Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture

1 Erasing the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence

i / Erasing the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance. . . . Weare neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in thepanoptic machine. . . . thepomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations ofpower, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance. —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish offers a body politics of state punishment and prosecution that is considered by some postmodernists to be a master narrative competent to critique contemporary state policing. Yet this particular work contributes to the erasure of racist violence. In respect to U.S. policing and punishment, the metanarrative of Discipline and Punish vanquishes historical and contemporary racialized terror, punishments, and control in the United States; it therefore distorts and obscures violence in America in general. By examining erasure in body politics, lynching, and policing; penal executions and torture; and terror in U.S. foreign policy —issues that Foucault overlooks in his discussion of the history of policing in the United States—we find visceral spectacles of state abuse. Erasure in Body Politics Writing about the "disappearance of torture as a public spectacle"—with no reference to its continuity in European and American colonies where it 24 Erasing the Spectacle I 25 was inflicted on indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas—Foucault weaves a historical perspective that eventually presents the contemporary ("Western") state as a nonpractitioner of torture.1 His text illustrates how easy it is to erase the specificity of the body and violence while centering discourse on them. Losing sight of the violence practiced by and in the name of the sovereign, who at times was manifested as part of a dominant race, Foucault universalizesthe body of the white, propertied male. Much of Discipline and Punish depicts the body with no specificity tied to racialized or sexualized punishment. The resulting veneer of bourgeois respectability painted over state repression elides racist violence against black and brown and red bodies. Foucault states that the "historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born" (137). Failing to concretize this "art of the human body," he leaves unaddressed these questions: which body serves as prototype? who bore this representative model or type? Ostensibly talking about the body while ignoring its uniqueness, Foucault explores issues of policing that are restricted to behavior. If one asserts that the "introduction of the 'biographical' is important in the history of penalty. . . . Because it establishes the 'criminal' as existing before the crime and even outside it" (252), one might also note that the biographical is intricately tied to the biological—that is, the "criminal" is identified not only by his or her act but also by his or her appearance.2 Consider how Foucault's discussion of nonconformity as offense masks the body: What is specific to the disciplinary penalty is non-observance,that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it. The whole indefinite domain of the non-conforming is punishable: the soldier commits an "offence" whenever he does not reach the level required; a pupil's "offence" is not only a minor infraction, but also an inability to carry out his tasks. (178-79) Nonobservance and nonconformity are often understood as biologically determined, given that the departure from the norm shows up not only in behavior but visually in terms of physical characteristics that are racialized. Foucault's exclusive focus on actions suggests undifferentiated bodies. Physical appearance, however, can be considered an expression of either conformity or rebellion. Because some bodies fail to conform physiologically , different bodies are expected and are therefore required to behave 26 / Erasing the Spectacle differently under state or police gaze. Greater obedience is demanded from those whose physical difference marks them as aberrational, offensive, or threatening. Conversely, some bodies appear more docile than others because of their conformity in appearance to idealized models of class, color, and sex; their bodies are allowed greater leeway to be self-policed or policed without physical force. To illustrate: a white male executive in an Armani suit is considered more docile, civilized, and in need of less invasive, coercive policing than a black male youth in a hooded sweatshirt and offthe -hip baggy jeans. (In contrast, white youths who racially cross-dress— with baseball caps turned backwards, "X" t-shirts, low-riding pants—are generally...