Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected by Lisa Marie Cacho (review)

American law, according to Lisa Marie Cacho, is rife with de facto status crimes, defined as “specific activities that are only transparently recognized as ‘criminal’ when they are attached to statuses that invoke race (gang member), ethnicity (‘illegal alien’), and/or national origin (suspected terrorist)” (43). California’s Proposition 21, for example, attached extra penalties to “gang-related” violence, with “gang-related” being commonly understood as violence perpetrated by non-whites. Through examining this and other case studies of racialized rightlessness, Cacho’s Social Death proves itself an eye-opening account of how and why the American polity “is dependent upon the permanence of certain groups’ criminalization,” groups who are thus rendered functionally “ineligible for personhood” (6).

Among the archive of incidents whose larger meaning the author explicates are: popular outcry against white teenagers being charged under Proposition 21; indefinite detention and deportation of a suspected Cambodian gang member; the placement of the so-called “War on Terror” within the broader context of “illegal” immigration; the situation of Elvira Arellano, who publicly resisted deportation in order to keep her family together; and, finally, the death of the author’s own cousin in a purported drunk-driving accident. For each of these, Cacho explicates how the legal system (and opinion makers such as journalists) judge certain racialized groups as inherently criminal while treating whites on an individual basis with regard to specific conduct (actus rea), not their de facto status. Those so criminalized by dint of status can seek recognition for their grievances “only by conforming to those U.S. heteronormative ‘morals’ and ‘standards of living’ that, ironically, have been defined over and against their very communities and their communities’ survival strategies”—and, through this appeal to respectability, essentially disavow others as deviant non-conformists (129).

Cacho’s work echoes Roberto Esposito’s Third Person (2012, English translation), especially in their shared argument that human rights cannot be pursued based upon the notion of personhood since the concept of the person creates the division between the human being and the bearer of rights in the first place. Like Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility by Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo D. Torres (2012), Social Death illustrates how the racial hierarchy of the United States exists as a function of transnational capitalism, how neoliberalism produces arguments for individual or group worth that obscure the question: who benefits from the placement of countless people into a state of social death? Cacho’s own strengths lie in pairing the broad-based, theoretical perspectives with an intimate gaze into the sphere of social death, illustrating how individuals are personally rendered non-persons by the neoliberal regime.

In response to this system of racialized rightlessness, the author advocates for the practice of “unthinkable politics,” urging her readers to move beyond “realistic” approaches and instead “to be critical of what makes us vulnerable to state violences and what makes us susceptible to the state’s seductions” (145). Few books since Charles W. Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997) have so successfully paired a scholarly inquiry into the mechanisms of white supremacy with a revolutionary consciousness.