Blackness, Citizenship, and the Transnational Vertigo of Violence in the Americas

When a Missouri grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown on November 24th, 2014, the United States erupted into a symphony of protests, the likes of which we have not seen since the civil rights movement. Indeed, we are witnessing the dawn of a new movement, but this movement is not about our national politics. It is about an emerging global politics of race, citizenship, violence, and nation that requires us as anthropologists take stock of our approaches to these topics. Since 2005 I have been working with black political organizers in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in the fight to denounce and demystify anti-black state violence. As an activist anthropologist, my collaborations have been with the grassroots community action network Quilombo X and the campaign React or Die!/React or Be Killed! (hereafter, React or Die! Campaign). This experience has led me to write about and analyze the relationship between blackness, citizenship, and national belonging in the Americas. Specifically, I consider anti-black state violence a performance of the modern American nation-state. In other words, state violence is a process of embodiment and subject making with plots, scripts, and spectacles that have tangible, material effects (e.g., Smith 2008). My work also recognizes the global patterns that connect local black experiences to transnational ones, like police violence. This essay is a reflection on those processes and their current political implications. Adapted from the source document.