Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section

We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, originally a response to the July 2013 acquittal of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s vigilante killer in Florida gained the silent ‘‘hands up, don’t shoot’’ gesture in reference to the August 2014 fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer subsequently acquitted by a grand jury. That winter, a New York City policeman was acquitted by a grand jury despite videotaped evidence of the July 2014 choking of Eric Garner, and t-shirts worn at protests and at sporting events called us to remember Garner’s last words: ‘‘I can’t breathe.’’ In each case, the loss of a young black man’s life was followed by a second symbolic death, in the highlighting of the victim’s supposed flaws and mistakes and the subsequent failure to hold anyone accountable for the death. A growing litany of these police killings was then given intersectional nuance by #SayHerName’s recounting of Black female, queer and trans victims who had not only been subject to violence but then omitted from the public recounting. The names of Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, Philando Castille, and too many others signal particular lives valued and mourned, but also indicate a repetition and wearing down of life. We wrote the proposal with ferocious anger and with the Movement for Black Lives in mind as an expression of righteous fury at state violence that cuts directly to the heart of race-biopolitics.