Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Thomas Nelson, 1843), 297. Available at Google Books →.
The murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 ignited Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle on May, 29, 2020. The center of these protests was the intersection of 11th Avenue and East Pine Street, which is a block from Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct. After clashing with protesters for a week, the SPD abandoned the East Precinct building. On June 9, 2020, the protestors declared the station and the superblock west of it an autonomous zone. Art has flourished there ever since.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963.
Thomas Piketty writes: “The role of historical research is precisely to demonstrate the existence of alternatives and switch points and to show how choices are conditioned by the political and ideological balance of power among contending groups.” Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Harvard University Press, 2019), 516.
Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 5.
Western, Punishment and Inequality, 95.
Adkins writes that the “feature of money as a commodity in present-day finance-led capitalism that distinguishes it from previous moments is that it is pervasive. Money as a commodity does not operate as such only in regard to specialist sites or specific kinds of exchanges but is omnipresent in everyday life.” Adkins, The Time of Money (Stanford University Press, 2018), 63.
What to make of this? The live music venue El Nuevo Rodeo, which was destroyed by fire during the second night of demonstrations that followed Floyd’s murder on May 25, was located near Minneapolis’s Third Police Precinct, which employed Officer Chauvin and which was also destroyed by fire on the second night of the demonstrations. Did Chauvin not know Floyd? How could they have missed each other? Chauvin is said to have spent seventeen years as an off-duty officer for El Nuevo Rodeo. Floyd is said to have also spent a long stretch of time at this business. The owner knew both of them. Did the white officer know he was killing a coworker? Could he not see him as a fellow bouncer at a music venue? Or could he only see a black man, which meant: a man with no property? Indeed, if we were to walk through the mirror of Floyd’s murder, we might enter something like that brutal beating scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seizing his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blonde man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, ‘Apologize! Apologize!’ But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him in the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare!” The white man lived and appeared in a newspaper the following day under the caption “mugged.” Ellison, Invisible Man (Vintage Books, 1995), 4.
The Guardian reports that one in two thousand of all black Americans have died from Covid-19. This piece of information reveals the real dangers blacks face in the present sequence of Black Lives Matter protests. On one side: anger, grief, voices must be made public, must be heard; and on the other: this political necessity, which cannot be expressed in a way that meets the safety standards of social distancing, will likely have lethal consequences for the black community. Once again, black America is between the devil and the deep blue sea. See Ed Pilkington, “Black Americans Dying of Covid-19 at Three Times the Rate of White People,” The Guardian, May 20, 2020 →.
When on March 20, Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, implored old Americans to sacrifice their lives for the economy, it caused a huge scandal. Newsweek’s headline was typical: “GOP Lieutenant Governor Faces Backlash for Saying Grandparents Don’t Want to Sacrifice the Economy for Coronavirus Isolation” →. But only a month later, Georgia, Florida, and Texas were reopening their economies despite the pandemic. A few weeks after that, almost all of America had come to terms with Dan Patrick’s realism, capitalist realism (there is no alternative). My feeling is that a large part of the present Black Lives Matter protest is charged by the horror of this realization: life (white or black) in America is actually less important than the maintenance of the economy, which is structured to preserve and protect property, things. Those in power thought that Americans would just automatically accept necroeconomics (a term I borrow from Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics), despite all of the polling data that clearly showed most Americans were deeply concerned about reopening in the middle of a public health crisis. The compounding of this horror (submit to necroeconomics) with the horror of George Floyd’s knee-choked face was enough to send a large part of the US over the deep end. See Charles Mudede, “Re-opening Businesses During a Pandemic Shows We Are Entering the Age of Necro-Economics,” The Stranger, April 23, 2020 →.