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6 The Dual-State Character of the United States Introduction A national border is part of the technology of a state as well as the edge of a nation. The several internal and unmapped boundaries we have encountered have shown themselves to constitute the technology of a white para-political entity and the edge of the white nation, residing within the United States under the auspices of the official constitutional state. That alternate entity, which moves beyond the limits of the political while expressing and socially instituting policies culturally, that is, manifesting what is taken for granted in the white culture, forms a mode of para-political state. White Populism and the State Let us return to the historical event that Jack Johnson’s life became. In the wake of Johnson’s 1908 victory over Tommy Burns in Sydney, newspapers and commentators called on Johnson to return to his place in the racist hierarchy, and they counseled black people not to think more highly of themselves because of Johnson’s victory. That is, Johnson’s status as a beacon of self-respect and personhood for black people required a special response. When white populism failed to stop him and he did not return to his place, white society turned to more stringent (and strident) measures. The state was enlisted to find an indictment. (See Chapter 5, note 6.) In 1911, the government concocted a fraudulent (and illegitimate) charge against Johnson under the Mann Act. The Mann Act prohibited the 148 Chapter 6 transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes. The government warped the intent of the law by focusing on trips Johnson had made across state lines with a white girlfriend. Since the woman was white, Johnson’s intimacy with her, though of mutual affection, was proclaimed by definition (a priori) to be “illicit.” Again, a woman was instrumentalized for the state’s political purpose: to reconstitute the coherence of white society in the face of the threat posed by this one man. The government’s first attempt failed because Johnson’s current lover, Lucile Cameron, refused to testify against him. The FBI then procured the services of a former lover, Belle Schreiber, to accuse him of Mann Act violations . It did not matter that the journeys to which she could testify occurred before the Mann Act had been passed and thus could not justifiably (or constitutionally) be used against him. Evidently, for the white state, warping the law for the repression of a self-respecting black person (or person of any color) trumped all principles of jurisprudence or justice. We see a similar corrupt pragmatics at work in the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Lindorff 2003) and Leonard Peltier (Messerschmidt 1983), who are still in prison. The government got its conviction of Johnson, without constitutional or evidentiary grounds or justification. And after a brief flight to Europe, Johnson returned and served a year in prison. In effect, white populism was able to wield the constitutional state for its own purposes. This is not an isolated incident. The obsessive racialized solidarity between a repressive social populism, the political structure, and the media has effected itself again and again, even up to the present. We have recently seen it war against Ward Churchill when he happened to put his finger on what made the U.S. economy tick: its financial administration of the impoverishment of the third world for corporate enrichment.1 Churchill, a Native American professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, has been a severe critic of the racist foundations of the United States, its colonialist history, and its genocidal policies toward all Native Americans. At one point in 2004, he was invited to give a lecture at an eastern college. A single derogatory remark by a nationalist white talk show host about one phrase in a three-year-old article, taken out of context, was all it took to elicit a call for his blood. The shock jocks, newspaper editorials , special state investigative commissions in Colorado, and even his own university administration all joined the mob. Few had read his work: some said they did not have to, while others said that they would go over it carefully enough to find what they needed to fire and disgrace him. When academics and high government officials go into frenzies over a shock jock’s turn of phrase, it is not because they are shocked but because they are [3.129...

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