Independence

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”

-Frederick Douglass, 1852  - Independence Day Speech at Rochester, New York

via (notes on) politics, theory, and photography

Wherefore art thou, politics?

“The second set of problems is global: it appears as a systematic use of various forms of extreme violence and mass insecurity to prevent collective movements of emancipation that aim at transforming the structures of domination…I do not hesitate to speak of a politics of global preventive counterrevolution or counterinsurrection.  But from another angle this ‘politics’ is really anti-political, because in a nihilistic way it leads to the suppression of the very conditions necessary to build a polity…the fields of politics and violence – a violence that seems to lack rational organization, not excepting self-destruction – are no longer separated.  They have progressively permeated one another.”

-Etienne Balibar, 2004.  (We, the People of Europe.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 116-7 & 125)

Public terror, private terror

“The key point is that [Richard] Wright connected the violence found in the private, domestic sphere to the ritual public brutality that was a means of political administration in the South. This public terror did more than help create conditions in which private violence could thrive. It was shadowed by the domestic authoritarianism and violence which it also required if the racially coercive social order was to function smoothly. Both varieties of brutality were shaped by the active residues of slave society in which lines between public and private became hard to draw.”

-Paul Gilroy, 1993 (The Black Atlantic. Boston: Harvard University Press. Pg 175)

A Task

“People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us”

-Theodor Adorno, “Johnny-Head-in-Air”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 56)