Derek Chauvin and Anti-blackness
Derek Chauvin and Anti-blackness
There is something even more terrible than white supremacy that has plagued the lives of Black Americans throughout American history and that still plagues their lives today. That “something”, Frank B. Wilderson III claims in his recent book entitled Afropessimism, as well as in a UCLA-sponsored Zoom lecture delivered on April 22, 2021, is anti-blackness.
What is the difference between white supremacy and anti-blackness? From the white supremacist perspective, humanity is a hierarchy, a scale of being, and black people are generally placed at the bottom of the scale. This is terrible enough. But from the anti-black perspective, as Wilderson defines it, black people are not even on the scale, and that is more terrible still. According to anti-black ideology, black people are inferior to other people, but not merely inferior. They are ontologically distinct from other people. That is, they are a different kind of being. In fact, they are not really people at all. They are not human subjects but objects to be used or discarded. They have no intrinsic worth. This, of course, describes the slavemaster’s mentality. In Wilderson’s view, the term “white supremacy” understates the viciousness of this mentality. Unfortunately, Wilderson believes, this mentality has been operative in American life ever since the time of slavery and is still operative today.
Perhaps the most infamous official U.S. government espousal of anti-blackness is to be found in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision of 1857. Dred Scott, who had been an enslaved person in the South, sued to become officially free after he had been brought to Missouri, where slavery was illegal. The court decided not only that Scott could not have his freedom, but also that he had no legal standing even to sue for it. Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, went on to make the blanket declaration that
“the Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.” No rights! None whatsoever! The implication, as James Cone points out in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, is “[T]hat to be black meant that whites could do anything to you and your people, and that neither you nor anyone else could do anything about it.” The implication is not just that black lives matter less than white lives but rather that black lives don’t matter at all.
The Dred Scott Decision was supposedly voided by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And yet, over the years, tragically, Black Americans have had many, many reasons to suppose that Taney’s horrifying pronouncement is still the law of the land. And nowhere is this more true than with respect to the criminal justice system, including both the police and the courts. Philip M. Stinson, in an article entitled “This Case Is an Outlier,” points out that “Less than 2 percent of the on-duty police officers who kill someone are ever charged with a crime and held accountable in courts of law.” Considering that black people are very disproportionately the ones killed, this statistic comes pretty close to indicating that where police violence is concerned black people still have “no rights that a white man is bound to respect.”
According to Professor Wilderson, Derek Chauvin’s crime against George Floyd should be considered a “ritual murder,” a murder with a meaning, a murder that expressed a terrible message that goes beyond white supremacy to antiblackness. Chauvin’s conduct was worse than just a terribly discriminatory and terribly excessive use of force. It was an act of absolute contempt for the very humanity of its victim.
An acquittal in this case, in which the evidence against the officer was so overwhelming, would have sent a chilling, devastating anti-black message to black Americans — a message that as far as the criminal justice system is concerned, they truly do not matter — at all. We can rejoice that in this case that message was not sent, but we should not, of course, be under the illusion that this one victory banishes anti-blackness from American life.
Wilderson’s characterization of anti-blackness as a toxin more deadly even than the toxin of white supremacy, suggests that what black people face in our society is more deeply threatening and destructive than even white folks like myself, who consider ourselves strongly anti-racist, have been able to fathom heretofore. It suggests, moreover, that those of us who are not black are called with greater urgency than ever to stand in solidarity with those who are.
