Since Republican Senator Tim Scott’s remarks on Wed April 28 (following President Biden’s address to Congress) the question, “Is America a racist nation?” has found renewed traction on the major news networks. Hot takes on our social media feeds also abound. There are many ways to think about how/why this question has been able to garner the attention it has in our public square. But for those of us who study how the history of race and anti-black violence unfolds in the North American context, one thing is abundantly clear: It’s precisely because the United States is a place where racism in general, and anti-blackness more specifically, can thrive that this question is able to capture the collective attention it has. In other words, that we’re still asking this question of whether or not “America is a racist nation” seems less about the question itself, and more about the existential threat that it poses to our collective investment in what Eddie Glaude, Jr. calls “the lie”. The lie, Glaude writes, is that “broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions” that gives to whiteness the subject position in the American grammar book. The same architecture of false assumptions that stitches together the horrific brotherhood of twenty-five year old Michael Stewart, forty-four year old Eric Garner and forty-seven year old George Floyd.
The minutes leading up to the jury’s verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial were harrowing, in a historical sense. They are minutes that many of us will always remember. We’ll always be able to recall what we were doing and who we were with as they slowly ticked away. What made the wait most difficult for me was watching my sons – both young black boys growing up in and against the “powerful architecture” of the lie – wait through those minutes, knowing that no matter what the verdict was, there was really no good news to celebrate with them. So when ‘guilty on all three counts’ finally came, there was some sense of relief, for sure. But it was the kind of relief you might liken to standing on the edge of a precipice, and being lucky enough to not have fallen off ‘this one time’. What I mean by that is that alongside the relief one feels in not falling off is that more overwhelming ‘wobble’ of dangling over the edge of a precipice in the first place. It’s a relief, yes. But not enough to undo the horror of what you’re all too aware was statistically way more likely. Not enough to undo the horror of knowing that you’re alive not because you were supposed to survive, but because of, well, some alchemic combination of grit and dumb luck.
It was in that way that I was relieved to hear that Derek Chauvin was going to be held accountable for the life he had taken away (in that slow and casual way he stole George Floyd’s life). The trifecta of guilty counts felt like being given a chance to steal away from a precipice’s edge, just a little, so that you saved yourself from falling off. At least this time. When I found out that George Floyd’s murderer was going to pay a price for taking his life, I felt like I needed to hug my two boys, in the way I imagine George Floyd’s family felt the need to embrace each other. Not quite in a moment of celebration, although there was a clear battle that had been won. I hugged my boys because we were seeing what looked like a criminal justice system working to value black life, affirming a black man’s sacred humanity. But I also (and, to be honest, mostly) hugged my boys because what we were seeing that day felt so very happenstance, so ‘this one time’, so unexpectedly against what we’ve come to know as statistically likely. Nothing about the relief of the Chauvin trial’s guilty verdict takes away this wobble of being racialized as black in the US, of having to insist on one’s right to freedom in a world in which black life is unequivocally unfree. I guess you can say that I hugged my boys because they still needed to understand this as their reality, even as the guilty verdict came across the TV that afternoon.
Rehearsing, here, all the police killings of unarmed black women, men and children that happened in the months prior George Floyd’s murder and immediately following the conviction of Derek Chauvin feels somewhat like indulging in catastrophe porn. (It is also something that would make me very fucking tired, and so I’m not going to do that.) However, I do want to point to this ever- and always-growing cluster of police killings to raise, perhaps, a more useful question than “Is America a racist nation?” And that is: Is there something about the intimacy between racism and self-formation in the US, which will always make that question a false start?
In a 2003 co-authored piece, Steven Martinot and Jared Sexton write that “notions of the state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same coin. Narrow understandings of mere racism are proving themselves impoverished because they cannot see this fundamental relationship. What is needed is the development of a radical critique of the structure of the coin.” What if we’ve already missed the rot of anti-black racism if we wait for a Derek Chauvin to express our outrage? What if what we should mean by ‘anti-black racism’ is not only the “flash point” of Breonna Taylor’s murder, but (before that), the disproportionate access to life-sustaining healthcare, education, clean water and safe housing that structures being black in the United States? What if “a radical critique of the coin” shows that anti-blackness – the racially uneven distribution of death across all aspects of our social field – makes someone like Derek Chauvin not a statistical anomaly, but rather a likely product of a state machinery invested in the capture of black life?
The black radical imagination and black activisms have historically understood the need for this kind of radical critique – of the whole coin, and of the interconnectedness of all its sides. It is only then, on the heels of such a critique, that an ‘otherwise’ future opens up for black life, an otherwise future in which “black” can, indeed, be free and human and sacred. To be sure, working toward such otherwise futures has always been the impetus for black politics in this radical sense, the sense in which studying blackness (in the words of the poet, Charif Shanahan) reveals what is both the “pained and possible” of black life. What is possible — it is also with that in my heart that I hugged my two boys on the afternoon of April 20. Imagining and working toward otherwise futures is essential to mothering black children. We raise them for living, for breathing, and for taking up the task of demanding – with an audacity of hope and a suspicion of cheap optimism – a world in which they can be free.
And so the question of what is possible for black life – possible as abolitionist rehearsals of naming ourselves – has always accompanied and ruptured the impossibilities coded in the violent algorithm of “the lie” in which the US continues to invest. And for this reason, what is of most concern to scholars of the history of race and anti-blackness in the United States is not the question of whether or not “America is a racist nation”. Rather, what most concerns us is the more urgent question of how we might gather our present and ancestral resources in order to – in the words of Ruthie Gilmore – “change everything”.
Kris F. Sealey
Kris F Sealey is Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. She graduated from Spelman College in 2001 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics, and received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Memphis. Dr. Sealey served as the book review editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy from 2011 - 2022. From 2018 – 2021, she also directed PIKSI-Rock (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute), a summer immersion experience at Penn State for under-represented undergraduate students with an interest in pursuing a doctorate in philosophy. Dr. Sealey’s areas of research include Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, was published in December 2013 with SUNY Press. Her second book, Creolizing the Nation, published in September 2020 with Northwestern University Press, was awarded the Guillén Batista book award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2022.
