Who is counting? ‘We’ — and this is not the royal we — are not taking the killing of black Brazilians into account (to keep the focus on one country, which happens to be the one in which I was born). More generally, regarding the present global political landscape: the security state, and its lethal police practices, is not at the centre of our political concerns. It is not the main point of our political discourse and practice and struggles. Who is and is not counting is not the question. What do we take into account as politically significant? Yes, this is the question. The first question; the beginning, the very early beginning of something else, something, I fear, that cannot emerge — let’s not talk about its articulation — in the present configuration of the field of political discourse. I’ve written extensively about this, the first time was 25 years ago for a newspaper in Brazil. That I have been writing about this for half of my life is not important. What matters is that many others in Brazil and elsewhere have done so — for just as long and many others for much longer — and it has not registered in our political imagination, conversations, and actions. It has not translated into an intellectual-political praxis. Fires, as direct action, then become the sole response when justice fails in/as its realisation — as we’ve just seen in Ferguson, Missouri. True, we talk about criminalisation (as an ideological move) and mass incarceration (as a modality of exclusion, a failure to meet the principle of universality) — of black folks, of immigrants, of Muslims, and other global subaltern populations — but we have yet to engage crime (the legal concept) as a question (in the classical sense that it targets the state and not as a moral one) for critical thinking and political organising. Why? Let’s ask another question: what counts as politically significant in Brazil and elsewhere? And let’s continue and ask all the other questions that arise from this. I’m pissed off, tired, sad, and fearful for the families; those who know, who love, and/or who have grown up with someone who will be killed by the state or by those who State-Capital gets to do the killing: in Brazil, in the US, in Palestine, in Mexico, in Colombia, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt, in Libya, and the list only grows. Read the papers, pay attention, take stock, and you will get the whole picture: it is a global state of affairs. What to do about it? Well, this is a challenge we (all of us) will then, and only then, face together, in Brazil and everywhere. criticallegalthinking/2014/11/29/counting-deaths-black-youth-brazil/
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 00:03:34 +0000
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