Social death: Racialized rightlessness and the criminalization of the unprotected by Lisa Marie Cacho
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Social death: Racialized rightlessness and the c r i m i n a l i z a t i o n of t h e u n p r o t e c t e d Lisa Marie Cacho New York University Press, New York, 2012, 236 pp., $24.00, ISBN: 978-0814723760 (paperback)
Latino Studies (2014) 12, 493–494. doi:10.1057/lst.2014.39
In this compelling probe of comparative racialization projects in the contemporary United States, Lisa Marie Cacho offers an abundance of analytic tools that help make sense of the spaces of “social death,” liminal positions from which the rightless struggle to assert their personhood. Relying on a broad range of materials – including news articles and other media products, official government reports and court transcripts – Cacho identifies three populations whose very being constitutes what she refers to as “de facto status crimes” – gang members, undocumented immigrants and un(der)employed African Americans. This form of preemptive criminalization produces, primarily through the coercive and ideological functions of law and the criminal justice apparatus, the sort of “impossible subjects” that Ngai (2004) referred to and that Cacho refers to as “persons ineligible to personhood.” Cacho points out that these are always people of color, the same categories of people who were marked as ineligible to citizenship for most of American history. From chapter 1, where Cacho traces the decriminalization of whiteness that was revealed in the case of the seven suburban San Diego white boys who brutally attacked Mexican immigrant men, to chapter 3, where she traces the post-9/11 temporary reconstitution of
Latinos from threat (as the face of illegal immigration) to quasi-“protector[s] of the American way of life” as Arab/Muslim identification came to be attached to illegality as well (30), Cacho weaves together the common threads of seemingly disparate categorical populations, from gang members to undocumented immigrants to terrorism suspects. Most fundamentally, each of these populations is considered criminal-inbeing, outside the protections, but subject to the punishments, of law, unlawful for who they are, not what they have done. The sharpest analytic insights come from Cacho’s discussion of the relative valuations that underpin a politics of worth anchored in “respectability” and which parallel the operation of race as an always relational system. Efforts to secure recognition of one group’s worth inevitably depend on the comparative depreciation of another group or type whether directly (real criminals), through the more subtle elision of those with particular value-laden characteristics or associations (hard workers), or some combination of both (terrorists). When redemption for immigrants is staked on their representation as the “model minority” of the working poor, this entails a parallel disavowal of those populations thought to reject conformity to the low-wage labor market (for example,
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Vol. 12, 3, 493–494
Book Review
unemployed African Americans)
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