concept public sphere as theorized by Jurgen Habermas along the lines of race, gender, class and globalization. See Melissa Harris-Perry, Barbershops, Bible and BET (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), Bruce Robbins, The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), The Black Public Sphere Collective, The Black Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Nancy Fraser, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (Malden: Polity Press, 2014). 52. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Beyond Only Difference: Necropolitics, Racialized Regimes, and U.S. Public Theology,” 247. 53. Lewis Taylor, The Theological and the Political.

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54. It should be noted that this book is also indebted to religious and theological texts concerned with how death and threat of death forms subjectivity. See Howard Thurman’s Luminous Darkness (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989) and Katie Geneva Cannon, Katie’s Canon (New York: Continuum, 1995). 55. Stuart Hall, “The Neoliberal Revolution,” in Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays (Durham: Duke, 2017), 324. 56. Keri Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 12–13. 57. Wendy Brown’s work has explored this relationship across a number of texts. See “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and De-Democratization,” Political Theory, 34, no. 6 (2006); Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books); In the Ruins: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press). 58. There is broad scholarly consensus that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 represented a significant advance in neoliberalism as a mode of governance in American life. The significance of this lies in its co-presence with the War on Drugs, accelerated rates of incarceration and significant redefining of the traditional “welfare state” designed to assure citizens access to basic resources that sustain life. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 1st Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. 59. Loic Waquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 171. 60. Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” in Sam Brinkley and Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium (Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 4–5. 61. Ibid. 62. Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, The Foucault Effect, 236. 63. Ibid., 238. 64. Ibid. 65. This is also mimetic repetition of this changing understanding of law and society in American experience in the emergence of publicly elected prosecutors, with vast discretionary powers. See Angela J. Davis, Arbitrary Justice (Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–14. For an analysis of the mimetic relationship of European and American sovereignty see “Mimetic Reflections: the Religious Critic between Church and Empire” by Victor Anderson (unpublished paper). 66. Ibid., 244. 67. Andrew Dilts, Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership and the Limits of American Liberalism (New York: Fordham, 2014), 77. 68. Bill Yousman, Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Mass Incarceration (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 9. 69. Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004), 5. 70. Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 5. 71. See Forman, James Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow” (2012). Faculty Scholarship Series. 3599. 72. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), 165. 73. Social phenomenology as a discipline provides an account of the structures of the life world that occasion the particularity of the meaningful social world in which one lives. 74. National Research Council, Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steve Redburn, eds., The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2014).

Chapter One

The Politics of Death in the Arche of the American Experience

The politics of death within the religious depth of the American political community begins in the gallows. In the New England colonies, the execution of a criminal was a profound religious and political event. 1 Well-known preachers selected by the condemned would often visit the jail. After preaching to those awaiting execution, a sermon was then given to those assembled in the church. 2 Execution sermons were designed for the assembled to identify with the condemned as partakers in the reality of original sin and their guilt. This identification would invoke their own need for confession and repentance. 3 Richard Slotkin notes that the “world of the execution sermons and crime narratives consists of a series of concentric spheres—the family, the state and the cosmos—each of which is paternalistically organized, and all of which are encompassed and pervaded by the will and presence of God.” 4 The criminal was imaged to have been an ungrateful, disobedient child, resulting in latter offenses against society for which the state punishes and then receives their just deserts in hell. 5 The stability of this well-ordered society and cosmos was threatened if the criminal was black. In the case of a black offender, the theme of ingratitude was prominent, as English masters understood themselves as having delivered blacks from savagery and service to Satan into the light of Christian understanding. 6 The meaning of black criminality was interpreted as “ingratitude, disobedience, the base and greedy hankering for freedom and financial independence.” 7 Execution sermons during this time routinely served as warnings to both blacks as well as white and Native American servants about the desire for freedom. The New England divine Rev. Cotton Mather articulated the proper role of blacks in well-ordered society. 21

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In his 1706 tract The Negro Christianized, Mather argued that blacks represented an extraordinary missionary opportunity. 8 It was precisely because blacks were the “blackest instances of blindness and baseness” and “the most brutish of creatures” that masters would receive great glory through their conversion. In addition, Mather argued for the possibility that the elect may exist among blacks. Moreover, although slaves, they were still neighbors and masters would be judged by their treatment of slaves. 9 Further, Mather argued that Christians would also make better servants. He states, “Were your servants well tinged with the Spirit of Christianity, it would render them exceeding dutiful unto their masters, exceeding faithful in their business, and afraid of speaking or doing any thing that may justly displease you.” 10 Mather’s theology linked the conversion of slaves to the ongoing problem of “unprofitable slaves.” For Mather, the disobedient, runaway and generally unruly slaves should be seen as punishment for the sin of the master’s inhumane treatment. During this era in Puritan society, slaves lived with families who were responsible for integrating slaves into society. 11 The family was understood to be the primary foundation of both church and government (as a commonwealth). 12 Thus, for Mather, the ability for Christianity to produce particular kinds of subjects, benevolent masters and obedient slaves, was critical to a well-ordered society. The execution of Joseph Hanno threatened to unravel the fabric of this understanding. Joseph Hanno was an African-born ex-slave who received instruction in literacy from a New England master before attaining his freedom. In 1721, he confessed to and was convicted of the brutal murder of his wife. He was incarcerated in Boston’s Queen Street Jail and was executed that same year. Rev. Cotton Mather visited Hanno in prison and preached his execution sermon. For our purposes, it is critical to highlight that Mather’s “Tremenda: The Dreadful Sound with which the Wicked are to be Thunderstruck” included both the execution sermon as well as an account of the conference with Hanno. In 1717, Mather’s gallows literature would sell over one thousand copies in a mere five days, reaching nearly one in two households. 13 Together, the confession and the execution sermon produce the truth of Hanno as a juridical subject recognizable only through his criminal culpability. As a juridical subject, Hanno participates in a theologically inflected political rationality that weaves his eternal fate with the temporal fate of the wellordered society, the “City on the Hill.” The visit to the condemned Hanno begins with Mather’s attempt to prove that his faith is not genuine as evidenced by his “vain gloriously quoting” of Scripture and his “noisy profession of religion.” 14 In addition, Mather inquires as to the level of premeditation in the murder of his wife, asking, “How did you proceed in it? How long was your purposing and projecting of it?” 15 Hanno resists Mather’s assumption of premeditation arguing the thought never occurred to him until his wife began talking with the Devil and

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subsequently the Devil put the idea into his heart. While many confessors were known to give answers in view of their words living beyond them, this exchange is important in the context of Puritan understandings of restraining grace. Early Puritan theology emphasized universal human depravity as the origin of crime. However, this still left unresolved why some persons committed severe crimes and others did not. Mather, in his influential sermon The Curbed Sinner (1713), outlined God’s restraining grace which prevented some persons from committing crimes. 16 God may keep them out of tempting situations, infusing them with grace, illuminating their self-interest or endowing them with conscience. 17 If one did commit a sin, it was because of residual wickedness in which God choose to abandon them to their own corrupt natural impulses. Within this theological framework, it is significant that Mather’s question seeks to establish if Hanno’s crime was a premeditated act as well as “the more special sins, which you may apprehend, have provoked the Holy One, to leave you unto what you are now come unto?” 18 Hanno responds, “I can’t say. For all my sins.” 19 Mather prods further asking which sins in particular trouble him the most and Hanno simply replies “All my Sins.” Mather concludes the conversation by admonishing him that “I wish you had glorified God, by being more particular in confessing what might be for his Glory. But is there any more that I may do for you?” 20 Hanno responds that there is nothing more he desires. The significance of this exchange is the profound ambiguity over Hanno’s crime and God’s restraining grace. Mather’s questioning of Hanno attempts to secure the sins that could lead up to such a crime provoking God’s abandoning of restraining grace and punishing “sin through sin.” However, Mather does not acknowledge Hanno’s claim to be influenced by the Devil through possession, a key plank in how God punishes sin. This silence is amplified at Hanno’s execution where Puritan families and slaves in attendance listened to Mather interpret Hanno as the “black thing you have in irons before you.” 21 Mather faces the dilemma of reconciling Hanno’s crime with his claims in The Negro Christianized? Here Rev. Mather argues: The Ethiopian and Other Slaves among us, may hear a Dreadful Sound in the Fate of their Unhappy Brother . . . they are to take warning from it. There is a Fondness for Freedom in many of you, who live Comfortably in a very easy Servitude; wherein you are not so well-advised as you should be. If you were Free, many of you would not Live near so well as you do. 22 (emphasis original)

And; But when your Servitude is Gentle, and you are treated, with more than meer Humanity, and fed and cloth’d and logd’d, as well as you can wish for, and

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Chapter 1 you have no Cares upon you, but only to Come when you are called, and to Do what you are Bidden; certainly you should Glorify God with a sweet contentment of Mind, in the Lot which He has assigned you. Become the Servants of CHRIST, and you are made Free-men immediately.

The meaning of Hanno’s execution for this Puritan community extends beyond the punishment for his individual crime. Rather, his brutal crime becomes the potential for all slaves who have a “fondness for freedom.” The simultaneity of Mather’s words and the image of Hanno’s impending execution communicates that the desire for freedom results in death. Mather delivers a vision of subjection for slaves to avoid Hanno’s fate. Casting a vision of the well-ordered society, Mather admonishes slaves that only through pleasing their superiors can they please God. Moreover, their slavery would be quick and expire in glory where they would walk with their Savior in white as members of a royal priesthood. More importantly, Mather’s aim was to “particularly and pertinently and powerfully inculcate” 23 within slaves that their Christian knowledge should increase their obedience and promote humility. Moreover, slaves should strive to avoid the charge that the worst servants are those that have received instruction. Interpreting this spectacle of death in the presence of Hanno and the community, Mather, speaking to those held in bondage, admonishes: “but be the more humble, the more dutiful, the more diligent, for what you have arrived unto, pride goes before the destruction. See what the pride, of your conceited and vain glorius and ostentatious brother here has gone before!” 24 Joseph Hanno’s story represents perennial aspects of America’s public faith. Crucial to this faith is a social and religious imaginary where criminality in general and black criminality in particular has sacred significance for the fate of the wellordered society, the “City on the Hill.” Hanno’s case evidences that questions of criminality have historically been indexed to questions of freedom and participation in the American political community. More importantly, Hanno’s crime stands in for an entire racial group. I want to analyze the perennial contours of this American public faith through representations of social death and the arche of the American experience. Together they constitute the necropolitics in the religious depth of the American experience. Racecraft, as eloquently articulated by Karen E. Field and Barbara Fields in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, are the forms of reasoning that sustain racism through the ongoing interaction of imagination and action. 25 This form of rationality structures “what goes with what and whom (sumptuary codes), how different people must deal with each other (rituals of deference and dominance), where human kinship begins and ends (blood), and how Americans look at themselves and each other (the gaze).” 26 Thus, racecraft supports the metaphysics of racism that creates coherence between self-evidence, causation and judgment. This metaphysics of racism

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sustains a social ontology of “bad faith,” 27 by being what it is not and not being something that it is. It is this social ontology that sustains mass incarceration. The arche of American experience also reveals the implicit political rationality that contributes to Western societies as demonic. This political rationality is deeply formed by the co-presence of what Foucault named as the “city-citizen game” and the “shepherd–flock game.” 28 Foucault’s thoughtprovoking schema attempts to grasp the historical and mutually reinforcing legacies of Greek political thought with its emphasis on persons as juridical subjects within a political community and “pastoral power” with its concern for the salvation of each individual as well as the whole, the flock. Moreover, this legacy contributes to a political rationality in which issues of life, death, truth, power, knowledge and the governing of oneself and others are bound up together. 29 A key aspect of this political rationality for the modern subject is confession. The centrality of confession for modernity can be gleaned in Foucault’s rendering of the subject a “confessing animal” 30 within a society marked by the “triumph of the therapeutic.” 31 In particular, the confessional mode, having been secularized from religious and juridical traditions, has come to play a larger cultural role as marking the values of sincerity and authenticity. One only needs to survey the landscape of television talk shows to see our cultural appetite for self-disclosure. However, the ambiguity of confessional practices and their claims to truth are nowhere more apparent than in the long sordid history of coerced confessions of blacks in America. The story of Joseph Hanno is an example of the way confessions and testimonies are already embedded in relations of power that produce truth that legitimates necropolitics. The importance of this confession is gleaned when placed in the larger Puritan theo-political vision. The Puritan city-state and shepherd-flock games are animated by themes of atonement, primarily “penal substitution” and “satisfaction” respectively. 32 Thus, the well-ordered society is one where the relationship of God to whites stands in a mimetic relationship of whites to blacks. All of humanity is affected by The Fall and are capable of committing crimes. However, whites who do not commit crimes are the beneficiaries of God’s restraining grace, whereas blacks who do commit crimes are the beneficiaries of the restraining grace of slave masters. In the penal-substitution strain, Christ’s death stands in for whites, accepting the punishment righty earned and securing the possibility of eternal life and political freedom, whereas Hanno’s death stands in for blacks, receiving the punishment that blacks would receive if given political freedom in this life. In the satisfaction strain, Christ’s death serves as a form of expiation, restoring God’s order and providential favor for whites, whereas Hanno’s death as a form of expiation rationalizes the social death that secures the well-ordered society, the City on the Hill. 33

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The admonition that “many of you would not live near so well as you do” is juxtaposed with the free Hanno who is no longer going to Heaven, but to Hell. The Puritan family is simultaneously reassured of their mission to share the gospel with slaves as well as the integrity of holding their brothers and sisters in Christ in bondage. Finally, Mather’s sermon effectively equivocated Hanno’s crime with black freedom and liberty. Benjamin Wadsworth, a contemporary of Mather, articulates the criminalization of black freedom and liberty. In his book, Well-Ordered Family, Benjamin Wadsworth reflects upon the problem of unruly servants. The key problem he identified was their desire for liberty. Here Wadsworth is worth quoting at length: They must have liberty for their tongues to speak almost what and when they will; liberty to give or receive visits of their own accord, and when they will; liberty to keep what company they please; liberty to be out late on nights, to go and come almost when they will, without telling why or wherefore; such liberty they contend for, they wont not be ruled, governed, restrained; or it may be the work they are set about, they reckon ‘tis beneath and below them, they wont stoop to do it, but will rather disobey Masters or Mistresses . . . They are daring in their plain disobedience to God, their abominable rebellion against him: they trample God’s law, his Authority, under their feet. 34

For Wadsworth, the everyday exercise of black liberty itself is criminalized and equivocated with disobedience and rebellion against God’s law. For ministers such as Mather and Wadsworth, slavery was not a natural condition. Rather, humanity was created in a “State of Liberty” and when one reached the age of reason, one could exercise liberty. However, the relationship of masters and slaves as well as government itself was a consequence of The Fall. Mather’s sermon brings together the temporal well-ordered society with the transcendent narrative of a fall from grace and potential election to eternity. The religious meanings within Mather’s execution sermon solidify together the well-ordered society of slaves and slaveholders with eternal life and its violation with eternal damnation. Hanno’s execution ties the meaning of purity and stability in Puritan society to anxiety and fear of black freedom rendered as criminality. Finally, Hanno’s execution also served as an act of expiation. In Tremenda Mather argues, “You are to now dy as the land where you now live will be polluted, if you should be spared form death.” 35 Thus, Hanno’s crime is the potential consequence of black freedom and his death maintains the purity of the community. More specifically, his crime is represented as heinous and pathological for civil society but the normative result of all slaves who have a “fondness for freedom.” The denial of black freedom, understood as the cause of black criminality, maintains the purity of the political community. Crimes by blacks were evidence of both a natural pro-

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pensity requiring punishment as well as a pathological desire for freedom requiring discipline. Joseph Hanno becomes a premier example of natural differences that justify natural inequalities. In the execution of Joseph Hanno, we see the cultural logic of social death that equivocates black liberty with criminality and individual acts with cultural traits. Furthermore, the American political community is defended from the state of nature through the containment of blacks while its purity is maintained through their punishment. THE ARCHE OF LAW AND ORDER The idea of “law and order” is another critical theme in interpreting the necropolitics within the religious depth of the American experience that occasions mass incarceration is. The central contradiction of Western political liberalism is that it justifies itself through the rhetoric of inclusion while simultaneously making racial exclusion normative. Religious ethicist Victor Anderson notes that the rhetoric of order throughout Western history has consistently been positioned as the prerequisite for the possibility of meaning understanding and value. 36 All of these are threatened under chaos. In modern political theory, the language of order finds it voice in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, which argues that everything in the universe has a proper place within an ideal order. 37 Anderson argues that problems arise when a metaphysical understanding of order is applied to the realm of morality and politics. 38 The rhetoric of order within morality and politics raises critical questions regarding the possibility that “natural and non-moral inequalities” lead to “moral and political inequality.” 39 The language of species was developed to argue for the equality and dignity as a natural excellence of the human species. Thus, the sources of inequality as articulated by theorists such as Rousseau are rooted in the accidents and contingencies of human socialization. Anderson notes that the rhetoric of order finds a strong voice in the form of representative government. More importantly, this form of government secured its legitimacy through an aggregate consensus, a form of rationality that considers individuals as a part of groups and not instances of being. 40 This is an important point in understanding the relationship of the arche of American experience to the creation of a prison population. Uday Mehta’s essay “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion” tackles how liberal ideas that feature a universal constituency for political participation produce practices predicated on the marginalization of various groups. 41 Central to Mehta’s argument is that social conventions mediate between universal capacities that constitute political inclusion and the condition to actualize these capacities legitimating political exclusion. 42 Thus, individuals with universal

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capacities without having inculcated certain cultural norms become candidates for political exclusion. 43 Anderson notes that the absence of race is one of the key factors that mediated political exclusion in Mehta’s analysis. Anderson argues that the use of race as a rhetorical category of political exclusion emerged in the revolutionary period. 44 Race was added to the existing exclusion of English indentured servants, women and children, rooted in “law, convention, and manners.” 45 Thus, the simultaneity of species logic with a racial ideology served to naturalize or fix cultural differences. The result was an account of natural differences that justified natural inequality. 46 Moreover, the naturalization of race would serve to fix racial others in general and blacks in particular in a state of nature. This will have profound effects in constituting the political rationality of mass incarceration. In The Racial State David Theo Goldberg demonstrates that the state of nature is constituted by chaos, anarchy, irrationality and insecurity. 47 Those who reside there are understood to be without a face, identity and are a threat to the political community. 48 In addition to naturalizing differences through racial ideology, political liberalism also naturalized or made permanent racial “others” as constituting both an external and internal threat to its existence. This brief treatment of the relationship of order, race and political exclusion is decisive for our account of the arche of the American experience. The social conventions representing social death become self-evident truths for the foundational documents of the American political community. Another perennial aspect of the arche of America is the Providence of God. American providentialism is the belief in God’s plan for the nation. This belief also assumed our ability to discern God’s role in such a plan during a cultural crisis. There are three broad areas of providential thinking that dominated American history through the end of Reconstruction. The first was judicial providentialism, the belief that God judged nations solely on the virtues of their people and leaders with reference to a grand plan. The second, historical providentialism, imagined that God tailored the history of certain nations to prepare them for a special role in improving the world. And finally, apocalyptic providentialism held that nations are cast in various roles in history as they fulfill the narrative of the book of Revelation. 49 Various versions of providential thinking were marshaled in debates over the American Revolution, the potential removal of blacks and Native Americans, slavery and the Civil War. In addition, providential reason would play a key role in counter discourses by persons such as Fredrick Douglass and Martin Delany, who argued that blacks should “cease looking to Providence to do that for us which God has given us the ability to do for ourselves.” 50 The arche of the American experience discloses that at key historical moments the punishment of blacks and other non-whites emerge as a key rationality of governance securing the future of the political community. I have argued that necropolitics, the organizing of the power of death, mediates the relationship

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of racecraft and statecraft. The idea of social death is critical in explicating this form of mediation. SOCIAL DEATH AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE I find the concept of social death in Orlando Patterson’s classic study Slavery and Social Death to be an important way of tracking the permutations of necropolitics that occasion mass incarceration over time. 51 Culture in Patterson’s account plays a key role in transforming violence into right. 52 It is precisely this cultural authority that reproduces the slave relation, which is key to understanding slavery as an institutional process. More specifically, for Patterson, cultural authority creates and reproduces the slave’s natal alienation, the denial of rights (or claims) to the legitimate social order. Patterson here is worth quoting at length: Not only was the slave denied all claims on, and obligations to, his parents and living blood relations, but by extension, all such claims and obligations on his more remote ancestors and on his descendants. He was truly a genealogical isolate. Formally isolated in his social relations with those who lived, he also was culturally isolated from the social heritage of his ancestors. He had a past, to be sure. But a past is not a heritage . . . Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed to freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory. 53

It should be noted that Patterson does not claim that slaves did not possess social ties or engage in the production of meaning. Rather, the social world made by slaves was not recognized as legitimate. Thus, unions were not recognized as marriages, parents held no custodial powers over children and families could be separated at will. Natal alienation denied slaves the mutual recognition, either through naturalization or birth, required to participate in civil society. 54 As such, slaves are socially dead. The maintenance of persons as socially dead requires denying their recognition as citizens as well as their representation as slaves. 55 Patterson argues that this representation takes two primary forms: intrusive and extrusive. In the intrusive representation of social death, the slave is understood to be a domestic enemy, a captive with a hostile alien culture. 56 This intrusive mode of representing the slave relation turns on critical marks of cultural difference and the inability of assimilation. The extrusive representation of slavery was the “insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms or behavior.” 57 This included those who were economically destitute whose plight indicated either divine

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disfavor or innate incompetence. 58 These two modes of social death represent the slave as someone who was an outsider to the culture, or an insider who failed to comply with its cultural norms. 59 Drawing on Patterson’s distinction between intrusive and extrusive representation, I argue that mass incarceration is occasioned by the simultaneity of intrusive and extrusive modes of social death: cultural representations of blacks as animals not fit for civil society (intrusive) and career criminals who choose not to obey social norms (extrusive). However, as I have argued, a key challenge in understanding what occasions mass incarceration is understanding the influence of previous historical periods without equivocating them with our current conjuncture. I find Patterson’s account of slavery as a dialectical and institutional process with social death as central to our understanding of freedom persuasive. At the center of Hegel’s account of recognition is the well-known “trial by death” that constitutes the relationship of lordship and bondage, or the master-slave dialectic. 60 Hegel’s master-slave dialectic provides an important starting point for understanding the role of mutual recognition that constitutes the relationship between social death and slavery. Patterson argues that the question of recognition for the slave is indeed a “trial by death.” 61 More importantly, he argues that the master attempts to take advantage of what the slave yearns for most, namely, freedom. The slave relation is sustained by the possibility of manumission. Patterson states that by “holding out the promise of redemption, the master provides himself with a motivating force more powerful that any whip. Slavery in this way was a self-correcting institution: what it denied the slave it utilized as the major means of motivating him.” 62 This personal struggle for recognition is transformed into a cultural production 63 that both stands against manumission and requires it as a precondition. For Patterson, social death stands at the heart of freedom. I argue that this master-slave dialectic is transformed into an enduring white citizen–black criminal dialectic that produces mass incarceration. And it is precisely this religious cultural logic that is essential for understanding the ongoing governance of blacks through criminalization that I want to now explicate. NOTES 1. Richard Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800,” American Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1973): 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. Ibid., 9 7. Ibid. 8. Mather and Royster, “The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist That Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity (1706).”

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9. Ibid., 10. 10. Ibid., 12–13. 11. Lawrence W. Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom’: Servant Protest in Puritan Society,” The William and Mary Quarterly 19, no. 2 (April 1, 1962): 205. Also, Towner notes that the category of servants included: 1) servants by compact or agreement; 2) become servants through their parents or through crime; and 3) “Indians and Negroes” who were born, sold into slavery or captured in war, see 202. 12. Edmund Sears Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion & Domestic Relations in Seventeenth Century New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 133–143. 13. Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 18. 14. Mather et al., Tremenda. 15. Ibid. 16. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 84. 17. Ibid. 18. Mather et al., Tremenda. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Cotton Mather et al., Tremenda: The Dreadful Sound with Which the Wicked Are to Be Thunderstruck. : In a Sermon Delivered unto a Great Assembly, in Which Was Present, a Miserable African, Just Going to Be Executed for a Most Inhumane and Uncommon Murder. At Boston, May 25th. 1721. : To Which Is Added, a Conference between a Minister and the Prisoner, on the Day before His Execution. : [One Line from Deuteronomy]. (Boston:: Printed by B. Green, for B. Gray & J. Edwards, & sold at their shops., 1721). 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2014), 18–19. 26. Ibid., 25 27. Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), 8. 28. See Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978 and Mitchell Dean’s “Demonic Societies: Liberalism, Biopolitics and Sovereignty” in Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), edited by Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat. 29. Ibid., 71 30. Foucault and Hurley, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 59. 31. See Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. See also Andreas Fejes and Magnsu Dahlstedt’s The Confessing Society: Foucualt, Confession and Practices of Lifelong Learning, Chole Taylor’s The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucualt: A Genealogy of the “Confessing Animal,” Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject, and Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. 32. I have employed the terms “penal substitution” and “satisfaction” from Tyron L. Inbody’s excellent account of atonement theories as well as their contemporary critical reception. See Tyron L. Inbody, The Many Faces of Christology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002), 148–149. 33. My claim here regarding the meaning of Hanno’s death is consistent with theologian JoAnne Marie Terrell’s claim that “black bondage was propitiation for white refiner’s fire in slavemaking and slaveholding America.” See JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood?: The Cross in the African American Experience (New York: Orbis Books, 1998), 28–29. For the most sustained treatment of theologies of atonement and mass incarceration see Nikia Smith Roberts, “Penitence, Plantation and the Penitentiary: A Liberation Theology for Lockdown America,” The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School, Volume 12, 41–71. Roberts

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develops a compelling critique of mass incarceration through correlation between the feudal economy of Anselm’s context and the carceral state. The path pursued here focuses on discerning the internal sacrificial logic of execution sermons in preparation for a developing a religious response. Rima Vesely-Flad has also engaged the work of Rev. Cotton Mather as interpreting the influence of the Puritans. See Vesely-Flad’s Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 3–31. 34. Towner, “A Fondness for Freedom,” 211–212. 35. Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 147. 36. Ibid., 4–5. 37. Ibid., 6. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 8. 41. Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” Politics and Society 18, no. 4 (1990): 427–454. 42. Ibid., 430. 43. Ibid., 438–439. 44. Victor Anderson, “The Rhetoric of Order and the Politics of Racial Exclusion: Prolegomena to African American Political Theology,” 13–14. 45. Ibid., 14. 46. Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness. For more on the civilized/primitive binary relationship see Stuart Hall and Open University, Representation (SAGE, 1997), 235–236. 47. David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 40. 48. Ibid. 49. Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876. For additional sources of the prevalence of American providentialism, see Mark A. Knoll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis and Gregg L. Frazer’s The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation and Revolution. 50. Ibid., 233. 51. I draw on the resources of social phenomenology to use social death, as an interpretive scheme. Interpretive schemes are the vehicles through which experiences become meaningful everyday ordinary forms of reflection. Experience is always open to multiple forms of interpretation from various contexts of meaning. It is through this act of reflection that experience becomes lived. However, tracking the relationship of those who have lived before us with the experiences of our contemporaries presents a methodological problem as interpretive schemes may differ based upon the changes with the social world. Thus, the adequacy of social death as an interpretive scheme rests upon its the evidence of predecessors who experienced degradation, dishonor and the denial of recognition as citizens as well as their representation as aliens, animals and criminals. Plus, an interpretive scheme must be able to serve as a means to describe repeatable purposive action. Thus, my use is predicated upon phenomenological description and is not metaphorical. The argument presented here will recognize the perennial representations that occasion social exclusion in America as well as how the social world is made meaningful under conditions of social death. 52. I use culture here in the Weberian sense of interrelated webs of significance including economic, political, moral, religious, artistic and linguistic activities that constitute and produce social meaning. See Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism, (New York: Continuum, 1999), 22–23. 53. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 5. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 38. Patterson argues this work is accomplished by “law, custom and ideology” which we have defined as culture. 56. Ibid., 39–41. 57. Ibid., 41. 58. Ibid.

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59. Ibid., 44. 60. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, A. V. Miller, and John Niemeyer Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, 1979), 110–119. According to Hegel, the coming together of two persons results in their recognizing the other and being recognized. However, self-consciousness as a pure “being-for-self” understands its own actions through the actions of the other. The trial-by-death leads to a relationship where the master secures recognition from the slave through obedience. The master’s self-certainty is realized as his will returns to itself through the actions of the slave. At precisely this moment, the truth of the master’s selfcertainty is lost, as the slave cannot freely give recognition. Having reduced the slave to the status of thing, the recognition is one-sided and unequal. Moreover, for the slave, “servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is” and become a true independent consciousness. However, the certainty of the slave is achieved through the experience of dread, the fear of death, and the “absolute melting-away of everything stable.” This fear is inseparable from his labor that produces a product that has its own independence. The slave realizes the truth of self-consciousness in the permanent order of things through production as opposed to consumption and negation. For Hegel, the eventual bondage of the master and “freedom” of the slave represents the internal relationship of the master-slave relation. 61. Ibid., 98. 62. Ibid., 101. 63. Here I have combined Patterson “institutional dialectic” and “social process” within the term “cultural reproduction.”

Chapter Two

The Necropolitics of Social Death and Statecraft

In the previous chapter I argued that necropolitics, a politics of death, is disclosed in the very arche of the American experience. Moreover, representations of blacks as socially dead were critical to the rationalization of political exclusion. The case of Joseph Hanno reveals the role of the execution sermon and confession in the production of knowledge and truth that rationalized the regulation, discipline, and governing of the black population. Moreover, this theologically inflected knowledge was critical to reproducing the master-slave relationship that would secure the providential future of the well-ordered community, the City on the Hill. This chapter argues that in the antebellum period the master-slave relationship was transformed into the white citizen–black criminal relationship. More importantly, the enduring representations of blacks as animals and criminals would produce knowledge critical to American statecraft and the era of mass incarceration. The City on the Hill was a racialized vision buttressed by stereotypes to maintain social and symbolic barriers. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s distinction between types and stereotypes, I take stereotypes as deeply sedimented representations that reduce persons to exaggerated traits that fix the boundaries of the normal, separating it from the abnormal and deviant. 1 Particular stereotypes circulate within a long history of political thought that identifies the state of nature as the “other” to civilization. This is a critical component in maintaining the identity of the imagined community and protecting it through policing, containment and punishment. The representations that sustain the necropolitics of mass incarceration begin by associating blacks with the image of apes.

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STEREOTYPES AND SOCIAL DEATH In the earliest interactions of Africans and Europeans, blacks were depicted as bestial and brutish; the image of the Negro-ape served as the link in the great chain of being between humans and animals. 2 Theorists such as Jean Bodin asserted that Africans were the result of promiscuous relationships between men and apes. Naturalists such as Francois Leguat buttressed such claims by associating the Hottentots of Africa with apes, arguing: Nature, who does not oppose the Copulation of Horses with Asses, may well admit that of an Ape with a Female-Animal that resembles him, especially where the latter is not restrain’d by an Principle. An Ape and a Negro slave born and brought up out of the knowledge of God, have not less similitude between them than as Ass and a Mare. 3

Moreover, this imagery emphasized sexual intercourse between male apes and female humans. These particular male apes were said to be particularly libidinous, preferring human females and enslaved children. 4 Two particularly pernicious ideas grew out of this Negro-ape imagery: the first is that African people are part of God’s chain of being, though lack knowledge of God. This played a significant role in legitimating the European slave trade. French naturalist George Buffon argued, “The great Orang Outang carries off boys and girls to make slaves of them, which not only shews him, in my apprehension to be a man, but proves that he lives in society, and must have made some progress in the arts of civil life: for we hear of no nations altogether barbarous who use slaves.” 5 Thus, if Africans were made slaves by other primates, their subjugation was consistent with the natural order. Second, in addition to naturalizing African subjugation, the sexuality of the male ape was understood as a biological attribute of the black male. Thus, in a moment of sordid mimesis, the sexual desire of the ape for human females is transmuted into the unrestrained sexual desire of black men for white women. These deeply sedimented images would provide the meaning context for the myth of the black rapist. 6 In the postbellum period, lynching—a primary form of terror enforcing political and economic dominance—was justified by the myth of the black rapist. 7 This myth allowed law enforcement to see lynching as an extralegal form of justice rather than as murder. Ladelle McWhorter argues, “Whenever activists lobbied for legal change, the myth allowed a discursive shift away from white supremacist terrorism and toward the purported menace of uncontrolled sexuality.” 8 McWhorter’s argument shows the repetition of the religious themes of purity and expiation in emerging scientific discourses. She notes that the physicians also used the myth of the black rapist to call for the castration of offenders. 9 Thus, the myth of the black rapist is inseparable

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from a number of discourses that fueled movements dedicated to “incarcerate, institutionalize, segregate, [and] sterilize” black people and to forge a “Nordic race and its evolutionary supremacy, reproductive potential, and self-proclaimed civil singularity.” 10 Both lawmakers and journalists drew from this scientifically legitimated myth of the black rapist to call for more stringent laws to regulate the “problem” of black males. 11 Thus, the extralegal killing of blacks as a form of governance was legitimated by the knowledge produced about black desire. This is a profound repetition of the arche of the American political community that represents blacks as bestial and lacking sexual restraint, thus legitimating their political exclusion and punishment. This necropolitical repetition of the white citizen–black criminal relation endures as a source for renewing and securing the future of the American political community. The myth later undergoes a permutation critical for understanding the rise of mass incarceration as the black male rapist becomes the “cocaine-crazed Negro.” The myth of the cocaine-crazed Negro emerges in the social backlash toward Chinese immigrants working on railroads and mines in the 1850s. The desire to expand the economy while maintaining white cultural hegemony occasioned anti-Chinese clubs and unions. This socioeconomic situation quickly expressed itself politically. In 1877, a representative of San Francisco critiqued Chinese immigrants in his testimony before the Joint Special Committee of Congress: The burden of our accusation against them is that they come in conflict with our labor interests; that they can never assimilate with us; that they are perpetual, unchanging, and unchangeable alien element that can never become homogenous; that their civilization is demoralizing and degrading to our people; that they degrade and dishonor labor. 12

This representation of the Chinese as a source of permanent and unchanging defilement, dishonor, and degradation serves as a rationality of governance for political exclusion. The California state constitution restricted aliens from employment, voting, and land ownership. A delegate from the California state convention argued, “The State should be a State for white men, without any respect to the treaty, or misinterpretation of any treaty.” 13 This desire for cultural preservation stood in stark contrast to the trade treaty with China in 1868 that guaranteed protections for Chinese immigrants. The criminalization of opium emerged as a powerful means to resolve this political contradiction. The “gunboat diplomacy” of Great Britain introduced opium to China through the Opium Wars in 1842 and 1856. 14 Eventually, by the end of the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of the adult male population in China suffered from addiction. Because of this, the Chinese government welcomed

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a strong stance against opium. Legislation that addressed opium would appease the anti-Chinese sentiment domestically while also protecting U.S. trade interests. A key obstacle, however, was the southern fear that additional federal regulation might set a precedent for civil rights legislation interfering with the racial regime sustained under the rubric of “states’ rights.” 15 The image of the cocaine-crazed Negro would solidify southern support. The use of cocaine was present among both blacks and whites by the 1890s, yet its use among blacks was interpreted as a threat to social order. The meaning of drug use was quickly coupled with long-standing beliefs about the inferior capacity of blacks for self-governance. 16 A Houston druggist remarked, “Little did the North know, when freeing the Negro what awful slavery they would lead him.” 17 Further, sporadic episodes of extreme violence, such as the case of Robert Charles, were generalized into an image of the “cocaine-crazed Negro.” Charles went on a shooting spree in New Orleans, leaving seven people dead and twenty wounded. 18 Although there was no evidence that Charles was under the influence of cocaine, the local newspapers claimed a “bottle of cocaine” was found at his residence. 19 Through such sensational reports, the violence of one man came to represent the potential of all blacks using cocaine; this idea was then legitimated through other media accounts featuring medical professionals such as Dr. Edward Huntington Williams. In “Negro Cocaine Fiends Are a New Southern Menace,” Williams argued that “bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the ‘fiend’ to stop his rush or weaken this attack.” 20 Williams’s claims were drawn from D. K. Lyerly, police chief of Asheville, North Carolina, who received a call that a “previously inoffensive Negro with whom he was acquainted was ‘running amok’ in a cocaine frenzy.” Lyerly claimed that he put the muzzle of the gun to the man’s heart and fired with no effect. 21 Williams’s description of Lyerly’s response is worth quoting at length: The following day the Chief exchanged his revolver for one a heavier caliber. Yet the one with which he shot the negro was a heavy army model, using a cartridge that Lieut. Townsend Whelen, who is an authority on such matters, recently declared was large enough to “kill any game in America.” And many other officers in the South, who appreciate the increased vitality of the cocaine crazed negroes, have made similar exchange for guns of greater shocking power for the express purpose of combating the “fiend” when he runs amok. 22

Reports also began circulating that cocaine use would, in addition to providing exaggerated strength, cause black men to uncontrollably rape white women. 23 The myth of the cocaine-crazed Negro represents blacks as lacking the capacity for self-governance required for the exercise of liberty. Moreover, the use of science and scientific authorities such as Dr. Williams pro-

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duced a regime of truth that claims blacks using cocaine resist social norms, desire to rape white women, and exemplify animal-like strength. The coupling of the myth of the black rapist and the myth of the cocaine fiend situates blacks within the state of nature, outside of civil society. Scientific knowledge justified the myth of the cocaine-crazed Negro and supported its role in a rationality of governance. More specifically, it justified the use of extraordinary measures, such as larger bullets, to put the cocaine-crazed Negro to death. Additionally, the image of the cocaine-crazed Negro encodes drug use by whites or “nondangerous populations” as requiring therapeutic intervention, whereas drug use by blacks must be contained, disciplined, and punished. The image touched the arche of the American political community, preserving its political economy by reconciling southern interests for social control with their aversion to federal intervention through the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which was passed in 1914. This arche would be disclosed again decades later in the War on Drugs as a profound response to the socioeconomic and political changes in American society. REAGANISM AND THE BLACK NEOLIBERAL HUMAN PREDATOR The rise of Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement represents a powerful repetition of key aspects of the religious arche in American political economy. In 1974, a group of conservative activists gathered to discuss the future of the conservative movement. 24 Since then, the group, known as the Conservative Political Action Conference, has met annually to crystallize the best in conservative thought and strategy. The first speaker at this now fortyyear-old event was then Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s speech, “We Will Be a City upon a Hill,” touched on the themes of John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon. Following the tumultuous events of the 1960s, the speech invoked the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the interests of the conservative movement. Foreshadowing the character of “Reaganomics,” he argued, “fifty-six rank-and-file, ordinary citizens had founded a nation that grew from sea to shining sea, five million farms, quiet villages, cities that never sleep—all done without an area redevelopment plan, urban renewal, or a rural legal assistance program.” 25 To effectively frame liberal visions such as the Great Society programs as a threats to personal liberty, Reagan argued that “you are born with these rights, they are yours by the grace of God, and no government on earth can take them away from you.” 26 He then cites Winthrop directly, saying, “We will be as a city on a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we

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shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.” 27 Reagan immediately added his own coda, stating, “Well, we have not dealt falsely with our God, even if he is temporally suspended from the classroom.” 28 This retelling of the American story emphasizes expansionism while concealing the subjugation and enslavement of Native Americans and Africans. This concealment serves to discipline and discredit contemporary social movements born in response to America’s history of oppression. Moreover, this vision of individual liberty associated with the conquest of the wilderness, understood as the state of nature, is integral to the special mission given by God to America. The invocation of Winthrop’s words affirms the providential reasoning that is part of the religious arche of America. Through the theologically inflected claim that God has been “temporarily suspended from the classroom,” Reagan couples personal and political morality. This coupling implies that socioeconomic problems can be solved through acts of individual morality. In 1981, Reagan delivered a speech at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in New Orleans, Louisiana, in which he articulated an understanding of crime in relationship to persons, society, and government. Reagan argued that increasing crime rates result primarily from drug addiction and youthful offenders between the age of eighteen and twenty-one. 29 After citing reports that half of all inmates admitted to using drugs in the month prior to their arrest and that 50 to 60 percent of all property crimes are drug-related, Reagan constructed an image for the officers present. He reasoned, “From these statistics about youthful offenders and the impact of drug addiction on crime rates, a portrait emerges. The portrait is that of a stark staring face, a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time—the face of a human predator, the face of the habitual criminal. Nothing in nature is more cruel and more dangerous.” 30 Again, representations of social death would secure the well-ordered society. Reagan’s portrait draws on the deeply sedimented images of animalization and criminalization that in the 1980s disproportionately focused on young black males. In this imagery, the “human predator” whose humanity is criminalized and deserves punishment by the political community is also excluded from the political community as a result of an animalized nature. In addition, the images drawn from the state of nature ascribe an unchanging permanence to the “youthful offender,” proleptically transforming them into a habitual or career criminal. This equivocation frames the offender as unredeemed and unredeemable. Moreover, this framing delegitimizes alternative theories of social ills. Reagan here is worth quoting at length: In discussing these forms of sophisticated crimes, we see again the emergence of the problem of career criminals—those who make a conscious decision to pursue illicit professions, a decision based on a belief that crime does pay. I

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believe the emergence of this problem of career criminals has seriously undermined the notion that criminals are simply products of poverty or underprivileged backgrounds. 31

The argument is buttressed in Reagan’s speech by comments featured in Esquire magazine of a young married couple from Venice, California, who decided to arm themselves. They argue, “Some of these people are poor. Some of them are driven crazy with desire for stuff they’ll never be able to afford. But not all of them are poor, not by a long shot. A lot of them are making as much money, or a great deal more that you or I do. They do it because it’s easy. They do it because they believe no one will stop them, and they’re right.” 32 Such reasoning situates crime either as an irrational choice of the poor unable to control their desires or as a rational choice to circumvent the legal economy. Moreover, such reasoning was joined by a chorus of racially coded images of “Cadillac-driving welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” who buy T-bone steaks with food stamps, thus exploiting the racial resentment of working-class whites. The youthful offender was a predator that the well-ordered society needed to restrain as well as a career criminal to be punished. Reagan’s speeches evoked deeply sedimented fears of blacks as predators and animals unfit for civil society. More specifically, blacks are framed as human predators who lack control over their desire for material possessions, but their criminal act is framed as a rational choice. This representation mobilizes fear of an unrestrained and irrational black desire as well as resentment of a rational decision not to play by the rules of a market society. This criminalization of blackness within the terms of neoliberalism constitutes necropolitics. It touches the arche of the American experience that links the crisis of the political community with personal morality and ties social custom to social stability. Reagan argued that the decay of the economy and the growth of government could be traced to the problem of crime. 33 He states: Many of the social thinkers of the 1950s and ’60s who discussed crime only in the context of disadvantaged childhoods and poverty-stricken neighborhoods were the same people who thought that massive government spending could wipe away our social ills. The underlying premise in both cases was a belief that . . . he was a product of his material environment, and that by changing that environment—with government as the chief vehicle of change through educational, health, housing, and other programs—we could permanently change man and usher in a new era. 34

This argument forges an ideological link between race and crime, one that frames civil rights protesters as lawbreakers. 35 In 1964, Barry Goldwater argued that “if it is entirely proper for the government to take away from some to give to others, then won’t some be led to believe that they can

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rightfully take from anyone who has more than they? No wonder law and order has broken down, mob violence has engulfed great American cities, and our wives feel unsafe in the streets.” 36 While invoking the specter of rape, Goldwater’s rhetoric collapses the distinctions between violent protest and civil disobedience. More importantly, Goldwater’s comments reveal a reinterpretation of the welfare state in which the redistribution of wealth causes unrest rather than mitigates the potential for unrest. 37 Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to counter this critique, arguing that lawmakers who lament violence in the streets should not vote against the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Act, and major educational bills. 38 Johnson’s rejoinder would not be enough. The weakening of social-scientific explanations for crime and rehabilitative responses continued as Richard Nixon was elected as the “law and order” president in 1968. 39 The focus on crime in politics and the media was extremely effective: one survey found that 81 percent of those polled felt that law and order had broken down, blaming “Negroes who start riots” and “Communists.” 40 Thus, the discourse that Reagan called on in the years that followed was rooted in deeply sedimented meanings that criminalized the struggle for justice and full inclusion in American life as a matter of taking from some and giving to others. Driving this point home, Reagan continued to discredit societal factors, arguing that “the solution to the crime problem will not be found in the social worker’s files, the psychiatrist’s notes, or the bureaucrat’s budget.” 41 Equating inclusion with criminality delegitimized the push toward structural transformation through investments in education, health, housing, and other social programs. Because contemporary educational and economic performance depends largely on the quantity and quality of past investments in schooling, the legacy of racial discrimination adversely affects the skills and experience of human capital today. 42 It also shapes the struggle over public resources between urban blacks seeking equitable opportunities and working whites unable to move to the suburbs. 43 Reaganism was undergirded theologically by the work Michael Novak and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). MICHAEL NOVAK’S PUBLIC THEOLOGY Michael Novak is an important figure in the neoconservative movement whose theological vision exerted significant influence on public policy. 44 Novak was one of many liberals who unexpectedly found refuge in conservative political pastures in the face of countercultural and radical social movements. 45 Although space does not permit an overview of Novak’s corpus, two currents of thought are important here. The first is Novak’s understanding of the democratic capitalism that cultivates virtue without recourse to a

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unitary moral order such as theocracy or socialism. And the second is his account of the decline of American virtue as the cause of increased criminality. Together, these constituted a public theology that wielded important influence on the rationality of governance supporting mass incarceration. In The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Novak marshals two points to ward off the charge that the pluralism of American society is inherently amoral. First, American political culture features symbols such as “God” and “Creator” that affirm the presence of a power that transcends the state. 46 Second, freedoms of speech, the press, and inquiry cultivate the virtues of restraint, tolerance, and patience within the democratic process. 47 Novak’s argument prepares the way to address the challenge of those who are not sufficiently integrated into society—those who suffer from “alienation, anomie, loneliness, and nothingness.” 48 Such alienation is rendered virtuous through a religious transvaluation in Novak’s vision. He argues: The “wasteland” at the heart of democratic capitalism is like a field of battle, on which individuals wander alone, in some confusion, amid many casualties. Nonetheless, like the dark night of the soul in the inner journey of the mystics, this desert has an indispensable purpose. It is maintained out of respect for the diversity of human consciences, perceptions, and intentions. 49

Novak reinterprets the experience of alienation from society as the experience of inalienable rights that allows one to question meanings received from one’s community or social world. In addition, the loss of social norms and social integration through the ravages of economic policies is reinterpreted as an intentional social sanctuary for the benefit of an individual’s spiritual quest. Subsequently, the inevitable social miseries must be reinterpreted to support this account as well. In 1986, Novak published Character and Crime: An Inquiry into the Causes of the Virtue of Nations. Novak argues that inquiring into the causes of poverty is a mistake because “one would then know how to make poverty. Wonderful!” 50 Transforming Adam Smith’s idea that to understand poverty one should inquire into the cause of wealth, Novak argues that because crime is caused by the absence of virtue, understanding crime requires inquiry into the causes of virtue. For Novak the criminal is a “mal-formed or ill-developed human person,” and human persons are responsible for their character as well as their acts. Further, since crimes are both against virtue and law, a national ethos or public culture is critical for reducing crime and criminals. The cause of America’s diminishing national ethos, Novak argues, is a shift of cultural authority within society’s professional class. In particular, authority has been transferred from doctors, clergy, and military leaders to political activists and cultural heroes trained in communication, described as “the New Class.” 51 Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1976, Novak argues

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these changes ushered in a shift in America’s national ethos from “selfmastery to self-expression, from formation of character to liberation, from virtue to self-discovery” expressed as a preference for impulse-release rather than impulse-restraint. 52 With cultural elites as the primary culprit, Novak argues that the cultural ethos of liberation undermined the acquisition of virtue, resulting in an increase in crime. 53 Novak’s theological interpretation of the profound changes in American society would aid and abet anti-black racism and contribute to the instantiation of necropolitics. Character and Crime steadfastly refuses to admit that this “new” cultural ethos is a product of the American ethos as such. More specifically, Novak denies the perennial tradition of protest and dissent within American culture. Novak’s portrait of “self-mastery” versus “self-expression” reiterates a deeply sedimented contrast in American history between “Jacksonian individualism” and “Emersonian individualism.” 54 Individualism for the former is the condition for political, economic, and social progress, while the latter sees progress in terms of the self battling against the machinations of society. Novak uses crime as an index of this transformation. Citing a passage from Tocqueville’s assessment of the political effects of a decentralized government, Novak laments that America no longer sees the criminal as the enemy of the human race. 55 More importantly, under the influence of cultural elites, “Police were called ‘pigs’ by youths, and perhaps the crime most likely to arouse antagonistic passion was ‘police brutality.’ It would be too much to say that in America the policeman began to be looked upon ‘as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him.’” In order to address crime, Novak recommends that cultural elites wage a campaign that represents the criminal “as an enemy of the human race” and that shows criminals that humanity is against them. 56 At this point I want to recruit the work of Paul Kahn, a legal scholar, to articulate how the racialized imaginary of Reagan’s public theology 57 transformed the War on Drugs into a literal war with black people as an enemy of the people. At the heart of Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is the claim that the sacred in American experience begins with revolution, a willingness to sacrifice that establishes a popular sovereign. 58 This sacred originating act of sovereignty occasions the social contract rather than the social contract creating a sovereign. 59 Thus, for Kahn, political theology is a phenomenological investigation into the political formation of the sacred, and this political formation has the capacity to imagine an enemy that threatens its existence. More specifically, Kahn presses for a distinction between criminals and enemies in modern American and international law. 60 The former is a juridical figure whose actions are subject to criminal procedure and are interpreted as personal pathology rather than political threat. 61 In addition, Kahn argues that “law enforcement aims to prevent the violence of the criminal from becoming a source of collective

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self-expression.” 62 For Kahn, the collapse of the distinction between criminals and enemies is the preeminent sign of political crisis. 63 It is precisely this collapse of enemy and criminal that is a perennial aspect of necropolitics in America and frames Novak’s contribution to the rationality of governance in the War on Drugs. In Crime and Character, Novak argues that statecraft should confine itself to the “preconditions of soulcraft,” while soulcraft itself is the responsibility of citizens. 64 Novak’s participation in the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and his relationships with Ronald Reagan and influence on Margaret Thatcher had the opposite effect. 65 Novak’s theological and social ideas were elevated to the level of statecraft, providing a powerful rationality of governance, one that inverts Kahn’s premise. Instead of law preventing the violence of the criminal from becoming a collective self-expression, Novak sees new collective self-expressions as producing the criminal. This criminal is an enemy, a threat to the existence of the American political community. As journalist Rodney Balko has argued, Reagan’s drug warriors would “dehumanize drug dealers, cast the drug fight as a biblical struggle between good and evil, and in the process, turn the country’s drug cops into holy soldiers.” 66 Consistent with the theological and moral framework that mediated the arche of the American experience with a rationality of governance, Attorney General William French argued that the Justice Department was not a domestic agency but the “internal arm of national defense.” Together, The Spirit of Capitalism and Crime and Character simultaneously reframed social alienation as a spiritual quest and envisioned new cultural expressions as producing crime and political enemies. The result is a social vision that disavows social responsibility for inequities while embracing a moral crusade against drugs in order to preserve the City on the Hill. Novak’s vision of the criminal as enemy was complemented by another vision that think tanks helped make normative: the much heralded revival of civil society, which buttressed Reagan’s racialized public theology. RACIALIZING CIVIL SOCIETY In 1977 the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, published Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus’s To Empower the People, infusing discussions of public policy with the now-ubiquitous phrase “mediating institutions.” To Empower the People was an ode to a tradition of social theories emphasizing the role of Edmund Burke’s “little platoon,” Tocqueville’s “association,” and Durkheim’s “little aggregations” to shield against the profound forces of modernization. 67 Mediating structures stand between the individual and the large institutions of public life. Eschewing any substantive distinctions between social entities, mediating structures would

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guard against megastructures such as “large economic conglomerates of capitalist enterprise, big labor, and the growing bureaucracies that administer wide sectors of the society, such as in education and the organized professions.” 68 Thus, mediating structures were a conceptual and policy intervention designed to resist the “massification” of American society. 69 More importantly, Berger and Neuhaus recommended that “public policies should protect and foster mediating structures, and wherever possible, public policy should utilize mediating structures for the realization of social purposes.” 70 Ironically, this particular attempt at resisting massification of the society contributed to mass incarceration as an integral part of Reagan’s public theology. Influenced by the vision of Berger and Neuhaus, Reagan thought that mediating institutions such as families, neighborhoods, churches, and schools were better poised to address the ills of society than government was. On the one hand, Reagan argued, “We have moved to cut away many of the federal intrusions of the private sector that were preempting the prerogatives of our private and independent institutions.” 71 These private institutions can then take their role in cultivating communal values and nurturing basic trust. However, these mediating institutions were also embedded in an ominous, racially charged vision, as Reagan explained: “We must never forget the jungle is always waiting to take us over. Only our deep moral values and our strong institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.” 72 The jungle was largely encoded as the urban environment of blacks, and black males in particular, who were represented as animals and criminals threatening the American City on a Hill. It is important at this point to draw out the link between civil society, the arche of the American political community, and necropolitics. To reiterate, my argument thus far has investigated the religious depth that sustains mass incarceration as a social formation in American life. In addition, I have argued, in contrast to Foucault, that within the arche of American life is a form of necropolitics, whose representations of social death legitimate actual social death. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault attempts to denaturalize the taken-for-granted nature of contemporary civil society to disclose its role in governance. Specifically drawing on the work of Adam Ferguson, he sketches the forms of association that are reducible to neither economic nor juridical relations. 73 Rather, they are formed through shared affections, sympathies, sentiments, and instincts. As such, these forms of association sometimes encourage benevolence toward others and sometimes cultivate a “loathing of others”; similarly, they sometimes generate repugnance, and other times pleasure, at the misfortune of others. 74 Foucault seizes on Ferguson’s rejection of the idea of the state of nature, arguing for the futility of imagining a transition from “nature to history, or from nonsociety to society.” 75 Two important consequences flow from this. First, civil

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society constituted by forms of association reproduces itself through economics. And these economic interests also serve as a means of disassociation. Second, the juridical form is an expression of the power relations within civil society. Civil society becomes the engine of history, the power of both rending and repairing the social fabric. The religious situation of mass incarceration complicates this picture. In Reagan’s speech there is a parallel vision of civil society that emerges along racial lines. In the face of international economic competition, the arche of the American experience serves as the power of renewal. This renewal is achieved by casting predominantly white society as the City on the Hill, endowed with natural rights not given by government, while blacks and urban communities are framed as residing in the state of nature. Blacks are seen as lacking the rational capacity to enter the social contract that secures protection from this “Hobbesian sovereign.” Instead, their rational capacity for crime makes them a target of the Hobbesian sovereign. Within Reaganism, mediating institutions conceal the interventionist role of government, whose policies facilitate social disparities along racial lines. Within the context of mass incarceration, association and disassociation within civil society are not merely formal aspects of the economic motor of history. Rather, the arche of the American experience and its attendant representations of social death rend the social fabric through a racialized political economy on the one hand, and punishment on the other. Such a rending of the social fabric is legitimated by the way Novak frames the criminal as enemy and uses a focus on mediating institutions as a way to disavow responsibility for and deflect attention from the miseries produced by social inequalities. The representations of Reaganism’s human predator and the cocaine-crazed Negro would not disappear. They coalesced into the much maligned and feared “crackhead.” THE NECROPOLITICS OF CRACK COCAINE Crack cocaine originally appeared as a practice of freebasing in the late 1970s. At that time, its primary users were stockholders, investment bankers, rock stars, socialites, and professional athletes. Problems associated with this new form of cocaine use resulted in laws passed by Congress to cover drug treatment through health insurance. 76 However, when blacks and others in urban areas began using the same form of cocaine, the response was profoundly punitive. As the same form of drug use shifted from affluent private spaces to lower-income, street-level drug markets, a complex image emerged that would guide public attitudes and responses: the crackhead. Like many drug scares of the past, crack was framed as being immediately addictive.

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In the spring of 1986, Newsweek reported that crack was “the most addictive drug known to man.” 77 Moreover, news outlets routinely used the language of communicable disease such as “plague” and “epidemic” to underscore the central fear that crack would spread beyond urban areas. In the same year, the New York Times ran several front-page stories claiming that crack was spreading to wealthy suburbs and to the middle class. 78 The use of plague metaphors for crack obscured the fact that crack “did not spread far beyond the most marginalized and vulnerable segments of society,” where its primary consequences were felt. 79 Moreover, the “crackhead,” the new “cocaine-crazed Negro,” portrayed crack as having a causal relationship to violence, obscuring a more complex story. A major study conducted in 1988 with data collected from the New York City Police Department indicated three primary forms of drug-related homicide: psychopharmacological, economic compulsion, and systemic. 80 The first indicates excitable, irrational behavior that becomes violent or leads to victimization. The second indicates homicides committed as a consequence of criminal activity pursued to support drug use. The third refers to homicides that arise from involvement in an illicit drug market. Drug markets bring together a potent combination of large financial deals without a legal means of settling disputes. Reinarman rightly argues that systemic violence includes territorial disputes between rival dealers, assaults and homicides committed within particular drug-dealing operations in order to enforce normative codes, robberies of drug dealers, elimination informers, punishment for selling adulterated or bogus drugs, or assaults to collect drug-related debts . . . between users, as in cases of disputes over drugs or drug paraphernalia. 81

Within a three-month period at the height of the crack scare in 1988 a total of 414 homicides were initially classified as drug related. However, research shows that 196 (47.3%) of those cases lacked sufficient evidence to be classified as such. In addition, only 31 (7.5%) homicides were attributed to psychopharmacological causes while 162 (74%) were attributed to systemic factors. The racialization of crack, with representations of social death through the crackhead, provided a rationale of governance to protect predominantly white and affluent populations. Moreover, the image of the irrational crackhead obscures the market rationality of the majority of deaths associated with crack. Necropolitics misrepresents both the potential threat to predominantly white and affluent populations and the actual threat killing urban populations. This complexity was lost with the death of Len Bias on June 19, 1986, from an overdose of cocaine. It is important for this analysis to understand sports as more than a mere game or entertainment. Rather, there is a growing

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body of scholarship on sports as a primary religious, cultural, and institutional text in American life. 82 Scholars have recently made inroads by thinking about sports as a religious phenomenon itself rather than only analyzing religious themes in sports. 83 I argue that the relationship between sports and society reveals the arche of the American experience at critical junctures. 84 In addition, sports are a major site of hypersurveillance that shapes and forms the public imagination of predominantly white audiences about black athletes. More specifically, the black athlete in the NBA becomes a stand-in for broader conversation about race in society, 85 while also serving as the premier site for articulating the ideology of the American dream. 86 Prior to the full-scale embrace of hip-hop and urban culture in the 1990s that cultivated a “racial voyeurism,” the NBA focused on producing a commercially acceptable blackness as epitomized by Michael Jordan. 87 It is critical to situate Len Bias in the broader context of what C. L. Cole describes as the “sport/gang dyad” governing the American imagination. 88 The sport/gang dyad assumes the pathological breakdown of the black family that leaves sports and gangs to fill the void. More importantly, a neoliberal American imagination separates black youth from their material contexts, rendering their participation in sports or gangs as an “expression of a truth-of-being and individual choice.” 89 The black NBA athlete is imaged as the realization of the American dream, while gang members are those who have rejected American meritocracy. The death of Len Bias threatened this legitimacy and occasioned a profound repetition of necropolitics. In 1986, when Len Bias became the second-round draft pick for the Boston Celtics, he was expected to be one of the most dominant players in the NBA. Bias would also provide a major image overhaul for the Boston Celtics and the city of Boston. In recalling the draft pick, sports columnist David Steele writes, “In the two days after, we had pondered the deep psychological and philosophical shift that was required of us becoming— gulp—Celtics fans. Celtics gear had already started popping up all over D.C. and Prince George’s County. You did not see kids in the D.C. area, certainly not black kids, wearing Celtics gear in 1986.” 90 During the 1980s, the rivalry between the Lakers and the Celtics was cast in distinctly racial terms, featuring their respective heroes Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Len Bias represented the potential for a profound shift in racial identification within basketball. Shortly after his death, some media outlets reported that Len Bias had died of heart failure associated with smoking crack. While such reports were ultimately refuted, it was precisely his blackness that encoded his choice to use crack rather than powder cocaine. In the wake of his death, a version of the “sports/gang dyad” was recruited to make sense of the event. Brian Tribble, one of Bias’s friends, emerged as a representative of Bias’s Washington, D.C., neighborhood accused of supplying Bias with drugs, while Lefty Driesell, the head basketball coach at

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the University of Maryland, was accused of neglecting his role as white mainstream patriarchal figure. 91 Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell argue persuasively that together Tribble and Driesell provided a human face to the social fault line with “the mob of black youth, out of control and in need of discipline,” on the one hand, and “white authority debilitated by conflicting interests . . . and competing goals,” on the other. 92 The death of Len Bias served as a social, spatial, and ideological breach in securing a well-ordered society; it was a crisis in governance that required a response. Eric Sterling, a member of the House Judiciary Committee Counsel (1979–1989), describes the impact of the death of Bias. He recalls: I worked for the House Crime Subcommittee in the spring of 1986, and in June Len Bias dies. Suddenly voltage goes through the Congress. The lights go on. “Drugs! Drugs!” You’re over, you know, every little theater of operations that can have a hearing—Energy and Commerce, Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Interior and Insular Affairs Armed Services, Ways and Means. You know everybody! It’s like, “Drugs!” You know the curtain goes up, and hearings are held on what every congressional committee can do about drugs. 93

In Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, Dan Baum states: Immediately upon returning from the July 4 recess, Tip O’ Neill called an emergency meeting of the crime-related committee chairman. Write me some goddamn legislation, he thundered. All anybody up in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. The papers are screaming for blood. We need to get out front on this now. This week. Today. The Republicans beat us to it in 1984 and I don’t want that to happen again. I want dramatic new initiatives for dealing with crack and other drugs. If we can do this fast enough, he said to the Democratic leadership arrayed around him, we can take the issue away from the White House. 94

Fueled by this breach, Congress, bypassing traditional legislative protocols, rewrote nearly all of the nation’s drug laws, including the death penalty for major traffickers, life in prison for some repeat offenders, mandatory federal sentences for possession, and direct military intervention. This legislation would fuel America’s prison population and prison building. The death of Len Bias touched the arche, the religious depth of the American experience. The rhetorical and political influence of Reaganism effectively coupled representations of social death—the animalization and criminalization of blacks—with drugs as a threat to the fabric and future of American life. In addition, the racialized imagery of civil society and the jungle prominent in Reaganism finds its mimesis in the “sports versus gangs” imagery in which the NBA serves as a surrogate mediating institution taking the place of the “disappearing black family.” Bias’s death was considered a

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breach of the City on the Hill by “the jungle” and by the “mob of black youth” beyond redemption. Those communities already suffering from the economic marginalization legitimated by the necropolitics of Reaganism would now be subject to containment, discipline, and punishment through the War on Drugs. The drafting of Len Bias into the NBA invested his image with sacred ideology of the American dream. His death occasioned a profound and punitive retaliation that constitutes not justice but vengeance. The mythology of crack cocaine would also extend itself to the black family. The most pernicious aspect of the mythology around crack cocaine was the construction of crack mothers and crack babies. Black mothers have undergone a long history of representational assaults as emasculating Jezebels, Mammies, and welfare queens. These images have consistently legitimated the idea that unregulated black motherhood is dangerous. 95 The racialized images of crack mothers appeared in the midst of an ideological battle over what sociologist William Julius Wilson called the “underclass.” Wilson’s term has received sustained criticism for reinforcing social stigma and denying the agency of residents in marginalized communities. While recognizing that these critiques name the potential abuses of the idea, it should be noted that Wilson’s research places the social miseries of economically depressed communities at the feet of deindustrialization and social isolation rather than blaming individuals for lacking personal responsibility, as conservative ideology would have it. 96 And it is precisely this ideological position that was intensified by the mythology of crack mothers and crack babies through necropolitics. Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post reporter, opened up a 1989 editorial with the following: “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.” 97 Douglas Besharov, former director of the National Center on Child Abuse and first to coin the term “bio-underclass,” argued, “This is not the stuff that Head Start can fix.” 98 Krauthammer’s argument is relentlessly tied to biology, noting that crack is the “most effective destroyer of the maternal instinct ever found.” His argument culminates in the claim that when the problem is widespread it produces individual tragedies, but only when it becomes concentrated and localized, as it the inner-city or on the reservation, does it become a threat to communal life as a whole. In the poorest, most desperate pockets of the American society, it has now become a menace to the future. For the bio-underclass, the biologically determined underclass of the underclass, tomorrow’s misery will exceed yesterday’s. That has already been decreed. 99

The individual tragedies referenced are families whose “middle-class values and middle-class money can at least help protect these children after

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birth.” 100 Krauthammer buttresses the “culture of poverty” argument by drawing on a tradition of thought that claims black mothers are incapable of imparting moral values to their children. Since mothering for black women is framed by this tradition as a matter of instinct rather than middle-class values, crack usage destroys their ability to reproduce children capable of participating in the political community, consigning them to a life of “poverty, delinquency and despair.” 101 The representation of black women as crack mothers would serve as a key image in the necropolitics of mass incarceration. This discourse surrounding the predetermined future of “crack babies” reached its zenith when John Robert Silber, philosopher and then president of Boston University, invoked St. Thomas Aquinas. Silber criticized health care providers who fail to spend sufficient resources to support children who could live “to the greater glory of God, while spending immense amounts on crack babies who won’t ever achieve the intellectual development to have a consciousness of God.” 102 Tragically, this was false. Medical researchers who conducted follow-up studies with these infants found that with the proper pediatric care and home environment all of the damage thought to be permanent was reversible. 103 The exaggerated claims of the billions these babies would cost in health care, education, and criminal justice were never retracted. 104 The impact of this on mass incarceration is illustrated by Krauthammer’s logic that “taking custody of the child unfortunately but necessarily means taking custody of the mother. This is no solution to the mother’s drug problem. But it is a solution to the baby’s. There might be a better solution fairer to both, but no one can find it. And until we do, the biounderclass grows.” 105 In the religious depth of American political economy, black women and children who fell under the image of social death as crack mothers and crack babies were stigmatized as unredeemed and unredeemable. This shifted the rationality of governance from ameliorative programs like Head Start to forms of discipline that punish black women and contain the future “menace” of their children. Nothing embodies this fear more that the image of superpredators. THE NECROPOLITICS OF SUPERPREDATORS In 2016 Hillary Clinton spoke at a fundraiser in a private residence in Charleston, South Carolina. This campaign stop was important, as South Carolina’s Democratic primary was only days away. During her speech, Clinton indicated her commitment to social justice by referencing her actions in response to the murder of Walter Scott by police and the Charleston Church Massacre. 106 Her commitment to racial justice did not go unchallenged. During Clinton’s speech, #BlackLivesMatter activist Ashley

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Williams slowly unraveled a white-and-black banner with the words “We have to bring them to heel” and boldly declared that she was not a superpredator. 107 Williams’s words are the fruit of the tireless work of activists addressing mass incarceration, the popularity of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and the unmistakable mark the #BlackLivesMatter movement has made on American public life. The 2016 presidential race placed in sharp relief President Bill Clinton’s policies on mass incarceration and his support of the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act in particular. 108 To build support for this bill, then first lady Hillary Clinton gave an address at New Hampshire’s Keene State College where she stated, “They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.” 109 While activists are correct to challenge Hillary on her advocacy of the bill, it is critical to understand her comments as rooted in a bipartisan form of necropolitics. The phrase “no conscience, no empathy” is the rhetorical and ideological echo of political scientist John DiIulio’s words, which became accepted as truth. The representations of superpredators and the moral panic that ensued began with DiIulio’s prediction in The Weekly Standard that America was sitting on a “demographic time bomb.” 110 Without articulating any social or historical context, he recounted that among ten thousand boys born in Philadelphia in 1945, 6 percent of them committed over half of all serious crimes. In an extraordinary extrapolation, he reasoned that the presence of an additional five hundred thousand teenagers by the year 2000 translated into thirty thousand more “murderers, rapists and muggers.” 111 The argument offers no theory of why these adolescent boys were being arrested in 1945. In addition, the theory naturalizes this social fact into a natural law for the purpose of social forecasting. Still, there was the task of explaining why these youth, a new generation of superpredators, would be even worse than Bloods and Crips. 112 To accomplish this, DiIulio developed a theory of moral poverty rooted in conservative theories of crime and supported by statistical and anecdotal evidence—what he refers to as the “best science” and “common sense.” 113 The theory of moral poverty, described by DiIulio in Body Count: Moral Poverty: How to Win Americas War Against Crime and Drugs, which he coauthored, asserts that superpredators are the result of children who grew up in homes without “loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong; the poverty of being without parents and other authorities who habituate you to feel joy at others’ joy, pain at others’ pain, satisfaction when you do right, remorse when you do wrong.” 114 Such communities lack any moral sense, moral authorities, decency, or love capable of cultivating the qualities of empathy or remorse. 115 In one his most striking statements, DiIulio makes a theological claim that superpredators are the product of social

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settings that are “fatherless, Godless, and jobless.” 116 This theory of moral poverty is situated in a powerful reiteration of necropolitics reinforced by spurious social science. The animalizing and criminalizing representations of inner-city youth, and urban black males in particular, as superpredators born of moral poverty renders them a population outside of civil society requiring containment and punishment by the state. DiIulio argues that “an extremely morally impoverished beginning early in life makes children vicious who are by nature merely aggressive, makes children remorseless who are disposed to be uncaring, and makes children radically impulsive who have difficulty sitting still, concentrating and thinking ahead.” 117 He goes on to claim that superpredators would have required a “maximum dosage of moral tutelage” from moral authorities such as teachers, coaches, and clergy in order to be “civilized and socialized.” 118 He explains that this applies to such youth regardless of race, region, zip code, or socioeconomic status. 119 The speed by which this theory spread evidences its ability to touch the arche of the American political community. Moreover, this theory of moral poverty operates as an explanation for the rise of “superpredators” and also provides its remedy: the renewal of family and civil society. This leaves the theory with an explanatory problem. Why is civil society unable to prevent crime from becoming normalized in the population of youth endangering the future? DiIulio looks to culture as the culprit. American drug culture is framed by DiIulio as an outgrowth of “the radical political and moral criticism of American culture and the related youthful rebelliousness of the late 1960s and 1970s.” 120 He specifically argues that the “themes of revolution, liberation, and drugs were intertwined in popular music, in other parts of the entertainment industry, in the press, on university campuses, and in some quarters of the media,” contributing to anti-establishment views that vilified law enforcement, particularly those who work in drug enforcement. 121 The theory of moral poverty also has particular relevance for African American communities. According to DiIulio, government programs that grew out of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s “helped wreck the two-parent family” and undermined civil society. 122 He argues that this has had a particularly negative effect on the black community: Among other puzzles, the moral poverty theory explains why, despite living in desperate economic poverty, under the heavy weight of Jim Crow, and with plenty of free access to guns, the churchgoing, two-parent black families of the South never experienced anything remotely like the tragic levels of homicidal youth and gang violence that plague some of today’s black inner-city neighborhoods. 123

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In one fell swoop, superpredators served as a referendum on the social movements that broke the stranglehold of Jim Crow. The theory of moral poverty ignores all other sociological and historical evidence regarding the rise of gangs, such as the effects of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and growing impoverishment from neoliberal policies that undermine the stability of all families, regardless of their formation. The theory engages in the “romancing of Jim Crow,” where the social conditions of the present are explained by the loss of a romanticized, reductive, and pastoral image of the southern black nuclear, churchgoing, and gun-toting family. 124 The image is important given DiIulio’s primary recommendation for addressing the problem of superpredators: government funding of religion. The government should fund religion, he says, based on the idea that “the good requires constant reinforcement and the bad needs only permission” is a self-evident truth lost on modern society. 125 In DiIulio’s Weekly Standard article, he cites a 1986 study by Harvard economist Richard Freeman, claiming that among black youth “church attendance was a better predictor of who would escape drugs, crime, and poverty than any other single variable.” 126 That same study, however, indicates that churches have the greatest impact on youth who are in school and does not have a strong effect on youth who are out of school. 127 In addition, the study found that it was the role of churches as social institutions, rather than their role in the formation of religious attitudes, that affected youth behavior. 128 This contradicts the thrust of DiIulio’s argument for the distinctive role of religion in preventing superpredators. Superpredators are represented as radically present-oriented 129 and self-regarding. 130 Such attitudes would be transformed by religion into attitudes that pursue the moral good and regard others regardless of social circumstance. However, Freeman’s study affirms greater government support of public schools, employment opportunities, and social services, not less. DiIulio’s theory and subsequent policy recommendations strip away resources from the social institutions whose overlapping influences are required to develop the “moral sense” he desires. As the images of superpredators and the theory of moral poverty traveled through various articles and books in the public sphere, they eventually found their way to Washington, D.C. The necropolitics of superpredators can be witnessed in “The Changing Nature of Youth Violence,” a subcommittee hearing of the Committee of the Judiciary of the U.S. Senate. Both John DiIulio and Rev. Eugene Rivers, a well-known Boston pastor and representative of the Ten Point Coalition, a clergy-sponsored organization that received national attention for its work on youth violence, were present at this meeting. 131 In a number of publications, DiIulio draws on the ministry of Reverend Rivers to provide the empirical validation for his theory of moral poverty and superpredators. In addition to sharing the stories of Rivers’s work with youth, DiIulio often quotes Rivers

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as saying, “It’s barbed wire and more black juvenile super-predators . . . or civil society and stronger black churches. It’s that simple.” 132 Together, Rivers and DiIulio proved to be formidable partners as the face of the “best science” and “common sense.” DiIulio provided academic legitimacy, and Rivers offered ecclesial moral authority. Here, I want to examine the key differences in their testimonies in order to understand how DiIulio’s theory operates as form of necropolitics. The beginning of Rivers’s testimony to the subcommittee begins with the bleak social prospects of nearly ten million Americans living in postindustrial urban centers. 133 Rivers emphasizes that without serious intervention, a generation of blacks will not pass on the cultural values necessary to achieve success as changes in the economy render a generation of Americans economically obsolete. 134 However, Rivers also places his own interpretive gloss on the theme of moral poverty by arguing that unlike blacks who came out of slavery with “strong backs and discipline, a thirst for literacy, [and] a deep religious faith,” a new generation of blacks has emerged that “do not know the ways of the Lord” and would fail to qualify to work as slaves. 135 The result is a new form of social death. Rivers is worth quoting at length on this point: Unable to see a more rational future through the eyes of faith, they lack the hope that sustained their forebears. Lacking hope, they experience what Orlando Patterson has called social death. But unlike the social death of formal slavery, this new social death is fundamentally spiritual, rooted in the destruction of faith and hope. . . . If we fail to grasp the spiritual implications of the death of faith and hope for a generation of young people, we will have missed the point entirely, completely. So I encourage all the social policy analysis, but if we fail to recognize this fundamental truth, the worst is yet to come. . . . In a world without faith and hope, history and identity are themselves divested of meaning. So as Christian philosopher Cornel West has argued, I think correctly, the future is transformed into a spectacle of nihilism and decay. It is, in the end, this profoundly spiritual nature of the current crisis that gives it its unique historical character. 136

Rivers’s argument reveals a number of important problems, the least of which presupposes that religious faith is necessary for youth to work, even as slaves. It is a curious assertion inasmuch as it collapses a theological interpretation of American history while ascribing theological motivations to all blacks in American history. Moreover, it is profoundly at odds with the voices of the black youth that Rivers himself bears witness to. Specifically, Rivers testifies that there are sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids willing to put in sixteen hours a day selling drugs: “This needs to be stressed, too, because there is a fiction at large in the public that somehow these folks just want to be on welfare and not work. That is obviously false. If these kids are

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willing to work 16 hours a day selling drugs, with no insurance, no retirement plan, no health plan, you know, the will to work is not the problem.” 137 Rivers’s testimony delivers an important critique of representations of black youth as irrational and inherently criminal. However, this critique is overshadowed by the reinscribing of a conservative interpretation of Cornel West’s influential concept of black nihilism that inadvertently contributes to necropolitics. In 1994 Cornel West’s Race Matters became a national bestseller and introduced “black nihilism” to academic and mainstream audiences. In the now well-known essay “Nihilism in Black America,” West frames the issues facing black America as beyond the structural explanations offered by liberals and the behavioral explanations offered by conservatives. What is at stake for West in the polarization of the debate is the inability of either ideological position to grapple with nihilism, the “horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness,” as the basic threat to the very existence of black America. 138 While recounting the long history of blacks in America struggling against forces of oppression, and without an ahistorical reading that imputes Christianity to all blacks, West argues that a robust black civil society sustained cultural meanings that supported “service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence.” 139 West, echoing familiar laments among African Americans, struggles to give voice to the significant cultural changes that are copresent in an era of increasing social miseries among the most marginalized communities. West names the culprits: market forces and market moralities. Market forces have shattered the institutions of black civil society while promoting a market morality whose primary virtue of pleasure stands in stark contrast to the virtues of “love, care, and service to others.” 140 For our purposes, it is important to recognize West’s concept of black nihilism as a transformation of Orlando Patterson’s natal alienation, a critical part of his account of slavery and social death. In his chapter “Philosophy and the Urban Underclass” West identifies 1964 through 1967 as a decisive rupture in the character of black communities caused by the pervasive presence of the drug trade. 141 Specifically, he argues: Black neighborhoods underwent a qualitative transformation largely due to the invasion of a particular kind of commodification, namely, the buying and selling of a particular commodity—drugs. Whether or not this was conspiratorial, black communities undoubtedly have changed fundamentally. For the first time we have the disintegration of the transclass character of black communities in which different classes live together. 142

The result was a historical break in the ability of the institutions of black civil society 143 to transmit the values of self-respect and self-esteem. However, West is left with the curious problem of accounting for why black civil

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society was able to transmit such values as hope, sacrifice, and caring for others against the backdrop of Jim Crow but is no longer able to do so in the face of drugs. West finds the answer through cultural psychology. The inability of black civil society to transmit values is rooted for West in the cumulative effects of historical natal alienation on the black psyche. The consequence is the creation of an “airborne people, a dangling people, a people who must forever attempt to acquire their self-identity and self-image” and its intersection with a new era of consumption from 1964 to the present. West transforms Patterson’s concept of natal alienation from the formal denial of social recognition to a psychological claim about black people. In a reiteration of Du Boisian double consciousness, the natally alienated black psyche is at war with the black psyche formed by black civil society. Although West leaves unaddressed why the post-1965 American culture of consumption is fundamentally different than previous eras (possibly to provide a defense of the integrationist aims of the civil rights movement), the natally alienated psyche marked by “self-contempt, self-hatred, self-affliction” is unleashed by market forces and the weakening of black civil society. 144 This psychological rendering of natal alienation and the culture of consumption would become black nihilism. This rendering, however, has the unfortunate consequence of muting West’s critique of capitalism. Instead, the “politics of conversion,” the renewal of civil society locally through love and care, becomes the prerequisite for addressing the neoliberal logics that create the circumstances of self-destructive behavior within black America. At this point, I want to examine how John DiIulio’s moral poverty and Cornel West’s black nihilism become strange bedfellows in the testimony of Reverend Rivers. Both West and DiIulio invoke the 1960s as a profound postlapsarian moment in American history during which civil society is shattered. For West, this is caused by market forces and moralities of pleasure. In contrast, for DiIulio the destruction is caused by the critique of traditional American culture through social movements. Here West and DiIulio are worth quoting at length. West states: Those in the first camp—the liberal structuralists—call for full employment, health, education, and child care programs, and broad affirmative action practices. In short, a new, more sober version of the best of the New Deal and the Great Society: more government money, better bureaucrats, and an active citizenry. Those in the second camp—the conservative behaviorists—promote self-help programs, black business expansion, and non-preferential job practices. They support “free market” strategies that depend on fundamental changes in how black people act and live. To put it bluntly, their projects rest largely upon a cultural revival of the Protestant ethic in black America. 145

And, DiIulio argues:

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Some liberals insist that the problem stems from a lack of meaningful programs; some conservatives insist that it stems from a lack of no-frills prisons. Liberals argue that criminals kill because there are too many guns; conservatives respond that criminals kill because there are too few executions. Liberals assert that the justice system is shot through with procedural racism; conservatives assert that the justice system is shot through with technical loopholes. And while both liberals and conservatives may agree that adverse economic conditions breed crime, the former are more inclined to lament the lack of well-paying jobs, the latter to lament to lack of well-motivated job-seekers. 146

West and DiIulio are both attempting to account for pressing social issues beyond the polarized liberal and conservative positions. For West, the increase in drug traffic weakens civil society, opening the floodgates to the forces of black nihilism’s self-hatred, whereas for DiIulio, drugs weaken the ties of family that can restrain the radical self-regard of those disposed to become superpredators. To be sure, I am not equivocating the positions of West and DiIulio. However, their causal historical claims regarding the ways that drugs weaken family and community institutions, creating pathologies of self-hatred and self-regard, result in West’s arguments being recruited into the logic of necropolitics. Ironically, their religiously inflected calls for renewing civil society leave American political economy untouched. West’s politics of conversion begins at the local level through grassroots democratic organizations that produce new leaders while DiIulio’s government funding of religion leaves broader policies and public investment untouched. The proposals of both West and DiIulio fail to articulate the religious significance of an American political economy structured by global capitalism and anti-black racism whose representations are invoked to preserve the well-ordered society. As such, their respective proposals ultimately reproduce the representations of social death that legitimate the disinvestment of marginalized communities. This perspective was not unanimous, however, among those giving testimony. Among those presenting was Judge Carol Kelly, who described herself at the time as having the dubious distinction of incarcerating the youngest person in the country. Kelly’s testimony, which takes no refuge in the image of superpredators, walks through her wrestling with a gut-wrenching case of two boys who had murdered other children. She is adamant that merely locking up more children could not solve such a growing social problem. Thomas P. Gordon, a Delaware chief of police, argued, “Every kid has a specialty. I haven’t found one yet that you can’t develop either a computer skill, a karate skill, a dancing skill. We have choir, we have the whole gamut. I haven’t found one child yet that if you improve upon his or her attribute, you won’t keep them out of trouble.” 147 Gordon’s testimony analyzes a significant social problem and provides recommendations that are not rooted in rendering black youth as superpredators. To be clear, I am not ascribing

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intentional malice or speculating on the motivations of Rivers, DiIulio, or West. Rather, I am concerned about the effects of representations that attempt to explain social problems and that influence social policy. In particular, when one looks at the variety of voices offering testimony, what accounts for the representation of superpredators becoming so widespread? Together, the psychological rendering of natal alienation as black nihilism and the moral poverty of superpredators touch the arche of the American experience in Reverend Rivers and DiIulio’s testimony to the subcommittee. 148 The chapter opened with the claim that representations of blacks as animals and criminals would be critical to producing the knowledge constituting the politics of death that occasions mass incarceration. I argue that representations of blacks as cocaine-crazed Negroes, human predators, superpredators, and crackheads existed within a theopolitical vision that viewed them as a threat to the prosperity and existence of America. Moreover, this theopolitical vision disavowed social responsibility for social inequities by situating mediating institutions, personal virtue, moral poverty, and black nihilism as the primary culprits. The white citizen–black criminal relationship persists through the permutations of images of blacks who lack the capacity for political participation and express inclinations that threaten polity. As this point, I want to press this argument regarding the necropolitics of mass incarceration through those affected by its forces, whom Abdul JanMohamad calls the “death-bound-subject.” NOTES 1. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: SAGE, 1997), 258. 2. Francis Moran III, “Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau’s Second Discourse,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 1 (January 1993): 37–58. 3. Ibid., 48. 4. Tommy L. Lott, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 9. 5. Ibid. 6. Richard Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800,” American Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1973): 27–28. Slotkin here notes that the crime narratives within Puritan New England imaged “society as embodied in the white woman—pure and virginal— who is violated and defiled by the black rapist of revolution and anarchy, while ‘liberal’ (i.e. permissive, morally and sexually loose) whites stand by and encourage, apologize for and protect the black ravisher. The comprehensive network of associations in guilt makes the execution and its accompanying ritual and literature a ceremony of exorcism, in which the ritual murder of the black villain rides the state of a generalized Evil as well as the specific culprit.” 7. See Angela Davis, “Myth of the Black Rapist,” in Women, Race and Class (Vintage, 1983), and Tommy Lott, “Fredrick Douglass on the Myth of the Black Rapist,” in The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation (Blackwell, 1999), both of which are exemplary in highlighting the work of Ida B. Wells as well as the political usage of this mythology.

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8. Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 9. Ibid., 160. 10. Ibid., 161. 11. Ibid. 12. Doris Marie Provine, Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 69. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 73. 15. Ibid., 74. 16. Joseph F. Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 94–95. 17. Ibid., 95 18. Ibid., 120. 19. Ibid., 45. 20. Edward Huntington Williams, “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace— Murder and Insanity Increasing among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to ‘Sniffing’ Since Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition,” New York Times, February 8, 1914, https://www.nytimes.com/1914/02/08/archives/negro-cocaine-fiends-are-a-new-southernmenace-murder-and-insanity.html. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way, History Channel (Tera Media, 2000). 24. See Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford, 1995). 25. Ronald Reagan, The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagan (West Palm Beach: NewsMax Publishing, 2001), 19. 26. Ibid., 23. 27. Ibid., 29. 28. Ibid. 29. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, September 28, 1981,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1981, 840–41. 30. Ibid., 841. 31. Ibid., 843. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 845. 34. Ibid. 35. Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–34. 36. Ibid., 35. 37. For an analysis of material redistribution as a key pillar on the welfare state, see Amy L. Chua’s “The Paradox of Free Market Democracy: Rethinking Development Policy,” Harvard International Law Journal 41 (2000): 287–380. 38. Beckett, Making Crime Pay, 36. 39. Ibid., 37–38. 40. Ibid. 41. Reagan, “Remarks in New Orleans, Louisiana,” 845. 42. Marcellus Andrews, The Political Economy of Hope and Fear (New York University Press, 2001), 74. 43. Ibid., 133–134. 44. Reagan, “Remarks in New Orleans, Louisiana.” In this speech Reagan quotes theologian Michael Novak saying “the family nourishes ‘basic trust.’ And from this springs creativity, psychic energy, social dynamism. Familial strength that took generations to acquire can be lost

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in a single generation, can disappear for centuries. If the quality of family life deteriorates . . . there is no quality of life.” 45. For detailed account of Michael Novak’s relationship to neoconservatism see Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). 46. Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Rev. ed. (Lanham: Madison Books, 1990), 54. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 55. 49. Ibid., 54–55. 50. Michael Novak, Character and Crime: An Inquiry into the Causes of the Virtue of Nations (Lanham: University Press of America, 1986), 38. 51. Ibid. For an excellent account of the New Class, see “What Is Neoconservatism?” and “The Struggle for the World: The Forerunners” in Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind. 52. Novak, Character and Crime, 60, 73. 53. Ibid., 65. 54. Here, I am not equating Emersonian individualism with the New Class, as he distrusts the masses. Rather, the transgressing of traditional moral authority predicated on conscience and a mythic sense of the self can be traced to Emerson’s influence. See “The Emersonian Prehistory of American Pragmatism” in Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), and “The Ritual of Consensus” and “Emerson, Individualism, and Liberal Consent” in Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1992). 55. Novak, Character and Crime, 58–60. 56. Ibid., 70; emphasis in original. 57. There is significant overlap in the variety of meanings attributed to the terms “public theology” and “political theology.” However, a central point of contention is the relationship of the “political” to politics and policies. I discern three major trends: (1) political theology transcends politics and policies (e.g., Jurgen Habermas); (2) political theology is related to urgent questions in everyday politics without being reduced to them (e.g., Hent de Vries); and (3) political theology is an interdisciplinary and dialogical engagement between religious and theological forms of critical thought and political ideas and practices (e.g., Corey B. Walker, Vincent Llyod). I have associated the term “public theology” with Michael Novak and Ronald Reagan (and “Reaganism”) as it describes the relevance of their religious and theologically informed understanding of public life in general as well as politics and policies. See Jürgen Habermas, “‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere , ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 16–17; Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press), 25; and Corey Walker, “Theology and Democratic Futures,” Political Theology 10, no. 2 (2009): 202. 58. Paul Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 12. 59. Ibid., 19. 60. Paul W. Kahn, “Criminal and Enemy in the Political Imagination,” Yale Review 99, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 148–149. 61. Ibid., 149. 62. Ibid. 63. Kahn argues that treason is the formal transition from criminal to enemy. However, this crisis of distinction also presents profound moral ambiguities in international law, such as the inability to reprimand President Omar al-Bashir and the indefinite detainment of persons at Guantanamo. Ibid., 150. 64. Novak, Character and Crime, 51; emphasis in original. 65. See Loic Wacquant’s Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), for the role of public policy think tanks in promoting more punitive policies. For a

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discussion of Novak’s relationships with Reagan, see Novak’s contribution to Michael Novak and John Cogan, The New Consensus on Family and Welfare: A Community of Self-Reliance (AEI Press, 1987); for Margaret Thatcher’s explicit acknowledgment of Novak’s influence in her approach to “democratic capitalism” and “dependency culture,” see Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 627, and Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (Harper Collins, 2011), 539. 66. Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 139. 67. Peter L. Berger, To Empower People: The Debate That Is Changing America and the World, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1985), 160. 68. Ibid., 158. 69. Ibid., 206. A number of scholars across the political and ideological spectrum attempted to wrestle with the problems of “massification” and “mass society” that threatened the individual. Most notably, the Frankfurt School theorists grappled with the forces of commodification, standardization, and massification. At the time To Empower the People was written, the term also achieved saliency as a way to grasp profound changes in higher education. 70. Berger, To Empires Peoples, p. 163. 71. Reagan, “Remarks in New Orleans, Louisiana.” 72. Ibid. 73. For a broader background of the complexities of Foucault’s choice of Ferguson, see Samantha Ashenden, “Foucault, Ferguson, and Civil Society,” Foucault Studies, no. 20 (December 19, 2015): 36–51. 74. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978— 1979 (New York: Picador, 2010), 301. 75. Ibid., 299. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Paul J. Goldstein, Henry H. Brownstein, Patrick J. Ryan, and Patricia A. Bellucci, “Crack and Homicide in New York City: A Case Study in the Epidemiology of Violence,” in Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 124–127. 81. Ibid., 116. 82. See David J. Leonard and C. Richard King, “Celebrities, Commodities, and Criminals: African American Athletes and the Racial Politics of Culture,” in Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports, ed. David J. Leonard and C. Richard King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 1–22. 83. Eric Bain-Selbo and D. Gregory Sapp, Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon: An Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 84. For treatments of professional sports as civil religion and sacred convention, see Michael Novak, Joy of Sports, Revised: Endzones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit, rev. ed. (Lanham: Madison Books, 1993), and William Dean, The Religious Critic in American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 85. Leonard and King, “Celebrities, Commodities, and Criminals,” 13. 86. Leonard and King, Commodified and Criminalized, 127. For additional analysis of race, sports, and the ideology of the American dream that examines the political economy, see Earl Smith, Race, Sport and the American Dream: Third Edition, 3rd ed. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2013), and Billy Hawkins, The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions, 2010 edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 87. Ibid., 134. 88. David L. Andrews, ed., Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 66. 89. Ibid., 70.

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90. David Steele, “Memory of Shock, Emptiness Still Fresh 20 Years Later,” Baltimore Sun, June 19, 2006. 91. Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, The Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1994), 139–140. 92. Ibid., 140. 93. “Drug Wars: Part 2,” Frontline, PBS, October 10, 2000, transcript, http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/etc/transcript2.html. 94. Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Little, Brown, 1997), 225. 95. See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; and Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism. 96. For a good summary of this debate, see Keri Day’s Unfinished Business: Black Women, the Black Church and the Struggle to Thrive in America; Bill Lawson, The Underclass Question; and Michael Katz, The Underclass Debate: Views From History. 97. “Drug Wars: Part 2,” transcript. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 8. For more on the criminalization of African American motherhood, see “‘The Enemy Within’: African American Motherhood and the ‘Crack Baby Crisis,’” in Isabel Heinemann, Inventing the Modern American Family: Family Values and Social Change in 20th Century United States (New York: Campus Verlag, 2012). 102. Richard Saltus, “Silber Attacks Health Care System, Issues Call to Shift Patient Priorities,” Boston Globe, April 30, 1991. 103. Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, “Crack in the Rearview Mirror: Deconstructing Drug War Mythology,” Social Justice 31, no. 1/2 (January 2004): 193. 104. Ibid. 105. Charles Krauthammer, “Children of Cocaine,” Washington Post, July 30, 1989. 106. “#WhichHillary?#BlackLivesMatter Activist Demands Apology from Clinton for “Superpredator” Comments,” Democracy Now, February 26, 2016,https://www. democracynow.org/2016/2/26/whichhillary_blacklivesmatter_activist_demands_apology_ from. 107. Jonathan Capehart, “Hillary Clinton on ‘Superpredator’ Remarks: ‘I Shouldn’t Have Used Those Words,’” Washington Post, February 25, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/02/25/hillary-clinton-responds-to-activist-who-demandedapology-for-superpredator-remarks. 108. Presidential candidate and senator Bernie Sanders also voted for the bill while criticizing its inattention to social conditions associated with crime. See Congressional Record 140, no. 39 (April 13, 1994), https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1994–04–13/html/CREC1994–04–13-pt1-PgH49.htm. 109. Ibid. 110. John DiIulio, “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” Weekly Standard, November 27, 1995. 111. Ibid., 4–5. 112. Ibid., 6. 113. William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty— and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 68. John DiIulio is not the sole author of Body Count. However, the specific claims I critique are specific to his contributions as they appear in the book and in other publications. 114. Ibid., 56–57. 115. DiIulio, “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” 6. 116. Ibid.

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117. Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, 57; italics added. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 146–147. 121. Ibid. 122. DiIulio, “Coming of the Super-Predators,” 9. 123. Ibid., 7. 124. See “Romancing Jim Crow” in Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: New Press, 2001). 125. Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, 208. 126. DiIulio, “Coming of the Super-Predators,” 9. 127. Richard Freeman, The Black Youth Employment Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 364. 128. Ibid., 369. 129. In subsequent chapters I will return to the idea that those who are “present oriented” are especially targeted for law enforcement through the legal development of quality-of-life policing. 130. DiIulio, “Coming of the Super-Predators,” 8. 131. For an overview and assessment of the program, see Anthony A. Braga, David Hureau, and Christopher Winship, “Losing Faith—Police, Black Churches, and the Resurgence of Youth Violence in Boston,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 6 (2008): 141. Rivers achieved national recognition for his role in starting a conversation on the role of African American scholars in the “age of crack.” See “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack,” Harvard University Kennedy School, Institute of Politics, November 29, 1992, http:// iop.harvard.edu/forum/responsibility-intellectuals-age-crack, and Reverend Eugene Rivers, “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack,” Boston Review, February 1, 1992, http://bostonreview.net/reverend-eugene-rivers-on-the-responsiblity-of-intellectuals-in-theage-of-crack. 132. “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours,” City Journal, December 23, 2015, http://www. city-journal.org/html/my-black-crime-problem-and-ours-11773.html. 133. United States Congress Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Youth Violence, The Changing Nature of Youth Violence: Hearing before the Subcommittee . . . (University of Michigan Library, 1997), 26. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid., 27. 138. Ibid., 19–23. 139. Ibid., 25. 140. Ibid., 27. 141. Bill E. Lawson, The Underclass Question (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 195. 142. Ibid.; italics in original. 143. West’s account of civil society is broader than those delineated in To Empower the People and includes institutions such as family, church, fraternities, sororities, funeral parlors, beauty shops, and barbershops. 144. Lawson, Underclass Question, 195. 145. Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Vintage Books, 1994), 11–12. 146. William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty— and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 39. 147. Changing Nature of Youth Violence, 75. 148. Although space prevents me from offering substantive treatment, for an excellent account of the effects of the representations of superpredators as it relates to a concrete case, see Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B, (Boston: Beacon, 2003).

Chapter Three

Beyond the Death-Bound-Subject

There is life within the structures of social death. This is not a pietistic statement designed to simply make the general reader or those who are not incarcerated feel content. Rather, I make this claim through a religious critique of mass incarceration using the memoirs of Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s Blue Rage, Black Redemption and Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row as a resource. Their respective narratives of redemption and revolution reveal forms of hope and political agency that transcend being death-bound-subjects. Moreover, their memoirs reveal the contradictions of mass incarceration that produce gods whose battle for sovereignty leave black and brown populations under-protected and over-punished. Finally, a religious critique that attends to such memoirs reveals how necropolitics of mass incarceration shapes the politics of redemption that determines who is worthy of living. To accomplish this, I want to establish the relevance for employing the image of the death-bound-subject. This image is taken from Abdul R. JanMohamed’s Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death, a complex reworking of Orlando Patterson’s theory of social death. This reworking interprets how the contradictions of Jim Crow society shaped Wright as a person and how Wright resolves them through his literary corpus. 1 In particular, JanMohamed’s work uses Wright’s corpus to articulate how the threat of death operates as a mode of coercion within the means of production that generates involuntary labor. 2 Furthermore, JanMohamed serves as an important conversation partner in my argument as Richard Wright’s Native Son was taken very seriously by the social sciences and impacted the knowledge production that influenced rationalities of governance. 3 As such, I want to engage JanMohamed’s theoretical insights from this classic text to interpret the necropolitics within

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the religious situation of mass incarceration. The paradigmatic image that influenced such polices and research was that of Bigger Thomas. BIGGER THOMAS AS THE DEATH-BOUND-SUBJECT Richard Wright’s Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a twenty-yearold black man living in the 1930s poverty-ridden South Side of Chicago. Native Son opens with the picture of a family of four sharing two iron beds with a wooden floor as they begin their morning routine. As Bigger’s mother and sister Vera Thomas awaken, they are careful not to allow the boys to see them naked while they get dressed. The mother and sister also avert their eyes as Bigger and his younger brother Buddy Thomas are getting dressed. This economy of respectability and decency in the midst of poverty is suddenly shattered by a violent struggle. The struggle is between Bigger Thomas and a rat. The black rat instills horror in Mrs. Thomas and Vera as they stand on the bed while Buddy is recruited to assist Bigger. The rat does not run or hide. Rather the rat is aggressive and offensive, leaping and squealing while attacking Bigger’s leg. Bigger shakes the rat, throwing it against the wall only to see it get up and leap at him again. The rat stands on its hind legs as Bigger looks into its “black beady eyes” as the “rat’s belly pulsed with fear.” 4 Soon, Bigger has the rat cornered. Slowly, Bigger takes a skillet from Buddy. As the rat rears up again showing its “long yellow fangs, piping shrilly belly quivering,” Bigger, with the skillet lifted “high in the air,” lets it fly. The rat is dead. Bigger with a deep sense of satisfaction says, “I got ’im. . . . By God, I got ’im.” 5 The death of the rat, however, is not enough. Bigger takes a shoe and pounds the rat’s head in, crushing it while yelling and cursing. Bigger and Buddy then begin to offer post-mortem tributes acknowledging the rat’s size and strength. Vera begs Bigger to take the rat outside. Bigger grabs the rat by the tail and taunts his sister, relishing in her fear until she passes out on the floor. After Bigger helps his sister back on the bed, he takes the bloody rat with its crushed skull, wraps it in newspaper, and puts it in a garbage can at the end of the alley. The satisfaction of Bigger’s epic struggle with the rat is short lived. As the blood is being cleaned up, Bigger’s mother states, “We wouldn’t have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you.” 6 In the eyes of his mother, Bigger’s masculinity is tied to his inability to secure legitimate employment within the political economy of Jim Crow. Moreover, in her estimation, Bigger is jeopardizing his ability to provide at all by hanging out with the wrong crowd engaging in crime that could result in his incarceration. A weapon lifted high in the air. A killing. A skull crushed. Blood and newspapers. A dumped carcass. These are the recurring images of the political and psychological economy whose

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contradictions form Bigger Thomas. As such, a brief analysis of the importance of this initial struggle between Bigger and the rat is warranted. The rat represents the critical difference between Bigger’s struggle-tothe-death and the paradigmatic image of Frederick Douglass who emerged as a free man from his violent resistance to Edward Covey, the slave breaker. Although Douglass emerges as a free man, Bigger’s social position is unaltered and his family that exists in a state of survival recognizes his status as a man within the political economy of Jim Crow only for a brief moment. JanMohamed’s interpretive emphasis is on the means by which the rat is a symptom of their “bare life,” disrupts the family’s ritual that signals their participation in civil society. I argue that the rat symbolizes the racialized political economy of Jim Crow that sustains and reproduces the family as a mediating institution of society. Thus, Bigger’s struggle does not merely disrupt the family, it represents the contradictions that constitute and reproduces its existence. While the American reader is confronted with the effects of the political economy of Jim Crow, Bigger himself cannot bear to reflect upon the fact that his struggle for recognition is with a rat, not another person. Bigger Thomas “knew that moment he allowed what his life meant enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else.” 7 The rat symbolically mediates the contradictions of a racialized political and psychological economy whose conditions produce the violence that society then punishes. Thomas finds a job serving as the chauffeur for Mr. and Mrs. Dalton as well as their daughter Mary. They are one of the wealthy elite families that inhabit Hyde Park. Bigger is familiar with Mary Dalton, having seen her on newsreels in the theaters. The newsreels present Mary as one of fifty debutantes who are collectively worth “over four billion dollars of America’s wealth.” 8 For JanMohamed, the newsreel is a complex site of identification as Mary is an object of sexual desire and prohibition for black men. Her wealth and position are also objects of desire around which slavery and Jim Crow society organized their sumptuary codes 9 to regulate the behavior and social relation of blacks to white society. 10 However, while viewing the newsreel, Bigger imagines that this projection of desire might indeed become his actual reality. He reflects, “Maybe Mary Dalton was a hot kind of girl; maybe she spent lots of money; maybe she’s like to come to the South Side and see the sights sometimes. Or maybe she has a secret sweetheart and only he would know about it because he would have to drive her around; maybe she would give him money not to tell.” 11 Bigger, however, finds himself within the contradictions of the sumptuary codes that structured the desires and prohibitions of black men in Jim Crow society. One night after driving Mary home after her night of drunkenness, Bigger precariously puts her to bed and fantasizes about having sex with her. Wright vividly describes Ms. Dalton, who is blind as a ghostly figure as a “white

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blur,” that floats through the room. 12 When Mrs. Dalton walks into Mary’s room, Bigger’s fear of being caught with a white woman pushes him to place a pillow over her head to keep her quiet. As Mrs. Dalton continues to call out for Mary, Bigger presses the pillow even harder suffocating her. 13 This moment is critical in JanMohamed’s understanding of Bigger Thomas as a death-bound-subject. The ghost-like blurry figure of Mrs. Dalton represents the racialized gaze that literally haunts Bigger. She represents the means by which racialized subjects are formed. JanMohamed argues, “the incorporation of that gaze into the superego of the racialized subject is a crucial part of the racializing process, or, put differently, it is the precondition for the birth of a racialized subject.” 14 Moreover, in classical psychoanalytic theory, society masters individual aggression by “weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” 15 Thus, the threat of death as the precondition for social death is lodged within the black psyche that disciplines and prohibits foreclosing the possibility of resistance. 16 This combination of an external threat and internal fear constitute a process of subjugation and subjectification that binds the subject together. 17 For Bigger, these contradictions of desire and prohibition within the process of subjection through social death explode into a murder suicide. Mary’s death occasions Bigger’s experience that he has engaged in an action that will bring about his actual death. The birth of a racialized subject is a point I will return to in interpreting the memoirs of Williams and Abu-Jamal. JanMohamed notes that burning Mary’s body in the furnace serves the ideological function of preventing Bigger from being a passive victim of circumstance and thus from garnering sympathy or patronizing pity from white readers and critics. 18 It is important to note here that a Neo-Freudian 19 revision of a death drive is central to JanMohamed’s interpretation of Bigger. Briefly, the death drive, while having no aim as such, is a process of unbinding, fragmenting and breaking up what is internal to persons as living organisms. 20 As such, it is interpreted as an instinct. This death drive “will affect reality in a secondary way, inducing splitting in the object, in the ego, in every group or individual agency that claims a vocation to an ever increasingly embracing unity.” 21 JanMohamed notes that this process is gleaned within Wright himself as he asks, “But in what other ways had the South allowed be me to natural, to be real, to be myself, except in rejection, rebellion, and aggression? 22 Bigger moves in the direction of symbolic death by seeing his own decapitated head and reflecting upon the experience of killing Mary. However, it is his incarceration and impending execution that both concretize and render visible the structures of social death. A key incident in the story of Bigger Thomas is the murder of his girlfriend Bessie. A journalist visiting the Dalton family finds the remains of Mary’s body which triggers a city-wide manhunt. Bigger goes to Bessie and attempts to

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convince her to leave with him. In an effort to bind their fates together, Bigger leans in just inches from her face and confirms her worst fear saying, “Yeah, I killed the girl” and “You in it as deep as me!” 23 Bigger’s concern is that if Bessie stays behind, she will talk to the police. As Bessie leaves with Bigger she eventually resigns herself to the inevitability of being captured and killed. Bessie, in a moment of clarity, reflects upon her life of heartache and trouble. She confronts what alcohol was used to forget, that Bigger brought pleasure but never happiness. Bigger determines that Bessie could not be taken along and could not be left behind. Later that evening, Bigger rapes Bessie. Bigger’s act of rape is an act of soul murder that renders visible the “permissibility” 24 to rape black women and the prohibition of raping white women within the racial and sexual economy that forms the deathbound-subject. After raping Bessie, he murders her by beating her head in with a brick and dumping her body into an airshaft. Bessie’s murder is a narrative repetition of the contradictions of Bigger as a death-bound-subject. The first is Bigger’s struggle with the rat that establishes and then emasculates him as the “man” of the house. Second, his attempt at self-preservation through silencing Mary to avoid recognition by the white gaze murders both Mary and himself. And finally, Bessie is murdered for who she might become, a snitch. A rat. The image of Bessie as a potential rat indicates that Bigger is still caught in the political economy of the threat of death that permeated the wood floors he once called home. Bigger’s fear of being “ratted out” sealed Bessie’s fate. The image of the raised brick and Bessie’s sunken skull, join the axe and Mary’s decapitated head as well as the skillet and crushed rat’s head. In Wright’s prose, Bigger has become the “Rat Man” that haunts the American political unconscious. As Bigger Thomas is incarcerated and put on trial, so too will the American political community be put on trial as to its culpability in the death of Mary Dalton. This is a critical moment in Native Son that discloses how the political economy of social death is concealed within the juridical processes of mass incarceration. Bigger’s incarceration and trial are moments that crystallize his experience within the structures of social death. Bigger reflects, “Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be free of them; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood; what they did claimed every atom of him.” Bigger is very much aware that his murder of Bessie was only evidence of his real crime, the murder of Mary. Bigger recognizes that “that the white people did not really care about Bessie being killed. White people never searched for Negroes who killed other Negroes . . . Crime for a Negro was only when he harmed whites, took white lives, or injured white property.” 25 Thus, Bigger Thomas reflects the deeply sedimented ways in which

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black liberty, through the mode of social death, is only acknowledged in terms of criminal culpability. JanMohamed rightly notes that this will be a key factor in the trial that occasions Bigger’s engagement with symbolic death. The trial demonstrates the political value of Bigger’s death, as his execution will be used to coerce and control the black population of the city while simultaneously protecting the white community from the threat of death by blacks. 26 This threat of death, however, is effective precisely through bracketing the social aspect of Bigger’s formation. Thus, the prosecutor Buckley focuses on Bigger’s individual free will and personal accountability as a rights-bearing juridical subject. Bigger’s attorney Max (who is also a communist) focuses on the production of Bigger Thomas by the structures of social death. He states, “The hate and fear which we have inspired in him, woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness and into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality, have become the justification of his existence.” 27 Max’s argument passionately weaves these social and psychological themes together that criminalize the movements of his unconscious as protests, bodily gestures as threats, ego desires as conspiracies, and hope as insurrection. 28 It is within this contest over the political meaning of his death that Bigger grapples with how death could be a victory. 29 JanMohamed argues that the transition to symbolic death for Bigger is he achieved with his experience of “double vision.” 30 Through his experience, Bigger sees: “one vision pictured death, an image of him, alone, sitting strapped in the electric chair and waiting for the hot current to leap through his body and the other pictured life, and image of himself standing amid throngs of men, lost in the welter of their lives with the hope of emerging again, different, unafraid.” 31 In JanMohamed’s reading these two images represent the uncoupling of eros and thanatos previously locked together producing uncontrollable and explosive violence. 32 He argues, “Only now that thanatos is contained, both within the jail and in the image of the electric chair, can the desire to live be clearly visualized as a form of social bonding.” 33 More importantly, this double vision represents a form of comprehension that allows Bigger to reconcile with the reality of his life. The tortuous path by which Bigger has arrived at this knowledge does not prevent him from being executed. However, he is now free from being driven by the threat of death. The simultaneous preservation of his actual death through electrocution and the overcoming of its intended purpose of subjection through fear culminates in what JanMohamed calls “symbolic-death.” The value in Bigger’s actual death is rooted in his freedom to dissent from social death. Symbolic-death occasions the possibility of a rebirth into a different subject-position. It overcomes the threat of death that regulates social death for the powerful. In the thicket of philosophical articulations, the structure of

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affectivity 34 emerges as a key point of origin for the possibility of resistance for the death-bound-subject. It is a transvaluation of the subject’s relationship to life and death that is no longer repressed but recognized as the condition of social death. The image of the death-bound-subject in Richard Wright’s Native Son discloses the political economy of social death concealed within the juridical processes of mass incarceration. Our discussion illustrates the potential of these structures to be articulated through the lives of those who live within them. As such, this image will be used to interpret the experiences of Stanley “Tookie” Williams and Mumia Abu-Jamal whose lives provide a profound witness to the religious situation of mass incarceration. Their respective time on death row is co-present with the era of mass incarceration. Like Native Son, their respective published works operate as forms of political agency that confront the American political community with the contradictions of mass incarceration. VOICES OF POLITICAL AGENCY IN THE NECROPOLITICS OF MASS INCARCERATION In this section, I extend JanMohamed’s dialectical movement of the subject toward symbolic death to the narratives of Mumia Abul-Jamal and Stanley “Tookie” Williams. I argue that through their writings, Abul-Jamal and Williams exercise political agency by both disclosing and contesting the structures that attempt to shape them as death-bound-subjects. In their subject-positions both individuals reveal the impact of neoliberal rationality of governance through mass incarceration. Moreover, through their memoirs, I argue they are political actors. I define a political act by two criteria: (1) it intentionally represents a judgment on behalf of a particular image of the political community; and (2) the act takes place in an institutional framework that gives the act political significance. 35 Moreover, this institutional framework is already embedded within a narrative that the political actor reads and makes judgments regarding its meaning and continuance. Thus, the published writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Stanley Tookie Williams serve to illuminate both the political agency and religious significance of those persons mass incarceration attempts to form as death-bound-subjects. Live from Death Row: Mumia Abu-Jamal As stated previously, theologian Mark Lewis Taylor has long engaged the intersection of religion, culture, politics, ethics and criminal justice. 36 He is the founder of Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a non-profit group that has been instrumental in securing a legal victory to transfer Mumia from death row to general population. 37 Moreover, Taylor explicitly engages the work of

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JanMohamed in interpreting the significance of Abu-Jamal’s case for contemporary theories that wrestle with the “contradictions that form and inform the multiple discourses on ethics, politics and religion.” 38 Mumia Abu-Jamal has served more than 26 years on death row for the 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulker. 39 At the time of his arrest, Abu-Jamal was an accomplished journalist known for his politics and activism who had no prior criminal record. 40 Abu-Jamal’s previous political involvements as Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party and as a journalist covering the police brutality within Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo’s administration were key aspects of his trial and the state’s push for the death penalty. Thus, Taylor interprets Mumia Abu-Jamal as a political prisoner 41 and engages the work on JanMohamed to explicate the racialized character of the “bare life” 42 to which Mumia has been subjected. Taylor argues that the “race-biased character of Philadelphia’s and Pennsylvania’s criminal justice system” and its rulings against Mumia became representative of racialized violence in the very heart of the American democracy. 43 More importantly, for Taylor, Mumia is a primary example of someone who has reworked their social death and impending actual death in order to secure “personal freedom for himself” as well as “collective freedom for his people and others.” 44 For Mumia, this reworking takes place through his books, articles, poetry, and audio recordings that have achieved an international audience. Through Mumia’s voice, the prison is rendered as a “second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self.” 45 In summarizing the importance of Mumia, Taylor is here worth quoting at length: Abu-Jamal, in the bare life of death row, has not just waited for the system to find a mistake relative to his case. He has devoted himself to exposing the collective mistake of a fundamental component of the project of democracy in America—the politics and practices of the criminal justice system. In so doing, Abu-Jamal has placed himself at greater risk of actual death. The risk becomes greater because in articulating and exposing those already determined to execute him. But at the same time, this risk is a mode of liberation from his social death and from that “bare life” space where he was to remain on hold until the time of his final dispatch. 46

Taylor’s analysis of the extraordinary way in which Mumia reworks social death is compelling. Here I want to explicate the specific way in which Taylor’s claim about Mumia’s symbolic death represents political agency. Mumia’s writings give voice to the experience of social death marked by incarceration, in this case death row. More importantly, Mumia’s writings not only disclose what he has experienced himself, but also for those in his situation. Thus, they provide fruitful engagement for understanding political subjects bound by social death. At its most basic understanding, incarceration

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disrupts and denies the freedom of sociality that constitutes the social world. Social philosopher Alfred Schutz argues that when two people attend to one another, they each grasp the lived experience of the other before they are able to reflect upon it. This particular form of simultaneity or grasping of two streams of consciousness is that which endures and can be reflected on. He states, “It endures in a sense that a physical thing does not: it subjectively experiences its own aging and this experience is determinative of all its other experiences.” 47 This is the phenomenon of “growing older together.” 48 Mumia is subject to the denial of the various forms of human touch. Inmates are cut off from the everyday ordinary forms of growing old together that constitute meaningful relationships. In describing this reality, he states: While a person is locked away in distant netherworlds, time seems to stand still but it doesn’t, of course. Children left outside grow into adulthood, often having children of their own. Once loving relationships wither into yesterday’s dust. Relatives die, their loss mourned in silent loneliness. Times, temperaments, mores change, and the caged move to outdated rhythms. 49

This form of social death does not deny the ability to claim one’s children (as articulated by Orlando Patterson), but rather disrupts the ability to shape and be shaped through the sharing of experiences with one’s children. Mumia’s writing are laced with references to the prison as a humanly constructed hell. Visions of hell in the theological imagination borrow images from the structures of time and space in everyday life and project them into an “eternal punishment.” Mass incarceration shares this instrumental use of time and space as a form of punishment rupturing the dynamics of consciousness critical in forming discrete experiences that become meaningful. The flow of pure duration, or duree, is the ongoing undifferentiated experiences that flow into one another and “what formerly seemed to be separate and sharply fixed images have become supplanted by a coming-to-be and passing-away that has no contours, no boundaries, and no differentiations.” 50 The radical closing of the social world into a cell brings the dynamics of conscious life to the fore in immense suffering. In a revealing passage, Mumia states, “The mindnumbing, soul-killing savage sameness that makes each day an echo of the day before, with neither thought nor hope of growth, makes prison the abode of spirit death that it is for over a million men and women now held in U.S. hellholes” 51 (emphasis added). Mumia’s memoirs communicate how being incarcerated subjects people to hell while also serving as an act of political agency. Mumia relates the story of a young man who he calls Rabbani who was a part of the first wave of teenagers sentenced as adults in the 1970s. At fifteen, Rabbani was sentenced to fifteen to thirty years for an alleged robbery with an air pistol. 52 After years of pitched battles with guards, many years in

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solitary confinement, the hole, Mumia witnessed him grow in size and bitterness. 53 Mumia states: For those critical years in the life of a male, from age fifteen to thirty, which mark the transition from boy to man, Rabbani was entombed in juridical, psychic, temporal box branded with the false promise “corrections.” Like tens of thousands of his generation, his time in hell equipped him with no skills of value to either himself or community. He has been “corrected” in precisely the same way that hundreds of thousands of others have been, that is to say, warehoused in a vat that sears the very soul.

And; When I hear easy, mindless slogans like “three strikes, you’re out,” I think of men like Rabbani who had one strike (if not one foul) and are, for all intents and purposes, already outside of any game worth playing. 54

To appreciate Mumia’s story of Rabbani as a form of political agency, investigating the historical context is important. RESISTING THE MEANING OF “THREE STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT” In 1988, a television commentator in Seattle, Washington, coined the term “three strikes and you’re out” in reference to someone who received life without parole after two serious violent crimes. 55 The idea received little support until Diane Ballasiotes was abducted and stabbed to death by a convicted rapist recently released from prison. In response to this crime, Friends of Diane, a citizen group, formed to seek harsher penalties for sex crimes. 56 Even when joining their efforts with Washington Citizens for Justice (formerly the Three Strikes Group), efforts to impact legislators, criminal justice professionals and academics failed. 57 However, in 1993 an alliance with the National Rifle Association proved highly effective and the proposition appeared on the November ballot and 77 percent of voters approved it. 58 The decisive event, however, was the abduction and murder of Polly Klaas in California prior to the vote. 59 The event and the media coverage galvanized politicians and citizens across the political spectrum with nearly 80 percent of Americans voicing their approval. 60 President Bill Clinton, in his 1994 State of the Union address, thumped his finger on the podium and received a standing ovation when he said, “When you commit a third violent crime, you will be put away, and put away for good. Three strikes and you are out.” 61 Clinton’s Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 would pass that same year. 62

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A key aspect of this story is the way contemporary media produced what Ray Surette calls “news from nowhere.” This is the ability of news media to construct a story from a distant locality and present them in a way that has local significance. Moreover, Surette argues that “predator criminals and predator crime” defined as interpersonal violence among strangers where the victim is innocent and randomly chosen have become “modern icons of mass media.” 63 The fusion of policy groups, criminal justice decision makers and media-based constructions of the predator created a symbolic reality 64 of new roaming predatory killers. Furthermore, Surette argues that popular culture, such as the movie and novel The Silence of the Lambs, along with media coverage of actual serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, “cemented the reality construction process and its legitimacy in the public’s consciousness.” 65 Finally, the three “strikes and you’re out” legislation flourished in a cultural climate in which “the horrendous crime became the norm; the rare as common; the reactive, symbolic policy as significant.” It is precisely this legitimacy that I argue Mumia’s Live from Death Row contests the “news from nowhere” constituting form of political agency. 66 Mumia’s writings bring the images of the incarcerated to those outside of the prison. If the media construction of the predator turned the horrendous and rare into the normal and common, then Mumia’s writings render the bureaucratic barbaric, the institutional unimaginable, and the correctional corrosive. Moreover, this rendering discloses the way fear of irrational individual predators rationalizes a population of criminals whose activity may be highly predictable based upon social structures. In addition, Mumia’s reference to “three strikes and you’re out” in the story of Rabbani also comments on the passage of Clinton’s crime bill. He argues: This so-called crime bill, that profane political expletive, is now the law. Packing some sixty odd death penalties, a “three strikes, you’re out” provision, and billions of bucks for cops and prisons, the crime bill, as proposed by President Clinton, was an act so Draconian that neither presidents Bush nor Reagan could have successfully passed such a measure. The bill is, in essence, a $30+ billion public employment program for predominantly white workers, a social program if ever there was one that reflects the changing face of America’s sociopolitical and economic reality. 67

In light of our explication of the political actor, the political intentionality of this passage renders a judgment against the crime bill. More importantly, it reflects a judgment against a neoliberal rationality of governance that dismantles the welfare state while pouring extraordinary resources toward incarceration. In addition, both parties embraced this neoliberal form of governance as President Clinton’s administration oversaw the largest increase in inmate population and budgets in American history. 68 More importantly, the political meaning of such empirical facts is contested as it is framed not only

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as a rollback of social programs but also a rollout of a social program for whites. The political space is death row, an institutional framework of social death supported by social conventions. And it is from this space, the space of hell, Mumia challenges the social conventions supporting the American Political Community. In moving beyond a critique of the empirical facts and meaning of Clinton’s crime bill, Mumia critiques the deeply sedimented representations of animalization and criminalization that inform it. In speaking directly to citizen supporters, he remarks: Consider this: The drugged out zombie about to rob you calculates the worth of stealing your property versus four to eight years in prison, if caught. Factor in your property versus life without parole, and your life not your property, is devalued. That swift and fatal calculation is being tallied hourly in cities from coast to coast, and the so-called crime bill just made it more costly—for you. 69

Here, Mumia returns the image of the zombie, the crackhead, the predator, the subject whose rationality, will and liberty are recognized only within the bounds of criminal culpability. However, it is returned not merely in the form of a negation that the drugged out zombies do not exist. Rather, the representation that legitimated the crime-bill discloses how it produces the very thing it is designed to prevent, the devaluing of life. Mumia’s writings render the social agreements that produce death-bound-subjects in our religious situation from the space of death row. A space also occupied by Stanley “Tookie” Williams. Blue Rage, Black Redemption: Stanley “Tookie” Williams The formation of death-bound-subjects within our religious situation also receives a powerful rendering in the life and death of Stanley “Tookie” Williams. Williams’s memoir Blue Rage, Black Redemption chronicles the story of a young man that would become a co-founder of the Los Angeles Crips be convicted for murder, experience a life transformation, and be executed by the state of California. In particular, his refusal to separate the structures of social death from his narrative of redemption legitimated his actual death by the state. Williams has become a symbol of hope by encouraging those whose lives also fall within the shadow of the conditions of social death. Stanley “Tookie” Williams was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1953 and his mother moved to California in 1959 to escape the “lingering racist effects of Jim Crow.” 70 Williams’s mother participated in a migration of African Americans to California from World War II until the 1960s. The rise of the defense industries in Southern California during World War II “laid the foundation for extensive industrial growth in the postwar era.” 71 During

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the 1960s when the black population of Southern California grew by more than 50 percent, a painful economic restructuring was just beginning. From 1963 to 1964, just prior to the riots in Watts, twenty-eight industrial manufacturing firms left South Central and East Los Angeles. 72 Furthermore, deindustrialization and global competition forced seventy thousand jobs to disappear from 1978 to 1982. 73 The disproportionate impacts of these changes upon blacks were mediated through violence. The first black migrants to Los Angeles in the 1940s faced many invisible social barriers supported by restrictive covenants for home ownership and enforced by policing. As the black population grew, however, so did racial paranoia. White teenagers formed clubs such as the Spook Hunters and terrorized black youth as a way of “fighting school integration and protecting racial purity in the community.” 74 To defend their communities against such violence, blacks formed their own clubs such as the Bossmen. 75 However, white flight to the suburbs found many of these black clubs in conflict with one another. The result was increased criminal activity that registered as a major concern in 1960 when rivalries between black clubs lead to six murders. 76 During that same period, relationships with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) under Chief William Parker continued to worsen with more than $1 million in police brutality and misconduct claims filed in 1960. 77 The escalating tensions between blacks and the LAPD would provide the backdrop for the Watts rebellion in 1965. In the aftermath of the Watts rebellion, black clubs put aside old rivalries in order to address police brutality and build community institutions. Black clubs that had morphed into gangs received direction from organizations like the Black Panther Party (BPP) and The Organization Us that focused on building self-esteem and self-affirmation. 78 During this time, juvenile gang activity was of minimal concern to residents of South Central. 79 This situation would change drastically with the demise of the civil rights and black power movements. In particular, for blacks in Los Angeles, the assassination of BPP leaders Bunchy Carter and John Huggins on the campus of UCLA signaled the end of an era. The power vacuum of political leadership and a generation of black teens that witnessed the assassination of black leaders formed a backlash toward black nationalism and political organizing. 80 Geographer Alex Alonso emphasizes the importance of the search for identity and masculinity in the resurgence of gangs among black youth during this period. 81 He argues, “The original intentions of group leaders were to serve as community leaders and protectors of their neighborhoods; however, because of a weak resource base, an unplanned agenda, lack of support, immaturity and perhaps most important, severe racialization of the 1960s, left a generation of youth clueless about their future.” 82 Alonzo’s argument is helpful in understanding the effects of racial exclusion upon gang formation and deindustrialization upon gang proliferation as well as gang persistence.

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Stanley “Tookie” Williams would become a symbolic representative of this search for identity, opportunity and redemption amid the forces of social death. In Blue Rage, Black Redemption, Williams describes his involvement with the Crips in cultural and decidedly religious terms. He argues, “this forgotten generation created a quasi-culture with its own mores, style of dress, hand symbols, vernacular, socioeconomic qualities, martyrs, rituals, blue color identification (for Crips), legends, myths, and codes of silence.” 83 In addition, Williams recalls that for a Crip to show weakness or fail to defend themselves was an offense to the “Crip god.” 84 He recalls, “Crippen was our raison d’être, our reason for being. It grounded us in a way that nothing else had. It permitted us to lash out at gangs and at a world that despised our existence.” 85 During his years in solitary confinement from 1988 to 1994, Williams began a “path toward redemption” that included years of education, soul-searching, edification, and spiritual cultivation. 86 It was during this time that Williams woke up one night in a cold sweat consumed by sadness for the innocent black lives caught in the crossfire and years of young lives lost. He recalls, “Wide awake I lay there thinking about how, most of my life, I lived it for Crip, but the Crip god had abandoned me.” 87 Williams’s reflections on his life and redemption include responsibility for his personal actions as well as a critique of the social conditions in which he lived. Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s story resists the vision of redemption prescribed by our religious situation. Cultural theorist Bryan J. McCann argues that in the neoliberal imagination, “rhetorics of redemption denote an individualistic ethics characterized by appeals to personal responsibility and upward mobility.” 88 In particular, in the context of mass incarceration, this image of redemption eclipses an analysis of racial and economic inequality. McCann rightly situates Williams’s narrative of redemption within a radical imagination that critiques neoliberalism and does not merely conform to norms of white civil society. 89 Williams’s narrative of redemption begins with daily conversations with other inmates in the “study of Black history, law, psychology, math, religion, Swahili, spirituality.” 90 A critical aspect of Williams’s story of redemption is the situating of violence in his community within a broader meaning context of social inequality. In reflecting upon gang life, he states, “Strange how we Crips, Bloods, other black gangs, and the black street drug dealers were so gung-ho to obliterate one another—but would shy away when it came to confronting poverty, unemployment, politics, cop brutality, and other social inequities.” 91 Moreover, Williams also cast the effects of social death in distinctly psychological terms as well. He states:

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Throughout my life, I was psychologically scarred. I carried an inner loathing of self and my own culture. Since I wasn’t psychotic—Bobby Wright’s book Psychopathic Racial Personality confirms my analysis—self-hatred motivated me to seek a kind of accomplishment by hurting blacks. That’s why I could stroll through Will Rogers Park during the Watts Festival, eager to impress my fellow Crips by knocking unconscious any target they pinpointed. 92

And, Conditioned and brainwashed to hate myself, and my own race, other black people became my prey and the Crips my sword. Though I cannot condone it, much of the violence I inflicted on my gang rivals and other blacks was an unconscious display of my frustration with poverty, racism, police brutality, and other systemic injustices routinely visited upon residents of urban black colonies such as South Central Los Angeles. I was frustrated because I felt trapped. I internalized the defeatist rhetoric propagated as street wisdom in my ‘hood, that there were only three ways out of South Central: migration, death, or incarceration. I located a fourth option . . . incarcerated death. 93

The story of Stanley Williams presents an important aspect of the image of the death-bound-subject. In these passages, Williams does not passively accept a racialized social death mediated by a lack of socioeconomic opportunities recognized as legitimate. Rather, the struggle for recognition becomes an intra-racial struggle expressed in the language of “respect and disrespect.” 94 James Gilligan, a clinical psychiatrist with experience with inmates in a maximum security prison, situates respect as the clue to understanding the moral vocabulary and psychodynamics of chronically violent men. 95 He states, “I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of being shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this ‘loss of face’—no matter how severe the punishment, even if it includes death.” 96 Gilligan’s clinical insights are supported by Nathan McCall’s memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, where he recalls hearing the stories of violence and how they garnered respect. He argues, “I wanted that kind of respect. Everybody I knew wanted it. So we all worked on our knuck games to earn our reps. We tried to learn various ways to hurt people, to fuck somebody up so bad it was remembered in the streets for a long, long time.” 97 The Crip god was the sovereign by which social recognition or respect was secured through fear and violence within his community. The result is a subject formed simultaneously by the threat of death from other blacks as well as the state. It is important to note that in the religious situation of mass incarceration, the desire for recognition that is constitutive of human flourishing is secured through the means that produce death-bound-subjects. It would take an equally compelling narrative framework of the “psychopathic racial per-

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sonality” for Williams to begin reinterpreting his life and break form the Crip god. 98 Slowly as Williams interprets his life experiences, the lens of the “psychopathic racial personality” brings into view the Crip god and its attendant violence against blacks as the mimetic mirror of how whites have historically interacted with blacks. Williams’s original trial serves as a primary example of this process in his story of redemption. In 1981, Williams was put on trial for the murders of Albert Owens, TsaiShai Yang, Yen-I Yang, and Yee-Chen Lin during two separate armed robberies in 1979. The prosecutor argued for the death penalty in front of an allwhite jury during the sentencing phase of the trial. A key aspect of animalistic imagery described Williams as a “bengal tiger” who should not be allowed back in his “natural habitat.” 99 In the introduction of Blue Rage, Black Redemption, Williams states: Throughout my life I was hoodwinked by South Central’s terminal conditions, its broad and deadly template for failure. From the beginning I was spoon-fed negative stereotypes that covertly positioned black people as genetic criminals—inferior, illiterate, shiftless, promiscuous, and ultimately “three-fifths” of a human being, as stated in the Constitution of the United States. Having bought into this myth, I was shackled to the lowest socioeconomic rung where underprivileged citizens compete ruthlessly for morsels of the American pie— a pie theoretically served proportionately to all, based on their ambition, intelligence and perseverance. 100

Through Williams’s study of a wide range of subjects with a major emphasis upon African American culture, he interprets the images used by the prosecutor as an instance of the deeply sedimented cultural logic of exclusion in America. Moreover, his actions while serving the “Crip god” are reinterpreted as the product of “having bought into this myth.” The process of redemption for Williams would also serve as a point of contestation in his appeal for clemency with California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. In capital cases, the question of whether someone deserves to die is separate from their criminal guilt. Dahlia Lithwick notes that the latter is a “backward-looking decision as to what happened” and the former a “forwardlooking judgment as to whether the defendant’s life might have any value.” 101 Moreover, scholars Austin Sarat and Karl Shoemaker argue that persons involved in the death penalty process often “reflect society’s conventions about what makes life worth saving as well as prejudices that devalue the lives of particular persons of groups of persons.” 102 The same society that produced the conditions for Stanley “Tookie” Williams to become a deathbound-subject now must determine if he is an “executable subject.” 103

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In the religious situation of mass incarceration, narratives of redemption are legitimated through persons accepting responsibility for their crime as well as repudiation of who they once were. Such repudiation represents the embrace of self-governance as defined by civil society, a key aspect of the rationality of governance. 104 In the case of Stanley Williams, repudiation was evidenced by cooperation with the state in providing information to prosecute other members of the Crips. 105 Williams’s narrative of redemption, however, is neither solely individualistic, nor embraces the norms of civil society in general or the criminal justice system in particular. The image of the death-bound-subject is discerned in Williams’s story as he states that redemption “symbolizes the end of a bad beginning and a new start.” 106 In addition, he argues that his redemption is primarily a process experienced through helping others, especially the youth. 107 More importantly, Williams’s advice toward youth to stay away from gangs and work toward peace also critiques mass incarceration. In the “Tookie Protocol for Peace,” he argues: “The United States government’s approach to urban violence is often to launch one of its intermittent ‘wars’ on crime and then trumpet success by pointing to wholesale incarcerations, measures which fail to deter or to rehabilitate the criminal mentality.” 108 Williams gives a complex portrait of redemption for those who fall within the image of the death-boundsubject. It is an interpersonal process intimately tied to concrete acts and effects upon persons other than himself. In addition, redemption for Williams repudiates his former gang life as well as the religious situation that occasioned it. The religious situation of mass incarceration and the birth of the “Crip god” stand in a dialectical relationship. Williams’s experience of redemption transcends the grip of this theopolitical rivalry when God is disclosed as his “joie de vivre,” an enjoyment and love of life itself. 109 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appealed directly to Williams story as evidence of a failure of redemption as defined by neoliberalism, and not worthy of clemency. More importantly, he explicitly cites the dedication of Williams’s book Life in Prison as casting doubt on his redemption, since it mentions many political radicals who have challenged the state. The list includes: “Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier, Dhoruba alMujahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the countless other men, women, and youths who have to endure the hellish oppression of living behind bars.” 110 Schwarzenegger argues that the inclusion of George Jackson “defies reason” and was a “significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as legitimate means to address societal problems.” 111 Moreover, he argued that Williams has not sufficiently atoned for the murders committed by the Crips as a “byproduct of his former lifestyle.” 112 Finally, while the governor argued there is no atonement without apology for the murders he was convicted of, the bulk of his argument

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against clemency rested upon what theologian Edward Farley calls “the facticity of redemption.” 113 For Farley, the facticity of redemption is the clue to how God comes forth as God for Christian communities. I want to extend this argument. More specifically, I want to argue that Farley’s theorizing of the facticity of redemption is a resource in discerning God within the religious situation of mass incarceration. Redemption for the death-bound-subject in the religious situation of mass incarceration is seen in Schwarzenegger’s interpretive choices. In the governor’s written decision, Williams’s five nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, four nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature and his receipt of the President’s Call to Service Award in 2005 from President George W. Bush, “do not have persuasive weight in this clemency request.” 114 Neither did the thirty-two thousand signatures for clemency nor the recommendation by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that “Williams’s good works and accomplishments since incarceration may make him a worthy candidate for the exercise of gubernatorial discretion.” 115 In addition, the ongoing presence of the Crips was interpreted as a sign that Williams’s peacemaking efforts were not effective. However, the governor is silent regarding the testimonials in the foreword of Blue Rage, Black Redemption that might evidence the concrete effects of his work. One person remarked, “Yo Tookie, I’ve been bangin’ since I was eight. And I really Wanted To Thank You For Settin’ Me Free, Cuz. I Mean You Were My Idol, And Now I See All Tha Pain I’ve Caused People Who Never Deserved It, Over A Color And What It Stood For. Thanks To You, I Now See How Wrong I Was. I Needed To Get My Life Back, And You Gave It To Me.” 116 Thus, for Schwarzenegger, the facticity of redemption was not evidenced by the testimonies of those likely to fall within the image of the death-bound-subject occasioned by our religious situation. Moreover, his identification with those that challenged the legitimacy of mass incarceration or were political prisoners discredits any claims to redemption. Although his memoirs indicate that Williams believes that God allowed him to go to prison to pay for crimes he committed (but was not convicted of), that facticity of his redemption resists the necropolitics of mass incarceration by call himself as well as the political community to repentance. The image of the death-bound-subject reveals that the religious situation of mass incarceration reveals the way in which the threat of death operates as a mode of coercion within political economy. I also argue that this image also discloses religious meanings beyond the fatalistic overtones of JanMohamed towards possibilities of hope and political agency. The lives of Mumia AbuJamal and Stanley “Tookie” Williams symbolically reestablish a relationship with the society whose prisons attempt to cut them off from. Their stories are of profound religious significance as they both personify the possibilities of affirming life in the midst of the political structures of death. As the image of

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Africa figures prominently in both stories (Williams’s ashes now reside in Africa), we are reminded that mass incarceration participates in the history of the involuntary presence of blacks as constitutive of the arche of the American political community. It is within the narratives of Abu-Jamal and Williams that we see God come forth as God in the religious situation of mass incarceration. How precisely the historical structures of social death and their subjective formations coalesce into a neoliberal regime of juridical power is the aim of the next chapter. NOTES 1. Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 12. 2. Ibid. 3. See Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 89 and Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 49. 4. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998), 6. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Wright, Native Son, 10. 8. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 92–93. 9. Sumptary codes are “rules, written or unwritten, that establish unequal rank and make it immediately visible.” See Fields and Fields, Racecraft. 10. Ibid. 11. Wright, Native Son, 34. 12. Ibid., 85. 13. Scott, Contempt and Pity. 14. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject. 15. Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, and Peter Gay, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 84. 16. The super-ego provides the theoretical glue for a psychopolitical analysis that rearticulates Patterson’s social death from an intersubjective relationship to an intrasubjective relationship. 17. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 162–163. 18. Ibid., 98–99. 19. The work of J. B. Pontalis and the various schools of thought built upon the work of Jacques Lacan. 20. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 24–25. 21. Ibid. Although space does not warrant a full treatment, this reworking of the death instinct is thanatos, a constitutive pair with eros. Eros and thanatos operating as a process of binding and unbinding that generates its own repetition is psychologically analogous to Tillich form-creating and form-destroying power of the ground of Being (later revised as Spiritual Presence the unity of power and meaning). In mythology and biblical imagery, Tillich sees the demonic as represented by demons that are divine-antidivine beings. Thus, they are not negations of the divine but rather they participate in the divine in distorted ways. As it relates to the individual, he argues that the demonic dwells in the subconscious level of the human soul. The cultural disclosure of the demonic is always discerned through forms whose power and creativity destroy their own historically conditioned form. See “On Death-Work in Freud, Self, Culture,” in Alan Roland, Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); “The Demonic” in Paul Tillich, Nicholas Alfred Rasetzki, and Elsa L.

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Talmey, The Interpretation of History (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936); Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3 (University of Chicago Press, 1976), 102–106; and “Puritans, Freudians, and the Classical Eros” in Irwin, Eros Toward the World. 22. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 25. 23. Wright, Native Son, 179. 24. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 114. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 124. 27. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity, 98–99. 28. Wright, Native Son, 400–402. 29. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 126–127. 30. Ibid., 128–129. 31. Wright, Native Son. 32. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 129. 33. Ibid. 34. I employ Nancy McWilliams’s definition of affectivity as “any state of mind and condition of arousal that we have learned to describe as a discrete emotional experience” that includes diverse phenomena as “love, hate, envy, gratitude, boredom, spite, resentment, guilt, pride, remorse, hope, despair, exasperation, tenderness, vindictiveness, pity, scorn, the feeling of being moved or touched and other emotional conditions.” See Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 103. JanMohamed carefully works through the ambiguity of Freud’s use of the term cathexis to avoid a strictly quantitative reading. He defines cathexis as “the investment of various objects with varying forms and degrees of affect” (272). I have summarized his discussion here for clarity with the use of the term affectivity. 35. I distilled these two criteria from Steven Crowell’s “Who is the Political Actor? An Existential Phenomenological Approach,” in Thompson and Embree, Phenomenology of the Political (New York: Springer Publishing, 2000). Crowell defines institutions broadly which also include “rallies, petitions, political conventions, the press, deliberative bodies, grass roots movements, courts, constitutional guarantees, designated ties for assemblies, campaigns, changes of office, and so on,” 24. 36. See Mark L. Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011); The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001); Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post9/11 Powers and American Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005); and Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). 37. Timothy Williams, “Execution Case Dropped Against Mumia Abu-Jamal in Officer’s Killing.” New York Times, December 7, 2011. 38. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Today’s State of Exception: Abu-Jamal, Agamben, JanMohamed, and the Democratic State of Emergency,” Political Theology 10, no. 2 (2009): 306. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Here Taylor follows Joy James in defining a political prisoner as one who is advocating for greater democracy and not the restoration of older orders of supremacy. See James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation and Rebellion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 42. Taylor’s larger argument concerns the relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereignty, bare life and the state of exception to interpret unprecedented rulings in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 319. 45. Ibid., 320. 46. Ibid., 322. 47. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 102.

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48. Ibid. 49. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Avon Books, 1996), 53–54. 50. Ibid., 47. For another account of the effects of solitary confinement in particular, see Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, 2013; and “Punishing the Residue” in Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog. 51. Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row, 54. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 42–43. 55. David Shichor and Dale K. Sechrest, Three Strikes and You’re Out: Vengeance as Social Policy (New York: SAGE Publications), 15. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 179. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. See “1994 State of the Union Address” at http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/videos.html. 62. As an index of the media-driven cultural climate of the times a Clinton official remarked, “You can’t appear soft on crime when crime hysteria is sweeping the country. Maybe the national temper will change, and maybe, if it does, we’ll do it right later,” in Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, The Politics of Injustice (New York: SAGE, 2003), 67. Also see Beckett, Making Crime Pay. 63. Shichor and Sechrest, Three Strikes and You’re Out, 185. 64. Ibid., 183. Here Surette explicitly invokes the social construction of reality through three terms: experienced reality, symbolic reality and subjective reality (a mix of the experienced and symbolic in each individual). The importance for the argument is his claim that for modern people, most of our knowledge is gained not form experience, reality but from symbolic reality,” 183. 65. Ibid., 186–187. 66. The social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz contains two important points for thinking about Mumia’s writings as a form of political agency. The first is that within the natural attitude of everyday life, that which appears to consciousness is given in a pairing. This pairing is given in passive synthesis of that which is perceived and apperceived. Apperception immediately pairs that which is present with forms of remembrance, recollection and imagining. The second is that different provinces of meaning within the social world are paired through symbols. It is at this level of symbolic relations that the meaning of social collectives and institutional forms are mediated. For the purpose of this argument I have bracketed Schutz’s discussion of the means through which symbols can pair different provinces of reality. See Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life World Volume 2 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 132–133. 67. Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row, 109. 68. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor. 69. Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row, 111. 70. Stanley Tookie Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 3. 71. McCann, “Redemption in the Neoliberal and Radical Imaginations.” 72. Ibid., 180. 73. Ibid., 181. 74. Alejandro Alonso, “Racialized Identitites and the Formation of Black Gangs in Los Angeles,” Urban Geography 25, no. 7 (November 1, 2004): 658–674, 662. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 665. 77. Ibid., 666. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 668

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81. Ibid., 668–669. 82. Ibid., 669. 83. Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, 100. 84. Ibid., 131. 85. Ibid., 100. 86. Ibid., xviii. 87. Ibid., 278. See also R. H. S. Crossman, The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) for Richard Wrights’s experience with his hope of communism being able to provide him with secure grounding. 88. Bryan J. McCann, “Redemption in the Neoliberal and Radical Imaginations: The Saga of Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams,” Communication, Culture & Critique (2013): 2. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 9. 91. Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, 161. 92. Ibid., 161. 93. Ibid., 217–218. 94. For a comprehensive treatment of the dynamics of respect in marginalized communities see Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000); Against the Wall (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Also see John A Rich, Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 60–61; and Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a theological reading of respect and its relationship to gun violence see “God Is an AK-47” in Stewart, Street Corner Theology. 95. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 105–106. 96. Ibid., 110. 97. Ibid., 58. 98. The significance of this reframing can be interpreted through Alfred Schutz’s account of the personal ideal-type that “is itself always determined by the interpreter’s point of view. It is a function of the very question it seeks to answer. It is dependent upon the objective context of meaning, which it merely translates into subjective terms and then personifies.” See Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 190. 99. Bryan J. McCann, “Redemption in the Neoliberal and Radical Imaginations: The Saga of Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams,” Communication, Culture & Critique (2013): 7. 100. Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, xi. 101. Austin Sarat and Karl Shoemaker, Who Deserves to Die: Constructing the Executable Subject (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 6. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Mitchell M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Second Edition (New York: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2009), 20. 105. McCann, “Redemption in the Neoliberal and Radical Imaginations,” 12. 106. “A Conversation with Death Row Prisoner Stanley Tookie Williams from His San Quentin Cell,” Democracy Now!, accessed December 8, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/ 2005/11/30/a_conversation_with_death_row_prisoner, 5. 107. Ibid. 108. Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, 361. 109. “A Conversation with Death Row Prisoner Stanley Tookie Williams from His San Quentin Cell,” 9. The term “joie de vivre” was popularized by the person-centered psychology of Carl Rogers. See Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 88, and “Introduction” by Irving Yalom in Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995).

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110. Sarah Kershaw and Shadi Rahimi, “Governor Schwarzenegger Denies Clemency for Gang Co-Founder,” The New York Times, December 12, 2005, sec. National, http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/national/12-tookie.html, 4. 111. Ibid. 5. 112. Ibid. 113. Edward Farley, Divine Empathy: A Theology of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 8. 114. Kershaw and Rahimi, “Governor Schwarzenegger Denies Clemency for Gang CoFounder,” 4. 115. Williams v. Woodford, 384 F. 3d 567, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2004. 116. Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, forward.

Chapter Four

Necropolitics and Juridical Power

The examination of the religious situation of mass incarceration thus far has focused on representations of social death and their role in the production of knowledge used by the rationalities of governance. In addition, I have argued that such rationalities are displayed in the lives and reflections of those most impacted by mass incarceration. In this chapter, I want to focus on how our religious situation mediates between mass incarceration and juridical power. I argue that necropolitics creates a powerful circuit of representations that legitimate the mythology of black-on-black crime, the racialization of drugs and broken windows policing allowing blacks to be disproportionately subject to juridical power. In addition, I argue this analysis also discloses important theological aspects of a racialized popular sovereignty that are critical for understanding the persistence of mass incarceration in American life. Finally, I engage the HBO television series The Wire in order to interpret how these elements work together in our social world. NECROPOLITICS AND THE WIRE The Wire has already permeated American culture as an important site of critique. The Wire’s relevance for scholars was minted when Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson argued, “The Wire’s exploration of sociological themes is truly exceptional. Indeed, I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understandings of the challenges of urban life and urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publication, including studies by social scientists.” 1 Although The Wire is fictious, many of the characters are composites of the individuals David Simon chronicled during his twelve-year tenure at the Baltimore Sun newspaper. 2 I argue that The Wire should not be viewed merely as a visual form of vulgar positivism. 3 91

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Rather, The Wire is valuable in its artistic rendering of our religious situation that contextualizes prisons and jails within a racialized neoliberal political economy. 4 In Season 1’s episode titled “The Pager,” Russell “Stringer” Bell, drug kingpin Avon Barksdale’s second in command, visits D’Angelo Barksdale in “the Pit” located at the low-rise towers. The scene sets up an important relationship between space and hierarchy. “The Pit” is the place where youth in the neighborhood are schooled in the drug trade as they hope to rise in the organization, eventually working in the high-rise Franklin Towers. Moreover, “the Pit” represents an important relationship in the necropolitics of The Wire. “The Pit” marks the intersection of private capital accumulation through an illegal drug trade, the public housing in which it flourishes, as well as the publicly financed juridical and disciplinary power that contains it, thus preserving key public space for legitimate private enterprise. This racialized neoliberal political economy effectively reproduces its own image outside of the law that it must punish. D’Angelo Barksdale, Avon’s cousin, has recently been demoted to the low-rise units from the Franklin Towers back to the “the Pit” until he can prove himself. Bell’s visit is prompted by a recent robbery of their stash house by a stick-up crew as well as a raid by the police. Stringer teaches D’Angelo Barksdale how to ferret out a snitch. Stringer instructs D’Angelo that when the next payday comes, the crew is not to be paid based on their poor performance. D’Angelo’s response is one of puzzlement, as he doesn’t think the crew will work if they don’t get paid. Stringer, laughing, looks around and points to the towers while asking D’Angelo if he thinks they will simply leave, get another job, or go to college. He assures him that they may “buck a little,” but they’re not going to walk. Stringer wants D’Angelo to wait until they are desperate enough to begin asking for an advance. At that point he explains that the worker who is not asking for help, the “one who is still eating,” is the snitch. D’Angelo’s responds, “You know how to play a nigga into a corner, String.” 5 The exchange demonstrates Stringer’s “stock of knowledge,” the deeply sedimented experiences that allow us to accomplish goals in different situations. Any given stock of knowledge is already constituted by and limited by the spatial, temporal and social stratifications of the life world. In addition, the limits and potential in a given situation are also constituted by personal biography, which may give rise to novel forms of deliberation, reflection, and projection into the future. 6 Stringer’s mastery of the given situation allows him to predict the actions of his workers based on the novel and stable aspects of their situation. The novel aspect being the withholding of pay and the limited economic and educational opportunities constituting what is experienced as stable. In this exchange, D’Angelo’s stock of knowledge has increased, giving him further mastery of his situation as well as garnering

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respect. This relationship between stock of knowledge and the discernment of possibilities within a situation resonates with the work of sociologist Alford Young. Young’s work is important in interpreting the narrative arc of Bell’s character and his significance for understanding the necropolitics of The Wire. 7 The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances is an ethnography that describes the ways black men think about their own lives in relationship to American society. Young’s study moves the study of black men beyond the methodological assumption that a person’s view of the future can be simply derived from their actions. Young states, “the fact that an individual is chronically unemployed and does not go to work on a regular basis (his behavior) tells us nothing about the complexity of his thoughts on the intricacies of the modern labor market (his thoughts).” 8 A key finding from Young’s study is that the degrees of social marginalization of black men had a significant impact upon their understanding of broader social forces, and how they framed their aspirations. The men who experienced the most severe social isolation maintained the strongest sense of American styled individualism where mobility was almost exclusively tied to individual effort and initiative. 9 Moreover, they lacked the experiences that interpret the relationship between broader social forces and their relationship to issues of mobility. Men who experienced marginal social connections articulated the impact of race and class as well as how judgments of those in positions of power can affect the individual initiative. 10 The men with the most extensive social experiences beyond their neighborhood were the most articulate about potential barriers, obstacles and oppression. 11 They routinely emphasized the value of defending personal and collective interests. In addition, they articulated the relationships of blacks and whites as well as rich and poor as being in a state of ongoing conflict. Young states, “These men held that in order to engage mobility from a subordinate position one had to consciously and assertively confront power and status differentials in a warlike fashion.” 12 The relationship of social marginalization and necropolitics is displayed in the evolution of Stringer Bell. In Season 3’s episode, “Middle Ground,” Bell has slowly been consumed by the idea of becoming a businessman as a way out of the day-to-day routine of defending corners from rival gangs and upstart drug lord Marlo Stansfield (whose Stansfield Organization eventually finds itself in a turf war with the Barksdale Organization after their business is disrupted by the city’s demolition of Franklin Towers). Bell begins taking courses in economics at a community college and using the economic language of elasticity to interpret the difference between his involvement in the drug business and their legitimate front at the “Copy Cat” print shop. Bell begins to make inroads into real estate through his corporation B&B Enterprises. More importantly, he con-

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tinues to try to persuade Avon that there are games “beyond the Game” if they could “handle this shit like businessmen. Sell the shit, make the profit, and later for that gangster bullshit.” 13 Bell also attempts to convince Avon not to go to war against Marlo over corners in favor of participation in the New Day Co-Op with Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart, another drug kingpin that favors peaceful resolution to conflict. Bell argues, “The fact is we got every mob in town, East Side, West Side, ready to pull together, share territory on that good shit, man. Like we find us a package and we ain’t got to see nothing but bank. Nothing but cash. No corners, no territory. Nothing.” 14 Stephen Lucas rightly notes that “Stringer’s ‘nothing but cash’ mantra emerges logically from the culture of monetarism—of cash without territory or industry—that eviscerated West Baltimore neighborhoods formerly reliant on employment in the manufacturing sector.” 15 Thus, Bell is caught up in the contradictions of necropolitics, having to adopt the very perspective that legitimated the economic disinvestment that occasioned the flourishing of the illegal drug trade and its attending violence. While Bell’s seriousness about his business perspective increases, his aspirations are also curtailed by the experience of social marginalization. In Season 3, Stringer is consistently seen dressed in slacks, a button down shirt, a construction hat or a suit and tie rather than his trademark jogging suit. Although such changes are intended for persons to render a different aesthetic judgment of him, they are no substitute for the acquisition of a stock of knowledge. As B&B Enterprises attempts to build condominiums in the city’s new empowerment zones, Bell is increasingly frustrated with the realities of cost overruns, grant writing and the social cues of corporate culture. This becomes painfully clear as Stringer learns through his attorney, Maurice Levy, that State Senator R. Clayton “Clay” Davis, a corrupt politician who promised state contracts for B&B in exchange for money, has exploited him. In addition to Bell’s shock that Davis would be so brazen as “to run game,” the logic of the conversation turns on appearances. Bell sees federal grants announced in the newspaper but sees no payout to B&B. He gives money to Davis but does so without actually seeing money exchange hands with anyone in authority. He watches Chunky Coleman receive grants and assumes it was a bribe. Levy tells Bell, “Chunky Coleman gets his money like everyone else. He fills out his application, makes sure his buildings meet spec, and then he prays like hell.” 16 Bell, whose mastery of the drug business and his social situation previously taught D’Angelo how to ferret out a snitch based on appearances, “that one that’s still eatin,” has now been taken advantage of due to an inadequate stock of knowledge for this new situation. Bell’s realization enrages him to the point of ordering Slim Charles, an enforcer for the Barksdale Organization, to order a hit on Clay Davis. Startled by the request, Slim responds, “the Clay Davis, downtown Clay Davis, yo String . . . murder ain’t no thing, but this here is some assassination

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shit.” 17 Their exchange is important as issues of race, class, gender, status and space are structured by necropolitics. Slim Charles and Avon Barksdale articulate their own discernment of the possibilities and limits within the dynamics of necropolitics and juridical power. They remind Bell that when a body drops in their neighborhood it’s murder, but when it is a state senator, it’s an assassination. Again, Avon reiterates the issue of their stock of knowledge by stating that to put a hit on Clay Davis requires a “Day of the Jackal”–like assassin rather than a “rough and tumble Nigga.” The point is brought home when Avon states, “I told you about playing those away games!” This opens up a deep rift in which Bell and Avon’s interests are irreconcilable. Bell begins to take steps toward giving the police information about Avon. The metaphor of the “game” is a prevalent one in The Wire. Here Avon has articulated the taken for granted understanding of the politics of death that structure the drug trade in everyday life. At this point, it is necessary to articulate the way in which violence is framed within necropolitics. NECROPOLITICS, VIOLENCE AND THE CITY In interpreting The Wire, it is important to note that the main character of the drama is Baltimore itself which serves as an archetype of the urban city. David Wilson’s Inventing Black-on-Black Violence is a key resource in understanding the generative power of necropolitics to pattern the disproportionate impact of the “War on Drugs” on black communities. Wilson notes that black youth in particular were part of the explanatory reasons for the decline of U.S. cities as the centers of “profit accumulation and symbolic American values.” 18 The primary tool used to address the post–World War II economy was suburbanization. Wilson argues: As now chronicled, a mind-boggling set of government supports fueled this unfolding: Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Affairs mortgage loan program, the secondary mortgage market, thrift lenders, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and local tax abatement programs. Each helped make spaces that could seamlessly absorb new investment and traditional bourgeois values. These programs and policies fueled consumption of land and housing, production of building neighborhoods, and reproduction of existing social relations. (emphasis added) 19

Blacks and other minority youth were offered as the primary reason for the decline of the city due to their inability to adjust to the complexities of urban life. Moreover, they were seen as “contagious and repulsed non-poor blacks, industrialists and investors.” 20 This is another important moment of “bad faith”; that is, something proceeds by being what it is not and not being what

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it is. In this case, suburbanization proceeds by being what it is not, economic prosperity as the sole result of cultural values and ghettoization proceeds by not being what it is: economic decline as the sole result of cultural values. This represents the tactical use of juridical power to support a political economy and its reproduction of social relations structured by sumptuary codes. These tactical interventions, however, do not signal the complete abandonment of the city as a potential economic engine. The pursuit of public housing and urban renewal would serve as complementary government tactics to recapture the urban economic base. Public housing, which began in the 1930s, would receive new energy through the fear associated with declining cities and problem populations. From 1949 to 1967, more than 600 public housing projects were begun in more than 700 cities with 450 more built by 1970. 21 The effects were immediate. Wilson writes: But the program offered with much fanfare soon blew up in the government’s face. As early as the late 1950s, public housing was being criticized by both conservatives and liberals as slum-sustaining, paternalistic and welfare-perpetuating. It flagrantly isolated and stigmatized poor people to a degree that embarrassed politicians. But because public housing so effectively walled off “dangerous” and “property-value-threating” people, a perceived necessity by growth elites in cities, its use continued. Never had such an unpopular program but functionally efficient program gone so far. 22

This tactical intervention could not completely “wall off” all of the social consequences that it produced. A key aspect of regulating a population is the information that is produced about the population. The representations of violence and death serve as knowledge that often legitimates the social agreements that drive juridical power. In the early 1980s, a particular representation of animality, criminality and urban spaces congealed into a discourse called “black-on-black violence.” In 1982 the phrase was used in 4.5 percent of all articles addressing violence in the black communities. By 1986, it has risen to 44.5 percent. Thus, “black-on-black violence” effectively positioned the problem of violence in black communities as a problem of “blackness” and not “violence,” thus shielding America’s political economy and its social agreements from culpability. Necropolitics generates the knowledge to legitimate disinvestment as well as the knowledge to legitimate the discipline, punishment and regulation of its effects. In the production of knowledge used to organize the power of death, statistics plays a central role. The discourse of “black-onblack violence,” co-present with the mythology of crack cocaine analyzed in a previous chapter, is a powerful repetition of the cultural logic that weaves together race, crime and statistics. It is important for this argument to under-

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stand the historical roots of this logic as it relates to the criminalization of blackness and the meaning of incarceration. NECROPOLITICS AND STATISTICAL KNOWLEDGE In The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil G. Muhammad states, “With the publication of the 1890 census, prison statistics for the first time became the basis of a national discussion about blacks as a distinct and dangerous criminal population.” 23 Against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the census was used to assess the progress of African Americans in a postslavery era. 24 The realities of racialized laws, discriminatory punishments, convict leasing, and extra-legal lynching were obscured as crime statistics were presented as objective and color-blind. These new statistics provided a discourse in which to debate the “appropriate levels of African American access to the social and economic infrastructure of the nation.” 25 Thus, the ideas of natural inferiority that legitimated natural inequality during slavery would be re-encoded through statistics about black criminality as “the Negro Problem” post-slavery. The significance of the statistical data was understood through the deeply sedimented meanings associated with black criminality and inferiority. There are two contexts of meaning that are important for the argument advanced here, “the cause of crime” and the “responsibility of society.” The first meaning context compared criminal statistics between the categories of Foreign-born and Negro. Muhammad notes that during the progressive era, white social scientists and reformers interpreted the Foreign-born criminals as victims of industrialization, while black criminals were considered selfdestructive and pathological. 26 Charles R. Henderson, a University of Chicago social scientist, expressed this view arguing that immigrant crime is not the evil that “statistics carelessly interpreted might prove” but that black crime was a matter of “racial inheritance, physical and mental inferiority, barbarian and slave ancestry and culture.” 27 The net effect of this first discourse was to re-inscribe the former perception of blacks into another classificatory scheme by which to produce racial knowledge. This racial knowledge, forged through racial criminalization, continued to solidify race as a deeply sedimented category that justified discriminatory practices as well as racial violence in the name of public safety. 28 Frederick L. Hoffman 29 studied mortality among whites in 1893, a year in which suicide among whites was on the rise, exemplifying the second meaning context, the responsibility of society. Hoffman argued that this alarming rise in suicides was due not to their own vices, but to “the state of society into which the individual is thrown.” 30 A critical aspect of Hoffman’s research is his understanding of the role of social sciences in relationship to the state. He

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claims, “The study of statistics of suicide, madness, and crime is of the utmost importance to any society when such abnormal conditions are on the increase” and “when such an increase has been proven to exist, it is the duty of society to leave nothing undone until the evil has been checked or been brought under control.” 31 Hoffman’s work attempted to undermine the abolitionist claims regarding the effects of religion and education. Hoffman acknowledged that the increasing number of blacks attending school and church while arguing “neither religions nor education has influenced to an appreciable degree the moral progress of the race. Whatever benefit the individual colored man may have gained from the extension of religious worship and educational processes, the race as a whole has gone backwards rather than forwards.” 32 Finally, Hoffman’s research was influential in interpreting the migration of blacks to the northern cities as a serious threat to the advancement of the white race. As Muhammad succinctly states, the result is the “nationalization of the Negro Problem.” 33 The implications of this particular moment in which blacks as a race were represented as inferior through crime statistics are numerous. First, ideas of racial inferiority were reproduced through culture as opposed to biology. As such, black crime was constructed as a cultural problem whereas crime among “foreign born” and whites was a societal problem. The latter legitimated societal empathy and investment whereas the former warranted punishment, confinement and disinvestment. When viewed from the standpoint of necropolitics, this moment produced a cultural logic that paired blackness with criminality, individual acts with enduring cultural traits, and racial fantasy with scientific objectivity expressed through statistical knowledge. This knowledge is then instrumentalized through the juridical power that fuels mass incarceration. Foucault theorized that within biopolitics, juridical power begins to respond to the life of the individual and not merely to a criminal act. I argue that necropolitics is the inversion of this formula. In necropolitics, juridical power erases the individuality of the juridical subject. Thus, the logic of mass incarceration begins with the “massification” of juridical power. Similarly, laws such as mandatory minimum sentencing prevent judges from actually engaging in the act of judgment. The effect is the rendering of individual cases as merely instances of a population. The deeply sedimented nature of the cultural logic of necropolitics is rendered through the attempts of The Wire’s Stringer Bell to overcome and navigate its corridors. In one of the most overtly religious scenes in The Wire, Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin and Stringer Bell meet at graveyard. Major Colvin, frustrated with the experience of the drug war, secretly institutes a “free zone,” called Hamsterdam, where drugs could be legally sold in an effort to reduce violence. The project eventually blows up in his face and becomes a political nightmare. The rich symbolism of Bell and Colvin meeting in the graveyard is that they both have tried to move beyond the way necropolitics has struc-

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tured their respective “games.” Stringer acknowledges to Colvin that the Hamsterdam experiment is the reason why he reached out to him. Both Stringer and Colvin share the ideal of establishing the drug trade as pure business, without violence, bodies and turf wars. As a consequence, both are headed toward very different forms of death. In their meeting, Bell gives information to Colvin regarding the location of a safe house containing illegal weapons being used in an ongoing turf war. When Colvin asks Bell if Avon has done something to him to give up his longtime friend and partner, Stringer’s response is, “Nah, it’s just business.” The Wire weaves together the actual death of Bell and the symbolic death of Major Colvin. Bell faces a literal firing squad composed of Brother Mouzone, a well-dressed bow-tied hitman from New York, and Omar Devone Little, an openly gay stick-up man who refuses to use profanity and only robs those in the drug trade. Major Colvin faces a firing squad of his commanding officers Commissioner Ervin Burrell and Deputy Commissioner William Rawls’s. The last words on their lips of Bell and Colvin are “get on with it mutha—,” but before they can finish Deputy Commissioner William Rawls sarcasm and the bullets of Omar and Mouzon have the last word. Stringer Bell is dead. Major Colvin is no longer a police officer. After Bell’s death, Detective James “Jimmy” McNulty, obsessed with bringing down the Barksdale Organization, and William “The Bunk” Moreland, his partner, visit the home of Stringer Bell. They are genuinely surprised by the aesthetics of Bell’s apartment which includes samurai swords, paintings, wall fountains, sculptures, and Persian rugs. McNulty asks, “This is Stringer’s?” Then McNulty moves over to a shelf of books and grabs a volume. The scene focuses in on McNulty’s face as he wonders out loud: “Who the fuck have I been chasing?” The scene pans down and lingers on the title of the book he is holding in his hand: The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. The image of McNulty holding this book symbolizes the contradiction of the War on Drugs within necropolitics. The political economy he is sworn to protect is also the one that produced Stringer Bell. 34 Stringer Bell emerges as the preeminent American neoliberal subject. Cultural studies scholar Mark Anthony Neal rightly notes that of “The Wire’s many characters, Bell is the one who seems most emblematic of the American Dream” and is “largely responsible for managing Barksdale holdings, which during the first season includes a strip club, a towing company, a warehouse, a print shop, and an apartment complex.” 35 As the face of neoliberalism, Bell has sacrificed all meaningful relationships in pursuit of more markets: the “games” beyond the drug game. The violence that Bell uses in search of these markets is deeply rooted in the American mythos. Cultural historian Richard Slotkin argues that the American mythos is “the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of

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by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” 36 As a black American neoliberal subject, however, Bell is unable to fulfill this archetypal role as he is still impacted by the structures of race, gender, class, and region. Bell’s social marginalization and involvement in the drug trade prevents him from achieving the recognition he desires as a legitimate businessman. The logic of violence that gave Bell respect in the drug trade is unable to restore the financial and social respect lost to Clay Davis. More importantly, Bell abandoned the moral code undergirding the illegal violence of the drug trade, making him a “man without a country.” 37 Also, the ability of Bell to escape arrest by McNulty and find common ground with Colvin represent The Wire’s sustained critique of the failure of the “War on Drugs.” The mediation of necropolitics in the circuit of juridical power and mass incarceration within our religious situation is disclosed in the relationship of sentencing and policing. NECROPOLITICS, DRUG MARKETS AND POLICING I argued previously that the mythology of crack cocaine was a repetition of the deeply sedimented beliefs about blacks as animals and criminals. Here I argue that the effect of such cultural logics is a punishment and policing structure that fuels mass incarceration constitutive of necropolitics. In the necropolitics of our religious situation, crack cocaine is a commodity with social, symbolic, juridical and economic significance. 38 More importantly, criminologist Dimitri Bogazianos argues that crack cocaine represents a “criminological structure of feeling” that gives meaning and value to a generation in a period of time. In addition, he argues that this time period, the socalled crack era, represents the “lethal core” of crack’s structure of feeling due to its association with the number of homicides. 39 While his work investigates rap music as a primary site to examine crack’s structure of feeling, this structure can be witnessed in a 2002 interview with the late singer and actress, Whitney Houston. Diane Sawyer (of ABC’s Primetime Special Edition) interviewed the late Whitney Houston after a number of public appearances in which her severe weight loss gave currency to long-standing rumors of drug abuse. Sawyer’s interview immediately began with an effort to ascertain the cause of her perceived weight loss, citing a number of causes such as bulimia, anorexia, and drugs, all of which Houston flatly denied. However, when Sawyer repeated this media headline, “Whitney Dying, Crack Rehab Fails,” Houston became visibly disturbed. Houston quickly remarked, “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight. OK? We don’t do crack. We don’t do that.

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Crack is whack.” 40 Houston’s words and the affect associated with them reveal important aspects of the meaning of social crack. The initial remark by Sawyer, “Whitney dying, Crack rehab fails,” indicated the degree to which the meaning of crack signified “black and poor” as opposed to the emergence of powder cocaine among the predominantly white and wealthy in the late 1970s. 41 Thus, Houston’s initial response, “Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack,” re-establishes her status as a wealthy, internationally renowned entertainer. However, the tonality in Houston’s voice and the flushness of her face was saturated with moral indignation. Her repetition of “We don’t do that” indicated the moral significance crack represented. However, Houston’s final punctuation, “Crack is whack,” originally appeared in 1986 on a two-sided mural located on 128th Street in Harlem painted by graffiti artist Keith Haring. Thus, Houston’s response to Sawyer reveals a complexity through which she rejects the class stigma of crack, while her use of the phrase “crack is whack” reveals an embrace of black culture not reducible to the structures of class. Moreover, her use of this phrase effectively mediates a more complex response of the black public sphere to the crack epidemic contesting the prevailing stereotypes within wider publics. If Whitney Houston’s interview represents the deeply sedimented symbolic force of crack within the black community, the death of Len Bias would represent the fears of crack moving from the urban centers to suburbia and middle America. The death of Len Bias occasioned the now infamous 100-to-1 sentencing disparity where possession of five grams of crack cocaine would trigger a mandatory minimum sentence of no less than five years in prison. The same sentence would be given to someone if they were convicted of trafficking five hundred grams of powder cocaine. In addition, the legislation was amended in 1988 to make crack the only drug for which simple possession carried a mandatory minimum penalty. 42 More importantly, Bogazianos argues that under the “Kingpin Strategy” created by the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1993 set up “a presumption that possession of five grams of crack cocaine meant the possessor was a trafficker.” 43 The assumption was that the five grams represented an intent to distribute as opposed to personal use, and that such a penalty was warranted due to the “lethal characteristic of this form of cocaine.” 44 Bogazianos goes on to claim the punishment structure of crack cocaine represents one of the “most powerful symbolic demonizations in late twentieth-century America.” 45 I argue that it is also a profound act of necropolitics within our religious situation. I have previously argued that through mandatory minimums, necropolitics erases the individual circumstances of the juridical subject, stripping away the use of judicial discretion constitutive of the act of judgment. 46 In the case of crack cocaine, the differences between the intentionality of real or imagined drug kingpins, retail-level dealers and users is erased under the

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category of simple possession. More importantly, Bogazianos argues that the combination of punitive sentencing and aggressive task force–style policing destabilized the drug trade and actually increases lethal violence. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has described this as a conflict between “cultural” and “entrepreneurial” violence. 47 Bogazianos argues, “In effect, through the intensification of violence via market-based relations, interpersonal trust at the community level itself was corroded. Old ways of violence, although brutal to outsiders, are thought to maintain neighborhood solidarity, codes of honor, and familial relationships. Instrumental violence, on the other hand is corrosive.” 48 This argument finds additional support in the autobiography of Sanyika Shakur (Monster Kody Scott), a former member of the Crips. Upon his release from prison in 1988, Shakur recalls: This new, highly explosive atmosphere was a bit frightening. It’s almost as if I had contributed to a structure here, but then had somehow slept through years of its development, and now was awakening to find a more advanced, horrifying form of the reality I had known. 49

A close friend remarked to Shakur that “capitalism has hit the gang world.” 50 The implication of the increase in market-based violence is significant for necropolitics within the religious situation of mass incarceration. To reiterate, the various mediating institutions of society are reproduced by and within political economy. I am in agreement with Michel Foucault that such mediating institutions are formed for non-instrumental reasons such as “instinct, sentiment or sympathy.” 51 Moreover, our political economy presents a principle of disassociation through economic individual interests into the heart of mediating institutions. As such, political economy is both the engine that produces the associations of civil society while simultaneously threatening their very fabric. The necropolitics that mediates between juridical power and mass incarceration weaken the social norms of an illegal drug trade already constituted through violence. With such social norms weakened, the entrepreneurial and individual economic interests emerge with greater intensity and corresponding violence. Such violence and death also intensifies the social fears that legitimate more punitive expressions of juridical power and prison building. As necropolitics organizes and manages the power of death, its generative power expresses itself as profitable through both public and private financing that require the criminal actions they were designed to deter. The increased instrumental use of violence also finds its mimesis in the increased market rationality of police management and militarization. The prime example of this in the religious situation of mass incarceration is the “broken windows theory.” In 1982, George Kelling and James Q. Wilson formulated a theory of crime featuring the well-known “slippery slope” logical fallacy that event X

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will result from event Y without providing any evidence. The theory was called the “broken windows theory,” a recasting of a 1969 experiment by a Stanford psychologist that documented community responses to an abandoned car left in the Bronx, New York, and one in Palo Alto, California. 52 The article acknowledges that the car left in the Bronx was pilfered within a day, whereas the car in Palo Alto sat for a week. Curiously, the article mentions these brief facts without any social context or analysis; the article assumes the car in the Bronx was pilfered due to the anonymity within the community and a lack of anyone caring. The article moves swiftly to make an analogy between untended cars to untended behavior. Kelling and Wilson are worth quoting at length: We suggest that “untended” behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers. 53

Their argument did not posit that crime automatically happens from an abandoned piece of property. Rather, it posited that the abandoned property would increase the atomization of residents. The effect would be to decrease investment in the neighborhood as residents would no longer see their neighborhood as “home” but as only “the place where I live.” 54 It was this apathy that paved the way for a community to be vulnerable to criminal activity. The importance of this popular theory of urban decline was that it ended with images of persons in public spaces deemed undesirable. Sociologist Loï c Wacquant argues that the “broken windows theory” has never been empirically validated. 55 Yet its impact, however, would continue to be significant. William Bratton was promoted to New York City Chief of Police in 1994 extolling the virtues of the broken windows theory. In a conference delivered at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Bratton declared: “In New York, we know who the enemy is.” Bratton then defined the enemy as “the squeegee men,” individuals who would begin to clean the windshields of cars at stoplights in hopes of receiving some meager compensation. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made the “squeegee men” a symbol of moral and social decline, referring to them as “squeegee pests” and “vermin” in his 1993 defeat of then Mayor David Dinkins. 56 The images of social and economic insecurity were effectively demonized and criminalized as leading

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to serious crime. These representations were coupled with zero tolerance policies promising to increase the quality of life. Also, Bratton combined this focus on punishing petty disorders with a computerized statistical reporting system known as CompStat. Bratton was explicit about his adoption of market rationality calling police stations “profit centers” if they reduced crime and that his command staff was as efficient as any Fortune 500 company. 57 The result was a focus on entire categories of offenses rather than individual offenders. Moreover, the statistical intervention of CompStat placed enormous pressure on commanders to meet quotas affecting the everyday use of police discretion. Sociologist Peter Moskos’s Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District provides an excellent insight into the historical effects of the peculiar combination of the broken windows theory, zero tolerance policies, CompStat and the use of police discretion. Moskos describes the tension between “high arrest officers” and “low arrest officers.” 58 When Moskos’s unit received a number of memos warning of low arrests by officers, they decided the easiest way to increase numbers was to lock people up for violating bicycle regulations. 59 The combination of the law requiring bikes to have lights at night and the use of bikes by drug runners and lookouts late in the evening provided a perfect opportunity to increase arrests. When bicyclists stopped for this violation were unable to provide identification, the riders were locked up. In defense of his actions, an officer stated: I lock up bicyclists. It’s called zero tolerance. If you’re biking in violation of the law, I’m going to write you a ticket . . . those humps [less active officers] can call me whatever they fucking want. I don’t see them arresting Al fucking Capone. It’s legal. And I’m gonna do it. If they don’t want to get locked up, all they gotta do is follow the law. 60

A number of “low arrest officers” were dismissive of his strategy, remarking that it was “just wrong” or “that’s not real police.” 61 His sergeant, however, was supportive, arguing, “Look, I don’t know what his motivations are. But I think it’s good. He’s locking people up, which is more than half the people in this squad. You think the lieutenant doesn’t like those stats? It’s good for all of us. And he gets a lot of CDSs [Controlled Dangerous Substances] off those lockups. Most of them are dirty. And it’s all legal.” 62 A report called a “95” is an official memo that details an officer’s underperformance. The form was required of all police officers who had not made an arrest in a four-week work period. Moskos asked his sergeant about the significance of his record of one arrest in comparison to an officer who had made no arrests. The sergeant stated, “If you make an arrest, I don’t have to write a 95 on it. Now I have to write a 95. And they have to write a 95, too! This is CompStat bullshit. It’s all numbers. The major goes downtown and

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gets grilled if they see a zero in any category. So now we can’t put zeros down for anything. . . . If I get yelled at, then I’m going to be pissed.” 63 Moskos’s account is significant for understanding the circuitry of necropolitics within our religious situation. The theory of “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” is a powerful repetition of “law and order,” a perennial theme aimed at those deemed the “enemy” and “vermin” of civil society. Moreover, the instrumentalization of policing through statistical management helped secure political legitimacy by regulating the effects of neoliberalism. CompStat and zero tolerance policies complement each other in providing a rationale and incentive to the everyday actions of policing toward communities suffering from mass incarceration. The tactical use of the broken windows theory was revealed when Jack Maple, close associate of William Bratton, stated: “‘Broken Windows’ was merely an extension of what we used to call the ‘Breaking Balls’ theory.’” 64 The “Breaking Balls” theory suggests that the “bad guys” could be discouraged from doing anything bad on a particular beat if they used enforcement for minor infractions pushing them to the next precinct. 65 In addition, Maple debunked the broken window theory suggesting that the article posed a rather “mystical” link between minor infractions and serious crimes. 66 Thus, the instrumentalization of arrests is an effect of the tactical recruitment of a knowledge generated within the public sphere for the regulation of a population. Finally, it is important to understand the broken windows theory as a symptom of the neoliberal punishment within necropolitics that mediates between mass incarceration and juridical power. BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING AND THE ILLUSIONS OF NECROPOLITICS In The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing, social and political theorist Bernard E. Harcourt provides a genealogical account of the rationality undergirding broken windows policing that simultaneously dismantles the welfare state and expands the penal sphere. In this section, I want to bring key features of Harcourt’s genealogy of order-maintenance policing and the free-market as the natural order to bear upon our analysis of necropolitics in the religious situation of mass incarceration. In Illusion of Order, Harcourt argues that the broken windows theory represents the order-maintenance approach to criminal justice that emphasizes proactive enforcement of misdemeanor laws and zero-tolerance policies for minor offenses. Ironically, Harcourt argues that the order maintenance approach is often presented as an alternative to the severe sentencing practices of mass incarceration. 67 The effect, however, is that order-maintenance

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policing actually complements those policies such that police “crackdowns permeate our streets and police station houses while severe sentencing laws pack our prisons.” 68 Moreover, Harcourt argues that the rationale of order maintenance policing relies on categorizing persons as either orderly or disorderly. The disorderly possessed a pathological “lower class culture” that “human nature seems loath to accept a style of life that is so radically present oriented.” 69 However, the radically present-oriented individual unable to calculate the costs and benefits of committing a crime is served in contrast to orderly persons, those understood as normal, future oriented and ‘upper class. 70 In the same manner, class membership and cultural ethos turn on the psychological orientation towards time. This categorization is derived from the work of Edward C. Banfield, mentor and professor of James Q. Wilson, and provides a conceptual framework for policy makers to assume that such “cultural and personality traits are practically immutable.” 71 This logic also provides an interpretation for neighborhood decline as orderly persons will eventually move out of the community to pursue their goals elsewhere. A critical link for our analysis here is when this order-maintenance account of human nature is wedded to an account of harm that justifies punishment. Beginning with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Harcourt traces a genealogy of debates regarding the legal enforcement of morality and the terms by which the political community can use power to restrict individual liberty. Mill’s account of liberty is rooted in what he perceives as a shift in the problem of tyranny. Thus, democratic self-rule needs to move beyond protecting people from tyrannical rulers to protecting individuals from the tyranny of the majority. Mill’s account is clear-eyed regarding the ability of one part of the social body to present itself as the whole or “the people.” Moreover, he argues that social tyranny is “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression” and “penetrates more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself.” 72 The “harm principle” expressed as “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant” is the basis for which we are “warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action.” 73 Harcourt argues persuasively that Mill’s harm principle held firm in renewed debates about the legal enforcement of morality from the 1960s through the early 1980s. 74 The consensus however would not hold. As the public theology of Reaganism ascended a news consensus emerged to protect the City on the Hill. In the 1980s and 1990s Mill’s harm principle received a new ideological rendering so that it was no longer a norm to limit, but to rather to justify state intervention. This shift effectively took advantage of the fact that the harm principle acted as a necessary but not sufficient condition for legal enforcement. More specifically, the principle was used to exclude certain activities

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from legal enforcement while remaining silent on which activities to include. The broken windows theory performed the same kind of work effectively transforming “quality-of-life offenses from mere nuisances or annoyances into seriously harmful conduct.” 75 The relationship of this transformation and the profound expansion of the penal sphere require capturing aspects of Harcourt’s Punishment and the Myth of the Natural Order. A key question that Harcourt seeks to unravel is the durability of beliefs regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of the free market even during times of crisis such as the 2008 financial crisis. More importantly, the idea that the economic domain represents a natural order, which emerged in the eighteenth century, is central to rationalizing a dual commitment to “small government” and an extraordinary penal apparatus in the era of mass incarceration.” 76 Harcourt’s account meticulously charts the influence of Francois Quesnay and the Physiocrats, a group of Enlightenment-era French economists who theorized the idea of the economic domain as an “autonomous, self-regulating system that required no external intervention,” a natural order. 77 This was complemented by a political theory known as “legal despotism,” influenced by Le Mercier de la Riviere, in which positive law or human law’s only purpose was to criminalize and punish those who did not abide by the natural order. 78 This particular rationality of governance would permeate through Jeremy Bentham’s synthesis of key points from the works of Adam Smith and criminologist Cesare Beccaria. Harcourt here is worth quoting at length: Bentham would ultimately replicate—however unintentionally—the Physiocratic paradox, namely an element of natural orderliness in the economic realm and legal despotism in the penal sphere. Bentham’s alchemy would prove terribly productive and help shape modern American conceptions of the criminal sanction. In this way, Bentham inadvertently provided the link from the nineteenth century to the present, in large part due to his significant influence on modern legal, economic, and political thought. 79

The most important influence of Bentham’s thought emerges as a distinct neoliberal form of penality. More specifically, in a neoliberal penality, the role of punishment is to prevent individuals from bypassing the market because “involuntary, uncompensated forms of social interaction . . . are by their very natures inefficient and reduce social welfare.” 80 Thus, Eric Posner could effectively argue that violence against another person to acquire their possessions was really a form of bypassing the market. As such, both the market and the penal sphere form a binary relationship that is mutually exclusive. The role of government is to intervene outside of the market, coercing persons back into the market. Thus, the language of natural order is reoccupied by the rhetoric of market efficiency while retaining its same internal logic. An important aspect of this rhetoric is that it conceals the fact

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that all markets are regulated and that regulation is intimately involved in creating wealth disparities. Harcourt argues, “At the end of the day, the notion of a ‘free market’ is a fiction. There simply is no such thing as a nonregulated market—a market that operates without legal, social, and professional regulation.” 81 This fiction, plays a pivotal role in justifying the policing of the disorderly and placing them behind the walls of jails and prisons. Harcourt’s account of the broken windows theory and neoliberal penality together unmask the rationality of governance that naturalize persons as “orderly” or “disorderly” and judge their ability to participate in the natural processes of the “free market.” However, after Harcourt effectively disclosed such categories as not being natural, a fiction, it is the invocation of his term “illusion” that still begs for interrogation and is central to our purpose here. Political theorist Wendy Brown draws an important theoretical link between political sovereignty and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical account of religion that prove helpful for understanding how the fictions of neoliberal penality became deeply sedimented and their relevance for understanding the religious situation of mass incarceration. NECROPOLITICS, POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF PRISON WALLS In her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown argues the powers of global capitalism, our religious situation, nurtures basic tensions of “opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and re-inscription” that materialize “through the liberalization of borders while also dedicating vast resources toward fences, walls and the fortification of borders.” 82 In addition, Brown also notes that walls today are not primarily about regulating relations between states. Rather, such walls target transnational movement among persons, groups, organizations, industries and movements. 83 Moreover, contemporary walls are not reiterations of nation-state sovereignty but instead signals its weakening. Equally, they serve as the performance of the aspirations of sovereignty rooted in the popular desire for homogeneity of political membership. 84 She argues, “The popular desire for walls harbors a wish for the powers of protection, containment, and integration promised by sovereignty, a wish that recalls the theological dimensions of political sovereignty.” 85 In particular, she contends that theories of political sovereignty, in all of their varieties, are never without a theological structure. Brown turns to Freud’s psychoanalytical account of religion in order to theorize the theological aspect of “walling” as political sovereignty draws power from the religious forces it attempts to contain. In Future of an Illusion, Freud argues that civilization is precisely that human effort which protects us from the state of nature that “destroys us—

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coldly, cruelly, relentlessly . . . and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction.” 86 However, humanity is consistently reminded of its vulnerability to nature, fate and civilization itself. 87 He also argues that this vulnerability is a repetition of the experience of infancy. Religion, Freud argues, casts God as the parental imago that is both feared and trusted for providential protection. 88 Freud, whose primary interest was in a scientific account of the persistence of such ideas, argues that they are illusions. Illusions for Freud, however, are not errors. Rather, they are wishes, which account for their power and persistence. 89 Brown’s account of the relationship of Freud’s account of religion and the contemporary practice of walling is instructive. She asserts: To the extent that walls optically gratify the wish for intact sovereign power and protection, to the extent that they produce an imago of such power and protection and an effect of sovereign awe, the desire for walling appears as a religiously inflected one. It is a desire that recalls the theological dimension of political sovereignty. So, too, does the notion of sealing ourselves off from a dangerous outside appear animated by a yearning to resolve the vulnerability and helplessness produced by myriad global forces and flows coursing through the nations today. The fantasy that the state can and will provide this resolution thus reconvenes a strong religious version of state sovereignty. The desire for national walling carries this theological wish, and walls themselves may visually gratify it. 90

At this point I want to draw insights from Brown’s theoretical link between popular desire and the theological dimension of political sovereignty to interpret the illusions of “orderly and disorderly people” and “free markets.” As I have argued, the animalization and criminalization of blacks that legitimate their social death is constitutive of the arche, the religious depth and resource of the American political community. It is this depth that is revealed in times of cultural crisis and instantiates a repetition of the original compromise of slavery and the meaning of freedom. 91 Moreover, this reveals that popular sovereignty in American is already racialized. And it is this sovereignty rooted in those images of blacks as animals and criminals that is instrumentalized through a neoliberal penality. Moreover, it is the theological dimension of a racialized popular sovereignty that ascribes immutability to the very qualities that position blacks as outside of the “natural order” of market efficiency and interprets them as preeminent targets of government discipline, regulation and punishment. In the traditional parlance of classical theological discourse, ascribing qualities of an eternal God such as immutability to changeable and finite creatures is an idolatrous act with demonic effects. A central aspect of political sovereignty is both to protect and to punish. The demonic effects of a racialized popular sovereignty are the overpunishment and under-protection of blacks that is rationalized by the mutual-

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ly reinforcing and interlocking illusions of neoliberal penality. It is a rationalized demonism. Prisons have become the “imago of power and protection” generated by the religious depth of American popular sovereignty. At this point I want to interrogate how the hope of this imago shapes our political economy whose material manifestation is our current arrangement of jails and prisons. NOTES 1. “HBO’s The Wire: Racial Inequality and Urban Reality,” April 4, 2008, at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. See http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/video/ hbos-wire-racial-inequality-and-urban-reality-william-julius-wilson. 2. For example, David Simon wrote a five-part series for the Baltimore Sun on Little Melvin Williams, a drug lord in the 1980s who experienced a religious conversion in prison. Williams would go on to play the Deacon in The Wire. See Van Smith, “Redemption Song and Dance: Little Melvin Is Not The Deacon He Played on The Wire,” City Paper Baltimore, March 19, 2008. In addition, Stringer Bell is likely a composite of Baltimore drug dealers Stringer Reed, Roland Bell and Kenneth Jackson. Such claims must be made carefully as a cottage industry has grown up around “the real” figures and stories behind The Wire (some supported by public officials in Baltimore). See Jeffrey Anderson, “Last Word.” 3. For an excellent account of thinking about The Wire and ethnography see Linda Williams, “Ethnographic Imaginary: The Genesis and Genius of The Wire.” 4. Contemporary representations of prisons and prisoners in series such as HBO’s Oz, MSNBC’s Lockup, and Netflix’s series Orange Is the New Black have the virtue of rendering the prison as a “total institution,” which sociologist Erving Goffman popularized as “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.” See “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” in Goffman, Asylums. Scholar and activist Angela Davis argues that popular culture has contributed to the perception of prisons as familiar and inevitable even during the unprecedented rise of mass incarceration. See Angela Yvonne Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 18. Finally, such series participate in a long history of genres that features prison life. For an excellent overview of such popular representations and their relationship to society see, Bill Yousman, Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV, (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009). 5. The Wire: The Complete Series (HBO Studios, 2011), Season 3. Episode “The Pager.” 6. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life World V. 1 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980), 99–115. 7. Although space does not permit a full treatment here, it is important to note that while Alford Young Jr.’s work displays a conceptual debt to Alfred Schutz, he eschews the term “stock of knowledge.” Rather he employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as well as human capital, financial capital, cultural capital, and social capital. I have chosen to retain Schutz’s term “stock of knowledge” for the consistency in using social phenomenology as well as to avoid confusion in how the term human capital is employed in discourses around neoliberalism. 8. Alford A. Young Jr., The Minds of Marginalized Black Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 10. 9. Young also cites the research of sociologist Carla O’Connor whose research focuses on African American high school students’ views about achievement. She finds that most students do not either fully reject of accept dominant societal narratives about mobility but rather create “co-narratives.” Thus, their views contain complexities beyond what may be termed mainstream or counter-narrative. 10. Ibid., 145. 11. Ibid., 149.

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12. Ibid. 13. The Wire: The Complete Series (HBO Studios, 2011), Season 3. Episode “Time After Time.” 14. The Wire: The Complete Series (HBO Studios, 2011), Season 3. Episode “Homecoming.” 15. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall, The Wire Urban Decay and American Television (New York: Continuum, 2009), 141–142. 16. The Wire: The Complete Series (HBO Studios, 2011), Season 3. Episode “Middle Ground” at 3:11. 17. Ibid. (17:02) 18. David Wilson, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 21. 19. Ibid., 23. 20. Ibid., 24. 21. Ibid., 25. 22. Ibid. 23. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 8. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Ibid., 4–5. 29. Ibid., 35. Fredrick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: Macmillan, 1896) was the first text to include nationwide statistical data on black criminality and was a critical in solidifying the role of criminality in race-relations discourse. 30. Ibid., 40. 31. Ibid., 41. 32. Ibid., 52. 33. Ibid. 34. While Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is known for theorizing mercantilism, the text continues to signify contemporary formations of capitalism in popular culture. 35. Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 100. 36. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 466. 37. The Wire: The Complete Series (HBO Studios, 2011), Season 3. Episode “Homecoming.” 38. Scholars such as Michelle Alexander and Bogaziamos acknowledge that the War on Drugs had already been declared prior to the emergence of crack. 39. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). Bogaziamos is not specific regarding the cause of the homicides referenced. However, given the overall tenor of the argument it appears that a significant portion of this number is associated with the market activities of crack cocaine. 40. “Transcript.” 41. It should be noted that early rap artists would eventually feature powder cocaine prominently is songs such as “white lines” and names such as Kurtis Blow. 42. Ibid., 34. 43. Ibid., 35. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Although space does not allow me to address the point here, it should be noted that a recent report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that the reduction in the use of mandatory minimums sentencing has been followed by increasing disparity between sentences for black and white offenders similarly situated. See “Demographic Differences in Sentencing:

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An Update to the 2012 Booker Report,” https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/researchand-publications/research-publications/2017/20171114_Demographics.pdf. 47. Ibid., 45. 48. Ibid., 46. 49. Shakur, Monster. 50. Ibid. This change is also represented in The Wire. Although focused on heroin, the hierarchy around the Barksdale Organization is primarily centered around the dynamics of family structure and obligation. The upstart Stansfield Organization however is organized around power and financial interest lacking an additional layer of meaning structured by blood relations. The result is a visual representation of the difference between entrepreneurial and cultural violence. 51. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979 (New York: Picador, 2004). 52. Kelling and Wilson, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic, March 1982. For additional critical perspectives on broken windows policing see Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (New York: Verso, 2016) 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Loï c J. D. Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 15. 56. Themis Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 145. 57. Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty, 17. 58. Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 136–142. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 140. 61. Ibid., 141. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 148. 64. Jack Maple and Chris Mitchell, The Crime Fighter: Putting Bad Guys Out of Business (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 154. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 154. Also see Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 263–269. 67. Illusion of Order, 5. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 176. 70. Ibid., 29 71. Ibid., 32. 72. John Stuart Mill, ed. Stefan Collini, “On Liberty” and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8. 73. Ibid., 13. 74. Illusion of Order, 208. 75. Ibid., 207 76. Ibid., 240. 77. Ibid., 50–51. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 104. 80. Ibid., 147. 81. Ibid., 242. 82. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010), 7–8. 83. Ibid., 21. 84. Ibid., 26. 85. Ibid.

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86. Freud and Gay, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1927), 19. 87. Ibid., 22–23. 88. Ibid., 30. 89. Ibid., 39–40. 90. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 132–133. 91. As an example, Long argues that during the social upheavals associated with the Civil Rights Movement the American system was revealed as a “gross irrationality or a rationalized demonism,” see Long, Significations, 165.

Chapter Five

The Eschatological Production of Mass Incarceration

As, previously stated, within many Christian traditions Hell is the use of place and time as an instrument of punishment. From the standpoint of phenomenological description, mass incarceration is, quite literally, Hell on earth. More importantly, I argue that necropolitics produces an eschatological hope by sacrificing the flourishing of predominantly marginalized black and Latinx communities. I intend to evidence this claim by integrating theoretical currents in spatial theory into my account of necropolitics. Eschatology often indicates thinking about “last things” or “endings.” However, in Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present, Vitor Westhelle rightly argues that spatiality was initially very much part of eschatological thought denoting limits, borders, passages, and openings. 1 This is evidenced in the New Testament phrase “the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8, 13:47) or “to the end of the world” (Rom. 10:18). These spatial aspects of eschatology began to erode with Augustine’s distinction between the temporal earthly and eternal city and culminate in circumnavigating the globe by the Portuguese in 1524. The effect Westhelle argues is that spatial or latitudinal concerns were displaced by a longitudinal focus on time and history with sharp emphasis on a future telos. 2 What I find compelling in Westhelle’s recovery of space as the “lost dimension” in eschatology is its relationship to the historical occurrence of liberation theology and postcolonial discourses. Westhelle honors that the diversity of thought often gets lumped under the category of liberation theology while drawing attention to how the margins of society question dominant modes of thinking. In particular, they challenge teleological visions where the lives of all persons are moving progressively forward and improving. He argues that liberation theologies and 115

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postcolonial perspectives draw our attention “not only the differences among people and their discourses but also to the preponderant inequalities. And this inequality runs deep into what the eschatological discourse is really about: life and death, beginnings and endings, even though life is a compromise that we settle between the two.” 3 To move beyond the era of mass incarceration requires an unveiling of this eschatological hope that creates spaces of social death and inaugurates a new era by resisting cultural stereotypes and political economies that create conditions of desperation. This requires understanding the relationship of margin to center as it relates to the religious depth of the American political community. This theoretical account returns to where I began, with the arche of American Political Community that is touched in times of crisis. However, here I want to engage Charles Long’s Significations on the relationship of the arche to the spatial ordering of public life. Long acknowledges a key aspect of Mircea Eliade’s work that is often overlooked: the idea of the center. The center is that which is religiously real, the site of revelation that organizes the various aspects of our common life through participation in the sacred. 4 The center is the source of human value. What is important for my argument here, is that Long claims this is evidenced by empirical studies of the rise of citied traditions. In particular, he highlights the historical transformation of ceremonial centers into cities. While the former does not always become the latter, ancient cities were nearly always first ceremonial cities. A central feature of citied traditions is that the ceremonial site becomes the center through which power is both drawn and distributed. The city as center is copresent with the rise of the critique of myth by classical Western philosophy as well as the correlation between the ordering of space and epistemology through hierarchy. 5 A key concern in Long’s argument is the hermeneutical aspects of Western rationality and of “others” as data to be interpreted. In particular he argues that the problem of epistemology is one of distance and relationships, time and space, center and periphery. As such I argue that mass incarceration in the U.S. is the material and spatial ordering produced by a political community whose arche, its generative power in times of crisis includes the animalization and criminalization of blacks. In effect, mass incarceration renders visible the eschatological dimensions of necropolitics as a rationality of governance. 6 Thus mass incarceration represents a perverse racialized eschatological hope by a necropolitics that mediates uneven development, 7 spatial regulation and dispossession. This is a critical step in accounting for the actual material existence of jails, prisons and those who suffer within them.

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INTERPRETING SPACE A key insight of spatial theory is that space is not something that is neutral or that simply contains culture. Rather, the production of space is itself a social process inseparable from its meaning. Scholars working at the intersection of black studies and geography understand space as a means of investigating the reciprocal relationship of physical materiality, imaginative configurations and black populations. Our focus thus far has emphasized the way that representations of social death constitute a rationality of governance. It is important to realize that such representations also constitute the meaning of jails and prisons. However, black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick in referring to slave ships argues, “The physicality of the slave ship, then, contributes to the process of social concealment and dehumanization but importantly, black subjectivity is not swallowed up by the ship itself.” 8 Likewise, in examining the lives of Stanley Tookie Williams and Mumia AbuJamal, I argue that jails and prison are sites of concealment and revelation, repression and resistance, punishment and redemption. 9 More importantly, mass incarceration in America is also a product of the transformation of the master-slave dialectic to the white citizen–black criminal dialectic. And the simultaneity of this dialectic within our religious situation affirms the insight of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space that space is the site of social struggle. As such, the eschatological dimension of necropolitics is also a site of struggle. As such, spatial theory helps to articulate the reciprocal relationship between racialized spaces of incarceration and society 10 mediated by the logic of containment, regulation, surveillance and necropolitics. The question of spatiality is important in another respect. I contend that mass incarceration should be understood as a symptom of America’s unjust social arrangements, rather than an isolated social problem. As such, there are three theoretical currents that warrant brief engagement in understanding U.S. mass incarceration. The first is the recent mainstream engagement with abolitionist discourses 11 through a groundswell of social movements addressing mass incarceration and police violence 12 as well as the heinous policy of family separation by the Trump administration. 13 It is critical that as abolitionist framings flourish we do not lose the key insight that abolition is not only concerned about what we should eliminate, but more importantly what we should build. I find the definition of Abolition from Critical Resistance as a “political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment” 14 to be deeply persuasive. This entails both challenging our society’s current consensus on our reliance on mass incarceration to address social problems as well practical actions that citizens can take toward transforming society. Julia Sudbury outlines those actions as working toward moratoriums, decarceration and abolition. 15 Pursuing moratoriums seeks to

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reduce public support of prison expansion by raising awareness of costs as well as policies that increase the prison population. Decarceration is the specific targeting of a population such as survivors of domestic violence or those charged with non-violent drug offenses. The third, abolition, is the task of constructing a society where people have access to the material and social goods necessary to flourish in their communities. Such a vision also calls for citizens to confront the patterns of spatial organization that perpetuate mass incarceration. The importance of an abolitionist perspective is that it challenges the eschatological aspects of governance that sustain mass incarceration. There are two issues worth considering. I am sympathetic to concerns raised by Amy Levad that the rhetoric of prison abolition may hamper building the widest possible coalitions for dismantling mass incarceration. 16 This is an important point. There are those who want to eliminate all jails and prisons under any circumstance and those who want to eliminate most of them. 17 Embedded in many accounts of prison abolition however is the idea of “nonreformist reforms” which are changes that actually decrease our reliance upon mass incarceration to address social problems produced by social injustice. This is a critical point can serve as a bridge across a broad range of ideological lines. Moreover, it provides a critical norm for strategies employed by all persons, activists, organizers and coalitions attempting to end mass incarceration. 18 Although space does not allow for an adequate treatment here, it is important to think about the relationship between the reasons why we want to end mass incarceration and the rhetorical frames that alter public perception and relationships of power. 19 Together, nonreformist reforms, moratoriums on prison expansion, decarceration and the restoring of the common good are key practices compatible with what I call eschatological practices that challenge the representational, ideological and material investments in mass incarceration. The second current is that of afro-pessimism. Although a diverse group scholars are often gathered under this sign, for this particular point, Frank Wilderson III serves as a good conversation partner. In Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Wilderson articulates a paradigmatic analysis of the political ontology that occasions black suffering that is not reducible to Marxist accounts of the exploitation of labor power. In an effort avoid the “downward spiral into sociology” that would lead to unsubstantiated claims of racial progress and turn our eyes away from this ontological question, he engages the work of Orlando Patterson. In a passage worth quoting he states: Orlando Patterson has already distilled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of

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“work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues not slave is in the world. 20

Wilderson’s interpretation fails to address that Patterson is not denying facts or historical records. Specifically, he is profoundly dependent on them to investigate slavery as a social fact. In addition, Patterson’s engagement with Marx on this point is not to remove the “plank of work,” but to comparatively identify the relationship of domination that can be constituted through direct and indirect forced labor. More importantly, it is precisely the slave’s status in the social world that is at stake. Patterson’s key claim is that free men must be made into slaves through the repetition of the original form of violence. It is precisely the lack of engagement with Patterson’s account of slavery as an institutional and dialectical process that leads Wilderson equivocate social status with social ontology. This culminates in his curious challenge to anyone to find a “distinction between Slaveness and Blackness.” 21 This challenge and assertion is representative of the central problem with afro-pessimism as it relates to the religious situation of mass incarceration: in severing social death from an institutional and dialectical process we fail to distinguish what mass incarceration resembles from what is. The contingent and perennial aspects of historical struggles and social formations are equivocated and our historical understanding of mass incarceration distorted. More specifically, this distorts key aspects of spatial analysis such as the history of space, 22 representations of space as lived and representations of space 23 in rationalities of governance. This does not require an adoption of a narrative of inevitable progress that denies the persistence of racism. Rather, it is critical to have the best handle on the nature of this social formation of power in order to engage forms of redress. 24 The third theoretical trend this account is designed to avoid is the obscuring of social complexities through concepts such as “empire” and “globalization.” It is not that these terms have no value or are unimportant. I have argued that U.S. mass incarceration is the product of an intersection of antiblack racism and global capitalism as our religious situation, the arche of American Political Economy. Some accounts of empire appear to render the complexities of deeply sedimented cultural meanings as well as the structures of governance that secure markets to be epiphenomenal. 25 To reiterate, as a religious symbol, “American Political Economy” represents the dynamics of global capitalism we can intuit within the society in which we live. The question of scale, however, acknowledges the complexities of these dynamics at different levels of social processes. As geographer David Harvey states,

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“Human beings have typically produced a nested hierarchy of spatial scales within which to organize their activities and understand their world. Households, communities, and nations are obvious examples of contemporary organizational forms that exist at different scales.” 26 The question of scales is critical for addressing the particular conundrum in thinking about mass incarceration: the ability for various cities with different political cultures to have similar outcomes for black and brown people while crime is traditionally understood as a local issue. Thus, representations of social death as a rationality of governance interacts with uneven geographical development to dispossess blacks from our common social world creating Hell on earth. RACE, SPACE AND ESCHATOLOGY In The Racial Contract Charles W. Mills argues forcefully that the racial contract, which has been the actual social contract throughout American history, is dependent on the racialization of space. Moreover, the racialization of space has as its correlate the state of nature and civilization. Thus, for spaces that are understood as white, the state of nature is a metaphorical space that the civilized might fall into. However, for spaces understood as non-white, those spaces are understood to actually be the state of nature, inhabited by those whose very nature are understood to be unable to participate in the political community. More importantly, Mills argues that this racial contract produces a normative judgment through a vicious circularity: people considered “subpersons” are such because of the space they originate from and such spaces are that way because of who inhabits them. 27 This is consistent with our previous engagement with David Wilson’s Inventing Black-on-Black Violence where representations of social death provided explanations for the decline of American cities in capital accumulation and moral values. These representations simultaneously inform how people imagine other geographic spaces and the people who inhabit them, without actual interaction. Such representations are then able to justify disinvestment from communities as undeserving while investing in punitive policies that protect them from such elements. 28 Eschatology is a way of framing how the human flourishing of certain geographies and populations are sacrificed to protect the “City on the Hill.” This task implicitly calls for an account of the relationship between space, eschatology and justice. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward Soja develops a spatial theory of justice. Key aspects of this account are the intertwined claims that we are spatial as well as social beings from birth embedded in geographies. This serves as a corrective to social ontologies that only focus on the social/societal and temporal/historical as determinants of human existence. I want to emphasize two key claims by Soja to examine the formation of space in religious depth of

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the necropolitics of mass incarceration. The first is that social forces such as a racialized political economy actually shape geographical landscapes and the built environment. In turn, the products of these processes also shape the forces of capital. The second point is that this process produces uneven development that occasion inequalities. And while existence itself produces inequalities, Sojo is concerned about consequential inequalities that “have deeply oppressive and exploitative effects, especially when maintained over long time periods and rooted in persistent divisions in society such as those based on race, class, and gender.” 29 Soja refers to spatial injustice as a product of social relations, as a socio-spatial temporal dialectic. Previously, I have argued that in America, the master-slave dialectic was transformed into a white citizen–black criminal dialectic. When spatial analysis is integrated into necropolitics, the material appearance of jails and prisons is a not a “social problem,” rather it is a product of our social arrangements. This leaves the task of evidencing this relationship within an invisible ontology, 30 the representations of social death and the forces of political economy is this socio-spatial production of mass incarceration. There are three important and related claims for our account of the persistence of mass incarceration as the spatial production of the white citizen–black criminal dialectic. The first is David Harvey’s revisiting of the Marxist analysis that the internal contradictions 31 of capitalism create social unrest at home eventually leading to colonial and imperial ambitions abroad. These actions abroad help to ease social tensions domestically, while simultaneously avoiding any rigorous programs for redistribution of wealth. The second is that this movement abroad is related to what Harvey calls the “spatial fix.” 32 The spatial fix recognizes that the built environment does not simply immediately adapt to changes in society. As such, the “creative destruction” 33 of capitalism is played out in the built environment itself. The spatial fix is the use of geographic expansion and spatial reorganization to address the internal contradictions of capitalism as evidenced by the accumulation of capital within a particular geographic area. Such surplus capital can be invested in long-term capital projects, social expenditures, as well as the opening up of new markets elsewhere. A key aspect of this analysis is the mediating role of financial and state institutions to generate credit that allows investments to flow in the built environment. Third, he notes that often Marx’s account of primitive or original capital accumulation 34 is rendered a historical fact and the ongoing aspects of violent and coercive means of capital accumulation is often left out of contemporary accounts of political economy. Harvey calls the contemporary iteration of this accumulation by dispossession. 35 Accumulation by dispossession addresses the problem of surplus capital that lies idle with no form of investment. Dispossession releases a set of assets, including labor power, at low or zero cost, available for capital

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investment to turn a profit. Harvey includes familiar examples of privatization of formerly public goods, the commoditizing of land from forceful expulsion of populations and more recent trends in the pirating of genetic material for pharmaceutical companies. Curiously absent from this list as an example is our current practice of mass incarceration. In Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California Ruth Wilson Gilmore augments this analysis with the idea of the “prison fix.” Gilmore’s work investigates the reason for the growth of the prison population by nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000 despite the crime rate peaking in 1980. 36 This includes construction of 23 new prisons at a cost of $280 to $350 million dollars apiece. 37 Previously the state had built only 12 prisons between 1852 and 1964. 38 Central to this development was the simultaneity of two forms of surplus. The first is what Gilmore calls the end of the golden era of U.S. capitalism. This is includes profits that allowed for a massive military buildup for World War II as well as the transformation of the Pentagon from the organizational structures implemented by the New Deal. In addition, the increase in military spending occasioned a lot of economic development in the southwest and Gilmore even dubs this a form of “military Keynesianism.” However as Gilmore rightly notes, economic inequality is a political problem and “African Americans who had migrated from the South and East to fight their way into wartime industries and their California-born children were poorer in real terms in 1969 than they had been in 1945, because after the hot war was over, most were pushed out of war material jobs whose pay levels could not be duplicated in other sectors.” 39 The result is that extreme poverty was concentrated in Alameda County, Los Angeles and other regions where black people had settled. These profound changes in California’s political economy produced new capital movement creating a surplus of finance capital, land, labor and state capacity. These surpluses were not all absorbed politically, economically, socially, or regionally. Wilson argues that the use of prisons was a deliberate political choice to absorb these surpluses. State resources and capacities are put in motion, making use of idle land and public debt resulting in the removal of 160,000 low-wage workers off of the street. 40 This surplus population created, experiencing a doubling in poverty and racial confrontations, found themselves outside of restructured labor markets and literally stranded in urban and rural communities. In bringing Harvey and Gilmore’s analysis into this account, I want to argue that necropolitics results in accumulation through dispossession of the common good and membership in the political community. Harvey’s analysis of the internal contradictions of capitalism within society does not take into account the potential creation of an “internal colony.” 41 In the case of California the contradictions of capitalism created a surplus population, what criminologist Steve Spitzer refers to as “social junk.” In the

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“prison fix,” prisons serve two roles simultaneously, to regulate and contain this population through punishment creating a “prison industrial complex” that absorbs capital investment. Through necropolitics this surplus population is simultaneously dispossessed of the representation necessary for political participation as well as the common goods necessary for human flourishing. This is also evidenced by an important distinction between mass incarceration and slavery. During slavery the slave was the object of capital investment, whereas under the regime of mass incarceration, jails and prisons rather than inmates are the object of capital investment (a point I will return to later in this chapter). 42 The necropolitics in the religious depth of the “American Political Economy” creates a social ontology that realizes itself in the visible social and spatial formations known as mass incarceration in America. As previously mentioned, I want to move beyond a smooth historical narrative of peculiar institutions, as persuasive as Loïc Wacquant’s account is. Wacquant has argued for a series of institutions of social control moving from slavery, to Jim Crow, to the urban ghetto and now mass incarceration. 43 The last two are deeply intertwined as he argues that mass incarceration disproportionately targets the black poor. As such, prisons are used primarily to target those blacks that are dispossessed and dishonored. In addition, he argues that each historical instantiation of institutional social control is accompanied by its own stereotypes and images of dishonor. Although, I agree with Wacquant’s descriptive claims, it still does not account for the salience of these images nor the cultural logic of their permutation. Wacquant’s analysis has the virtue of bringing together a wealth of empirical research within an analytical frame that explicitly bridges the material and symbolic aspects of mass incarceration. At this point, I want to articulate more specifically the relationship between dispossession and social death. Talk of the common good or the commons in particular is a challenge for anyone, least of all for religious scholars. Gone are any univocal understandings and agreements of a “good” that constitutes a common aim of all diverse cultures. Critical theorist Nancy Fraser cautions that speech about the common good can serve as a dangerous form of mystification concealing relationships of exploitation and domination. 44 A number of scholars have noted the pressures from social movements to disrupt the erasure of difference under the well-meaning banners of “community,” “universality” and “unity.” 45 Simultaneously they have noted the neoliberal assault to render the common corporate while difference has become commoditized as a homogeneous individualism. 46 In addition, many have theorized political engagement through religious ways of being that emphasizing the multiplicity and multivocality of the commons that is planetary in scope. 47 As I have argued, the radical rise in the use of incarceration to manage populations is a global phenomenon. However the particular histories of various political commu-

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nities profoundly influence which populations fall into its clutches. Thus, understanding and resisting mass incarceration in the U.S. requires an investigation of the co-presence of the global and national political community. However, our analysis of the necropolitics as the arche of American Political Economy evidences two important points. The first is that the arche and its invisible ontology can be seen as operating across “scales of justice” from the federal to the state and local forms of governance. Likewise, I find aspects of David Hollenbach’s account of the common good to be persuasive in providing a normative criteria to address mass incarceration as symptom of our socio-spatial production that reveals an eschatological hope sustained by necropolitics. The Common Good and Christian Ethics by David Hollenbach is a sustained effort to renew the idea of the common good as part of a public philosophy. Hollenbach presses the point that the social problems facing American public life such as economic deprivation, unemployment, homelessness, drug violence, and I would add mass incarceration, cannot be addressed by concepts such as tolerance. 48 Moreover, his account acknowledges that urban poverty arises from sustained disinvestment and that “periodic irruptions of civil unrest remind citizens of how much remains to be done if they are to address the continuing plight of the urban poor. But shortlived attention to urban problems stimulated by this unrest suggests that the nation is unprepared to make efforts to address these problems that are commensurate with their seriousness.” 49 At the heart of Hollenbach’s vision is the recognition of democracy as a social good that we must pursue together while embracing the fact of genuine pluralism. There are four key points worth articulating. The first is that social reality is embodied in social relationships constituted by mutual respect. Thus, a common good is a good that members both create and benefit from together. The second is that any account of freedom and self-determination cannot be predicated on understanding ourselves through an isolated self-sufficiency. Rather, self-determination presupposes social institutions and practices of democracy that give one an experience of being a moral agent in society. 50 The good of autonomy and the good of society are interdependent. Third, social relationships are good within themselves with public life serving as the realization of this intrinsic aspect of who we are. Finally, society is related through forms of mutual interdependence. As such, he rightly argues that urban and suburban communities are not independent variables, but are in a relationship marked by unequal interdependence based in non-reciprocity and inequality that affects both geographic regions. Hollenbach is careful to note that this relationship is not immediate as between two persons, one being a thief and the other a victim. Rather the relationship is mediated through political, economic and cultural institutions that affect issues such as “land use, zoning, housing and the funding of

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education opportunities.” 51 In addition, he acknowledges that these decisions affect the movement of capital and thus jobs erecting a “high wall separating inner cities from middle class suburbs.” 52 Hollenbach’s retrieval of the religious and philosophical legacy of the common good and its application to questions of social ills contains an important spatial dimension. More specifically, it avoids the perennial problem of seeing the “urban question” as isolated from larger forms of spatial and social organization. More importantly, his account is compatible with the insight of geographer Neil Smith who challenged the conventional wisdom that gentrification was driven by “consumer sovereignty.” Rather, Smith demonstrates that gentrification is largely a product of unhampered land and housing markets. 53 Moreover, this retrieval of the common good leads to a normative account of solidarity rooted in two related aspects of justice, contributive and distributive. The common good of adequate housing, accessible jobs, quality education, child care and health care goods that citizens require to live in dignity. Contributive justice calls on all citizens to build up these aspects of social life appropriate to their capacity while distributive justice concerns the allocations of goods for the well-being of its members. 54 When citizens fail in their contribution is a failure of solidarity as institutional arrangements that prevent some people from sharing in social goods is a failure of distributive justice. This rendering of the common good challenges American beliefs about the right to live in communities of similar households and excluding those who diminish their quality of life (terms used in broken windows theory) are complicit in sanctioning racial discrimination. While this account of the common good excels at challenging widespread beliefs that maintain unequal interdependence, accounting for the rise of mass incarceration and possibilities of resistance and restoration requires integrating an analysis of necropolitics and its generative power in times of crisis. 55 The unequal interdependence of inner-cities and suburban cities that Hollenbach describes is a product of the social–spatial dialectic that produces uneven development—and the predictable social miseries that accompany it—is a white citizen–black criminal dialectic legitimating containment, regulation and over-punishment. Up to this point I have argued that such images of social death are used to represent persons and populations that provide a rationality of governance. This also includes representations of geographic space, how we imagine people we do not interact with on a regular basis is critical. As I have evidenced previously, representations of blacks in general and black youth in particular, as animals and criminals served as explanations for the decline of the city and legitimated investment in the suburbs with assumptions of moral worthiness. However, a key aspect of necropolitics is the importance of how representations of neighborhoods as such are often portrayed.

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In Police Power and the Production of Racial Boundaries Ana Muniz documents the process by which the neighborhood of “Cadillac-Corning” became “LaCienega Heights.” More than just a name change, the shift in terminology indicates a long struggle and process by which a neighborhood became predominantly African American and Latino surrounded by affluent whites and Jewish residents. 56 Muniz’s research documents the relationship between zoning, housing development and school segregation to gang injunctions, broken windows and community policing. More specifically, she notes that repressive policing policies require a target area understood as “exceptional and threatening” in order to be justified. 57 More importantly, the area targeted by police was according to their own data “one of the safest places in LA during and before the time of the gang injunction.” 58 Gang injunctions have deep resonances with broken windows policing analyzed in the previous chapter and effectively operate as another plank in the logic of necropolitics. As many other scholars, organizers and activists have stated, Muniz is not arguing that social problems within communities are not real. Rather our response to social problems exacerbates them considerably. Gang injunctions are civil lawsuits against neighborhoods based on the distinction between gang and nongang residents. Police have the discretion to determine who is labeled as a gang member and which otherwise legal behaviors they are prohibited from engaging in such as congregating in groups of two or more or standing in public for more than five minutes. Engagement in any of these behaviors could result in arrest. 59 Three effects of gang injunctions are important for the argument presented here. The first is that gang injunctions expanded to prohibit a wide range of noncriminal acts giving police broad discretion to detain and arrest people based on appearance and assumptions about acts they might commit rather than acts they have committed. 60 In addition, gang injunctions effectively created a dual criminal justice system in which marginalized urban communities of color are criminalized or not due to neighborhoods that are stigmatized. Moreover, gang injunctions evolved not only to keep people indoors but also to displace them from neighborhoods. Gang injunctions complemented the process of gentrification. A police officer in Los Angeles County remarked that a gang injunction was successful since “We’ve got Bed, Bath and Beyond now! We’ve got Starbucks now! We’ve got In-N-Out Burger . . . here!” 61 These comments reveals the aim of gang injunctions as a tactic of governance is merely public safety for current residents who suffer from social miseries rooted in inequalities. In addition, gang injunctions are simultaneously rationalized by the criminalization of blacks and Latinos that justifies the targeting of a geographic space in order to facilitate capital investment. The importance of Muniz’s research and the comments of the police officer is that they reveal the dialectical relationship of racialized spaces of

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incarceration and gentrification. Gang injunctions are tools used to simultaneously frame geographic spaces as threats to the well-being and boundaries predominantly of white middle-class residents while simultaneously facilitating the investment of capital to renew the built environment through the “development of entertainment centers, business districts and gentrified housing.” 62 As such, the very social problems often created by political economy are not addressed. Rather, they are pushed to another geographic location, often jails or prisons. This is social-spatial dialectic within necropolitics that occasions jails and prisons that both disappears surplus labor and “problem populations” but also sacrifices the well-being of a large segment of the political community for another. The “prison fix” renders populations both disposable and indispensable. Thus, returning to Hollenbach, I want to argue that in the U.S. necropolitics mediates between the spaces of jails and prisons and urban and suburban spaces dispossessing people of the common good. 63 The eschatological significance of this cannot be underestimated as necropolitics creates spaces with different life outcomes, expectancies and hopes. Another important example of the role of the prison in mediating this social spatial dialectic can be witnessed in the State of Illinois. In The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison and Punishment in a Divided City Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper draw the portrait of the threads between our cultural perceptions of the neighborhoods, political economy and punishment. In a poignant example, Bethel New Life Community Development Corporation (CDC) engaged in a range of activities such as affordable housing and job training for those formerly incarcerated. Many of their services were funded by grants from state government. During the economic recession of 2008 the finances of the state were also in dire straits falling behind on $9 billion worth of bills. The lack of revenue from the state forced nonprofits to consider closing their doors. Bethel New Life however decided to organize. Traveling to the capital in Springfield, residents of the West Side neighborhood sent a clear message, “Pay your bills! You owe the West Side of Chicago! Pay your bills!” 64 On the very same day, however, there was another much larger protest happening. The governor of Illinois planned to close Pontiac Correctional Center as a cost-cutting measure. Despite the falling crime and incarceration rates, the removal of residents from Austin through incarceration was an economic engine for corrections-related jobs in Pontiac. The protest to save the correctional facility carried the day. The correctional center is still open while Bethel New Life was forced to severely curtail their services toward families, those returning from prison and affordable housing. Austin as a high incarceration neighborhood is effectively “locked in a zero-sum competition with prison towns for scarce and ever-decreasing levels of state investment.” 65 In addition, a critical point within their broader account concerns the emergence of “million dollar blocks” where over $1 million in state money is spent in a

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residential block to incarcerate residents. This is a direct result of prisons being the fasted growing of all public investments in Illinois since the 1970s. 66 On average the state invested $100 million into Austin for incarceration and $6 million from the Illinois Department of Human Services. 67 Moreover, from 2005 to 2009 $1 million was invested in 851 census blocks with 121 of those blocks exceeding a million dollars from non-violent offenses alone. 68 Returning to Hollenbach’s account, it is not only that poverty and social miseries along geographic lines born of unequal interdependence occasions the incarceration of black and brown citizens, but that rural communities in particular are dependent on the prison economy itself to secure its future. 69 Necropolitics mediates an eschatological contradiction in American Political Economy as most socially and economically marginalized communities are judged as “surplus” and “disposable” to clear the way for new investment while simultaneously being judged as indispensable as their incarceration provides economic development for rural areas. Ironically, the evidence is thin that these left behind rural areas are better off having entered into this politics of death. NOTES 1. Vitor Westhelle, Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 56. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 76. 4. Charles H. Long, Significations (Davies Group, 1999), 79. 5. Ibid., 80. 6. Mitchell Dean in Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2009) argues that what makes governance an art rather than only the exercise of authority rendering the activity “irreducible utopian.“ In addition, he argues that isolating this utopian aspect or telos is critical in making regimes of government intelligible. I am in general agreement with Mitchell although here I invoke eschatology to render the spatial and hermeneutical aspects of telos of necropolitics visible. 7. The term “uneven development” has a long genealogy in urban studies and studies of political economy. Here, I use the term to refer to inequalities across geographic spaces and scales produced by our political economy. For representative theories of uneven development see Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); David Harvey, Space of Global Capitalism: Toward a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006). 8. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii. Also see, Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press 2015), Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Adrian Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (Lutsen: Between the Lines, 2007). 9. I am not implying that incarceration is redeeming, rather I am stating that an individual experience of redemption can sometimes be discerned within such spaces. 10. See Dominique Moran, Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration (Routledge, 2016) and Jennifer Turner, The Prison Boundary: Between Society and Carceral Space (Springer, 2016).

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11. Here I am referencing the engagement with the abolition democracy of W. E. B. DuBois by George Lipsitz, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba and Critical Resistance. 12. See “What Abolitionists Do,” by Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein in http:// jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration and “Mariame Kaba Is Our Very Own Modern Day Abolitionist,” by Mekeisha Hadden Toby Essence, https://www. essence.com/holidays/black-history-month/mariame-kaba-warrior-wednesday/. 13. Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna, “‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE,’” POLITICO Magazine, accessed September 26, 2018. 14. “Unpacking the Crisis: Women of Color, Globalization, and the Prison Industrial Complex” by Julia Sudbury in Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), Rickie Solinger et al., 21. 15. Ibid., 21–22. 16. “Redeeming a Prison Society,” Syndicate (blog), https://syndicate.network/symposia/ theology/redeeming-a-prison-society/. 17. In her response to Brandy Daniels, Levad reiterates the point made by Aristotle and Aquinas that there are those who “rape, abuse, and murder others for the sake of raping, abusing, and murdering” or such acts as such always satisfy a good. I’m in agreement with Levad that not every act committed by a person is reducible to adverse social conditions. However, it is still the case that the social conditions profoundly exacerbate such issues. I would argue for the increased use of restorative justice where appropriate (e.g., the potential for psychological manipulation in some domestic violence cases pose particular challenges), I want to focus my argument here on key aspects of what occasions our use of jails and prisons to solve social problems. 18. In Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice and the Abolition of Prisons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd argue persuasively those wanting to end mass incarceration and other systemic forms of violence are already in alignment with abolitionist struggles, 58. 19. This point is explored in depth in Deva R. Woodly's, The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 20. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 11. 21. Ibid. 22. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1st edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 46. 23. Ibid., 38–39. 24. Wilderson invokes Loic Wacquant’s work to argue that a carceral continuum is a constant condition of black life regardless of the historical formations such as the “slave ship, Middle Passage, Slave estate, Jim Crow, the ghetto and prison-industrial complex.” The problem with this interpretation is that it acknowledges Wacquant’s account of a genealogy of America’s “peculiar institutions,” but is simultaneously highly critical of those who describe mass incarceration as slavery. 25. Here I resonate with similar critiques by Seyla Benhabib et al., Another Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press US, 2006), 16–17 and Alexander J. Motyl, “Is Everything Empire? Is Empire Everything?,” ed. Niall Ferguson, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, Comparative Politics 38, no. 2 (2006): 229–249. 26. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 74. 27. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 41–42. 28. For an additional account of the role of racialization, space and its role in the production of racial exclusion and public policy see George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialiation of Race: Theorizign the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal. Also, see George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 29. Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 73. Also see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso Books, 2010), 76–93.

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30. Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, 2012. Here I have invoked the term “invisible ontology” to signal the structure of beliefs that constitute rationality that sustains the social practices of racism. 31. For the clearest account of Harvey’s meaning of the term “internal contradiction” see “Introduction: On Contradiction” in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. My usage here draws on Harvey’s understanding of contradiction as the presence of opposing forces in a particular situation, process or event. For Harvey opposing forces within capitalism such as use value and exchange value are the perennial generators of social crisis. My account differs from Harvey in one important respect. Harvey sees racism, sexism and other social antagonisms as interacting with and affected by capital accumulation but ultimately transcends them. Thus, I interpret Harvey as theorizing a revised economic determinism where cultural dynamics are not a mere superstructure or epiphenomenal but their presence is still dependent upon the workings of capital. As previously argued, my account here attempts more of a synthetic analysis of the co-presence of neoliberalism and anti-black racism in the U.S. For another account of the simultaneity of anti-blackness, neoliberalism and social crisis as it relates to criminal justice see Michael Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order.” 32. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 87. Also see David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2001), 284–311. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 24–31. 33. The term “creative destruction” owes its popularity to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s interpretation and critique of Karl Marx. Schumpeter argued that internal logic of global capitalism is an ongoing process of creative destruction. Schumpeter’s theory broke with the economic orthodoxy that focused on perfect competition within the market, and argued that relentless competition for markets through innovations revolutionizes from within, simultaneously creating and destroying economic structures. See Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter. 34. This refers to what might be called the “classical” account of how capitalist social relations emerge into those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labor to survive. For a good summary of the various concepts associate with “primitive accumulation” and “accumulation by dispossession” see Derek Hall’s “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global Land Grab.” 35. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 145–183. 36. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 7. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 274. 40. Ibid., 88. 41. Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (New York: Penguin, 2009), 270. In his memoir Newton argues that the state refers to the facility where he was housed as a “Men’s Colony.” However Newton uses the term California Penal Colony to describe a “penal institution and a colonized situation.” Newton’s description is prescient and prefigures the theoretical engagement given here. Moreover, the literature on African Americans as an internal colony is quite rich and vast. In light of the emergence of settler colonial theory there has been a revival of this scholarly debate. For two recent takes see Charles Pinderhughes, “Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism,” Socialism and Democracy 25, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 235–256 and Cedric Jonson, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” accessed October 18, 2018, https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no1/panthers-cant-saveus-cedric-johnson. For a good overview of the debate from the 1950s to the early 1990s, see Ramon A. Gutierrez, “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1, no. 2 (September 2004): 281–295. 42. I appreciate Michael R. Fischer for pushing me to considering this point further as he argues that the plantation is a more appropriate comparison to the prison. However, “prison fix”

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calls attention to a different relationship of a slave to a plantation and an inmate to a jail or prison that are often equated. There is a substantial debate regarding slavery and its relationship to our understanding of the history of capitalism in general and Marxist theory in particular. See this forum “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism and Justice,” at Boston Review. Here, I want to emphasize not only that slaves were property but also their role in the means of production and the distinction between slave and free labor. 43. Loïc Wacquant, “New Left Review,” From Slavery to Mass Incarceration 13 (January/ February) and Loïc Waquant, “The ‘New’ Peculiar Institution: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” Theoretical Criminology 4, no. 3 (2000): 377–389. 44. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, nos. 25/26 (1990): 72–73. 45. See the introduction in Catherine Keller and Elias Ortega-Aponte, Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology, ed. Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, 1st edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. David Hollenbach, Common Good and Christian Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32. 49. Ibid., 34. 50. Ibid., 72. 51. Ibid., 174–175. 52. Ibid. 53. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People: Journal of the American Planning Association: Vol. 45, No. 4.” 54. Ibid., 196. 55. Mark Lewis Taylor has forcefully argued for thinking about the U.S. public as a necropolitics constituted by an assemblage of racialized regimes of social control including mass incarceration, migration regime, land confiscation regime and imperial regime. I am in deep agreement with Taylor, however here I am attempting to integrate a spatial analysis while simultaneously providing a normative criteria that communities and citizens might use as a mean of recognition and action in responding to mass incarceration in the U.S. context. See Taylor’s “Beyond Only Difference: Necropolitics, Racialized Regimes, and U.S. Public Theology,” in Harold J. Recinos, Wading through Many Voices toward a Theology of Public Conversation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 235–250. 56. Ana Muñiz, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 15. 57. Ibid., 31. 58. Ibid., 40. 59. Ibid., 7. 60. Ibid., 54. 61. Ibid., 80. 62. Ibid., 82. 63. Here I have not addressed the complexities of the black middle class, which is an important factor. See my “Tangle of Perils: the Eschatological Dilemma of Black Families in America,” Concilium: International Journal of Theology, 2 (2016). 64. Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City (Beacon Press, 2018), 128. 65. Ibid., 129. 66. Ibid., 35. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 36. 69. For recent research on mass incarceration and rural economies see John M. Eason, Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, 1st edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Conclusion Beyond the God of Necropolitics

Moving beyond the era of mass incarceration will require a profound struggle by a critical mass of citizens against a necropolitics that is both material and immaterial. Communities that identity themselves as Christian in particular and our culture in general must wrestle with how the arche, the religious depth of America indexes black death and social death to its salvation and flourishing. For many Christian communities this will require difficult wrestling with various theologies that have contributed to the racializing of popular sovereignty and “law and order.” This also includes wrestling with the images of who we imagine we are being protected from and the multiple ways this upholds social inequalities. Moreover, this requires a conceptual shift from seeing mass incarceration as a social problem to a symptom of injustice born of social conventions and concrete policy choices. Religious communities in particular have a critical role in helping society confront the sacred myths and idolatries that contribute to social oppression. Such discernment is critical if we are to build a political community that does not produce the social miseries it then feels it must punish. It will be important for preventing another racialized regime of punishment to emerge. 1 Moving beyond mass incarceration includes vigilance in discerning how representations of blacks as animals and criminals proliferate implicitly and explicitly in our public policies and rationalities of governance. This means coming to terms with how such representations have mediated social death and punishment in the past that shaped who are today. It also includes the difficult work on confronting contemporary manifestations such calling persons who are undocumented citizens “animals,” 2 or the animalizing and demonizing 3 of Michael Brown after being murdered by officer Darren Wil133

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son. In addition, we must continue to disclose the way such representations also pave the way for spatial regulation determining which communities are marked for protection and investment and which are marked for disinvestment, containment and social death. To move beyond mass incarceration is to confront the connections between social conditions and the ways persons are shaped within them. The voices of persons like Stanley “Tookie” Williams or Mumia Abu-Jamal have much to teach us about how understandings of the sacred or ultimate concern are be shaped by necropolitics in America. Equally, America must confront its own politics of redemption that assumes persons are unredeemed and unredeemable. Specifically, citizens must choose to work for a robust common good where all citizens have the necessary goods to realize their full potential. This means breaking our default reliance on punishment to solve social challenges. The inability to resist this cultural logic at the heart of this eschatological production opens the door to another mutation of racialized discipline, punishment and containment. Moving beyond mass incarceration involves confronting the god of American political economy that religious depth called upon in times of crisis. Such a god judges blacks as animals and criminals unworthy of political participation in their own destiny. America’s God protects the boundaries of the City on the Hill through three forms of judgment. The first is the power of life and death otherwise known as “deadly force” by the police. The second occurs in the form of sentencing of the juridical subject. And the third occurs in the ritual creation of inmates as they cross the border into hell, the jails and prisons that sprawl across the American landscape. This hell created by the God of American political economy is not one of flames but of concrete and steel. It is a hell that is often veiled creating what sociologies call the “backstage of society.” To resist the era of mass incarceration is to unveil to workings of this God of necropolitics in American history and its desire to create spaces of heaven and hell, human flourishing and social death along racial lines. In the closing pages of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander gives a clarion call that a movement to end mass incarceration must have a profound impact on public opinion. My hope is that in attempting to unveil the religious and cultural logic of necropolitics as it relates to mass incarceration contributes to the effort. NOTES 1. Such as task is already upon us as many communities are attempting to move toward decarceration only through the narrow lens of electronic monitoring. Space does not allow for a full an adequate treatment of this problem here. However, for thousands of persons who are pretrial, this still represents a profound denial of freedom that disproportionately affects poor

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black and brown communities. Moreover, this further extends the reach of technologies and practices of surveillance effectively locking down communities. 2. Eugene Scott, “In Reference to ‘Animals’ Trump Evokes an Ugly History of Demonization,” Washington Post, May 16, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/ 2018/05/16/trumps-animals-comment-on-undocumented-immigrants-earn-backlash-historicalcomparisons/. 3. Josh Sanburn, “All the Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown,” Time, November 25, 2014, https://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-browndemon/.

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Reagan, Ronald. “Remarks in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police - September 28, 1981.” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States 1981 (1981): 840. ———. The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagan. NewsMax Publishing, 2001. Recinos, Harold J. Wading through Many Voices toward a Theology of Public Conversation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. Reeves, Jimmie L., and Richard Campbell. Cracked Coverage: Television News, the AntiCocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy. Duke University Press, 1994. Reid, Jennifer. Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long. Lexington Books, 2003. Reinarman, Craig, and Harry G. Levine. “Crack in the Rearview Mirror: Deconstructing Drug War Mythology.” Social Justice 31, no. 1/2 (January 2004): 182–199. ———. Crack in America. University of California Press, 1997. Roberts, Dorothy E. “The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities.” Stanford Law Review 56 (2004/2003): 1271. ———. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Press, 1998. Rogers, Carl R. A Way of Being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. ———. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Roland, Alan. Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature: A French-American Inquiry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Sarat, Austin, and Karl Shoemaker. Who Deserves to Die: Constructing the Executable Subject. University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Essays In Existentialism. Citadel, 2000. Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Harper Collins, 2008. Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press, 1967. ———. Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Springer, 1972. Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. The Structures of the Life World V2. Northwestern University Press, 1989. Scott, Daryl Michael. Contempt and Pity. UNC Press, 1997. Shakur, Sanyika. Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member. New York: Grove Press, 1993. Shichor, David, and Dale K. Sechrest. Three Strikes and You’re Out. SAGE Publications, Incorporated, 1996. Slotkin, Richard. “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800.” American Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1973): 3. doi:10.2307/2711554. ———. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Smith, Neil. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association. V. 45. N. 4., 2007. Spillane, Joseph F. Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Stewart, Carlyle Fielding. Street Corner Theology: Indigenous Reflections on the Reality of God in the African American Experience. Nashville, Tenn.: J.C. Winston Pub., 1996. Solinger, Rickie, Paula C. Johnson, Martha Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Rubia Tapia. Interrupted Lives: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States. Berkley: University of California Press, 2010. Soja, Edward W. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Taylor, Mark L. Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. ———. Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

142

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———. The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. ———. “Today’s State of Exception: Abu-Jamal, Agamben, JanMohamed, and the Democratic State of Emergency,” Political Theology 10, no. 2 (2009): 306. Taylor, Mark Lewis. The Executed God. Fortress Press, 2001. The Wire: The Complete Series. HBO Studios, 2011. Terrell, JoAnne Marie. Power in the Blood?: The Cross in African American Experience. Orbis Books, 1998. Thompson, Kevin and Lester Embree. Phenomenology of the Political. Springer, 2000. Thurman, Howard. The Search for Common Ground. Friends United Press, 1986. Tillich, Paul. Love, Power, and Justice. Oxford University Press US, 1960. ———. Systematic Theology, Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. ———. Systematic Theology, Volume 3. University of Chicago Press, 1976. ———. The Interpretation of History. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936. ———. The Religious Situation. Meridian Books, 1956. ———. The World Situation, Fortress Press ,1965. Tillich, Paul, Nicholas Alfred Rasetzki, and Elsa L. Talmey. The Interpretation of History. C. Scribner’s sons, 1936. Towner, Lawrence W. “‘A Fondness for Freedom’: Servant Protest in Puritan Society.” The William and Mary Quarterly 19, no. 2 (April 1, 1962): 201–219. Uday Mehta. “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion.” Politis & Society 18, no. 2 (1990): 427–454. United States Congress Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Youth Violence. The Changing Nature of Youth Violence. University of Michigan Library, 1997. Van Smith. “Redemption Song and Dance: Little Melvin Is Not The Deacon He Played on The Wire.” City Paper Baltimore, March 19, 2008. Victor Anderson. “The Rhetoric of Order and the Politics of Racial Exclusion: Prolegomena to African American Political Theology.” Political Ethics: The Priority of Democracy. Vanderbilt University, Spring 2005. Wacquant, Loïc. “Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America.” Daedalus 139, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 74–90. ———. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press, 2009. ———. “The Wedding of Workfare and Prisonfare in the 21st Century.” Journal of Poverty 16, no. 3 (2012): 236–249. ———. “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” New Left Review, no. 13 (January–February 2002). ———. “The New Peculiar Institution: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” Theoretical Criminology 4 no. 3 (2000). Wacquant, Loïc J. D. Prisons of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 Wendy Brown. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconcervatism, and De-Democratization.” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (2006): 690–714. West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Vintage Books, 1994. Westhelle, Vitor. Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Western, Bruce. Punishment and Inequality in America. Russell Sage Foundation, 2007. Wilderson III, Frank. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010. Williams, Stanley Tookie. Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir. Simon and Schuster, 2007. Williams, Timothy. “Execution Case Dropped against Mumia Abu-Jamal in Officer’s Killing.” The New York Times, December 7, 2011, sec. U.S. Wilmore, Gayraud S. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Duke University Press, 1989. Wilson, David. Inventing Black-on-Black Violence. Syracuse University Press, 2005. Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger). HarperPerennial, 1989. ———. Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998.

Selected Bibliography

143

Young, Alford A., Jr, and Alford A. Young. The Minds of Marginalized Black Men. Princeton University Press, 2006. Yousman, Bill. Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.

Index

abolitionism, 117–118 Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 15, 67, 83, 84, 87n66, 117, 134; incarceration of, 73–76 accumulation by dispossession, 121–122 AEI. See American Enterprise Institute affectivity, 73, 86n34 Africa, John, 83 Africa, Ramona, 83 Agamben, Giorgio, 8, 86n42; on biopolitics, 9–10; Foucault critiqued by, 9 Alexander, Michelle, 53, 111n38, 134 Alonso, Alex, 79 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 42, 45 American mythos, 99 American Revolution, 3 Anderson, Victor, 27, 28 animalization, 36–37, 40, 50, 54, 96, 109, 133 Aquinas, Thomas (Saint), 52, 129n17 arche, 17n4, 37, 45; conservative movement in, 39–40; in crisis, 116; of law and order, 27–29; of political economy, 119–120; of religion, 3–7, 39–40; renewal in, 47; social death as constitutive of, 109 Aristotle, 129n17 athletes, 49 atonement, 25–26 Augustine (Saint), 115

Balko, Rodney, 45 Banfield, Edward C., 106 Baum, Dan, 50 Beccaria, Cesare, 107 Bentham, Jeremy, 107 Berger, Peter L., 45–46 Bias, Len, 15; death of, 48–51, 101 biopolitics, 46, 98; Agamben on, 9–10; as governance technique, 8; Mbembe on, 9–10; power produced by, 9 Bird, Larry, 49 The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault), 46 #BlackLivesMatter, 52 black nihilism, 57, 58 black-on-black violence, 96 Black-on-Black Violence (Wilson, D.), 95 Black Panther Party, 74, 79 Black Power movement, 3 Blue Rage, Black Redemption (Williams, S.), 15, 67, 78–85 Body Count (DiIulio), 53–54 Bogazianos, Dimitri, 100, 101, 111n38, 111n39 Bourdieu, Pierre, 110n7 Bratton, William, 103–104 Breaking Balls theory, 105 broken windows theory, 102, 105, 125; policing and, 105–108 Brown, Michael, 134 Brown, Wendy, 12, 108–109 Buffon, George, 36

145

146

Index

Burke, Edmund, 45 Bush, George W., 84 Camp, Jordan, 14 Campbell, Richard, 50 capital accumulation, 130n31; through drug trade, 92; primitive, 121 capitalism, 111n34, 122; creative destruction of, 6, 121; dominance of, 7; internal contradictions of, 121, 122–123, 130n31; religion critiquing, 6–7; social relations under, 130n34; spirit of, 5–6; West critiquing, 58 carceral continuum, 129n24 Carter, Bunchy, 79 castration, 36 Character and Crime (Novak), 43–44, 45 Charles, Robert, 38 children and childbirth, 29, 52; crack babies, 52; incarceration of, 59; in moral poverty, 53–54; in social death experience, 75 Chinese immigrants, 37–38 Christ, 25 Christianity, 133; missionaries, 22 city-citizen game, 25 Civil Rights Act, 42 Civil Rights movement, 3 civil society: black, 57, 57–58; crime represented in, 26–27; enemies of, 105; Foucault denaturalizing, 46; institutions of, reproduced by political economy, 102; norms of, 80, 83; racialization of, 45–47, 50; renewal of, 54, 59; values transmitted by, 57–58; West on, 57, 59, 65n143 Civil War, 3, 97 Clinton, Bill, 53 Clinton, Hillary, 52–53 cocaine-crazed Negro myth, 37–39, 48 Cole, C. L., 49 common good, 123–125 The Common Good and Christian Ethics (Hollenbach), 124–125 CompStat, 103–104, 104 co-narratives, 110n9 The Condemnation of Blackness, 97 confession, 25

Conservative Political Action Conference, 39 Cooper, Daniel, 127 Cop in the Hood (Moskos), 104 crack cocaine, 100–101; addictiveness of, 47–48; crack babies, 52; necropolitics of, 47–52; racialization of, 48, 51 creative destruction, 6, 121, 130n33 crime, 1; Breaking Balls theory of, 105; broken windows theory of, 102, 105, 105–108, 125; causes of, 97; drug use and rates of, 40; foreign-born criminals, 97; of Hanno, 23–24, 26; media focus on, 42; Novak on, 43–44; Reagan on, 40; representation of, 26–27; slippery slope theory of, 102–103; statistics, 97–98; welfare state and rates of, 41–42; zero tolerance policy, 103–104, 105 criminalization, 50, 54, 96, 109 criminal justice, 13, 74; eighteenth century, 13; mandatory minimum sentences, 111n46; nineteenth century, 13; ordermaintenance approach to, 105; Pasquino on criminal justice, 13 Crips, 80, 81, 82, 83 Crowell, Steven, 86n35 Daniels, Brandy, 129n17 Davis, Angela, 5, 83, 110n4 Day, Keri, 12 Dean, Mitchell, 128n6 death-bound-subject, 81, 83, 84; in Native Son, 68–73 Death-Bound-Subject (JanMohamed), 67 death drive, 70, 85n21 death penalty, 82 decarceration, 117–118 Declaration of Independence, 3, 39 dehumanization, 117; in War on Drugs, 45 democracy, 10, 106, 124 deregulation, 12 Desire, Market and Religion (Sung), 6–7 DiIulio, John, 15, 55–56, 58–60; moral poverty theory of, 53–55; West contrasted with, 58–59 Dilts, Andrew, 13 Dinkins, David, 103 Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau), 27

Index dispossession: accumulation by, 121–122; as social death, 123–125 double consciousness, 58 Douglass, Frederick, 69 Driesell, Lefty, 49–50 drugs and drug trade: capital accumulation through, 92; cocaine-crazed Negro myth, 37–39, 48; crack cocaine, 47–52, 100–101; crime rates and use of, 40; necropolitics in, 100–105; racialization of, 15, 48; sentencing for possession of, 1; social death coupled with, under Reaganism, 50–51; violence in, 101–102; West on, 57 Du Bois, W. E. B., 58 Durkheim, Emile, 45 Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal, 73 Eliade, Mircea, 3 eschatology: defining, 115; race and, 120–128; spatial interpretation of, 117–120 Eschatology and Space (Westhelle), 115 Evers, Medgar, 4 The Executed God (Taylor), 10 execution, 21; of Hanno, 23, 26, 35 expansionism, 40 extralegal justice, 36 the family, 29, 52, 54; in political economy, 69 Farley, Edward, 84 fascism, 5 Ferguson, Adam, 46 Field, Karen E., 24–25 Fields, Barbara, 24–25 Fischer, Michael R., 130n42 foreign-born criminals, 97 Foucault, Michel, 8, 98, 102; Agamben critiqued by, 9; civil society denaturalized by, 46; on confession, 25; on governmentality, 8; on political rationality formation, 25; on sovereignty, 8 freedom, 26, 109 Freeman, Richard, 55 free market, 107–108 French, William, 45 Freud, Sigmund, 108–109

147

Future of an Illusion (Freud), 108–109 gallows, 21 gangs, 55, 83; injunctions, 126–127 gentrification, 125; dialectical relationship of mass incarceration and, 126–127 Gilligan, James, 81 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 122 Giuliani, Rudolph, 103 globalization, 119 God, providence of, 28 Goffman, Erving, 110n4 Goldberg, David Theo, 28 Golden Gulag (Gilmore), 122 Goldwater, Barry, 41–42 Gordon, Thomas P., 59 governmentality, 10; Foucault on, 8 Governmentality (Dean), 128n6 Habermas, Jurgen, 18n51 habitus, 110n7 Hall, Stuart, 12, 14, 35 Hanno, Joseph, 22, 25, 31n33; execution of, 23, 26, 35; Mather on crime of, 23–24, 26 Harcourt, Bernard E., 105–108 Haring, Keith, 101 harm principle, 106–107 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, 39 Harvey, David, 119–120, 121–122, 122–123, 130n31 Head Start program, 52 Hegel, G. W. F., 30, 33n60 Heiner, Brady Thomas, 18n43 hell, imagery of, 16 Henderson, Charles R., 97 Hitler, Adolf, 9 Hobbes, Thomas, 6; sovereign according to, 47 Hoffman, Frederick L., 97 Hollenbach, Dave, 124–125, 128 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 9 Houston, Whitney, 100–101 Huggins, John, 79 human predator myth, 39–42 idolatry, 6–7 The Illusion of Free Markets (Harcourt), 105

Index

148 The Illusion of Order (Harcourt), 105–106 immigrants, 97; Chinese, 37–38 imperial regime, 11 Incarcerating the Crisis (Camp), 14 incarceration: of Abu-Jamal, 73–76; of children, 59. See also mass incarceration; prisons indigenous land confiscation, 11 individualism, 44, 62n54 inequality, 27 Inventing Black-on-Black Violence (Wilson, Dave), 120

Jackson, George, 83 Jackson, Jesse, 1 James, Joy, 86n41 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 15, 60, 67, 69–70, 72, 84 Jeffersonians, 4 Jim Crow, 14, 55, 58, 67, 78; political economy of, 68–69 Johnson, Lyndon B., 42 Johnson, Magic, 49 Joint Special Committee, 37 Jordan, Michael, 49 juridical power, 8, 15, 91, 96; mass incarceration fueled by, 98, 102, 105; in necropolitics, 98 justice: criminal, 13, 74, 105, 111n46; extralegal, 36; restorative, 129n17; spatial theory of, 120–121 Kahn, Paul, 44–45 Kelling, George, 102–103 Kelly, Carol, 59 Kennedy, John F., 4 Kennedy, Robert F., 4 Keynesianism, 122 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 4 Krauthammer, Charles, 51–52, 52 law enforcement, role of, 44–45. See also policing Lefebvre, Henri, 117 legal despotism, 107 Leguat, Francois, 36 Levad, Amy, 118, 129n17 liberalism, 58; marginalization as necessity under, 27–28; neoliberalism

distinguished from, 12; race naturalized under, 28. See also neoliberalism liberalization, 12 “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion” (Mehta), 27–28 liberation theology, 115–116 liberty, 38; individual, 12, 39–40, 106; Wadsworth on, 26 Life in Prison (Williams, S.), 83 Lin, Yee-Chen, 82 Lipsitz, George, 13 Lithwick, Dahlia, 82 Live from Death Row (Abu-Jamal), 15, 67, 73–78 Lockup (television), 110n4 Logan, Samuel, 17n4 Long, Charles H., 3–7, 7, 17n4, 116; on theology of freedom, 4 Lugalia-Hollon, Ryan, 127 Lyerly, D. K., 38 lynching, 36 Makes Me Wanna Holler (McCall), 81 Malcolm X, 83 mandatory minimum sentences, 111n46 Mandela, Nelson, 83 marginalization, 93, 99–100; under liberalism, 27–28; necropolitics linked to, 93–94 market forces, 58; morality and, 57 Marx, Karl, 6, 130n33 Marxism, 118, 121 masculinity, 68 mass incarceration, 1, 11, 12; as accumulation by dispossession, 121–122; dialectical relationship of gentrification and, 126–127; historical framing of, 14; juridical power fueling, 98, 102, 105; political agency in necropolitics of, 73–76; religion as rationale for, 46–47, 83–84; slavery and, 14, 129n24; social death modes as rationale for, 30; as social formation, 2; spatiality of, 117–118 master-slave dialectic, 30, 33n60 Mather, Cotton, 14, 21; on African Americans as missionary opportunity, 22; on Hanno and crime, 23–24, 26; on slave roles, 24

Index Mbembe, Achille, 7–8; on biopolitics, 9–10; on necropolitics and sovereignty, 10 McCall, Nathan, 81 McCann, Bryan J., 80 McKittrick, Katherine, 117 McWhorter, Labelle, 36 McWilliams, Nancy, 86n34 media, 49; crime focused on in, 42; narrative construction via, 76–77; representations, 13; technology in political economy, 13 mediating structures, 45–46 Mehta, Uday, 27–28 mercantilism, 111n34 middle class, black, 131n63 migration, 11 Mill, John Stuart, 106–107 Million Man March, 1 Mills, Charles W., 120 The Minds of Marginalized Black Men (Young), 93 missionaries, 22 monarchy, 8 morality: law and order rhetoric within, 27; moral poverty, 53–55; personal and political, 39–40 mortality rates, 97–98 Moskos, Peter, 104 Muhammad, Khalil G., 97 al-Mujahid, Dhoruba, 83 Muniz, Ana, 126 natal alienation, 29, 58 Native Americans, 3 Native Son (Wright), 15, 67; death-boundsubject in, 68–73 NBA, 49 Neal, Mark Anthony, 99 necropolitics: of crack cocaine, 47–52; defining, 7–8, 10; drug trade and, 100–105; juridical power in, 98; marginalization linked to, 93–94; Mbembe on sovereignty and, 10; origins of, 21; planetary scope of, 10; political agency in, of mass incarceration, 73–76; prison political theology and, 108–110; statistical knowledge and, 97–100; of

149

superpredators, 52–60; Taylor on, 131n55; theological engagement with, 10–11, 44; urban violence and, 95–96; War on Drugs contradiction and, 99; The Wire and, 91–95 Necropolitics (Mbembe), 7–8 Negro-ape imagery, 36 The Negro Christianized (Mather), 22, 23–24 the Negro Problem, 97, 98 neoconservatism, 42; neoliberalism as copresence with, 12 neoliberalism, 19n58, 80, 92; defining, 11–12, 12; human predator myth under, 39–42; liberalism distinguished from, 12; neoconservatism as co-presence with, 12; policing under, 105; religious practices linked to, 12; subjectivity shaped by, 12, 99–100 Neo-slavery, 2 Neuhaus, Richard John, 45–46 New Deal, 58, 122 The New Jim Crow (Alexander), 53, 134 Newton, Huey P., 130n41 New York City Police Department, 103–104 nihilism, black, 57, 58 95 memo, 104 Nixon, Richard, 42 nomos, 9 Novak, Michael, 15, 61n44, 62n57, 63n66; on crime, 43–44; Reagan influenced by, 45; on statecraft, 45; theology of, 42–45 O’Connor, Carla, 110n9 On Liberty (Mill), 106 opium, 37–38 Orange is the New Black (television), 110n4 Owens, Albert, 82 Oz (television), 110n4 Park, Will Rogers, 81 Parker, William, 79 Pasquino, Pasquale, 13 Passion of the Christ (film), 2 Patterson, Orlando, 14, 57, 67, 118–119; on slavery, 29, 30, 119 Peltier, Leonard, 83

150

Index

Pentagon, 122 “Philosophy and the Urban Underclass” (West), 57 plantation, 130n42 pluralism, 124 Police Power and the Production of Racial Boundaries (Muniz), 126 policing, 100–105; broken windows theory and, 105–108; gang injunctions and, 126; under neoliberalism, 105 Policing the Crisis (Hall), 14 political agency, in necropolitics of mass incarceration, 73–76 political community, 5 political economy, 122; arche of, 119–120; civil society institutions reproduced by, 102; the family in, 69; of Jim Crow, 68–69; media technology in, 13; racialization in, 69, 92; as religious symbol, 7, 17n24 political exclusion, race and, 27–28 political rationality, Foucault on formation of, 25 Political Theology (Kahn), 44–45 political theory, sovereignty as central problem of, 8 Pontiac Correctional Center, 127 poverty: causes of, 43; culture of, 52; moral poverty, 53–55 Pratt, Geronimo Ji Jaga, 83 primitive accumulation, 121 Prison Industrial Complex, 2 prisons: necropolitics and political theology of, 108–110; prison fix, 122, 130n42–131n43; prison industrial complex, 123. See also mass incarceration privatization, 121–122 The Production of Space (Lefebvre), 117 public housing, 96 Puritanism, 4, 14, 23 Quesnay, Francois, 107 race: crime linked to, 41–42; eschatology and, 120–128; inferiority and, 98; liberalism and naturalization of, 28; political exclusion and, 27–28; social contract and, 47; space and, 120–128

racecraft, 24–25 Racecraft (Field & Fields), 24–25 Race Matters (West), 57 The Racial Contract (Mills), 120 racialization: of civil society, 45–47, 50; of crack cocaine, 48, 51; of drugs, 15, 48; in political economy, 69, 92; in social control, 11, 131n55; of social death, 81; subject formation and, 70; of violence, 74 The Racial State (Goldberg), 28 racism, 24–25, 59; denial of, 119; religion linked to, 2 rape, 70–71; black rapist myth, 36–37, 38–39 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 19n58, 61n44, 62n57, 63n66; on crime rates, 40; human predator myth perpetuated by, 39–42; Novak as influence on, 45; speeches of, 39–41 Reaganism, 39–42; social death and drug use coupled under, 50–51; theology of, 42 Reaganomics, 39 Reconstruction, 97 Red, White and Black (Wilderson), 118 redemption narratives, 128n9; religion in, 83–84 Reeves, Jimmie L., 50 Reinarman, Craig, 48 religion, 2; arche of, 3–7, 39–40; Black church, 2; capitalism critiqued by, 6–7; Christianity, 22, 133; defining, 18n49; Freud on, 108–109; mass incarceration rationalized by, 46–47, 83–84; neoliberalism linked to, 12; political economy as symbol of, 7, 17n24; racism linked to, 2; redemption narratives and, 83–84; slavery and, 24; social death as lack of, 56; superpredators prevented by, 55; Tillich on, 5–6; in United States, 4 The Religious Situation (Tillich), 5–6 representation, 15, 30; animalization, 36–37, 40, 50, 54, 96, 109, 133; of black youth, 125; of Chinese immigrants, 37–38; of crime, 26–27; crime statistics and, 97–98; media, 13; of slavery, 29–30; of social death,

Index 29–30, 40, 46, 133 restorative justice, 129n17 Riverbend Maximum Security Prison, 2 Rivers (Reverend), 55–57, 65n131 de la Riviere, Le Mercie, 107 Rizzo, Frank, 74 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 27 Sarat, Austin, 82 Sawyer, Diane, 100–101 Schumpeter, Joseph, 6, 83, 130n33 Schutz, Alfred, 75, 87n66, 88n98, 110n7 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 82, 84 Scott, Walter, 52 Security, Territory and Population (Foucault), 8 Seeking Spatial Justice (Soja), 120–121 self-esteem, 57 self-governance, 38, 83 self-respect, 57 serial killers, 77 sexuality, black, 36–37 Shakur, Assata, 83 Shakur, Sanyika, 102 shepherd-flock game, 25 Shoemaker, Karl, 82 Significations (Long), 116 Silber, John Robert, 52 Simon, David, 91, 110n2 sin, punishment of, 23–24 slavery, 14, 26, 36, 109; concealment of, by American myths, 40; mass incarceration and, 14, 129n24; masterslave dialectic, 30, 33n60; Mather on, 24; naturalization of, 36; Neo-slavery, 2; Patterson on, 29, 30, 119; religion and, 24; representations of, 29–30; slave ships, 117; social world in, 29 Slavery and Social Death (Patterson), 29 slippery slope theory, 102–103 Slotkin, Richard, 21, 60n6, 99 Smith, Adam, 43, 107, 111n34 Smith, Neil, 125 Smoke and Mirrors (Baum), 50 social contract, race and, 47 social control, 123; racialization in, 11, 131n55; in United States, 11 social death, 28, 32n51, 67, 71–72; American experience of, 29–30; arche

151

constituted by, 109; children in experience of, 75; dispossession as, 123–125; drugs coupled with, under Reaganism, 50–51; legitimation of, 81, 109; mass incarceration and modes of, 30; racialization of, 81; religion lacking as form of, 56; representations of, 29–30, 40, 46, 133; stereotypes and, 36–39 social junk, 122–123 social phenomenology, 14, 19n73 social tyranny, 106 Soja, Edward, 120–121 sovereignty: Foucault on, 8; Hobbes on, 47; Mbembe on necropolitics and, 10; political theory and, as central problem, 8; racialized popular, 109; war as means to achieve, 10 space and spatiality, 115; eschatology and interpretation of, 117–120; justice theorized through, 120–121; of mass incarceration, 117–118; production of, as social process, 117; racialization of, 120–128 The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Novak), 43, 45 Spitzer, Steve, 122–123 spot/gang dyad, 49–50 the state, power-relations and, 8 statecraft, 45 state of exception, 9 statistical knowledge, 97–100 stereotypes: black rapist myth, 36–37, 38–39; cocaine-crazed Negro myth, 37–39, 48; defining, 35; Negro-ape imagery, 36; social death and, 36–39 Sterling, Eric, 50 subjectivity: black, 117; neoliberalism as shaping factor of, 12, 99–100; racialization and formation of, 70 suburbanization, 42, 79, 95–96, 124–125 Sudbury, Julia, 117–118 suicide rates, 97–98 Sung, Jung Mo, 6–7 superpredators: necropolitics of, 52–60; religion and prevention of, 55. See also human predator myth Surette, Ray, 77 symbolic death, 72–73, 99

152

Index

systemic violence, 48 Taylor, Mark Lewis, 10–11, 17n4, 18n49, 18n51, 73, 74, 86n41; on necropolitics, 131n55 Terrell, JoAnne Marie, 31n33 Thatcher, Margaret, 45 The Theological and the Political (Taylor), 10 theology: defining, 18n49; liberation, 115–116; Long on, 4; necropolitics engaged by, 10–11, 44; of Novak, 42–45; political, 62n57, 108–110; public, 62n57; of Reaganism, 42 13th Amendment, 2 three strikes rule, 76–78 Tillich, Paul, 3–7, 7; on religion, 5–6 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 44, 45 To Empower the People (Berger & Neuhaus), 45–46 Tremenda (Mather), 22, 26 Tribble, Brian, 49–50 Trump administration, 117 uneven development, 116, 120, 121, 125, 128n7 United States: American mythos, 99; American Revolution, 3; religion in, 4; social control in, 11; social death experienced in, 29–30 urban violence, necropolitics and, 95–96 Vanderbilt Divinity School, 2 violence, 29; black-on-black, 96; in drug trade, 101–102; psychodynamics of chronic, 81; racialization of, 74; systemic, 48; urban, 95–96 Violent Crime Control Act of 1994, 53 Wacquant, Loïc, 103, 123, 129n25

Wadsworth, Benjamin, 26 Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brown, W.), 108 War on Drugs, 1, 19n58, 39, 45, 95, 111n38; dehumanization in, 45; necropolitics and contradictions of, 99 The War on Neighborhoods (LugaliaHollon and Cooper), 127 War on Poverty, 42 The Wealth of Nations (Smith, A.), 111n34 Weber, Max, 32n52 welfare state: crime rates and, 41–42; DiIulio on, 54–55 West, Cornel, 56; capitalism critiqued by, 58; on civil society, 57, 59, 65n143; DiIulio contrasted with, 58–60; on drug trade, 57 Westhelle, Vitor, 115 Whorter, Ladelle, 36 Wilderson, Frank, III, 118, 129n25 Williams, Ashley, 52–53 Williams, Edward Huntington, 38, 73 Williams, Stanley “Tookie”, 15, 67, 78–85, 117, 134; trial of, 82 Wilson, Darren, 134 Wilson, David, 95, 96, 120 Wilson, James Q., 102–103, 106 Wilson, William Julius, 91 Winthrop, John, 39 The Wire (television), 15, 112n50; cultural importance of, 91; necropolitics and, 91–95 World War II, 78 Wright, Richard, 15, 67, 68–73 Yang, Tsai-Shai, 82 Young, Alford, 93, 110n7, 110n9 youth, representations of, 125 zero tolerance policy, 103–104, 105

About the Author

Christophe D. Ringer is assistant professor of theological ethics and society at Chicago Theological Seminary.

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