The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal

The Black experience in this country has been a phenomenon without analog.--Eugene Genovese (Boston Review, October/November 1993) THERE IS SOMETHING ORGANIC TO BLACK POSITIONALITY THAT MAKES IT ESSENTIAL to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society's junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness. In her autobiography, Assata Shakur's comments vacillate between being interesting and insightful to painfully programmatic and "responsible." The expository method of conveyance accounts for this air of responsibility. However, toward the end of the book, she accounts for coalition work by way of extended narrative as opposed to exposition. We accompany her on one of Zayd Shakur's many Panther projects with outside groups, work "dealing with white support groups who were involved in raising bail for the Panther 21 members in jail" (Shakur, 1987: 224). With no more than three words, her recollection becomes matter of fact and unfiltered. She writes, "I hated it." At the time, i felt that anything below 110th street was another country. All my activities were centered in Harlem and i almost never left it. Doing defense committee work was definitely not up my alley.... i hated standing around while all these white people asked me to explain myself, my existence, i became a master of the one-liner (Shakur, 1987: 224). Her hatred of this work is bound up in her anticipation, fully realized, of all the zonal violations to come when a white woman asks her if Zayd is her "panther ... you know, is he your black cat?" and then runs her fingers through Assata's hair to cop a kinky feel. Her narrative anticipates these violations-to-come at the level of the street, as well as at the level of the body. Here is the moment in her life as a prison-slave-in-waiting, which is to say, a moment as an ordinary Black person, when she finds herself among "friends"--abolitionists, at least partners in purpose, and yet she feels it necessary to adopt the same muscular constriction, the same coiled anticipation, the same combative "one-liners" that she will need to adopt just one year later to steel herself against the encroachment of prison guards. The verisimilitude between Assata's well-known police encounters, and her experiences in civil society's most nurturing nook, the radical coalition, raises disturbing questions about political desire, Black positionality, and hegemony as a modality of struggle. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe--the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of Black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best, limitations of radical social movements in America. …