ABSTRACT
Civilization is a permanent attempt to incarcerate Black being, to dissipate its decentering of canonized (white, multiculturalist) human being, that is, White Being. This chapter is a confrontation with White Being as the proctoring force of Civil Rights. Guided by Sylvia Wynter’s critique of European and Euro-American humanism, i understand White Being as the militarized, normative paradigm of human being that inhabitants of the ongoing half-millennial Civilization project have involuntarily inherited as a violent universal. (The use of “i” is an intentional practice of disidentification from notions of the free-willing, self-determined, rational (white and Western) modern liberal subject.) Global anti-Blackness, then, is a condition of possibility for White Being, and, as João Costa Vargas exhaustively demonstrates, attracts non-Black social identities into various degrees of affinity with White Being’s infrastructures of sociality (including Civil Rights and legitimated anti-Black state violence). Under the contemporary regime of Civil Rights, the horizon of liberated/free/“equal” Black (and other nonwhite) racial subjectivities is defined through a disciplinary and compulsory attachment to the legislative and juridical order of rights. This begins to describe the generalized anti-Black tyranny of the Civil Rights regime, which attempts to capture Black human being within a Civil Rights ensemble that is always simultaneously enforced and constituted by criminalization and militarized policing (domestic war). The chapter considers how abolitionist praxis demystifies the Civil Rights regime as a carceral anti-Black and racial-colonial violence that defines what i have elsewhere called the contemporary period of White Reconstruction.
