Fast Violence, Revolutionary Violence: Black Lives Matter and the 2020 Pandemic
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SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
Fast Violence, Revolutionary Violence: Black Lives Matter and the 2020 Pandemic Claire Colebrook
Received: 25 June 2020 / Accepted: 5 August 2020 # Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Pty Ltd. 2020
Abstract The 2020 pandemic cannot be divorced from the problem, pace, and spectacle of race, both because of the racial rhetoric regarding the origins of the virus and because of the subsequent racial injustice in the distribution of healthcare. This paper adds the concept of fast violence to Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” to look at the intersection between the climate of the planet and the climate of racial injustice. Keywords Pandemic . Anthropocene . Violence
The Anthropocene is an intensively temporal concept, not because it marks out a span of geological time (which would simply be extensive) but because it marks a time within human history and a certain discipline (geology) where one way of marking time (stratigraphy or the temporality drawn from the earth’s layers) intersects with a shift in the understanding of human time. At a certain point in geological history, a species can have geological impact, and at a certain point in human history, the earth’s geological time enters the political imaginary. The layers of the earth start to speak to how we might imagine our future; the contraction of our future speeds up. Taking account of the once slow time of geology shows just how narrow our window is for any action that might save the world as we know it. What 2020 has brought to the fore is C. Colebrook (*) Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Penn State, State College, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
the extent to which the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene and the “we” whose future is imperilled has always been racial (Karera 2019). The speeds and intersections of human and geological time need to be rendered distinct by noting that the “we” of the Anthropocene and the future that is both promised and threatened by humanism were made possible by a history of slavery, in which the private spaces and personal timelines of modern urban existence depended upon a massive interruption and destruction of African time. As Frank Wilderson has argued, so encompassing and universal is the trajectory of “the human,” so definitive was the social death demanded of slaves, that anti-blackness becomes definitive of a human time that knows no outside. In the United States especially, the state is premised upon anti-blackness: Without the sexualized violence against and mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Black captives, Americans would not be able to elect a U.S. president. Thomas Jefferson would never have become president. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, … 389,000 [that’s less than a half million] . . . African slaves, bred like horses or sheep, became four-million enslaved African-Americans . . . [T]he forced mating of slaves . . . gave slave states more voting power based on the number of slaves they held captive.Virginia was the largest slave-breeding state. As a resul
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