my first name is angel

Restrictive and narrow conceptions of liberty derived from bourgeois constructions  of the market, the atomizing and individualizing character of rights, and an equality grounded in sameness enabled and dissimulated the domination and exploitation of the postbellum order. Prized designations like “independence,” “autonomy,” and “free will” are the lures of liberalism, yet the tantalizing suggestion of the individual as potentate and sovereign is drastically undermined by the forms of repression and terror that accompanied the advent of freedom, the techniques of discipline that bind the individual through conscience, self-knowledge, responsibility, and duty, and the management of racialized bodies and populations effected through the racism of the state and civil society. Liberalism, in general, and rights discourse, in particular, assure entitlements and privileges as they enable and efface elemental forms of domination primarily because of the atomistic portrayal of social relations, the inability to address collective interests and  needs, and the sanctioning of subordination and the free reign of prejudice in the construction of the social or the private.  

And my looking is a looking / primed, it is a looking to the power of itself, / and I see a sea folding inward, / 200 little seas folding on themselves—

Lantern laws made the lit candle a supervisory device – any unattended slave was mandated to carry one – and part of the legal framework that marked black, mixed-race and indigenous people as security risks in need of supervision at night. In this way the lit candle, in a panoptic fashion, sought “to extend to the night the security of the day.” Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of o more than forty lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner, before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than fifteen lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture….We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable, and contained within the city.

The proper recourses (space) Black(ened) folks are afforded within the ‘fair and just’ legal framework—if we are discriminated against—serve as disciplinary techniques that reinforce the subjected status of the Black: if we are to be thought of as properly ‘integrated’ or ‘civilized’, we have no other option but to pursue these avenues. Moreover, these proper avenues force us to align ourselves with the state (by requiring us to actively collaborate with the surveillance apparatus). The purpose of neoliberal (state-sanctioned) ‘anti-racist’ politics is, thus, not to bring about the end of an anti-black world, but to redirect anti-colonial struggles into safe business models, such as anti-discrimination agency, which, in a larger sense, manage, redirect, and defuse Black rage. These agencies give us a false sense of hope.

One problem with the “personal essay” is that it requires the essayist to speak too plainly and for too many people “as a woman,” “as a black woman,” “as a black queer woman,” rather than to write in a womanly style, a black womanly style, a black queer womanly style—a personal style, the thing I feel so passionately and contradictorily about. There are so many essays with no style which are subsequently not essays at all. Didion said style was character. Hardwick said style was fate. Someone else I’m sure has said what I believe, which is that style is argument (again, there is nothing more stylish than an argument raged against yourself, and there is nothing less stylish than an argument raged against people who don’t even care about you, which is one of the traps of what we now call “identity politicking” (never mind that in America all politics are identity politics)). Another problem with the “personal essay” in our moment is that it mistakes the first person for the personal. An essay can’t just be about something that happened to you because you’re you. Everything has happened to someone; what new can you make of it is the question. There is nothing more personal than the connections you see between seemingly disconnected things, the ability to do so being, as I learned in an old episode of the X Files, “a mark of genius”; I just think it’s a mark of individuality, which is normal and easy to confuse with genius. There are enough geniuses but not enough individuals. There are a lot of people who know a lot, but knowing a lot is no reason to write an essay. Neither is feeling a lot. Neither is having learned a lot: a good essay is not a lesson but a relentless taking apart of the object(s).