CHAPTER 1

Testify

A letter from Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells appears as the preface to Wells’s seminal The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Douglass writes, “You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity, and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.”¹ In these pages, I attempt to do the same.

The central argument of this book and the theory I advance in it is that White people react with anti-Black violence—and then justify, excuse, and ignore that brutality—when they encounter perceived Black bodies “out of place.” Black bodies are often identified as out of place when they are in physical and social spaces where White people believe Blacks do not normatively belong. It is an issue of boundaries or location or both. The dominant White racial group responds to out-of-place Black bodies with the “pushback,” activity that takes the form of various attacks on Black bodies and their psyche. Pushback is a central component of anti-blackness, and it is a core dynamic in the related system of structural racism. Surveillance is the most common form of pushback, but the strike may also come via threatened or actual acts of physical, sociocultural, economic, political, and psychic violence on Blacks. This hegemonic White-sponsored violence seeks to constrain Black people’s well-being and advancement by diminishing our agency, oppressing us structurally, and outright harming and killing us. Despite this, Black people continue to persistently and creatively resist constraint and to name the oppression and the oppressors. Black resistance, such as the declaration that Black lives matter, challenges and rejects White supremacist ideology. Denials of the existence of structural racism, rejection of the construct of White privilege, and a concomitant rise of overt anti-Black actions grew during the U.S. presidential administration of Donald Trump. These continue to reverberate. As award-winning writer Amanda Gorman implored in her Inauguration poem, “The Hill We Climb,” “We must end this uncivil war.”² To be clear, it will not end until structural racism does.

Why Focus on Bodies?

Racism as practice is often invisible, but it is performed on individuals and groups in society with harmful consequences that can be seen.³ Howard Winant states it this way: “In its most advanced forms, indeed, it [racism as practice] has no perpetrators; it is a nearly invisible, taken-for granted, ‘common-sense’ feature of everyday life and global social structure.”⁴ Racial identity is about the body. In Racial Formation in the United States, scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant define race as “a social construct which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”⁵ Examining the treatment of racialized bodies in society crystallizes the existence of a social system of advantage and disadvantage based on race.

We are embodied beings. Our bodies—individual and collective—shape and are shaped by society, and the form those bodies take is both highly politicized and socially regulated.⁶ Not only can bodies be governed, many consent for their bodies to be governed. Critical social theorist Michel Foucault terms this biopolitics, the exertion of power over one’s life.⁷ It is important to recognize that though all bodies are subject to regulatory and disciplinary control, some are more imperiled than others.⁸ Intersecting vulnerabilities are connected to particular embodiments, especially as it relates to matters like race, gender, class, age, sexuality, size, and physical ability. These variations are used to create strata and, in the process, hierarchies of human difference. The classifications then get mapped onto subaltern bodies and are used to subject them to discrimination. Therefore, the bodily lens is fruitful, for it aids in the recognition that perception matters and these perceptions have a profound impact on how people act, interact, and react to others. A lens on the body is useful for studying both the structural objectification of the body as a fleshy thing and the lived experience of the social body as mediated through the personal and institutional experiences of individuals and groups in society.

A bodily focus is also attentive to place, a central concept in this analysis. Racial enclosures and racial enclosure policies—like the plantation, segregation, the ghetto, and prison—provide a place-based mechanism for regulation of the body.⁹ In Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology, Bryan Turner describes modern society’s movement toward a “somatic society . . . structured around regulating bodies.” In the process Turner outlines, the body is the central site on which political and cultural power gets enacted. A bodily focus also recognizes the agency of bodies. The body is not just stripped of power. The body is power: it is “simultaneously [a site of] constraint and resistance.” Not only are bodies regulated, says Turner, but so too are “ spaces between bodies [and] the interfaces between bodies, societies and cultures. . . . The somatic society is . . . crucially, perhaps critically, structured around regulating bodies.”¹⁰ Control of bodies is accomplished through policies and practices administered by legal, religious, educational, familial, medical, and other institutions, often through the actions of their individual members. So a focus on the body permits analysis of both the individual and population level. It also incorporates the institutional level—public and private.

Consistent with the focus I propose, throughout this book I use the term or phrase “Black bodies” (or “the Black body”). The term is not meant to objectify or debase. Instead, I use it to foreground that the epidermal trace of Black skin is what marks the Black body as other. This feature triggers actions (motivated by ignorance of the other) manifested in hatred, fear, and loathing. As cultural historian Harvey Young explains in Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body, “It is the black body and not a particular, flesh-and-blood body that is the target of a racializing projection.”¹¹

The Black Body as Other

The Black body is presumed as other. As such, it is believed to be inferior. This presumption privileges whiteness. I argue that the disciplining of Black bodies—in schools, policing, and public or private space—is tolerated as a necessary means to instill this hierarchy into the subjugated. In Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race, philosopher George Yancy explains: “The Black body [has been treated] as an entity that is to be feared, disciplined, and relegated to those marginalized, imprisoned and segregated spaces that restrict Black bodies from ‘disturbing’ the tranquility of white life, white comfort, white embodiment, and white being.” This categorization is central to White supremacy. Yancy continues:

The history of the Black body in North America is fundamentally linked to the history of whiteness, primarily as whiteness is expressed in the form of fear, hatred, sadism, brutality, terror, avoidance, desire, denial, solipsism, madness, policing, politics, and the projection and production of white fantasies. From the perspective of whiteness, the Black body is criminality itself. It is the monstrous; it is that which is to be feared and yet desired, sought out in forbidden white sexual adventures and fantasies; it is constructed as a source of white despair and anguish, an anomaly of nature, the essence of vulgarity and immorality. The Black body is deemed the quintessential object of the ethnographic gaze.¹²

What Yancy describes is an anti-blackness so ingrained that even the blind can see it. In his book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind, Osagie Obasogie asks: How do blind people understand race? Obasogie conducted over 100 interviews with people of various ages and backgrounds, all of whom had been blind since birth. The sociologically trained bioethicist asked questions like “How do you define race?” and “What is your earliest memory of race?” and “How would your family respond if you dated someone of another race?” To his surprise, Obasogie discovered that “blind people understand and experience race like everyone else—visually.” Obasogie’s findings suggest that, much like sighted people, blind people often use visual markers like skin color and facial features they have never seen in order to describe race.¹³ These cues are learned. Both blind and sighted people are socialized to see race in ways that contribute to continuing racial inequality in society. Obasogie’s interviews revealed that some parents and friends of the blind respondents reinforced social boundaries by outlining specific prohibitions against race mixing.¹⁴ Obasogie’s study suggests that race has less to do with what you see and more to do with what you are taught.

What Is Meant by the Term “Blackout”?

When hearing the term “blackout,” readers will likely think of the failure of an electrical power supply. A secondary definition of “blackout” is a suppression of information. My use of the word is closer to this. Though not always recognized as citizens or even fully human beings, Black bodies have had a physical presence on the American landscape for over 450 years. The contemporary pattern I outline is one in which Black bodies are welcome in physical and social space but only under certain conditions. These caveats on acceptance effectively foster, maintain, and promote continuing racial segregation and a racialized hierarchy amid the illusion of a purportedly open, post-racial society. “Blackout” describes a provisional and limited acceptance that rejects, denies, or ignores the continuing existence of a long-established White supremacist racial order. Through these processes, blackout acts as a violent, insidious attack on Black humanity, well-being, and life. It is a complex social landscape where Black progress and Black presence is desired for either the purposes of maintaining the fiction of equality or the fiction of personal, organizational, or institutional progress, but too much Black presence or Black progress is subject to White pushback—an attempt to reinstate the Jim Crow order of the past.

The embodied experience of most Blacks in the United States is that of “other,” a decided classification of marginality or not belonging. As outside of the polity, the person (or group) so categorized as other is treated and viewed as a lesser, inferior being. The hope is that the subjugated will adopt a similar view of themselves. If they do, it facilitates the control of such bodies. Foucault writes, “A body is docile that[it] may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.”¹⁵ “Blackout” describes a modern-day project aimed at the docility and social control of Black bodies. “The captive body,” argues Black feminist scholar and literary critic Hortense Spillers, “is reduced to a thing.”¹⁶ In the process I outline and describe in this book as blackout, Black bodies are often welcome in physical and social White space. However, Black embodiment is not welcome. (I define “Black embodiment” here as perceived or intentional use of the body or flesh to convey certain cultural, ideological, or other messages about identity, consciousness, and belonging to the social group).

First, Black bodies are welcome in a space as long as there are not too many of them, such as to threaten and endanger the comfort of Whites or the perception of the physical/geographic/social area as White space. The second condition under which Black bodies are welcome is if the Black bodies do not disturb or challenge the normative sensibilities or practices of the space. Social scientists Glenn E. Bracey II and Wendy Leo Moore cogently describe this process in their article “Race Tests: Racial Boundary Maintenance in White Evangelical Churches.” Bracey and Moore write, “White actors in white social spaces initiate utility-based race tests to determine whether people of color are willing to serve the interests of whites in the space, or execute exclusionary race tests to coerce people of color into leaving the space. . . . Although the [institutional] norms [in white social spaces] are white, they are rarely marked as such. Consequently, racially biased institutional norms are wrongly defined as race neutral and merely characteristic of the institution itself (e.g., ‘the appropriate way to act in church’), masking inherent institutional racism.”¹⁷ People of color who do not challenge White norms are usually welcome (subject to the caveats above) in White space. While the visual landscape might be slightly modified through the presence of Black bodies, the workings of institutional White space are not. This affords Whites the psychological and tactical advantage of looking like they have changed without actually having changed at all. The third condition under which Black bodies are welcome in physical/geographic/social space is if the Black bodies are performing stereotypical positions at stereotypical times. These three qualifications produce a form of racial enclosure—a geographic or social isolation with inequitable distribution of power and resources—that contributes to (if it does not produce) poverty. Sociologist and theorist Loïc Wacquant terms such structures “institutional encasement[s] founded on spatial confinement.”¹⁸ Under these conditions, the distinction between Black and White bodies ostensibly shrinks, but the disparity in outcomes between Blacks and Whites festers and grows.

The following example should aid in understanding the practice I describe as blackout and its consequences. Approximately 13.4% of the U.S. population identifies as Black, but a 2019 survey by Coqual (formerly the Center for Talent Innovation) found Black professionals make up only 3.2% of all executive or senior leadership roles and less than 1% of all Fortune 500 CEO positions.¹⁹ This disproportionate representation has psychic consequences. A 2021 LinkedIn survey found 81% of Black professionals say seeing someone Black in leadership would make their workplace feel more inclusive.²⁰ Instead, Black and brown bodies get scripted into subordinate positions. For systemic change to occur, Black and brown faces need to be in decision-making places at the table. As long as individuals, companies, organizations, and institutions can point to that 3.2% of Blacks in leadership positions, the fiction that there are no barriers persists. Instead, the narrative becomes: “If X or Y [individuals] have made it, others just need to work harder in order to succeed on that level.” This false narrative asserts that it is not systemic oppression but your own failings that have prevented you from rising higher.

Blackout as an operational practice is less overt than the anti-Black racism primarily performed in periods past, but it is a related enterprise, still rooted in White supremacy.²¹ Black culture may still be consumed by Whites, but it is viewed as other culture—it may be commodified, it may be exoticized, but it is always inferior. Brandi Thompson Summers offers an example of this in her theorization of a practice she terms “black aesthetic emplacement.” In Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, Summers maintains that a Black aesthetic neither wants nor needs the presence of Black bodies.²² The consumption of blackness is invited, but Black people are not. Summers uses the transformation of H Street, a once predominantly Black section in Washington, D.C., to illustrate how Black aesthetic emplacement operates.²³ She describes a form of Black appropriation in which blackness is sanitized and then used for capital. What remains is a representation of blackness devoid of Black people.²⁴ It is a form of what I term blackout.

Somebody Ought to Testify

The word “testify” comes from the Latin testificari; the root is testis, witness. The English definition of the term means to make a solemn declaration under oath for the purpose of establishing a fact. A secondary definition of “testify” is to make a statement based on personal knowledge or belief: to bear witness to or serve as evidence or proof.²⁵ The final definition of “testify” is to express personal conviction. This writing serves all those purposes. I bear witness to the pervasive and continuing nature of racial oppression in society. I reach these conclusions based on personal knowledge and the application of inductive and deductive analytical processes. In these pages, I share my personal conviction and beliefs, and I offer insights into how continuing violence against Black bodies persists today and is rationalized.

There has been a great deal of discussion about race and racism in society. However, this focus ignores the reality that anti-blackness is the true evil that must be eradicated. The global racial structure posits Whites on top, Blacks at the bottom, and everyone else somewhere in between. In the resulting struggle to jockey for a better position, those along the strata recognize Black as disfavored. Consequently, the kind of prejudice directed toward Black bodies is different than that leveled against any other group. To clarify, anti-blackness is not limited to overt racism. It is often embedded in policies, institutions, and ideologies. Those ideas and beliefs, whether expressed or not, and those actions, intentional or unintentional, that have the effect of minimizing, ignoring, rejecting, marginalizing, denying, or devaluing Black life are forms of anti-blackness. This denial rejects the legitimacy of Black perspectives and acts as a dehumanization and negation of Black persons’ humanity.

As I testify, I am especially indebted to journalist and civil and human rights pioneer Ida B. Wells-Barnett (hereafter referred to as “Wells”). An anti-lynching activist and women’s suffragist, Wells wrote about and legally challenged the rising Jim Crow laws that proliferated at the end of the period known as Reconstruction.²⁶ Wells was a seer. She saw beyond the veneers articulated to justify lynching and other personal affronts against the Black body and psyche.²⁷ Wells knew that lynching was an attempt to subjugate Black people.²⁸ She told anyone who would listen, and she presented them with cold, hard facts to make her case. In The Red Record, Wells wrote: “During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body.”²⁹ In Southern Horrors, Wells wrote, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it is seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”³⁰ In an 1892 column in the Memphis Free Speech newspaper, of which Wells was a part owner, she wrote, “Neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or becomes his rival.”³¹ In Lynch Law in Georgia, Wells wrote, “The purpose of this pamphlet is to give the public the facts [about lynching and its pretexts], in the belief that there is still a sense of justice in the American people, and that it will yet assert itself in condemnation of outlawry and in defense of oppressed and persecuted humanity.”³² I share a similar belief and a need to put these insights on the record.

Wells knew that White supremacy rested on maintaining the fiction of Black inferiority and criminality. She discovered that the real transgressions for which Blacks in post-Reconstruction America were being punished were 1) in the case of men, having the audacity to become the White man’s rival—in business or for the affections of a White woman, and 2) asserting his or her humanity and thereby claiming equality to Whites. To assume such a position or place in society drew White ire and elicited sanction.³³ Lynching was one of several expressive acts of violence meant to push Black bodies back into their place—a position of subservience to Whites. The violent performance of public lynching allowed the actors (racist agents) and the viewing community to share and reinforce a stratified racial imaginary with Blacks on the bottom.³⁴ I situate my work as a continuation of Wells’s.

I had been laboring slowly over this book for five years, but after the confluence of three events it began to flow. The coronavirus pandemic, a painful personal assault on my character, and becoming caregiver for my mother (diagnosed with Alzheimer’s) reminded me of my mortality, and they made me realize the importance of bearing witness. I want to leave something behind that makes the world a better place. I was reminded that social science testimony can make a difference and be persuasive in helping others see what is plain to some but hidden to others.³⁵ This was certainly the case in the 1954 landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.³⁶ Brown was the first recorded time that the U.S. Supreme Court was persuaded by social scientific data.³⁷ Brown overturned the longstanding Plessy doctrine of separate but equal. Plessy had institutionalized and constitutionally protected restrictive Jim Crow practices and separate accommodations based on race in nearly every facet of life. Brown may have ostensibly reversed Plessy, but Jim Crow would not “go gentle into that good night,” to use the words of Dylan Thomas.³⁸ As in the past, each hard-fought Black gain was met with White pushback. The southern Massive Resistance Movement is one example.³⁹

Throughout this book, I highlight the pattern of pushback against Black advancement. But as Newton’s third law of motion says: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Backlash in the form of the pushback can have a boomerang effect. Black agency and resistance has always been present, but sometimes others find incentive to join or support the fight. In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, constitutional scholar Michael Klarman argues that televised broadcasts of southerners’ massive resistance campaigns of terror and violence against peaceful Black protesters created a climate for social change.⁴⁰ Part of that social change led to the 2008 election of America’s first Black president, Barack Hussein Obama. Many heralded the election of Obama as a sign that America was now a post-racial society. They were wrong.

The period since Obama was first elected president has been particularly dangerous. Practices of virulent racial entrenchment manifested in post-Obama expressions of anti-blackness can be seen in discursive, legal, interactional, and extralegal contexts. This became even more evident after the January 6, 2021, siege at the Capitol showcased emboldened citizens, a number carrying or wearing anti-Black and antisemitic iconography, ready to overthrow the government. These acts threaten the very essence of our democracy.⁴¹ So at this moment fraught with precarity, I have decided to speak, or at least to let this book speak for me. Because to remain silent is to be complicit in the continuing oppression inequitably visited upon Black bodies. It is also to remain complicit in my own death—demise by what psychologist Chester Pierce has called a “death by a thousand cuts.”⁴² Each aggression (macro or micro) and other invalidation produces a cut. Soon they number in the hundreds, and before long you have death by a thousand cuts. I have suffered these cuts, and I refuse to remain silent any longer, for, as Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Dust Tracks on a Road, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”⁴³

Violence

Anti-Black violence takes many forms. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.”⁴⁴ This understanding of violence is much broader than just the use of physical force. It includes the use of threatened or actual power. The WHO definition embraces sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, which occurs when those with symbolic capital use that power to unconsciously coerce less powerful groups to subordinate their norms to those in power.⁴⁵ Symbolic violence is the process by which the dominant group wields its power in ways that reinforce the idea that their norms, tastes, and preferences are superior and all other standards and beings inferior. Johann Galtung’s notion of structural violence, harms that result from social injustice as a form of force, is also included.⁴⁶ Inspired in part by the WHO “World Report,” epidemiologist Seema Patrikar asserts, “An analytical framework or typology is needed to separate the strands of this intricate tapestry [of violence] so that the nature of the problem—and the action required to deal with it—become clearer.”⁴⁷

Violence can be seen as legitimate or illegitimate. For example, self-defense can often be understood, but other forms of violence must be rationalized and excused in order to be justified. Creating sociological frames helps people to make sense of details and justify their behavior or response to things.⁴⁸ In his 1974 classic Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman wrote, “A central component of any dominant racial ideology is its frames or set paths for interpreting information.”⁴⁹ These ideologies are applied by individual actors and social systems and used to justify the oppression of people of color. This justification is a form of racism, which David Wellman defines as “culturally sanctioned beliefs which, regardless of the intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated positions of racial minorities.”⁵⁰ Once the culturally sanctioned racist ideology or belief is ingrained, oppression gets actualized through various attacks—emotional, psychological, verbal, cultural, physical, political, economic, et cetera.

Anti-Black violence in the form of racism is not an individual or group level process, it is both. Wellman’s definition tethers, connects, and inextricably loops racism performed at the micro (individual, interpsychic, or familial), meso (organizations or groups of people), and macro (larger systems like law, institutions, or policy) levels. Racial discrimination is not just the result of racist choices by individuals.⁵¹ Individual actors are part of a system designed to oppress people. While I foreground this nexus, I do not seek to reduce racism to individual-level prejudices manifested through thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors, nor do I focus on systemic racism. Instead, I want to highlight the interconnected loop between the two. As one of the essays in Readings for Diversity and Social Justice suggests, “Racism is in the set of institutional, cultural and interpersonal patterns and practices that create advantages for the people legally defined and socially constructed as ‘white,’ and the corollary disadvantages . . . for people not considered white.”⁵²

Research Questions and Rationale

Three principal research questions guide this project.

1. What can expectations about bodies, space, place, and belonging tell us about the ways anti-blackness operates and is perpetuated?

2. What historical, social, and political processes and practices influence the perception of being a body out of place (i.e., how does race interact with other identities)?

3. Where and how does racism appear in American culture and shape the ways we interact with one another (or fail to interact)?

Classification animates my research questions. Classification is one of six major cognitive acts.⁵³ It is a means of “lumping and splitting” and carving reality up into “islands of meaning.”⁵⁴ The designation of belonging in or to a certain space is accomplished through classification. Some historical classification systems have divided the world into two: human versus subhuman, civilized versus uncivilized, nature versus reason, and public versus private. These distinctions rely on reductionist binaries. Across time, they have been assigned not only to things but also to bodies, thereby sometimes sorting people into a non-person status.⁵⁵

Like people, places get classified and assigned to groups. This process makes place a particularly useful lens through which to see and understand continuing patterns of racial inequality.⁵⁶ The inquiry can help us interrogate why, despite the end to legal segregation, de facto segregation remains entrenched. I argue that one way this occurs is through the expectation that certain positions (social, political, geographic) are reserved for specific types of racialized (and gendered) bodies. Therefore, my inquiry is attentive to place—both as a geographic location and as a social position.

Sociologist Nirmal Puwar has investigated space and politics relating to bodies, class, and gender.⁵⁷ Puwar argues that bodies are not neutral; instead, they are raced, classed, and gendered sites. In “The Racialised Somatic Norm and the Senior Service,” she writes, “One of the central ways in which institutionalized racism is perpetuated is through the designation of the somatic norm.”⁵⁸ The somatic norm naturalizes certain bodies. Everyone else is the lesser other. Built on the racial contract and the sexual contract, the somatic norm contributes to the inequalities it perpetuates.⁵⁹ The White male body remains the unmarked somatic norm.⁶⁰ Further, it is subject to multiple advantages.⁶¹ I build upon the work of Puwar, but my examination is keenly interested in movement to and through physical and social space.

Critical race and gender scholar Sherene Razack cautions, “To interrogate bodies travelling in spaces is to engage in a complex historical mapping . . . [and] tracking of multiple systems of domination.”⁶² These insights and others lead me to believe that interrogating physical, geographic space or symbolic (sociopolitical) place can be useful in understanding continuing racialized oppression.⁶³ Puwar argues that “social spaces are not blank” and open for anyone to occupy.⁶⁴ Thus, I sought to better understand Black life as what Susan Hanson calls a “daily mobility project.”⁶⁵ I also explored how ideas about who belongs and does not belong in certain spaces influences how African Americans live their lives and where they go and do not go. To do so, I investigated interactions and experiences in sites of commerce, recreation, residency, transportation, work, and school, for example, and, because no group is homogeneous, I paid careful attention to intersectional identities.⁶⁶

My Call to Action

Most of my friends and colleagues know about my research interests, and many of them send me stories from across the globe detailing instances of racialized violence. To get through the day, I have become somewhat desensitized to these stories. Consistent with critical race theory, I believe that racism is endemic in society.⁶⁷ Therefore, while I was disheartened, I was not surprised when a number of pernicious and often insidious racial incidents happened, even in the midst of a spring and summer when a global pandemic threatened the world. Some of the violent acts resulted in death.⁶⁸ However, none struck me more than an incident involving an Oklahoma delivery driver named Travis Miller Sr.⁶⁹ His story stirred raw emotions in me. I believe this is because he reminded me of so many of my male students. He could have been any one of them. Miller had a large frame, but he seemed eminently approachable and caring. Despite his girth, his countenance read more like a teddy bear than a threat or menace. Several stories I learned in the late spring and early summer of 2020 angered or incensed me, but Travis Miller Sr.’s story made me want to cry.

On May 11, 2020, 43-year-old Miller, an African American man, and a coworker (also African American) were completing their last appliance delivery of the day.⁷⁰ The delivery was to a client in a gated upper-class neighborhood in Oklahoma City.⁷¹ The customer gave Miller the access code to enter, and, after completing his delivery, Miller looked for a safe area where he could turn his truck around without having to back into someone’s yard or drive on grass. Before he could exit the neighborhood, a White resident of the community parked his vehicle so as to block Miller’s egress, and then the resident peppered him with accusatory questions about why he was in the “private” subdivision and how he had gained access. Several minutes into the encounter, another neighbor (also White) joined the inquisition, and the first neighbor called the police to request assistance. Miller drove a marked company truck, and he was wearing a shirt that bore both his name and the employer’s logo on it.⁷² Still, the White male residents perceived him as a threat or interloper.

The encounter lasted almost 40 minutes. At some point, Miller went on Face-book Live, so he could have an account of the incident. You can hear Miller softly say, “You picked the wrong day. Move out the way.” Those words pierced my psyche. I knew that this was not the first time Miller had confronted such an attitude. Later in the taped encounter (and in subsequent interviews), Miller confirmed the same.⁷³ Miller’s frustration was as palpable as the White residents’ indignation at his refusal to answer their questions. I was struck by the extra burden Miller endured in the course of simply trying to do his job. Miller called his boss to explain what he was facing and apologized for not handling the situation better. Miller told his employer that most days he could take it, but he was reeling from the recent loss of two relatives, so he did not have the same capacity to tolerate idiocy that he usually exhibited. I felt another pain in my chest. Miller was not the one who needed to apologize. Approximately six minutes into the Facebook Live video, Miller said, “If I go around him, I’m gonna have to go on someone’s property, and I’m gon make a bad situation worse.” It occurred to me that Miller went through multiple levels of analysis in a relatively short amount of time. Then I remembered what must have occurred to Miller: countless Black lives are inhumanely taken based on erroneous split-second decisions. A look or gesture perceived as errant is often coded as a furtive movement and used by state actors to justify the taking of a life. In the face of someone falsely imprisoning him, Miller carefully calculated every move he personally might take and the likelihood that move, though rightful, might be falsely construed and used against him. He chose not to get out. Instead, he remained in his company transport—a vehicle that his White false accusers effectively turned into a prison. About 24 minutes into the encounter, the homeowner Miller made the delivery to vouched for him and his coworker to the two residents who were detaining them. Instead of apologizing to Miller and his colleague, one of the residents said, “All you had to do was tell me where you were going.” Miller rightly retorted, “I don’t have to tell you anything.”⁷⁴ The two exchanged a few more words. Then Miller asked the resident if the police were still coming. The resident stated that they were not. Both residents departed.

For Miller, the encounter did not end with the residents’ departure. After their departure, Miller was still visibly shaken and nervous. I thought about all the things that must have been swirling through his head. When they called the police, the White residents put Travis Miller’s life on the line. His livelihood was at risk too. He makes his living driving a truck. He did not need a blight on his record. Miller’s colleague was also concerned. After a moment, the colleague asked, “Do you think they’ll follow us?” Miller responded, “I don’t know. That’s why I’m waiting. I don’t know if I should move just yet.” The two men sat in silence. Then Miller wiped a tear from his eye.⁷⁵ Miller’s agony was clear, and so was the callousness of the White residents who caused that pain. Incidents like this are far too common, and in the wake of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery—a young Black man shot and killed while jogging through a middle-class White neighborhood—they serve as a reminder that blackness is commonly equated with suspicion, and this suspicion is used to justify surveillance and judicial as well as extrajudicial action.

Miller did everything right, but, more importantly, he never should have been attacked in the first place. Every move he made was calculated to increase his chances of returning safely home to his family.⁷⁶ I thought about all the Travis Millers who never make it home to tell their stories, and I decided that I wanted my work to live to testify to the disproportionate and racially motivated violence Black bodies face every day. I want this book to offer insight to those who sincerely seek to understand the crisis and point to public policy recommendations for those who seek to change this violent racial system. I am incentivized to speak in the place of all those who have been denied an opportunity to testify.⁷⁷ As I testify, I am reminded of the rich legacy of people of color who have testified before me. Some are my contemporaries, and many are ancestors, but their voices remain. I join my voice with theirs in a resounding chorus of Amen!

A Moment in Time

According to Foucault, all periods of history have possessed certain underlying epistemological assumptions that determine what is acceptable and true.⁷⁸ Change requires an epistemic shift. From time to time, shifts do occur. This is a moment when the potential for radical democratic social change exists. We stand on a shifting fault line. The illusions of safety and equality are eroding. Amid enormous pressure, the fantasy of a post-racial U.S. society is imploding. Young people brutalized by a police officer at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, discovered that youth is not a safe, protected time. Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man shot in the back while fleeing officers, found that daylight provides no safe refuge against excessive police force. Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Raynette Turner, George Floyd, and countless others found that police custody is not a safe state. For nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, murdered by a White supremacist on June 17, 2015, church was not a safe space, just as it was not in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Mother Emanuel was the kind of reminder that comes along every generation or so to warn Blacks and others that there is no place Black bodies are safe.⁷⁹

African Americans have long hoped and believed in the emancipatory power of visual evidence. This hope rises out of dust, as if it was willed there by the ancestors. As poet Maya Angelou warned and extolled: “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”⁸⁰ Today there is a wealth of video evidence that testifies to the injustices visited on certain types of bodies. It is an auspicious time, but we have been here before. Photography came to America around 1839– 1840, and Frederick Douglass (1818– 1895) believed it was a way for Black people to reclaim their image and tell their own story.⁸¹ In his lifetime, Douglass sat for over 160 photos.⁸² Each portrait stood as a testament to Black dignity and honor. Douglass never allowed himself to be debased in an image. He knew that representation could then be used to paint a false narrative about himself and his people. Celeste-Marie Bernier, coauthor of a book about the abolitionist, told the online platform Artsy, “For Douglass, photography was the lifeblood of being able to be seen and not caricatured, to be represented and not grotesque, to be seen as fully human and not as an object or chattel to be bought and sold.”⁸³ W. E. B. Du Bois saw a similar potential in documentary evidence when he curated a series of photos for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition.⁸⁴ The award-winning exhibit that offered a visual and written representation of Black people included hundreds of images of “Negroes and Negro life.” According to scholar Shawn Michelle Smith, “[Du Bois] believed that a clear revelation of the facts of African American life and culture would challenge the claims of biological race scientists influential at the time, which proposed that African Americans were inherently inferior to Anglo-Americans.”⁸⁵ Du Bois sought to depict the progress and dignity of the race.

Ida B. Wells painted images with her words. Her writings and speeches depicted vivid accounts of lynchings. Wells was also attentive to data, and in 1895 she published her groundbreaking findings in The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892– 1894. She pioneered what some now call “data journalism” and used her new methodology to let the facts she detailed testify to the nature of vigilante lynching and reveal the pretexts that justified it. Wells’s investigation revealed that numerous rape claims leveled against Black men were sheer fabrication, pretext to justify violence against Black bodies. Wells helped willing readers see that fears about political and economic competition with Blacks provided the real root cause of the violence against Blacks.⁸⁶ In a May 21, 1892, column, Wells boldly asserted, “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women.”⁸⁷ In the 1996 book Race, Rape, and Lynching, author Sandra Gunning affirms Wells’s conclusions. The false stereotype of Black males as sexual beasts intent on raping White women worked to legitimate White supremacy. In fact, the desire to lynch was so strong that alleged attacks on White women were concocted to justify the “blood lust” of White men. Gunning demonstrates how turn-of-the-century American literature often obscured White male drunkenness, savagery, and bestial behavior at lynchings and instead framed them as a tale of “black rape and white victimhood.”⁸⁸ Her accounts of Wells note that White men saw raping Black women as something they were entitled to do, while using lynching as a warning to White women to not have consensual romantic or erotic relations with Black men.

Almost one hundred years after publication of The Red Record, Black America again held fast to the promise that documentary evidence would help the world see and then want to atone for the perils long visited on Blacks in this country. Video footage of Rodney King being brutally beaten by four White police officers was recorded and viewed across the globe in 1991, but a year later those hopes were again dashed when all four officers were acquitted.⁸⁹ Today we stand at another such precipice. Four years after Sandra Bland’s death in police custody was ruled a suicide, which many have disputed, a recording by Bland of part of her exchange with Trooper Brian Encinia surfaced in 2019.⁹⁰ Together with her video blog, Sandy Speaks, these items testify from the grave. Finally, seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded the May 25, 2020, police killing of George Floyd, and she both witnessed and testified to the atrocity. Frazier’s video recording sparked a global outcry. This is the moment in which I write.

Audience and Organization of Book

This book is for anyone who genuinely wants to understand the root causes of continuing racial violence in contemporary U.S. society. It is also for those who acutely feel and bear the pain of this violence—sometimes in silence and sometimes shouting. They deserve affirmation and to know that they are not alone in the way they see the world; they are not wrong, pessimistic, or anti-American for seeing it this way. In The Racial Contract, philosopher Charles Mills observed, “All whites are beneficiaries of the [racial] Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it.”⁹¹ Therefore, another audience for this book is those Whites who are ready to acknowledge that they are either racist or beneficiaries of racism. It is for those complicit through their action or inaction, including silence. And it is for those who can only muster the courage to admit that some of their actions might indeed be racist even if they cannot yet admit that they are.

In many ways, Travis Miller Sr. inspired this work. Every decision that he made was calculated toward one end: he wanted to get home to the safety and security of his family. He wanted to live to bear witness, to testify. Miller’s story is woven throughout this narrative. You can even see it reflected in the organization of this book, which has three parts. Part I contains a short introduction and three chapters. This chapter, “Testify,” outlines the purpose and the organization of the book. I serve as a witness, and, as James Baldwin noted, “Part of my responsibility—as a witness—[is] . . . to write the story . . . to get it out.”⁹² This chapter makes the case for why this is necessary. In chapter 2, “This I Believe,” I introduce Bodies out of Place (BOP) as a sociological theory of oppression through which violence against certain bodies can be interpreted and understood, and I outline the tenets of the theory. The chapter explains the merit of foregrounding place in our inquiry and highlights how underexplored cognitive aspects of place (both as a geographical and social construct) can prove helpful in interrogating and challenging dominant narratives. Chapter 3, “The Pushback,” provides an abbreviated timeline of African/Black presence in America, and it details acts of White resistance to Black advancement.⁹³ I do this for several reasons. First, I want to highlight agency and dignity in the Black community. Second, I want to demonstrate that the promise of Reconstruction has yet to be fulfilled. Third, the chapter serves to counter the prominent progress narrative that argues “but things are so much better than they used to be.” This progress tale is particularly insidious. It denies consistent and organized White resistance to Black gains. It masks the actuality that while anti-Black racism may take a different form(s) than it has in the past, this does not mean that things are better, especially for large segments of the Black community. Finally, in outlining this history, the chapter underscores both the individual and structural nature of the pushback. It serves to disabuse people of the fiction that the larger society has made considerable efforts toward eradicating racism, and it is a call to arms to do something now to achieve that end.

Part 2 of the book contains five chapters, and each is dedicated to one of the five frames I identify as commonly used justifications to rationalize broad forms of violence against Black bodies, whether political, sociocultural, emotional (psychological), or physical. The BOP frames I outline are culturally determined definitions of reality that allow people to make sense of things.⁹⁴ Like sociologist Joe Feagin’s “white racial frame,” which extends his earlier systemic racism framework, I proffer BOP frames as analytical tools useful for explicating “the nature of the problem [White supremacy as manifested through anti-blackness] and the action required to deal with it.”⁹⁵ Chapter 4, “The Historical Fear Factor,” examines a frame that operates through adopters justifying the use of violence as a preemptive act of self-defense against some perceived attack. Expectations of danger or harm generally rely on the use of historical stereotypes and tropes that paint the “other” as threatening. In chapter 5, “Presumed Criminal,” the typological frame views Black bodies as suspicious until proven otherwise and properly subject to constant and heightened surveillance. The presumption of malevolence makes it acceptable to call in state actors—like police—for routine acts like shopping, walking, and driving. The chapter argues that once the presumption of criminality is invoked, any resistance to authority only heightens the assumption of criminality and is used to rationalize and justify carceral response. In chapter 6, “Massah Has Spoken,” the frame is built on the presumption of White moral superiority, which undergirded biological racism, and it suggests that any White person (or his or her assignee or designee, whether White or otherwise) has the right to be sole arbiter of what is proper, reasonable, and necessary in a given circumstance. It is an extension of the concept of whiteness as property right. Marked with the legal standard of a “reasonable man or woman,” the actor/opposer/overseer has the right to issue commands to the body he or she perceives as out of place and the expectation that the orders will be complied with fully and in the manner and with the speed desired. Failure to do so legitimately subjects the dominated body to violence. This chapter also highlights how the activities of individual actors often contribute to state-sponsored violence against Black bodies. Chapter 7, “You Don’t Belong Here,” describes a frame that relies on fixed ideas about where certain people belong, when they belong in those spaces, and with whom they belong. The chapter demonstrates how this ideology promotes the aims and objectives of White supremacy. Part 2 concludes with chapter 8, “It’s All White Space.” The frame described in this chapter largely depends on social control actualized through the use (and control) of place as a form of power. As sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes, “All domination is ultimately maintained through social control strategies.”⁹⁶ “It’s All White Space” recognizes that White space is amorphous, shifting, and ever expanding. White space is more than a geographic designation. Bracey and Moore write, “The concept ‘white institutional space’ elucidates how institutions . . . become normatively white in policy and practice by explicitly accounting for the intersecting mechanisms—structure, culture, ideology, and discourse— that justify and reproduce white privilege, power, and accumulation of resources in these institutions.”⁹⁷ This frame is reflected in broad attempts to control the body of another or attempts to control geographic and social space. In either case, the goal is the same. It is an effort to maintain a social order that preserves White privilege. Shannon Sullivan’s concept of “white ontological expansiveness” best summarizes this frame. White ontological expansiveness, says Sullivan, is the inclination for White people “to act and think as if all spaces—whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily or otherwise—are or should be available to them to move in and out of as they wish.”⁹⁸ Each of the five chapters in part 2 provides examples of how the frame operates. None of the frames are mutually exclusive.

Part 3 looks not only to the past but also to the future. Chapter 9, “The Weight,” discusses the psychological toll, pain, and weight that purportedly out-of-place bodies bear. This load is especially heavy in light of the cognizance that you are perceived as a danger or a problem. This weight means that people of color (and other bodies that defy the somatic norm) often carry the additional burden of taking preemptive action to make others feel comfortable with their presence in a space. Chapter 10, “Sincere Ignorance and Conscientious Stupidity,” explores the Martin Luther King Jr. quote, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”⁹⁹ The quote is taken from a sermon titled “Love in Action” published in his 1963 book Strength to Love. My examination of the idea challenges readers to acknowledge that both sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity are willful states of being created to make inaction more palatable and thereby appear harmless. The chapter offers a call to action consistent with Karl Marx’s charge that it is not enough to simply understand the social world, the point is to change it.¹⁰⁰ Chapter 11, “Policy Matters, “explores public recommendations for affecting change. The final chapter, “Tell The Story: Lest We Forget,” adds a counter-narrative to the oft-propagated one of Black subjugation. This chapter tells the story of Black hope, Black pride, Black agency, and Black love, and it encourages others to speak truth to power and tell their stories—lest we forget.

Conclusion

In a 2008 interview, award-winning author Toni Morrison, whose accolades include the American Book Award and both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize, told National Public Radio host Michel Martin, “Racism will disappear when it’s . . . no longer profitable and no longer psychologically useful. When that happens, it’ll be gone . . . but at the moment people make a lot of money off of it . . . and also it protects people from a certain kind of pain . . . if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible: about themselves: misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.”¹⁰¹ To rid society of anti-blackness, it is critical to unveil both the economic and psychological dividends it pays. In this book, I clarify and highlight the culpability of individual actors in maintaining racism and other forms of anti-blackness. To do so, I reject the popular “few bad apples” narrative and argue instead that individuals are not bad actors divorced from social systems but rather are embedded in them.¹⁰² Such a framework allows me to demonstrate how anti-Black racism operates not on a continuum between structural and individual levels but on an interconnected loop.