Facing the Dragon: Black Mothering and Gendered Necropolitics in the Americas PDF

Christen A. Smith FACING THE DRAGON: BLACK MOTHERING, SEQUELAE, AND GENDERED NECROPOLITICS IN THE AMERICAS Abstract true in spaces of terror in the Americas. It is par-...

Christen A. Smith FACING THE DRAGON: BLACK MOTHERING, SEQUELAE, GENDERED NECROPOLITICS IN THE AMERICAS Abstract Anti-Black state violence across the Americas reﬂects a global gendered necropolitical we often misread this violence by suggesting that the primary victims are men. Although state often results in the immediate physical death of young Black men, it is principally, yet formed for Black women and impacts Black women disproportionately. This essay argues that dered necropolitics of trans-American anti-Black violence is expansive and includes the direct, diate death of Black people and the lingering, death caused by sequelae. Within this calculus, Black mothers bear the particular weight of anti- Black state violence. Black mothers (social, cal, or otherwise) are scripted within the ero-patriarchal social order as enemies As such, they pose a unique political threat social order. Yet, while the intent of the kill, instill fear and intimidate, the result the creation of new political knowledge political tactics. This paper considers necropolitics of anti-Black state violence and the United States and Black mothers’ to this violence [anti-Blackness, violence, tics, gender, sequelae] Raising Black children – female and male – in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach – love, survival – that is, self-deﬁnition and letting go (Lorde 1984, 74). In 1984, Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet Audre Lorde wrote these words in the epigraph to her essay “Man Child.” It is a provocation. For Black mothers—those Black women who bio- logically and communally care for Black children —raising our children and simply surviving our- selves is a perilous game.1 This is particularly Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 24, Number Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/traa.12055. Black mothers’ experiences facing the dragon —living in the deadly fallout of the modern, heteropatriarchal, neoliberal, White supremacist democratic American nation-state—require us to rethink our traditional approaches to conceptualiz- ing anti-Black state violence by accounting for its devastating and lethal impact on the living. Anti- Black state violence is gendered, multivalent and permeating. The spectacular killing of Black peo- ple by the state, either in the shadows of secrecy or in front of loved ones, is a gendered racial per- formance that includes the explicit targeting of bodies and people (shooting bullets, immediate death), and the residual impact of killing—the eﬀective and aﬀective death that state violence pro- duces slowly. This fallout is an aspect of the state’s magic (Das 2007; Taussig 1997; Coronil 1997), and as such it reveals a necropolitical logic at the heart of the nation-state apparatus in the Americas: gendered anti-Blackness. This essay considers the gendered dimensions of transnational, anti-Black necropolitics and the sequelae that they produce in the service of managing death. Achille Mbembe deﬁnes necrop- olitics as “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003:39). Expanding from this deﬁnition, this essay explores the subju- gation of Black life to the power of death in Brazil and the United States as an intersectional process. In both Brazil and the United States, Black mothers bear a unique burden under the weight of anti-Black state violence not because they are the idyllic symbols of maternal purity, loss, or innocence,3 but because they are enemies of the state—subjects that challenge the ideology of anti-Blackness, which undergirds the state’s structure. The resonance between Black mothers’ experiences with anti-Black state violence in these nations reveals the necessarily transnational dimensions of this violence. Global anti-Black genocide has a gendered impact on Black mothers because of the explicit relationship between Black mothering and the production and proliferation of Black life. It is helpful here to clearly delineate the deﬁni- tion of Black mothering. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) uses the terms “bloodmothers” and “other- mothers” to designate the ways in which Black women mother Black children biologically and communally (1990:119). “Grandmothers, sisters, aunts, or cousins act as othermothers by taking on child-care responsibilities for one another’s chil- dren....Despite strong cultural norms encouraging women to become biological mothers, women who choose not to do so often receive recognition and 32 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 24(1) for the II (Inter)National March Against the Genocide of Black People organized by React or Die! Quilombo X is an oﬀshoot of the React or Die! campaign and a coalition for community action. It works with victims of police terror (fam- ilies and communities) and does outreach in the prison system, particularly the Lemos Brito State Penitentiary in Bahia. The two organizations are closely linked in that they share key members and coordinators, including Andreia Beatriz dos San- tos, whom I cite above. Both organizations deﬁne police terror as overt police operations (like raids and stop-and-frisk encounters), and covert opera- tions (like death squad assassinations). My reﬂec- tions on the Brazilian context focus on the stories of Ricardo and Enio, two Black youth killed by police oﬃcers in Salvador, Bahia in 2008 and 2013. My recounting of their stories comes from my personal experiences working with these cases with React or Die! and Quilombo X, my personal engagement with their parents, and my archival research of their deaths. The comparative lens on the United States comes from my archival research on anti-Black police violence in the United States, drawing mainly from newspaper and media accounts, and my evolving research on police violence in Austin, TX, where I have lived for the past 8 years. In 2015 I met LaKiza, the sister of Larry Jackson Jr., who was brutally killed by a police oﬃcer in Aus- tin in July 2013. LaKiza has been organizing for justice in her brother’s case since his murder. She has done this work in collaboration with the Peo- ple’s Taskforce—a grassroots activist organization based in Austin. My reﬂections here are based on our conversations about LaKiza and her family’s experience with her brother’s murder. LaKiza’s relationship with her brother as an older sister, and her identity as a mother herself, position her as a Black social mother—othermother—in her brother’s story. BLACK–MOTHERS–SORROW After Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Fer- guson, MO on August 9, 2014, the police were slow to respond to the scene and slow to wrap-up their investigation. They left Brown’s body exposed, lying in the middle of Canﬁeld Drive (where he was killed) for 4 hours, while his com- munity looked on in dread: Neighbors were horriﬁed by the gruesome scene: Mr. Brown, 18, face down in the middle of the street, blood streaming from his head. ﬁnds that the police kill approximately 400–500 people every year in the United States (Robinson 2014). However, many of the major government- funded sources of data on police killings, like the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report and the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System, “are often censored of critical information (like the names of the oﬃcers involved), lack unbiased evaluation of the justiﬁcation for the shooting, and are selectively published” (Ross 2014:1). “The FBI data, for instance, is incomplete, as the majority of the Uni- ted State’s 17,000 police departments do not ﬁle fatal police shooting reports, or do so only selec- tively” (ibid). In 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal statistics fail to account for hundreds of police killings in the United States. From this we can conclude that, “It is nearly impos- sible to determine how many people are killed by the police each year” (Barry and Jones 2014). According to studies of newspaper reports, a more realistic estimate of police killings in the United States is approximately one thousand per year (Robinson 2014). Based on the data that we do have regarding police killings, between 1960 and 2010, about 42.3% of all deaths by legal intervention were of Black men (Krieger et al. 2015).7 Police killings are haunted by the legacies of lynching and anti- Black terror (Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2008; Jung, Vargas, and Bonilla-Silva 2011; James 2007). The phenomenon of racially biased lethal poli- cing extends beyond the United States. In Brazil, the logic of police lethality also follows an ideolog- ical pattern of anti-Blackness (Vargas and Alves 2010; Ferreira da Silva 2009; Smith 2016). There, the police kill approximately six people per day (Forum Brasileiro de Segurancßa P ublica 2013). Those killed are disproportionately young, Black, working class and male (Waiselﬁsz 2012). In 2012, according to oﬃcial records, the police killed 1890 people in Brazil (ibid). In the state of Sao Paulo, the ninth largest city in the world, people of Afri- can descent (negros) are three times more likely to be killed by the police than their White counter- parts.8 Yet in Brazil, like in the United States, the data that we have on police killings is incomplete. Records of police killings are voluntarily and lack- adaisically kept (For um Brasileiro de Segurancßa Publica 2013). States often refuse to cooperate with federal oversight committees and research institutes that seek to investigate police homicides (Forum Brasileiro de Segurancßa P ublica 2013; CPI 2005). Moreover, it is only in the past decade that the police and the Legal Medical Institute (IML), the state-run morgue, have begun recording the 34 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 24(1) bodies as well as Black men’s bodies in our strug- gles to demand respect for Black life in the United States. As Kimberle Crenshaw (1991), founder of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and the Center for Intersectional and Social Policy Studies argues, our refusal to talk candidly about the violence that Black women experience in actu- ality perpetuates and facilitates violence against Black women, leading to more death. The invisi- bility of Black women’s experiences with police violence proliferates it; allowing it to continue with impunity (Incite! Women of Color Against Vio- lence 2007). What is missing from these conversa- tions is an explicit analysis of the gendered dimensions of state lethality beyond the physical killing and wounding of Black women. The stories of the mothers of Ricardo, Enio, and Larry Jack- son Jr. expound this point. Ricardo and Enio In January 2008, military police in Salvador, Bahia shot and killed a young Black man named Ricardo. Ricardo was an accomplished gymnast who worked for the circus. He had just been recruited by the prestigious troupe Le Cirque and was an understudy with them. He was in Salvador on break from his training, hoping to spend time with his family and catch up with friends. One day, he was out playing soccer in his neighbor- hood when Military Police oﬃcers invaded the ﬁeld and began shooting. They were, allegedly, pursuing a boy who was accused of stealing a bike. Ricardo ran but the police oﬃcers eventually caught up to him and killed him mercilessly, although he begged for his life and insisted he was not the person they were looking for. Ricardo was one of the ﬁve unarmed Black boys—all under the age of 21—the Military Police killed in the ﬁrst 12 days of that year. None of these youth were sus- pected of a crime. Shortly after Ricardo’s death I met his father, Jorge L azaro, an outspoken environmental activist and devoted father. Refusing to accept his son’s murder, he was in a bitter ﬁght to pros- ecute the police oﬃcers. As a result of this acti- vism, and the family’s push for justice, Jorge, his wife, and their remaining six children began to receive death threats. They had to be put into a state-run witness protection program (run, coinci- dently, by a branch of the very state police forces accused of killing Ricardo). The program was really no harbor at all. The police oﬃcers that killed Ricardo easily found the family and the threats began again. The family had to go com- Shortly thereafter, I had a long talk with Andreia Beatriz dos Santos about Ricardo and Enio’s mother and her health and well being since her sons’ deaths. Andreia told me that she had been in a state of utter limbo and despair since Ricardo’s death a few years earlier, and Enio’s death had simply worsened her state. Indeed, the entire family had been devastated by both mur- ders, but their mother’s pain was somehow diﬀer- ent. While their father had been able to channel his pain into activist work, his mother was unable to do so because of deep psychological and emo- tional scars. She found it diﬃcult to concentrate and focus on small, everyday tasks. By this time Quilombo X had succeeded in getting the family to a safe place where they could live in conditional openness, allowing them to work and go to school. However, Ricardo and Enio’s mom could not seem to keep a job. Interview after interview never worked out. When she did secure employment, she would fail to show up for work and then say that it was not a good ﬁt. Even daily chores were a challenge. Her relationship with her husband became strained. Her mind wandered. She existed in the space between the living and the dead. The story of Ricardo and Enio’s mother exem- pliﬁes the impact of police killings on Black moth- ers. Her experience indicates that while the entire family is aﬀected by this violence, the impact on Black mothers is gendered and speciﬁc to the intersectional conditions of Black women’s strug- gles. For example, while Ricardo and Enio’s father was able to ﬁnd and keep work, albeit with diﬃ- culty, their mother was not. There are many possi- ble reasons for this, which are impossible to deﬁnitively discern. However, we know that inter- sectional forms of discrimination structure Black women’s day to day lives (Caldwell 2007). The nexus of sexism and racism dictates access to resources and opportunities, particularly work (e.g., Caldwell 2007; Gonzalez 1983; Carneiro 2003). Beyond this, the trauma that limits Ricardo and Enio’s mother’s ability to relate to society is possibly due to the unique ways that their deaths aﬀected her. I would like to focus on the juncture between these two: how the intersectional realities of Black women’s life experiences and the fact of being a mother combine to create the unique terms in which Black mothers experience the pain of loss. In other words there is a matchless aﬀect associated with Black mothering that results in a pattern of sequelae that are particular to the gen- dered experience of anti-Blackness. This aﬀect is also transnational because of its relationship with 36 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 24(1) approximately 4 pm. The family called and texted Larry all afternoon with no response. They knew that he would not just leave his children without communicating something with the family, espe- cially given the fact that they were gearing up for the return road trip to their mother’s house. I was told that Larry’s mother, Billie, “in that motherly instinct...knew something was wrong” (Personal interview with LaKiza, 2015). At 11 o’clock the next morning Larry’s mother ﬁled a missing per- sons report. The police oﬃcer who followed up on the report arrived at her home at 3:30 pm. Approximately 2 hours later—25 hours after his death—the police showed up at Larry’s parents’ house to say that he had been killed. When the police arrived, they immediately began questioning Larry’s parents—a stance that the family felt was extremely insensitive. As LaKiza shared with me, “that’s not the way you treat victims. You don’t come to tell me that my son is dead and then you start questioning [me].” The family was utterly distraught. A friend volun- teered to drive Larry’s children back to Mississippi to be with their mother. The family then started on the long arduous journey of trying to get jus- tice within the legal system.15 The impact of Larry’s death on his been devastating. Larry Jackson’s sister and mother’s pain and treatment by police particularly highlight the impact of police killings on Black women. When I sat down to talk with LaKiza about her brother’s story, she told me that she could barely eat the month after her brother was killed. Her mother also barely ate. LaKiza lost forty pounds. This grief-induced fast is a glimpse into the physically damaging eﬀects of the trauma of losing a loved one. The pain of her son’s loss has taken a major psychological and physical toll on Billie as it has LaKiza. LaKiza told me, “My mother already had health issues...this has really aged my mother. She used to be really vibrant and happy and nothing could ever really get her down.”16 The impact of this grief is intergenera- tional. For LaKiza, seeing her “mother cry every day” has been particularly emotionally depleting. “It’s diﬃcult...because you are trying to muster up enough strength and courage to try to say that it’s going to be okay...[but] you don’t even know yourself.” The pain of loss not only directly impacts the individual who is grieving but also those who surround them. LaKiza’s 13-year-old daughter’s struggles with her uncle’s death also manifested through physical weight loss, where she slimmed down around 25 pounds. During our between the circumstances of police violence against Black people in both nations follow the thesis that there exists a pattern of global anti- Black genocide (Vargas 2005, 2008).18 Indeed, the disparate conditions of anti-Black violence across the African Diaspora, “are supra-national, histori- cally persistent, and...produce quantiﬁable negative and disproportionate eﬀects on Black peoples yet are seldom named and challenged for what they are: genocide” (Vargas 2011:246). Police violence is evidence of this transnational necropolitics.19 Nevertheless, a focus on body count limits our ability to gain a qualitative perspective on the extent of this violence. Many of the Black women who vehemently cry out against the injustice of police killings of Black people in the Black Lives Matter movement use the framework of Black motherhood to pref- ace our outrage. In her reﬂection on the murder of Michael Brown and Black youth, Dani McClain (2014) argues that anti-Black state terror is a reproductive justice issue, noting how Black women on social media cite the ways these inci- dents terrify and infuriate us as Black mothers. Feelings of trauma and fear of loss related to maternity are often the language through which Black women experience state violence. Interest- ingly, again, Black motherhood in this social jus- tice framework is not merely the fact of having children but also caretaking and the potential to have a child. Indeed, as Arneta Rogers (2015) observes, The traditional framing of police brutality oﬀers little recourse for addressing the harm faced by mothers in the current and historical climate of police brutality, intimidation, and surveillance. This framing requires further examination of the ways mothers of Black men [sic] navigate their personal and familial relationship with the police, how they combat negative public perceptions ascribed to Black men [sic] and youth, and how they negotiate the safety of their families. (Rogers 2015:4) Reading sequelae as a material eﬀect is one way to gender our analysis of the impact of police vio- lence on Black women. For generations, Black feminist activists in Brazil have argued that Black men are not the only victims of lethal state violence. In the 1990s sociologist Vilma Reis (2005) conducted research with Black mothers living in the peripheral neigh- borhoods of Salvador demonstrating the impact of 38 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 24(1) (mostly Black women), Andreia began to recognize how incarceration and police violence traumatize family members. There exists a psychological and emotional torture that stems from being sepa- rated from one’s loved ones either by death or by detention. For Andreia, the term sequelae ﬁts this torture. The ﬁeld of medicine often uses the term sequelae to refer to the lingering eﬀects of disease. However, psychologists also use the idiom to refer to psychological trauma, particularly related to disastrous events that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), like war and terrorism (e.g., Galea et al. 2002; Gorst-Unsworth and Goldenberg 1998). By using this medical term to describe the impact of state violence on Black communities, Andreia puts the experience of anti- Black state violence on par with that of war. Indeed, after I interviewed LaKiza, she followed up with me with a note that said, “I forgot to mention another thing about how my brother’s death has aﬀected me. I feel like I have PTSD. Each time I hear of other murders such as Larry’s, I relive his death over and over again. I have trou- ble sleeping sometimes, I can’t focus. I feel enraged and sad, all at the same time.” The symp- toms that Andreia identiﬁes in her patients in Bra- zil also reﬂect the symptoms that Black mothers suﬀer in the United States. In an interview I conducted with Andreia in October 2012, she deﬁned for me sequelae and its relevance, There is something really important that we have addressed when speaking of police bru- tality and death squads and the violence suf- fered by the communities, especially in the prison system. This violence is something that the state and society somehow render invisible: the sequelae of this violence. We work most of the time with numbers concerning death or imprisonment, but beyond that there are long lasting, lingering wounds (sequelae) that we can’t quantify or qualify...When a boy or a girl is shot, [or] is a victim of some other vio- lence, is assaulted, becomes paraplegic, or, comes to live with a projectile bullet inside their body, the cost of these wounds—not just from an economic perspective but also for the family—cannot be quantiﬁed. Here, Andreia introduces sequelae by noting two important points: (1) that it is an invisible aspect of the state’s purposeful violence; and (2) that it is contract designed to maintain a social order premised on patriarchy and white supremacy. Given this, the “interest of the ruling classes” to which Althusser refers is also a reference to the interests of patri- archy and White supremacy. Patriarchy and White supremacy are both ideological underpinnings of the social contract and, by extension, the state. Yet limiting our discussions to White supremacy is reductive. Beyond White supremacy, anti-Blackness is a unique set of processes that ties the modern American nation-state project to the subjugation of Black bodies.23 Gendered anti-Blackness is an ideol- ogy of the state that informs the operation of the state’s apparatuses. We can argue that the police, in any given society, function through violence and ideology in order to maintain the state’s superstructure. (Althusser 1971:129). The violence that the police enact on the populace, as an arm of the state, reﬂects the ideological principles of society as the state exists as an expression of society. Anti- Blackness manifests itself clearly in the dispro- portionate impact of lethal policing on Black people. By extension, anti-Blackness emerges in parallel and in connection to both the state’s Repressive Apparatus and its Ideological State Apparatuses, speciﬁcally, the family.24 It is the intersectionality of Black mothers’ positions as aﬀronts to the Repressive Apparatus (the police) and the Ideological State Apparatus (the family) that make them enemies of the state.25 The ideo- logical relationship between the state and anti- Blackness thus constructs the state as necropoliti- cal, but we must take care not to lose gender in this conversation. Although necropolitics is a useful framework for conceptualizing the state’s repressive apparatus and its relationship with Blackness in the Americ- as, feminist scholars note that Mbembe’s deﬁnition of necropolitics fails to critically engage with the question of gender (e.g., Ahmetbeyzade 2008; Wright 2011; Puar 2007). “Gender...is central to the violent dynamics linking the production of states to the reproduction of their subjects” (Wright 2011:710). Necropolitical subjugations of life to death incorporate uniquely gendered strate- gies of terror. Femicide in Ciudad Juarez and honor killings in Turkey are two examples of such mechanisms (Ahmetbeyzade 2008; Wright 2011). Indeed, in many ways, sovereign violence cannot be decoupled from the politics of gender. Mbembe develops the theory of necropolitics in conversation with Agamben’s (1998) conceptu- alization of bare life. Bare life, as Agamben 40 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 24(1) eternal wandering through state apparatuses. She continues, When people survive this level of violence, the majority of the time, they are resigned to a life of eternally wandering through hospitals, through the health system, through physio- therapy clinics, trying to reclaim their auton- omy and their health. And sometimes there is no other alternative. Sometimes the women must stop work to take care of their husbands, their sons, their brothers, and sometimes these people end up having their lives downgraded because their lives have become a living death [my emphasis] because of the sequelae they have suﬀered. The trauma of state violence is not unidirectional. It is also multifaceted, creating an intergenera- tional culture of fear among those who live in communities besieged by this terror and struc- turally upturning the community. This process undermines the economic structure of the family and also, ironically, weighs heavily on other state institutions—namely, hospitals and clinics—that absorb the impact of this loss. The concept of sequelae must be central in our qualitative analyses of anti-Black state vio- lence. It highlights the futility of relying solely on quantifying body count in order to demonstrate the consequences of processes like police killing. It also introduces the possibility that Black women are intended political targets of anti-Black state violence. Conclusions: Aurina, Mary and Radical Refusal I end this essay with a philosophical reﬂection on Black women as intended political targets of state violence through a look at the brutal murders of two Black mothers and the political practices of radical refusal that in part motivated their deaths. In 2007, a police death squad in Salvador killed Aurina Rodrigues Santana alongside her partner and son. In 1918, a White lynch mob murdered Mary Turner and her unborn child in southern Georgia. Although space and time separate their deaths by 89 years and thousands of miles, the political circumstances of their murders once again demonstrate the need for a transnational, gendered approach to our reading of the relationship between anti-Blackness, state terror, and Black motherhood. In July 2007, masked men entered the house of Aurina Rodrigues Santana (44), an activist in social and imaginary signiﬁcations is anti-Black- ness. For Mbembe, sovereignties, “whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations,” are engaged in necropolitics (13). He encourages us to acknowledge that, “such ﬁgures of sovereignty are far from a piece of prodigious insanity or an expression of a rupture between the impulses and interests of the body and those of the mind. Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what constitute the nomos of the political space in which we still live” (13). In ancient Greek culture nomos referred to the law, speciﬁcally the stan- dards of moral conduct agreed upon by society and implemented into law (Agamben 1998). In both the United States and Brazil, necropolitics is the nomos of Black existence. In the service of death, the sovereign ﬁgure (in this case the American nation-state) employs com- plex mechanisms in order to kill and terrorize. An example is the terror that police death squads in Salvador inﬂict on witnesses forced to stand by and listen or watch as neighbors are tortured and killed. This terrorization propagates sequelae. However, the unique impact of sequelae on Black mothers has another political consequence. To fol- low the arguments of those who claim that police violence is a reproductive justice issue, the sover- eign ﬁgure intends to kill and quell the possibility for rebellion and new life. Thus, in the case of anti- Black state violence sequelae are necropolitical mechanisms that terrorize Black mothers and inhi- bit their ability to further care for Black life not just kill.28 Within this equation, Black mothers who seek to protect themselves and their children, or perpetuate Black survival, are the archetypal enemy. A comparative look at the story of Mary Turner elaborates this point. Since I learned of Aurina Rodrigues’s death while living in Bahia, I have been struck by the eerie symbolic connections between her murder and similar state-sponsored and sanctioned abuse of Black mothers in the United States. In 1918, in southern Georgia, a White lynch mob killed 20- year-old Mary Turner and her unborn child. They killed Turner for threatening to procure warrants to prosecute members of the White lynch mob that had killed her husband, Hayes Turner, days before. Mary Turner was 8 months pregnant at the time. The gruesome, gut-wrenching details of Mary Turner’s murder, and the deliberate lynching of her unborn child, continue to be one of the ugliest hauntings of United States’ history (Arm- 42 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 24(1) demonstrate a persistent disregard for Black women’s maternity. The African American Police Forum observes, The presence of children does not necessarily prompt the police to proceed with caution where pregnant and mothering Black women are involved—even those holding their babies. This lack of concern is consistent with a longstanding historic pattern of devaluing Black motherhood and the loving bonds that tie mothers and children together. Damaging stereotypes that cast Black women as criminal and unﬁt mothers share a com- mon genealogy with practices that deprive Black women of protections typically associ- ated with motherhood during police encoun- ters, sometimes leading to the use of lethal force. (2015:30) Indeed, Black mothers seem to be particular types of targets for anti-Black state violence, and the state customizes its terror in response to their maternity. The horror that Black mothers experience inside the dragon is both the fear of death and the dread of life without one’s children. This leads many Black mothers to choose political actions that sacriﬁce their lives in the interest of their child’s, because to live without a child is unimag- inable. After the death of a child, or under the threat of extreme violence against their children, Black mothers do not always choose to ﬁght the dragon. Some mothers choose physical or mental detachment from life, or slip into a catatonic state of nonexistence.30 But when Black mothers choose to ﬁght, they typically do so knowing that they risk death. Aurina Rodrigues knew that denouncing the police oﬃcers that tortured her children and push- ing the system to hold them legally accountable for their actions were steps that would invite death. Yet, she insisted on not only denouncing the oﬃcers but also giving several newspaper inter- views that described the torture and publicly admonished the state government (Ofıcio n° 143/ 07 JG/RJ). Similarly, Mary Turner simply sought to have her husband’s murderers prosecuted and presumably knew the risks of her actions as well. As an activist leader, Aurina Rodrigues herself had a long history of grassroots militancy and protest. Her pro-active approach to her children’s abuse continued her sustained political engage- ment.31 Black women’s ties to family and rejection death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without it is not possible” (3). For Black mothers, the strong desire is not just to live but for our children to live as well. And that means facing the dragon, even at the risk of certain death. Audre Lorde’s 1978 poem, “Power,” presents a powerful reﬂection on this perilous, deeply painful reality of black mother- ing, The diﬀerence between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.33 The actions of Aurina Rodrigues and Mary Turner were, in this sense, poetic—Black whose speaking out challenged the life-and-death conﬁguration of the state’s gendered necropolitics. Their deaths, and the deaths children and partners, were designed to voices, but their decisions to choose the their death (standing up and speaking out) upturned the political calculus of gendered olitics. These acts of deﬁance—at once and potentially liberating—aﬀront the cal power of the state by harnessing death in the service of life. Radical Black mothering nition, poetic. Christen A. Smith Anthropology and AADS, University of Texas Austin, Austin, TX, 78712; [email protected] sexuality norms. Instead, if we keep Collins’s original deﬁnition as is, it inherently allows for a broad interpretation. Ruth Wilson Gilmore also employs Collins’s work to deﬁne the term “social mothering”, an “opening...for all kinds of moth- ers (and others) to join in the work as the enor- mous lab or confronting each mother tends to encourage all both to accept and extend help” (1999:15). 5. The campaign was originally titled, “Reaja ou Sera Mort@!,” using the “@” symbol to indi- cate men and women. Subsequently, the campaign switched to using an “x” in place of “@” to be gender inclusive, reﬂecting identities that fall out- side of the categories male and female as well. 6. I explore the complex and often confusing relationship between the police and death squads 15487466, 2016, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/traa.12055 by University Of Texas Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [19/08/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License tions that Black people experience in the United States are colonial conditions although African Americans are technically citizens of the nation in which they reside. See for example Allen 2005; Carmichael 1967; Casanova 1965. 18. Jo~ao Costa Vargas (2005, 2008) deﬁnes anti-Black genocide as, “deadly, often state- and society-sanctioned, yet seldom overt contemporary campaigns against peoples of African descent” (Vargas 2005:267). Although we tend to associate genocide with overt declarations of war, people of African descent have made the claim that the lethal racist practices of the state against Black people in the Americas is also a form of genocide for generations (Vargas 2005, 2008). Vargas’s com- parative work on anti-Black genocide in the Uni- ted States and Brazil explores the applicability of this term in depth, arguing that global patterns of anti-Black violence exist on a genocidal continuum that includes multiple forms of violence (Vargas 2005, Vargas 2008). His work builds from Black Brazilian scholar, activist, artist, and politician Abdias do Nascimento’s (1989) theory of the genocidal lynching of Blacks in Brazil and the doc- ument We Charge Genocide, by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). 19. There is a long-standing debate in Brazil- ian studies concerning the validity of comparing the conditions of Blackness in Brazil with the conditions of Blackness in the United States. Opponents to this comparative approach claim that the culture of race in Brazil is fundamentally diﬀerent to the culture of race in the United States because of the existence of a “racial democracy” mentality in Brazil and the emphasis on hypo-descent in the United States. Moreover, some have claimed that African-American Brazil- ianists do not have the ability to conduct objec- tive research on race in Brazil because of their imperialist U.S. bias (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999). However, a cadre of scholars (Brazilian and Brazilianist) have adamantly challenged the thesis that Brazil is a racial democracy with little to no racial tension for over 50 years with empir- ical, statistical and philosophical studies that dis- credit it to varying degrees (see e.g., Gonzalez 1983; Hanchard 1994; Nascimento 1976; Telles 2004; Vargas 2008). Others have soundly decon- structed the argument regarding imperialism by demonstrating the long history of anti-racism dis- course in Brazil, particularly that produced by Black Brazilians (see French 2000). 20. The Repressive State Apparatus “‘func- tions by violence’—at least ultimately” (1971:136). Christen A. Smith 45 15487466, 2016, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/traa.12055 by University Of Texas Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [19/08/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 27. I examine the relationship between necrop- olitics, policing, and death squads elsewhere (Smith 2013; Smith 2016). 28. This terror, Reproductive Justice activists argue, “[frames] the issue of police brutality as one of Reproductive Justice [and] confronts this procreative right in relation to the third pillar of the Reproductive Justice movement: the right to parent children in a safe environment” (Rogers 2015:4). 29. Here I am particularly thinking of Agam- ben’s argument that those relegated to bare life are marked as killable by anyone. “By anyone” does not refer to anyone who is part of the broader society, but rather anyone who constitutes the realm of the polis. Within democratic nation- states, this sovereign status is aﬀorded all citizens who are recognized as part of the political world, which I would argue, is in fact White male citi- zenry. 30. See Rhaisa Williams’s article in this issue. 31. Keisha-Khan Perry (2013) argues that Black women’s grassroots organizing is one of the most eﬀective responses to racism, anti-Black genocide, and state oppression in Brazil. 32. Here I am speciﬁcally thinking of the radi- cal Black female politics of the U.S. anti-lynching campaign, championed by Ida B. Wells. 33. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer who recommended incorporating this poem into the text. double ‘func- REFERENCES CITED African American Policy Forum 2015 Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women. New York: African American Policy Forum, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. Agamben, Giorgio 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Ahmetbeyzade, Cihan 2008 Gendering Necropolitics: The Juridical-Political Sociality of Honor Killings in Turkey. Jouarnal of Human Rights 7(3):187–206. Allen, Robert 2005 Reassisng the Internal (Neo)Colonialism Theory. The

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