Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity

"12 To get at this problematic, I offer a brief account of Bacon's Rebellion as an example of a case in which the Black Body is not socially dead-not incapacitated.[...]I challenge the ontological absolutism that is endemic to Afro-Pessimist thought at large.[...]looking at the case study of Bacon's Rebellion, I challenge Wilderson's advancement of a purity argument that also happens to be ahistorical.[...]it should be no surprise that Bacon's Rebellion began with conflict over how to deal with Indian tribes viewed as violent obstructionists to settler colonial expansion.Other accounts narrate it as a missed opportunity, given that poor Europeans eventually went the "white way," joining elites against those increasingly racialized as "black."[...]the Rebellion is also told as a genealogy of "whiteness" as a racial category and the "hidden origins" of race-based chattel slavery.