Blackness, Citizenship, and the Transnational Vertigo of Violence in the Americas

When a Missouri grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown on November 24, 2014, the United States erupted into a symphony of protests, the likes of which we have not seen since the civil rights movement. Indeed, we are witnessing the dawn of a new movement, but this movement is not about our national politics. It is about an emerging global politics of race, citizenship, violence, and nation that requires us as anthropologists take stock of our approaches to these topics. Since 2005 I have been working with black political organizers in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in the fight to denounce and demystify anti-black state violence. As an activist anthropologist, my collaborations have been with the grassroots community action network Quilombo X and the campaign React or Die!/React or Be Killed! (hereafter, React or Die! Campaign). This experience has led me to write about and analyze the relationship between blackness, citizenship, and national belonging in the Americas. Specifically, I consider anti-black state violence a performance of the modern American nation-state. In other words, state violence is a process of embodiment and subject making with plots, scripts, and spectacles that have tangible, material effects (e.g., Smith 2008). My work also recognizes the global patterns that connect local black experiences to transnational ones, like police violence. This essay is a reflection on those processes and their current political implications. On August 22, 2014, while demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri, headed to the streets to face another day of confrontation with an excessively militarized police force in the first weeks of protest following the death of Michael Brown, over 51,000 people in cities across Brazil also took to the streets to speak out against police brutality and racial profiling. However, their primary motivation was not the death of Michael Brown. The II (Inter)National March Against the Genocide of Black People, organized by the React or Die!/React or Be Killed! Campaign, was a nationwide protest to draw attention to the fact that according to official counts, Brazilian police kill approximately six people per day, totaling 11,197 over the past five years. This compares to approximately 11,090 people killed by the police in the United States over the past thirty years. Approximately