Care as Counterinsurgency

In Louisiana in 2021 a group of Black fathers gathered in the form of Dads on Duty to pre-empt increasing violence amongst their children at a local high school. Activist and writer Harsha Walia hailed this as community-based care exemplifying abolition in practice. This coheres with a recent focus on care as a political project providing an antidote to anti-Black violence. However, this case is instructive in foregrounding the limitations of a politics of care insofar as care is sutured into the continuation of policing and violence. With Fanon’s concept of incomplete death, I consider whiteness’ orienting tensions between the drive to annihilate Blackness and simultaneously to maintain Blackness as a source of exploitable value and the rights and privileges for whites. If care operates in this space of incomplete death, then care-politics becomes a survival program that conciliates anti-Black violence that would render impossible its abolition.