Tag Archives: circulation

We Can’t Breathe

After the injustices in Ferguson, a grand jury in New York piled it on by clearing the cop who put Eric Garner in a chokehold and killed him. Garner said “I can’t breathe!”  11 times. If the liberals of Northeast felt quietly smug about the situation in Ferguson, the failure to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the cop in question, should make it clear that when it comes to being Black in America, there is no safe space.

The sad, frustrating and perhaps devastating thing about the killing of Eric Garner is that it was all caught on video. It exposes why the campaign to put cameras on cops is not going to work. Its proponents misunderstand the issue as one of insufficient visual surveillance of the police. The actual issue is racism so deeply ingrained that it transforms the bodies of Black men and boys into “monsters” or, in the international register, the bodies of Muslim men and boys into terrorists. The Left needs to get over its techno-fetish. Visual surveillance by putting cameras-on-cops (or drone surveillance for human rights abuses or whatever) is neither here nor there when racism and empire have outposts in our heads.

Videos and images do not speak for themselves. After all, there was also a video of the beating of Rodney King. In an interesting deconstruction of what happened at that trial, Judith Butler has written about the contesting reads of the video: one that saw a man being beaten and one, the jury, who saw a man who was threatening the police:

From these two interpretations, emerges, then, a contest within a visual field, a crisis in the certainty of what is visible, one that is produced through the saturation and schematization of that field with the inverted projections of white paranoia. The visual representation of the black male body being beaten on the street by the policemen and their batons was taken up by the racist interpretive framework to construe King as the agent  of violence…(1993:16).

….

In a sense the problem is even worse: to the extent that there is a racist organization and disposition of the visible, it will work to circumscribe what qualifies as visual evidence, such that it is in some cases impossible to establish the ‘truth’ of racist brutality through recourse to visual evidence. (1993: 17).

That, in sum, is the difficulty of the problem: Racism conditions what we see.

Body cameras and increased surveillance of already surveilled communities. Streets, stoops and public space, particularly in poorer communities, is where a lot of life is lived. Whereas rich people can buy private space, construct gated communities and generally privatize their activities away from the surveillance of the state, activities from the mundane to the harmless but illegal, are often conducted publicly within poorer communities. Thus, structural economic inequality plays out in how space is lived, segmented and surveilled. Body cameras may surveil the police, but they will also increase the reams of surveillance data about these already heavily policed/surveilled communities — which is likely to render them subject to yet more policing. See how that cycle works?

The problem is structural racism and the maintenance of white supremacy, domestically and internationally. The problem is we can’t breathe.

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Bros and Colonialists

Looking at this, I am irresistibly reminded of this:

Not till the mountains were left behind and the American pioneers began to push across the trackless plains, did America cease to be English and become American. In the forests and on the trails of the Frontier, amid the savagery of conflict, the labor of reclamation, and the ardors of the chase, the American nation was born….

Now let us turn to the other side of the world, where…the British Empire may be seen shaping the British character, while the British character is still building the British Empire. There, too, on the manifold Frontiers of dominion, now amid the gaunt highlands of the Indian border, or the eternal snows of the Himalayas, now on the parched sands of Persia or Arabia, now in the equatorial swamps and forests of Africa, in an incessant struggle with nature and man…The Frontier officer takes his life in his hands; for there may await him either the knife of the Pathan fanatic, or the more deadly fevers of the African swamp. But the risk is the last thing of which he takes accountI am one of those who hold that in this larger atmosphere, on the outskirts of Empire, where the machine is relatively impotent and the individual is strong, is to be found an ennobling and invigorating stimulus for our youth, saving them alike from the corroding ease and the morbid excitements of Western civilization.

In this lecture delivered in 1907, George Nathaniel Curzon, the former British Viceroy of India (1898 – 1905) who would go on to become the future British Foreign Secretary (1919 – 1924), discussed frontiers as a critical geography for the development of imperial character. Note how closely the violence of empire is here, entwined with the development of character. That is, the overwhelming force meted out upon “darker” races, is indivisible from the development of the character of the “white” imperial. Going out there in the wilds of the “frontier” zone, whether it is Africa or Persia or wherever, is what ennobles, invigorates and saves them from the “corroding ease” of western civilization. Risk as experience is critical to this venture, for it is through the performance of exposing oneself to harm that the character develops. I say “performance” because of course when the colonialists go to Africa or Persia or wherever, they are backed by the force of empire. On mere suspicion of threat to the white man, entire villages are burned. Entire towns are bombed. Curzon knows this.

For the horrific deaths of 3,000 people on American soil by a murderous gang on 9.11, entire regions have been laid waste — again. It is on the tide of the latest empire that Bro TV’s rides (the link above). (I realize it’s a Kickstarter campaign, but the point of parsing through it is that it’s exactly in such semi-formal locations that the half-submerged racialized and imperial tics, attitudes and practices really flourish. I hope the actual show proves me wrong, but well, let’s see.)

The show’s host Adam Valen Levinson says, they are going to the “most forbidden and unfamiliar places on earth.” But, forbidden and unfamiliar exactly for whom? The staging of western subjectivity as the subjectivity goes uncommented. The co-creator, Marc Iserlis chimes in, “places with the worst reputations imaginable or without any at all.” That the reputation of the country which is in their first episode, Iraq, correlates to its position as a punching bag or (perceived) adversary for American empire also goes uncommented — even though it is that political relationship which delivers the sense of frisson, danger and risk that makes it desirable for a Bro TV episode. The twining of fear and desire circulates empire as entertainment:

When we thought of all the places we could possibly go to kick off the show, we couldn’t think of a better place (with a worse reputation) to have a great time in. While the name Iraq generally dictates images of fear and danger, we’d heard of Iraqi Kurdistan as an easily-accessible, warm-hearted autonomous region with gorgeous landscapes and awesome kebab.

In the months before we left, conflict erupted in Iraq.  On the day our flight was scheduled out of New York, ISIS was reported 30 miles away from Erbil (the airport on our tickets).  It was not at all what we had anticipated — all the dangers of “Iraq” seemed so much more real.  Still, our goal didn’t change: to see what the place felt like at a time when its reputation was worse than ever, and to connect with people on the ground living their day to day lives.  This was the only way we knew how to find out.

And what we found gave us so much hope amidst all the craziness.

ISIS is 30 miles from Erbil. The Taliban are 60 miles from Islamabad, a refrain oft-heard in 2009 and 2010 as the TTP took over Swat, a phrase often-uttered by two sets of people: 1) journalists eager to boost their own war-correspondent credentials and ‘devil-may-care’ bravado and 2) pro-war hawks to stage their own vulnerability, even if the political realities of those miles means that the TTP has little to no-chance of militarily taking over Islamabad. In other words, the instrumentalization of danger twined the journalist with the war-hawk, each using it for his own ends. It is a well-worn, tired, imperial tradition in which Bro TV now partakes. But, it has launched the career of many a western usually white, usually male journalist just as it also launched the careers of colonialists.

The twist is that unlike Curzon who saw “savages” on the frontier, these bros — and by that word, I now mean the rather irritating staging of pseudo-edgy white masculinity (see the smash shots set to pulsating music of jumping off cliffs, riding with soldiers, gun in hand in the Vimeo video) — want to find bros everywhere. (The sexism of this project would require a whole other post.) That is, they want to find people like them everywhere. But, there aren’t in fact people like them everywhere because the rest of us are positioned quite differently vis-a-vis the imperial project. Those living and surviving the violence in Iraq for instance, don’t necessarily have the option of choosing to perform their risk for money, fame, or television fame. Even living next door to ISIS won’t land them a television show, unless of course, it is mediated by a western, usually white subject — like the Bro TV team. In other words, these bros — the ones making the show — are intertwined with the imperial project, even, the privilege of the imperial project. So, they might find allies, even friends in Iraq or wherever they go — but bros? No. What Bro TV  does then is to make imperial force, that is, the very condition for the Bro TV project, invisible. It operates by rendering the privilege and position of the Bro team invisible by presenting bro-dom as some kind of un-located, universal condition in which they are just some of many bros. This is, in fact, exactly how American empire operates.

Empire today is fundamentally liberal.  The imperial project now rests rather heavily on the idea of a globalized single humanity — a globalized “bro” — which then deserves “democracy” and “freedom” or whatever — and hence American empire must enforce it. Levinson notes that in their search for bros, they are going to “all these places we’ve been marking off limits, to connect, to eat the food and find out what it really feels like to be there.” In their search for “bros,” COIN forces also sit around having food and tea with local community leaders in places marked as “off-limits.” What the Bro TV project and COIN share is an imaginary that assumes a global project, that wants to pretend all sides are equal, and expects others to accede to their bizarre delusion. Ignore those uniforms, the guns, the occupation. Ignore the camera. Let’s eat.

The point isn’t that one can’t “connect with people.” The point is, you can’t do it when you go looking a type — the bro — in order to make a terrible television show and cash in on your choice of taking a risk. Yes, sometimes, western journalists get killed, and it’s awful. I still haven’t been able to watch any of the circulating videos. But, the point is that while they are globally mourned, there’s no equivalent for the *many more* local journalists who are killed, and who do this work because they have no choice. The validation of western journalists for making the choice to take risks while locals who have no option to do otherwise rarely get the recognition they deserve, speaks to the utterly racist backdrop of global media circulation. This is what the Bro TV campaign capitalizes on.

This ain’t your grandfather’s racism. It’s hip, it’s cool, it elects Barack Obama and it’s calling you for dinner.

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