#necropolitics

The title of this book is a reference to the 1999 Mos Def album, and specifically the track "Mathematics."

The song focuses on how structural racism (particularly antiblackness) functions in the United States through citing different stats and numbers-- how much money is spent on the US military, how many Americans own cell phones being surveilled, how many people have AIDS, three strikes laws, minimum wage, unemployment rates, budget cuts being funneled into more police, rates of incarceration and probation, health & economic outcomes sorted by zip codes, and so on.

The specific lines from "Mathematics" that Snorton references explicitly in Black on Both Sides are:

"Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings But you push too hard, even numbers got limits"

The book's beating heart is concerned with the necropolitics of Black trans life, and how Black trans people are discussed, known, constructed as death statistics. How many Black trans women are murdered, how many Black trans people kill themselves.

Since reading that book, I've been listening to the song a lot. I've been thinking about how another song I listen to a lot probably took direct inspiration from "Mathematics"-- a song called "Strange Arithmetic" by The Coup.

In "Strange Arithmetic" the lyrics focus on the ways in which public education functions to socially reproduce racial capitalism to ensure submission and funnel people into (acceptance of) powerlessness. It opens with the verse:

"History has taught me some strange arithmetic Using swords, prison bars, and pistol grips. English is the art of bombing towns While assuring that you really only blessed the ground. Science is that honorable, useful study Where you contort the molecules and then you make that money. In mathematics, dead children don't get added But they count the cost of bullets comin' out the automatic."

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially writing fundraisers for friends in Gaza. Last week, I wrote a post for a teenager named Ahmed. Two weeks ago the Israeli military bombed a sewage line to destroy access to potable water in his area.

I googled "Gaza water news" and I saw articles discussing how often this exact tactic is used. I read analysis by a Palestinian activist, Ahmad Abushawish, titled "In Gaza, water kills too" where he outlines how the Israeli army targets Gaza's water infrastructure, blocks entry of materials for repair, and kills anyone working in the water sector.

I wrote that week about the struggle for water globally, and how control over water systems is so central to settler-colonialism. When I drink water, it is impossible for me to not think about Gaza, and Flint Michigan, and Standing Rock, and the fight over the pipeline expansion in Canada.

After months of starvation, famine in Gaza was officially declared. I read the news. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations says 98.5% of cropland in the Gaza strip is destroyed or inaccessible in militarized zones. The World Health Organization says that 100% of people in Gaza now suffer acute levels of food insecurity.

Israel mobilizes to occupy the remainder of Gaza. Al-Jazeera reports that 86% of the Gaza strip is now either a militarized zone, under forced evacuation, or both at once. This is where Ahmed is living. This is where his family's damaged tent is.

Ahmed messages me. He tells me, "the army is approaching our area, there are sounds of bombing, and we feel hungry."

Everything is statistics. Everything is deeply, viscerally personal. Everyone is a number.

The United State's scummiest insurer, and formerly one of the 10 most profitable corporations in the world, for years worked to keep nursing homes from sending their sick residents to hospitals where they could actually receive proper medical care.

In several cases identified by the Guardian, nursing home residents who needed immediate hospital care under the program failed to receive it, after interventions from UnitedHealth staffers. At least one lived with permanent brain damage following his delayed transfer, according to a confidential nursing home incident log, recordings and photo evidence. “No one is truly investigating when a patient suffers harm. Absolutely no one,” said one current UnitedHealth nurse practitioner who recently filed a congressional complaint about the nursing home program. “These incidents are hidden, downplayed and minimized. The sense is: ‘Well, they’re medically frail, and no one lives for ever.’”

Climate necropolitics means we are being sacrificed. There is nothing passive or natural about this process. Aimé Césaire talked about the “imperial boomerang”, the process by which violence that started against the colonies would be reimported to the colonised. Climate necropolitics is the ultimate imperial boomerang: the great economic and industrial forces that pushed European countries to take over land and wealth are now coming home to roost, on a planetary scale. The great fossil fuel companies are the great powers of our time, some even taking on state form. Exxon-Mobil, BP, Shell, Gazprom, Saudi Aramco: they have all decided that power and wealth is worth more than all of our lives. We don’t see fossil fuel company CEOs (and of course all who support them) roam our neighborhoods, emissaries of the angel of death, from house to house, taking here one person, there another, out to the killing fields. But they are, and they know they are. They have made the calculation, and our lives, well, just don’t matter to them.