HAVE MERCY

I saw him take flight yesterday

We gathered outside, looking up
Those who could read, read the note
And spread the word
So we gathered
to witness the Black man who had promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake
Superior at three o’clock.
The charity hospital was named Mercy
We called it No Mercy
Cause they said No Niggers Allowed
But Mr. Smith had written
At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away
on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.
It could have been any Wednesday, but it was this Wednesday
This love
This forgiveness
This mercy
This commitment
To fulfill the contract to us
So when Mr. Smith took flight from the roof of the White Only hospital
When Ruth went into labor on the hospital steps
When the whites finally let the first black person in for care
They would say it was the White Man’s mercy
That it was the change in policy that allowed the first black child to be born
there.
But we knew it was the flight
That when the contract is being executed—faithfully—between himself and others.

It was not [It should not] be understood as a simple desperate act, the end of a fruitless life , a
life without gesture, without examination, but as obedience to a deeper contract with his
people. It is [was]his commitment to them [us], regardless of whether, in all its details, they
understand [understood] it
I saw her take flight yesterday.
BLACK GIRL SING
Black girls have learned far too often
And far too quickly
How to love in EXCESS of yourself

I said fly black girl

Fly
Your wings are strong enough to carry
More than you wanted to
I wonder often who I would be if not conditioned to the perils of the state
of duty and responsibility
of antiblackness and misogynoir.
The chorus sent shock waves and reminded us to
Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t
take advantage, take disadvantage
Her wings are dangerous
A weapon
A shield
Have Mercy
Dear little black girl
You are not of this world .
This is your sacred black girl song
I hope your flight takes off
I hope you fly to freedom
I hope you fly home
They will clip your wings
If you fall
I will be there to catch you
I saw us take flight yesterday, and so the chorus sings
To call into question the next alternative future
We didn’t jump off the slave ship to sink
We jumped to fly.
We said it was No Mercy Debate
Yall called it Merciful.
We said the world was unfair.
Yall read fairness.
You struck the chorus from your pref sheet.
You told the chorus to go home.
You said the chorus was uneducational.
But I can hear its whispers in your blocks.
That thing that you would never give credit
Is the chorus
You marked us as
Wild
Loud
Aggressive.
Criminal.
You declined the call.
If you don’t understand us and understand what we’ve been through,
Then you probably wouldn’t understand what this moment is about .
This is home.
This is where we’re from.
You know, when [we] come [here], [we] invisible.
But still we ARE
Fierce in the presence of death
It gave her [us] clarity
Audacity
And Direction
You did not open the pearl gates
Our Flight DID
 PART II
THIS IS A DEBATE ABOUT DEBATE – WHAT WAYS HAVE YOU CONSIDERED HOW
WHAT WE IMAGINE IN THIS SPACE SPILLS IN AND OUT TO HOW WE APPROACH
EACH OTHER AND WHICH PEOPLE COUNT AS PEOPLE IN THIS SPACE?

All year we have said that the community should hold space for both
instrumentalist interpretations of the resolution and constitutive
interpretations of the resolution. And all year—like all the years before—y’all
have said WRONG FORUM, JOIN A BOOK CLUB. YOU SAID DARKY GO HOME.
YOU SAID OUR METHODS WEREN’T POLTIICAL. YOU SAID EFFICACY MATTERED
MORE THAN RHETORIC. YOU SAID REASONABILITY?! WHO GIVES A FUCK
ABOUT REASONABILITY?! YOU SAID THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR PERFORMANCE
HERE AND THAT YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE ACCOUNTABLE TO THIS COMMUNITY,
BUT WE ALWAYS HAD TO BE ACCOUNTABLE TO THIS COMMUNITY EVERY TIME
YOU CRIMINALIZED US.

You have double-speaked at us for years – you read reparations counter plans
about what happens outside of debate, but you didn’t think about what that
looked like inside. You said it was just a neutral game, but we heard you in the
hallways saying “if they’re so socially dead why do they win debates?” as if we
don’t have loved ones who are locked up, who are brutalized by police, as if we
are just saying the things we say to get a ballot and not because they affect our
motherfucking lives.

Legal personhood is at work here too because the default legal person is always
racialized and gendered. While the slave was figured as a beast of burden,
emancipation rewrote Black personhood as Burdened Individuality. The ex-
slave was now enclosed within a duty to demonstrate worthiness for
citizenship through mimicry.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Scenes of Subjection, pp. 313-7//ak47]
The "man" fabricated in documents like the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Fourteenth
Amendment was liberated from the past by the abolition of slavery and by virtue of his own endowments, the
capacity for self-making and the reasonable exercise of free will. The arguments on behalf of Reconstruction measures also attached great weight to the development of "true
manhood" in realizing freedom and equality. As Congressman Ignatius Donnelly advocated on behalf of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill:

If degradation and oppression have, as it is alleged, unfitted him for freedom, surely continued degradation and oppression will not prepare him for it. If he is not to remain a brute you must give him that which
will make him a man-opportunity. If he is, as it is claimed, an inferior being and unable to compete with the white man on terms of equality, surely you will not add to the injustice of nature by casting him beneath
the 314 SCENES OF SUBJECTION feet of the white man. With what face can you reproach him with his degradation at the very moment you are striving to still further degrade him? If he is, as you say, not fit to
vote, give him a chance; let him make himself an independent laborer like yourself; let him own his homestead; and let his intelligence, darkened by centuries of neglect, be illuminated by all the glorious lights of
education. If after all of this he proves himself an unworthy savage and brutal wretch, condemn him,
 the masculinity of the citizen-subject is being pronounced. The attention to
It is clear that the generic "man" is not being used here; rather,

manliness, self-making, maturation, and assimilation displayed Republican dedication to

transforming brutes into men and actualizing the admirable ends of autonomy, political
inclusion, self-sufficiency, and enlightenment. Upon the success or failure of this project depended the future of the Negro-true man or unworthy savage?
The sexual reverberations of this project, though muted, are conveyed by fraught terms like
"savage" and "brute," and the lurking sexual rapaciousness exceeds their cover. As Jared Waterbury argued in
Southern Planters and Freedmen, the failure to educate the freedmen and effect this transformation from brute to man endangered the very terms of social order, for unschooled and passionate men dwelling
within and moving amid society hinted at unspeakable dangers, but dangers regularly exploited by those opposed to black equality. In his veto of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, President Johnson equated the
"perfect equality of the white and black races" proposed in the bill with "the contract of marriage between the two races."

For Johnson, the attested need for legislation like the Freedmen's Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Acts fueled arguments that the Negro was a child, not a man, because these provisions made him a ward of the
state. 48 As Senator Edgar Cowan argued, "If they are put upon the same footing as white people, then they have the same remedies as white people; they have the same remedies that the honorable Senator has;
and there is no new necessity for this jurisdiction, this new power that is to be invoked for their protection."49 Those opposed to "special" legislation demanded that blacks stand on their own or forever prostrate
themselves before the superiority of the Saxon race. This perhaps cynical insistence on an equality of treatment, indifferent to the history of servitude and abiding vestiges of slavery, denied the extant legacy of
racial subordination while maintaining white dominance. However, when equality is defined by sameness, blacks either prove themselves the same, and therefore not in need of state intervention to aid their
condition, or they bear the stigma of difference. Others argued that after having been reduced to the "lowest grade of being," how were the freed instantaneously capable of resuming the duties of citizenship? As
a representative from Missouri argued: "For thirty years it has been steadily proclaimed that African slavery has reduced the enslaved to the very lowest grade of being. The enslavement of his body had, by
consequence, almost obliterated his intellect. He could scarcely be called a man. That he might be rescued, he must be freed. He is freed. Presto, change! As soon as the chains fall he is no longer the brutalized
being over whom, for thirty years, we have made the land to mourn; he is an American citizen, fully qualified and prepared to take upon himself the responsibilities of an elector, and qualified for all these
important duties. Wonderful!"5°

Friends and foes of the Negro alike assumed that the degradation of enslavement made blacks
less than men; so this emergent manhood was anticipated, groomed, doubted, and feared. The
infantile condition of the race both necessitated legislation on their behalf and justified black subordination. Noteworthy is the discursive tenor of these statements- the masculinist and

paternalist lens through which the condition of the freed was refracted, with terms like
"infantile race" and "mature manhood" framing issues of equality and citizenship. Degradation
accurately described the wretched material and social conditions of the freed, but as it was
deployed in Congressional debate, it was transposed into an ontology of black difference, which
reproduced, inadvertently or intentionally, the sophistry of Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott. The decision established the innate inferiority of blacks by reference to the laws and social conditions that situated
blacks as inferior. It was a brutal tautology. (The liberal conception of the individual as an isolated entity divorced from social and material conditions made it difficult, if not impossible, to acknowledge difference
without ontologizing it as abnormality or inferiority.) A slippage between race and status can be detected in the uncertain identification of the source of black degradation-was nature responsible, or the wretched
conditions of slavery, or both? Could degradation be cured or was it innate? And if nature was responsible for both this degradation and the antagonism between the races, then what did the abolition of slavery
portend? And how was equality to be understood? Would blacks be incorporated into the body politic or cast out and condemned?

The only sure way to quell these doubts and prove black worthiness was to license this question of equality and
sameness by aspiring to meet and exceed the norm-by adapting or aspiring to a normative

masculinity, by striving to be self-possessed and sovereign, ideals which ultimately were

inseparable from the entitlements of whiteness. No wonder the "manhood of the race" was
the prized figure of the discourse of racial uplift. However, this proved an impossible strategy;
while freedmen were able to gain entrance to the discourse of citizenship, unlike freedwomen, the nexus of race, sexuality, and capital

operated to discipline and regulate this nascent manhood.5' The ineluctable production of taxonomies
of purity and contagion, supremacy and degradation, decency and lasciviousness, and order and
danger constituted an impassable and insurmountable barrier to "perfect equality." The construction of
nature upon which these debates proceeded ultimately frustrated equality. While the discourse of civil and (eventually) political rights assumed that a modicum of normalization
could be achieved and the erstwhile brute could be inculcated with the virtues of mature manhood, the indelible markers of difference ensconced within the social marked the
limits of equality. The law retreated in the face of instinct and affinity.

The universalist embrace of man was not as expansive as it purported to be. Leaving aside for the moment the exclusion of women from the purview of equal rights and
protection, since gender was considered a reasonable basis for discrimination, race or former condition of servitude was no longer considered a reasonable basis for

discrimination. The masculinist universalism of equality was belied by racism. As many theorists and critics of liberalism have
duly noted, the identitarian formula upon which equality is predicated encloses difference within an arena marked as inferior, pathological, immoral, or perverse.52 The
universalist embrace and exclusions constitutive of liberalism reveal the gap between formal and substantive equality. The universalist reach of liberalism, according to Uday
Mehta, despite its declarations of natural equality, conceals "the thicker set of social credentials that constitute the real bases of political inclusion."53 "Liberalism's commitment

The demand to display

to principles of universality is practically sustained only by the reinvented and rationalized exclusions of racial particularity."54

one's worth instantiated only the want of equal rights rather than their enjoyment and likewise
revealed the menacing double bind of mimicry-almost the same, but not quite.55 Human, but not
quite.
Burdened Individuality is an unspoken Burden of Proof that follows Blackness.
Proceduralism mystifies the cause and effect of Black degradation and
individuates Black sociality as pathology. If self-making and reciprocity are the
hallmarks of civic participation, then failure to leave your Black baggage at the
door is the sign of a bad actor.
Hartman says:
Responsibility essentially denoted the duty of self-making and the virtue of individual
accountability. Invoked in this manner, it effaced the salient features of chattel slavery and the
vestiges that prevented even the illusion of autonomy or independence. To put it another way,
for the democratic advocates of responsibility the legislative remedies proposed in assisting the
freed in the transition to citizenship and securing of the rights and liberties of citizenship were
believed unnecessary because of this conspicuous faith in the freed's capacity to overcome the
obstacles before them. While this line of argument was cynical, hypocritical, and disingenuous, it
nonetheless revealed the centrality of self-making as a central tenet of democratic individuality
and evidenced the firm belief in the fairness of the marketplace in providing each man his due.
Moreover, this emphasis on self-making in the conferral of formal equality illumined the
tension between equality and redress within a liberal framework. It was easier to recognize and
correct the exclusion and inferiority written into slave law through formal measures like the
Thirteenth Amendment than it was to remedy the disparities and inequalities that were the
consequence of this former condition. Basically, subjugation was to be corrected by the
conferral of formal equality; this was sufficient to abolishing slavery and severing the present
from the preceding centuries of enslavement. According to the tenets of liberalism, as a result of
this dispensation the freed now possessed the same advantages and opportunities available to
others since they enjoyed the natural liberty previously denied them, While the conferral of
basic civil rights and equal protection in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth
Amendment overturned the precedent established in Dred Scott v, Sanford-that is, that blacks
neither were citizens nor possessed any rights that whites were bound to respect these newly
acquired rights were much less effective in obliterating the everyday vestiges of slavery.45

The truth is, they never wanted us to take flight.

They said the weight of my durag on my head and the speaker in my arms
weighed me down, and if I finally let them go I could get right.

Nigga they said if I read a plan I could get right, but I never felt more weighed
down in my life.

They said I couldn’t take flight because I was taking my brothers to school
instead of doing drills.
They want the chains, the same one my ancestors of no name wore, still
strapped to my wrists, binding me from flight.

On bro, my sophomore year of highschool when we were about to debate in

finals of that tournament, they called the cops on us. My nigga, even when they
want us gone, they don’t want us to take flight.

***

The topic paper claimed:

This topic will lead to extremely high-quality K debates.

We have never debated such a squarely metaphysical topic. The question – what is a person –
presents important questions of line drawing that directly speak to who we are. Are we defined
by our autonomy, or our relationships to others, and to our past?

Yet, the community has instead chosen to narrow the acceptable terms of
debate back to the same political framework. The disavowed antiblack
solidarity of debate has decided to silence the other modalities of making and
breaking law that constitutes political community this season.

The function of law is reached by the veracity of embodied experience – y’all

are acting like the law is just rule-making but the law is always requiring law
enforcement – and there’s a force of law at work that you utilize when you rely
on pre-existing pathologies about Black Debate to fill in the gaps in your
undeveloped framework arguments
Goldberg 19 [Jesse A., “James Baldwin and the Anti-Black Force of Law: On Excessive Violence
and Exceeding Violence,” Public Culture (2019) 31 (3): 521–538,
https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7532763//ak47]

the Black subject comes into existence as the object

In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Hartman argues that

of the law’s violence without ever being subject to the law’s protection. For her, “attempts to assert absolutist distinctions between slavery

the “freedom” granted by law to its subjects is inseparable

and freedom are untenable,” both in terms of conceptual coherence and historical event (13). That is,

from the violence of slavery, and so maintaining law’s order conceptually entails the
maintenance of the violence structuring the Black subject as non-Human. As a matter of
historical fact, the institution of policing emerges out of the institution of slavery,
Hartman’s work thus focuses on how

which traces as “the shift from the ‘power of police’ all whites exercised over slaves to the
she

supreme police power exercised by the state, and what occurred in its wake was the banishing
of Blacks from public society” (170).

This insight supplements Derrida’s argument in “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority” (1990). Here Derrida thinks with Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921) in distinguishing between justice and law, characterizing the former as

For Derrida, there is no law without enforceability, and

“undeconstructable” and the latter as inseparable from violence or “force.”

enforceability denotes the use of violence. He thus spends much of his energy in “Force of Law” considering the im/possibility of a distinction between the violence that inaugurates the law
and the violence that maintains the law while asking if it is possible to separate “just” or “legitimate” force from “unjust” force. While Derrida briefly mentions the police as the physical instantiation of the force of law, Hartman—and ultimately even more clearly, I
argue, Baldwin—flesh out what is only thinly theorized by Derrida’s otherwise generative abstraction. Namely, Hartman and Baldwin name the object of the law’s violence that goes unnamed in Derrida’s essay: the Black subject.

In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), Weheliye draws on the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter to critique Michel Foucault and Giorgio

“the legal conception of personhood comes

Agamben’s theorizations of bare life, social death, and biopolitics. In doing so, Weheliye recognizes that

with a steep price” (78) but moves from habeas corpus to habeas viscus to underscore that “the flesh is nothing less than the ethereal social (afterlife) of bare existence” (72). In
short, the law’s violence both marks the bare life of racialized assemblages such as the Black
subject and is exceeded by a “fleshy surplus” through which alternative genres of the Human
are practiced beyond the law’s force. Similarly, in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Sharpe invokes the term wake through multiple registers, implying
genres of mourning the dead as much as the after flows of a ship through water and the process of awakening to consciousness. She writes, “To be in the wake
is to live in those no’s, to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no
citizenship, to live in the long time of Dred and Harriet Scott; and it is more than that. . . . To be
in the wake is also to recognize the ways that we [Black people] are constituted through and by
continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and each
other by that force” (16). That is, Blackness is undoubtedly characterized through a precarious
proximity to death, but Black subjects are not reducible to that vulnerability.

So the framework is as follows: law’s violence exceeds the capacity for justice insofar as anti-
Blackness is its condition of possibility (Derrida and Hartman). Black being, even as the object of
law’s excessive violence, proceeds to exceed that violence (Weheliye and Sharpe). This
doubleness is at the heart of Baldwin’s theorizations of the law.
(Anti-)Blackness as the Law’s Condition of Possibility In “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin meditates on the position of Black Americans, whom he calls American Negroes, in contrast to Black Africans. Baldwin ([1963]
1998: 335) insists that the American Negro is a particular construct existing only in the United States: “I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white Protestant country, and this is what it
means to be an American Negro, this is who he is—a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as ‘three-fifths’ of a man, and who,
according to the Dred Scott decision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.”

The historical content in this sentence is probably familiar to most critical students of American history: Africans were brought to America mostly as enslaved chattel; colonial law evolved from the early 1600s to further solidify the construct of race throughout the
seventeenth century, eventually basing the condition of enslavability on the criterion of legible Blackness in the eighteenth century; then US law was inaugurated to continue the propagation of slavery as an institution that reduced enslaved people to the status of

the law sutured Blackness so tightly to enslavement

property, a paradox of which gets articulated in the often celebrated “three-fifths compromise.” And eventually,

through a legal framework that privileged property rights over civil rights that even African
Americans who found themselves on land where slavery was illegal could still be claimed as
property because whites were not bound to respect the rights of Black people. The law of
slavery is what gives the Negro his existence as a recognizable piece of the US political structure,
and so in the case of Blackness, race is produced by law. 1

Blackness emerges
If we take seriously the intermingling of Baldwin’s recollection of his “prolonged religious crisis” with his recollection of interactions with police officers describable only in terms of verbal and physical violence,

as an identifying marker of the American Negro produced not only by the law as a set of rules
but also by the law as violence. Baldwin does not write about the law in the abstract orThis is because

even as a matter of textuality; he writes about being cursed at, frisked, thrown to the ground,
whipped, and secreted into precinct basements by police officers. Baldwin knows the law
through bodily contact.
Throughout “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin assumes the role of a witness giving testimony before the law. He recalls having “seen men dragged from this very corner” by police, who dispersed crowds “with clubs or on horseback” (314); he writes of having “been
carried into precinct basements often enough” (317); he remembers being thirteen years old and hearing a police officer, on passing him in the street, complain about “niggers” not staying uptown, as well as “two policemen amus[ing] themselves with me by frisking
me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots” when he was just ten years old (298). And so when he reflects that “it was

such a conclusion about the function of the law as a

absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it” (299),

race-producing force is reached by claiming the veracity of embodied experience.

Generalization from embodied experience is an interpretive tool for understanding the

functions of law, as the broad field of legal scholarship known as critical race theory has
established. Mari Matsuda writes, “
In her article, “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” ([1987] 1995: 63) What is suggested here is not abstract consideration of the position of

we must look to what Gramsci called ‘organic intellectuals,’ grassroots philosophers

the least advantaged. . . . Instead

who are uniquely able to relate theory to the concrete experiences of oppression.” Matsuda’s
point is that we can learn as much about the phenomenology of law from reading Frederick
Douglass as we can from Oliver Wendell Holmes. And while her initial statements suggest that organic intellectuals like Douglass merely relate theory to experience, as her

this testimony from the bottom opens new conceptual ground by theorizing
argument develops she points to one way in which

in the seemingly uncrossable lacuna of critical legal studies. Matsuda asks, “How could anyone
believe both of the following statements? (1) I have a right to participate equally in society with
any other person; (2) Rights are whatever those in power say they are. One of the primary
lessons [critical legal studies] can learn from the experience of the bottom is that one can
believe both of those statements simultaneously, and that it may well be necessary to do so” (65).

Looking to the bottom opens the theorization of the “both/and” demanded by the politics of
deconstruction: the insistence on deconstructing law while believing that “justice in itself, if such
a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructable” (Derrida 1990: 945).

In every stroke of his pen, Baldwin is theorizing in this difficult both/and . We see this in “The Fire Next Time” as he holds on to both the assertion that “there is absolutely no
reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am” (342) and the diagnosis that “there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching

a demand to be included in the representative mechanism of the

changes in the American political and social structure” (335). The first assertion is

United States’ democratic republic, while the second is a demand to rethink the very foundation
of that republic. Baldwin does not believe that America was capable of
is not contradicting himself. He as it was at the time

making Black freedom truly possible, since America’s condition of possibility was and is Black
unfreedom. At the same time, Baldwin absolutely believes in his and any Black person’s right to
shape the laws that govern the United States. The law may not be able to deliver justice, but that does not mean Baldwin gives up on the possibility. And this is not a mere hypothetical
or theoretical exercise for him.

To repeat, Baldwin theorizes this both/and through his abstraction vis-à-vis his embodied experience. Haptically knowing the police is a way for knowing the law, and insofar as the police are the embodiment of

In this
the law, Baldwin’s knowledge of the law comes through violence. And philosophically, in the text of “The Fire Next Time,” Blackness comes to know itself as produced by the law through violence.

way, Baldwin severs the term law from the term justice, as any account of race and law in the
United States must do.

But Baldwin refuses to only sever; he also sutures. In separating law from justice, he also
attaches the former to the phenomenon of violence through the police officer’s enforcement and the lived conditions of those he calls Negroes. “The Fire Next Time” thus

“there is no such thing as

highlights what would become a central question for Derrida in “Force of Law.” In his extended essay, Derrida (1990: 925) occupies himself with thinking the seemingly simple truism that

law that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of
being ‘enforced,’ applied by force.” That is, the law means nothing if there is no capacity for
making sure people follow what it says. The law can function only if it has as part of its
structure the capacity to inflict violence. On a different register, Hartman (1997: 205) extends this through her analysis of police power, violence, the state, and the social as “the law’s excess.”2

For Hartman, as with Baldwin, the law is that which maintains social order using force. On the
one hand this sounds like a radical indictment of the law and its officers, but on the other hand
it is basic social contract theory.

one essential strand of

Without spending the time to close-read Locke, Hobbes, or Rousseau, or even John Rawls or Charles Mills or Carole Pateman—a worthy task that is beyond the scope of my present essay—

mainstream social contract theory has been the state’s monopoly on violence. Basically, citizens agree to cede their claims on
means of violence to the state to be used to maintain order. Put simply, I give up my right to bash your skull in for stealing my property in exchange to the police so that they can physically restrain (and injure and kill) people engaged in “criminal” activity as a way of
preventing innocent folks from being harmed. So, the state has a monopoly on violence embodied by the police. The police patrol the borders of the law. Inside these borders are those who are members of the body politic, the citizens who have agreed on the social
contract and are thus protected by it in the form of the violence of the law as embodied and performed by the police. Should any person break the social contract, they remove themselves to the outside of the law’s protection from violence.3 Once on the outside,
they are subject to the (legal) violence of the police because they are beyond the law’s protection.

Black people in the United States are both inside and outside the law. They are within
Hartman observes that 4

the vision of the law as potential criminals subject to the law’s punishments, but they are
outside the law’s reach of protection insofar as they are not counted as fully Human citizens that
merit protection from violence. And so, extralegal violence against Black bodies is made legal
in the sense that violence against a body outside the boundaries of the law, especially when
enacted on a presumed criminal—and “the slippage between being Black and a felon as Hartman (1997: 189) writes,

is quite remarkable in this punitive ontology of race”—is the legal violence of policing.

Here we have an account of the law’s magic—the transubstantiation of extralegal violence into
that which is necessary to maintain order. The policeman’s badge—like the slave catcher’s
badge when he was operating in a Northern city after the Fugitive Slave Act— casts a spell that
makes an illegal chokehold a mechanism of justice. It has always already been permissible,
according to this account of American law, to violently attack Black subjects.
After invoking without fully unpacking this aspect of social contract theory, Derrida (1990: 927) asks, “What difference is there between, on the one hand, the force that can be

law comes
just, or in any case deemed legitimate . . . and on the other hand the violence that one always deems unjust?” Derrida asks these questions in arguing that

into existence through a founding violence, and that this founding violence is indistinguishable
from the violence it requires of itself to enact in order to sustain its very existence. That is, the
structural violence of the law inaugurated by the social contract is both that which births law as
the “ordering” force of society and that which sustains law as the fabric keeping us all together.
It is at this point in “Force of Law” that it becomes most apparent why we ought to include Derrida in this constellation of thinkers through which we can read Baldwin on law. After all, the tension of indistinguishability between the “legitimate” force of law and the

the indistinguishability between the law’s founding violence and its sustaining
force “one always deems unjust,” and

violence, are most apparent in the very structuring terms of Baldwin’s thinking—the police. “But what
today bears witness in an even more ‘spectral’ way in mixing the two forms of violence,” Derrida (1990: 1005) writes, “is the modern institution of the police” (my emphasis).

Black studies
Thinking Hartman and Derrida alongside Baldwin as a way of occupying what Matsuda identifies as the apparent lacuna of critical legal studies5 engages the reasoning behind Baldwin’s fundamental skepticism of the law.

scholars like Hartman, Sharpe, Weheliye, Spillers, Wynter, Jared Sexton, Calvin Warren, and Fred
Moten have been and are thinking in this gap between law’s monopoly on violence and actual
embodied conditions of possibility of the social contract written in the blood of Black people. They are

the Black subject comes into being as the ground on which the law is erected
seeking analyses of how while also exceeding
and escaping the reach of the law.6

Baldwin theorizes the Negro as a conceptual figure brought into

As already mentioned, even as he does so by way of everyday embodied experience,

existence by the law through the violence of slavery. So when Baldwin claims “the Negro” as the figure that best describes his own existence in the mid-twentieth century, he

no matter what the law does

is claiming a figure haunted by the pejorative contained in the capitalized letter N that begins its name and can never let go of the founding violence of the law. Thus, for Baldwin,

to claim a change in the position of the Negro, it is impossible to construct a “postslavery”

Negro or a “post–civil rights” Negro. “the semiotics of the slave ship continue” in In Sharpe’s (2016: 21) words,

“the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and
the school.” The barrier that the law would erect between the founding violence of law that brings the Negro into existence as thing and the continued violence of law in the present that treats the Negro as object is revealed to be full of holes by
the very concept the law inaugurates.

if the construct of the Negro is produced through law, and the law is produced and maintained
So

through violence, then the construct of the Negro is produced and maintained through violence.
the mutual imbrications and coconstitutive relationship of these inextricable concepts
But Baldwin’s insight is in .

if violence becomes the inaugurating condition of the law, then Blackness becomes a
Rather,

constituting force of law. He is anticipating Sexton (2011: 36), as, indeed, “the law is dependent on what it polices.”

to be the descendant of enslaved Black people

To return to Baldwin’s pronouncement that to be a Negro in America is defined as property, as non-Human, as “flesh” in Spillers’s (1987)

to be a Negro in America, then, is to be a product of the law and the

words, and as not possessing rights that white people are bound to respect,

object against which the force of law acts in maintaining the law’s very enforceability and
therefore its very existence. Blackness thus does not merely exist in relation to law as that
which is outside it and therefore oppressed by it, but Blackness is inscribed in the law as that
other which receives the violence meted out by police that ensures the law’s possibility. Thus to extricate
Blackness from law is to tear apart the fabric of law—and, if we follow Hartman, the entire social world, and, if we follow Weheliye as we will below, the entire category of the Human as Man—itself.
Anti-Blackness as Both/Neither Legal and/nor Extralegal Even after the signing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the immediate signs that such legislation is ultimately inadequate, Baldwin continues to
write about the law, perhaps most directly in “No Name in the Street,” an essay that began as a meditation on the lives and deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. In this essay, the fact that the law is
violence—made material in the form of police and prisons—becomes a given for Baldwin and thus no longer a point that needs to be argued but a point from which to argue.

Baldwin argues that the demarcation between that which is and those whom are inside and outside the law is based in appearance alone. This has two valences: on one level, this means that actions that are
supposedly within the scope of the law are not substantively different from actions ostensibly prohibited by the law; and on another level, this means that individuals who are supposedly embodiments of the law
—that is, the police—are actually different from those who ostensibly embody the law’s limits—that is, criminals—only in appearance, not in substance. In Baldwin’s ([1972] 1998: 452) words, “It means nothing
therefore, to say to so thoroughly insulated a people [as white and privileged Americans] that the forces of crime and the forces of law and order work hand in hand in the ghetto, bleeding it day and night. It
means nothing to say that, in the eyes of the Black and the poor certainly, the principle distinction between a policeman and a criminal is to be found in their attire” (my emphasis). This emphasis on attire pushes
Baldwin’s argument beyond a simple (and still important) assertion that the justice system is racist by exploding the difference that defines justice in terms of legality.

The argument of “No Name in the Street” begins in France. In recalling the atmosphere in Paris during the early years of the Algerian War, Baldwin describes the precarity faced by anyone in Paris “who was not,
resoundingly, from the north of Europe” when hailed by the Paris police officer (375). In one scene, Baldwin describes “two young Italians” who, “speeding merrily along on their Vespa, . . . failed to respond to a
policeman’s order to halt, whereupon the policeman fired, and [their] holiday came to a bloody end” (376). While this brief account lacks the venom of the passage in which Baldwin differentiates between the cop
and the criminal based solely on appearance, it is appearance that emerges as the marker of the law in this (ocularcentric) earlier moment in “No Name.”

Within the shades of whiteness that are visible in Europe, Italians can be identified against the French by perhaps being marked by a slightly darker, more Mediterranean hue. The policeman’s visibility, in contrast, comes not through an ethnic identity readable in his
skin color—during a time when skin color could ostensibly differentiate between enemies on opposite sides of a colonial war—but instead from his attire. He is dressed in the garb of the state and armed with the instrument of its monopoly on violence. The
policeman is the embodiment of the (colonial) law, and the Italians embody the shades of the (colonized) criminals who exist outside that law in their failure to heed the law’s hailing. Even though they are Italian and not Algerian, in appearance the darker-skinned

If the police
Italians can be read by the eyes of the law as outside its arm of protection. In this French-Italian example, the borders of the law fall along national borders, highlighting what was perhaps only implicit in “The Fire Next Time.”

are the embodiments of the violence that is the force of law (Baldwin and Derrida), and if the
force of law is that which secretes the social as law’s excess by enforcing a defined order on the
people of a state then Baldwin’s analysis of the violence of policing is also an analysis of
(Baldwin and Hartman),7

the violence of the liberal nation-state itself. Policing operates on anti-Black logic, and the
nation-state is an anti-Black project.
It is important that this moment come early in Baldwin’s essay, for it establishes the stakes of what is to come. What happens when legal agents of the state are granted the authority and means—the power—to
end life? This question is given frightening inflection when brought back across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, where the context of assumed inherent criminality shifts from colonial war to the specificity
of anti-Blackness.

At one point, Baldwin recalls an encounter he had with “one of the most powerful men in one of the states [he] visited” (390). We don’t learn exactly what this person’s official position was, though it is not hard to
imagine him as a senator, representative, governor, or other kind of government official. While the scene serves mainly as an occasion for Baldwin to offer complex meditations on power, sex, sexuality, and love,
there is also an important moment when the mortal threat of policing rears its head: “This man, with a phone call, could prevent or provoke a lynching” (390). We don’t know for sure if this man is indeed an
employee of the state, but we do know that lynching can be interpreted as a kind of policing. And yet, it is definitively an extralegal means of policing, supposedly outside the realms of the law. But there is a
possibility that this man could be a worker of the very law that precludes lynching from the legal means of its own enforcement. Thus Baldwin gives us two different forms of violence—legal, such as when a police
officer shoots those who do not obey his hail, and extralegal, such as when a person is lynched—and brings them into a common space for interpretation.8

There is a literal common space for interpreting legal and extralegal violence within the geography of Baldwin’s essay, and that is the American South itself; more specifically, it is the Jim Crow–segregated
restaurant into which he accidently enters through the wrong door. He fails to be hailed correctly by the entrance signs. Like the case of the police officer’s uniform, the law enters Bald-win’s text in the form of a
dressing, this time an ornament of a business establishment, and the danger of (extra)legal violence is presented when a Black person fails to heed the hailing of this instantiation of the law. In failing to be hailed,
however, Baldwin enacts a mode of being in excess of the law precisely as his flesh is threatened with violence, if we follow Weheliye’s (2014: 110) discourse on pornotroping when he writes, “Instead of emerging
as an ontological condition, flesh comes into view as a series of desubjectivations, which are always already subjectivations, that hail the slave and the spectator in order to engrave upon him or her the
hypervisible yet also illegible hieroglyphics of the flesh.” Baldwin thus not only “fails” to move according to the hail; he moves, as (de)subjectivated flesh, in excess of the hail. His subjectivity is not destroyed, but
the moment highlights “how violent political domination activates a fleshy surplus that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality” (2).

While walking in a Southern town, Baldwin turns and enters a restaurant on a corner and is met with the paralyzing stares and deafening silence of an establishment full, at least visibly, with only white people. A
woman eventually breaks the silence, barking, “What you want, boy?” Baldwin backs away and hears a voice behind him directing him to a separate entranceway. Upon turning around and seeing a white man, as
Baldwin ([1972] 1998: 397–98) reflects, “This man thought that he was being kind; and he was, indeed, being as kind as can be expected from a guide in hell.”

Baldwin goes around to the other entrance, fearing what confrontation could come if he were to answer back, especially given his northern accent. Indeed, there exists a script that these actors clothed in the
color of their skins are expected to follow on the stage set by Jim Crow’s dance. In this moment, the police officer’s gun and the lynch mob’s rope imagined in the earlier two scenarios come together, as Baldwin
tells readers: “It was impossible to get anything but bourbon, and the very smell of bourbon is still associated in my mind with the mean little eye of deputy sheriffs and the holster on the hip and the ominous
trees which line the highways” (400, my emphasis). Here in the American South, a Black “boy” could be shot by the gun on the hip of the sheriff’s deputy and hanged from the tree on the side of the road by a
lynch mob of respectable citizens. He is subject to both legal and extralegal violence as means of policing his subjectivity, so that the two forms of violence become indistinguishable.

The Black Panthers and Baldwin’s Abolitionism Since Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin has pointed out how whiteness has packed the potential for its own demise within its own means of control, its own weakness
within its ostensible strength. This is no different in “No Name in the Street,” since in this very moment of segregation, the potential for violent backlash against Jim Crow—the potential for self-defense—is made
powerfully present.

After seating himself in the “colored” portion of the restaurant, Baldwin realizes, “I was nearly close enough to touch them, certainly close enough to touch her, close enough to kill them all, but they couldn’t see
me, either” (398). In this moment Baldwin embodies or, better, enfleshes Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus. The flesh, Weheliye (2014: 2) writes, “represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never
annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds.” Baldwin seating himself at the segregated counter is not merely a defeat at the hands of the state, the law,
and (the threat of) force. It is also in excess of the state, the law, and (the threat of) force that disfigures even as it sustains the social order.

In a scene that eerily mirrors Herman Melville’s Babo holding a shaving razor in “Benito Cereno,” in “No Name” Baldwin recalls a barber who refuses to register to vote in consideration of the threat of violence posed by his white customers. In his interaction with this
barber, while it would seem that Baldwin would be displeased by the refusal to register to vote, the man’s “response made it impossible to disagree with him: he may have been planning to cut a white man’s throat one day. If I had been white, I certainly would
never have allowed him anywhere near me with a razor in his hand” (392–93). Every stroke of that barber’s blade on the soft flesh of a white man’s exposed throat is the discourse-brushed flesh of the object of the law’s force brushing back against the body of the

The identification of
state—its law. This is because, to follow Hartman (1997: 199) in her reading of Plessy v. Ferguson, “police power was little more than the benevolent articulation of state racism in the name of the public good.

the state with its subjects was thus inseparable from the process of creating internal enemies
against which the comfort and prosperity of the populace could be defended.” the Black Simply put,

barber is the internal enemy of the state against which police power is deployed
, like Baldwin at the “colored” counter,

to maintain the social order of the state’s body politic. But, because the racialized assemblage
produced by this objectification exceeds the force of law, it can retain the potential for an act of
self-defense that would undo the social order being thus maintained by law’s violence.

self-defense frames Baldwin’s

It is this potential for that ([1972] 1998: 454–55) advocacy for the politics of the Black Panther
Party for Self-Defense. He describes their emergence as “inevitable”:
Yet the advent of the Panthers was as inevitable as the arrival of that day in Montgomery, Alabama, when Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to stand up on that bus and give up her seat to a white man. That day had been
coming for a very long time; danger upon danger, and humiliation upon humiliation, had piled intolerably high and gave Mrs. Parks her platform. . . . Just so with the Panthers: it was inevitable that the fury would
erupt, that a black man, openly, in the sight of all his fellows, should challenge the policeman’s gun, and not only that, but the policeman’s right to be in the ghetto at all.9

If Baldwin is aligning himself with the Panthers, who “are far from being an illegal or lawless organization” but instead are understood in “No Name” as “a great force for peace and stability” (455), then he is also
aligning himself with the critique made by the very existence of the Panthers: the American legal system does not include Black people in its boundaries of protection, and yet it punishes these same people with
its monopoly on violence.

Baldwin’s theorizing is not only illuminated and enriched by theorists like Weheliye and Hartman, but Baldwin himself illuminates and enriches those theorists. Baldwin reads the Panthers as responding to the police as an embodied claim of the state’s legitimacy. But

Thus the legal anti-Black violence of the

he then articulates that the Panthers respond to the nonevent of emancipation by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the law and its force.

police is rearticulated by Baldwin and other radical Black thinkers as “the violence which one
always considers unjust.” The system is established on the originary foundation of anti-Black
violence, but survival must still be possible within that system’s daily enactment of anti-Black
violence that sustains the state’s existence.

Simply put: the logic of policing in the United States is the logic of anti-Blackness. This logic
dissolves the distinction between legal and extralegal violence directed at Black subjects; it is
always unjust violence. This violence, which is both/neither legal and/nor extralegal is
structurally inherent in the law as the necessary potential for the law’s enforceability. This is
the only way to make sense of New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo’s
nonindictment in 2014 for killing Eric Garner. Because the system depends on the
expendability of Black people, who are assumed as always already criminal and therefore
beyond the law’s protection, as the necessary objects of the violence that maintains the law,
it is necessary by the law’s own logic of policing that Pantaleo’s violence not be deemed
unjust. Policing in the United States is racist not merely because of individual prejudice but
because it is inherently structured by racism as its founding and maintaining violence.
It may seem like there is no way out of this situation. But as Baldwin highlights in the scene with the Black barber holding his blade against the throats of white men, because of the dependent relationship
between the law and its objects of violence, the law’s ostensible monopoly on violence is constituted by vulnerability and thus is never truly a monopoly. The social structure as it is maintained by law is haunted
by the very specter the law seeks to keep at bay: the Black revolution that would literally undo the world as it is known.

the system is working exactly as it is structured to work. But other ways of being are
As Kaba (2017) notes,

possible. Throughout her work, Kaba articulates how radically revisioning our notions of community and relationality in
both philosophical and concrete ways is the work of abolition that not only seeks to tear down
systems of oppression but also build up a life-sustaining network of accountability and care.

the Panthers
Here, too, In their refusal of the state’s legitimacy and their turn toward
provide the best possible closing note.

caring for their own vulnerable communities—think of the breakfast program as prominently as
the armed patrolling of the police—the Panthers were wrestling with questions the Sharpe (2016: 101) articulates in In the

“How are we beholden to and beholders of each other in ways that change across time
Wake when she writes,

and place and space and yet remain?” It is in this being beholden to each other, and in his
reading of the Panthers’ attempts at this beholding, that Baldwin’s abolitionism emerges even if
he never names it as such. dare to imagine that the world need not be the way it is.
What Baldwin’s work s do is He is not

describing the excesses of law’s violence is theorizing the possibilities that exceed that
merely ; he

violence. Black people “are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to

Because, in Sharpe’s words,

overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and each other by that force” Black (16),

subjectivity is crafted by the force of law via the policeman’s club and the slave master’s
, for Baldwin,

whip, but it also lives beyond the reach of the club and whip. There are worlds within the
world Without ever leaving this world and all its
, and the Panthers are merely one vision on which Baldwin focuses in his gaze toward what Kaba calls “the horizon of abolition.”

terror theorizes another.

, Baldwin

A world without prisons.

A world without police.

A world where Black people can breathe.

But they wanted us to be beasts of burden

So instead like birds, we flew
 Counter-Advocacy

Counter-Advocacy: Instead of the AFF’s instrumentalization of duties and rights,

we should affirm a duty that this activity has to the Black Chorus
 Part III
To the ones who can fly
The street queers of the future
If you read this, you will hear the things we also heard.
The sound of the chorus.
It rejoices in the story.
The chorus taught us that not only birds and planes could fly
That there was a different dream
In the deepest darkest recess of an opaque song, it is clear that life is at stake.

Inside the circle it is clear that every song is really the same song,

but crooned in infinite variety,

every story altered and unchanging:

How can I live? I want to be free. Hold on

The chorus was a vehicle for a new kind of story

It made you rid yourself of all that was sovereign here
Our Ancestors used to tell stories about the people who can fly
For Black [QUEER AND] trans folk in particular, however, I think our ritual is the act of flight.

The people had forgotten what powers they had

so the story went, cuz they were enslaved.

But ever so often, there was the ones who still remembered

cuz they knew the old ways we had brought from our homeland,

and so they could mount up in the air like as if they had eagle's wings.

They would swoop down over the plantation

the story said

and whisper deep knowledge

knowledge of self

knowledge of spirit

knowledge of solidarity and of struggle,

right on into the ears of those Black people who had forgot,

and get them climbin on up into the sky right along with them.

IT WAS

She needed what most colored girls needed:

a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters

neighbors,

Sunday school teachers,

best girl friends,

and what all to give her.

We BEEN inviting you all to join the chorus

The cacophony of ever-present sound
Committed to the livability of all made impossible here

If you listen closely, you can hear the whole world in a bent note,

a throwaway lyric,

a singular thread of the collective utterance.

The chorus cannot die

Who else would dare believe another world was possible,

The chorus makes a plan, they [we] draft[s] a blueprint: move, escape, rush to the city, quit
the job and run away from everything hell-bent on sucking all the life out of them. A moment
of reprieve.

Who else would be reckless enough to dream a colored girl’s or a black woman’s future?

No one else imagines anything better.

So it is left to them [us] to envision things otherwise; as exhausted as they [we]are,

they [we]don’t relent,

they [we] try to make a way out of no way,

to not be defeated by defeat.

To fall in step with the chorus is to do more than shake your ass and hum the melody

Guessing at the world and seizing at chance, she eludes the law and transforms the terms of
the possible.
Mr. Smith wrote a note
Black Debate wrote one too
Meet us at No Mercy
You did not come
The chorus did
To bear witness to the flight
To Find the Courage to Leap
We’re talking to you
Who never show up to NO MERCY
Who shut the door on what the chorus was
And called it Black Debate
In the air, away from real life, he [we] felt free,
We heard the chorus
Sometime it whispered
Sometimes it was loud – IT DARED TO INTERVENE
but on the ground,
Concerned that we had stolen the thing by which you had no right to
When you could’ve joined the chorus
We don’t owe yall shit
You owe us everything
We have a home
You made it a house
when he talked to Guitar just before he [we] left,
the wings of all those other people’s nightmares
flapped in his face and constrained him.
I’ll be damned if it do that today.
We’ve called
Dred Scott, Breyonna Taylor, Nina Pop
We’re Calling
Decades of niggas who did not ever get a chance to make it here
Who spoke when not spoken to
Who dared to dream
For Louisville, For Towson, For Rutgers, For Wayne
For Oklahoma, For Fullerton, For Long Beach
For Liberty, For Emporia, For Vermont, For Iowa
For Houston, UMKC , Irvine
For Idaho, Los Rios, SFSU
For Those Without Names

Answer the Call

Right Now
Have Mercy – I’ll be Damned.

And so the chorus sang

O Sugarman done fly away
Sugarman done gone
Sugarman cut across the sky
Sugarman gone home