Moon-Kie Jung - Antiblackness

1. Joo H. Costa Vargas and Moon-Kie Jung
2. Charles W. Mills
3. Frank B. Wilderson III
4. Iyko Day
5. Anthony Paul Farley
6. Zach Sell
7. Sarah Haley
8. Jae Kyun Kim and Moon-Kie Jung
9. Dylan Rodrguez
10. Mohan Ambikaipaker
11. Connie Wun
12. Joy James
13. Crystal M. Fleming
14. Tanya Kater Hernndez
15. Sarah Ihmoud
16. Jodi A. Byrd

O H. COSTA VARGASMOON-KIE JUNG

The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated. For the horrors of the American Negros life there has been almost no language. Of the approaching centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin noted, You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon (1962, 22, 9495). In the past decade, the U.S. public was made aware of certain spectacular brutalities presently borne by Black people, owing largely to numerous video-recorded police and vigilante killings and the Movement for Black Lives. Reaching a tipping point in 2020, a series of such murdersof Ahmaud Arbery (February 23), Breonna Taylor (March 13), and, above all, George Floyd (May 25)set off an unprecedented wave of protests; the violent deaths of Black trans peopleNina Pop (May 3), Tony McDade (May 27), Brayla Stone (June 25), Merci Mack (June 30), Shaki Peters (July 1), and Bree Black (July 3)generated far less outrage. This ongoing moment has been important, but, as is too often missed in academic as well as nonacademic discussions, these cruelties, the latest additions to a vast and uncatalogued archive, were not exceptional but of a piece with a long history of global scale. Even those who sought to take full measure of the horrors continually understated them: some things, maybe many things, needed fixing, but surely, it was no longer 1963, much less 1863. There was still almost no language.

This book grew out of our dissatisfaction with not only liberal but also most leftist analyses that failed to contend, unflinchingly, with antiblacknessits enduring depth, breadth, and violence. Wishing to address this failure collectively and interdisciplinarily, we reached out to scholars whose work we hold in utmost respect and asked them to engage with antiblackness without compromiseto summon the necessary language. As the following chapters suggest, such an endeavor entails a thoroughgoing critique and a fundamental overhaul of the social sciences and the humanities. For our part, in this introduction, we posit and think through the constitutive antiblackness underpinning the foundational categories of the modern world, the Social and the Human. As a corollary, we then draw a conceptual distinction between antiblackness and racism, the latter proving to be inapt and inadequate in capturing the former.

To conclude Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, historian William Sewell Jr. returns to a most basic question: So, then: What is the social in social science? (emphasis in original). Distilling a lifetime of interdisciplinary work across the social sciences, he answers, The social is the complex and inescapable ontological ground of our common life as humans. In the modern disenchanted world, the Social is the foundation of collective human existence and the foundational term for the scientific study of it (Sewell 2005, 325, 329, 369). Yet the social sciences fail to grasp what W. E. B. Du Bois (1935, 727) refers to as the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history: the transoceanic, transcontinental enslavement of Africans. For example, the broadest of the social sciences that likewise claims the entirety of the Social, the modern social world, as its domain, sociology, despite thriving subfields on race and historical sociology, almost completely ignores racial slavery (Jung 2019). Even when the social sciences do acknowledge it and document it empirically, their theories of the Socialthat is, social theoriesinexorably misrecognize and euphemize it, most typically as a variety of coerced labor. In short, the social sciencesdisciplines born of modernity that theorize, empirically investigate, and, indeed, do their part in constructing modernityeither do not or cannot comprehend arguably the most decisive and defining development in modern history.

How do we make sense of this wholly unnoticed yet fundamental paradox? A profoundly antisocial condition, slavery breaches the bounds of the Social, the social sciences self-defined limits. The Social is not common ground for all. That slavery presents such an extreme antisocial situation (Steinmetz 2016, 1012) is prefigured by the work of Orlando Patterson, ironically a sociologist, whose Slavery and Social Death, though influential outside his discipline, has had little theoretical impact within it. In the book, he carries out a comprehensive historical survey of slavery and identifies its constituent elements: slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. The enslaved is a socially dead person or, alternatively, a social nonperson (Patterson 1982, 1, 5, 7, 13). In other words, to be enslaved is to have no recognized social existence: in and against the social world but not of it.

Articulated to transoceanic trade, empire building, and capitalism, the modern enslavement of Black people, racialized through enslavement as Black, assumes global scale and significance, distinguishing it from premodern cases of slavery. In an earlier publication, Charles Mills (2013, 35), one of this books contributors, reflects on the singular position of Black people in the modern world:

The peculiar experience of Africans under Western modernity, which originally turned them into negroes (lowercase), creating a race where previously none had existed, impressed a forced diaspora on them that took them to Europe and the Americas , made the extraction of their labor central to the making of the modern world, while still leaving them globally identifiable as the people who were appropriately designated a slave race in modernity, the very period when slavery was [otherwise] dead or dying in the West.