Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism

Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution.


For Afro-pessimists it is not the economic sphere that forms the ‘base’ from which the ‘superstructure’ of civil society, politics, and culture emerges, but antiblack violence that makes possible and is necessitated by global capitalism, freedom, civil society, and the interlocutors life of white (and nonblack)


Black Americans are what some might call ‘the canary in the coal mine’ insofar as they are the first to suffer the consequences of political and economic restructuring.


If the exploitation axis is characterized by the homogenizing wage relation... then the axis of expropriation relies on a logic of differentiation that reproduces racialized (as well as gendered) subjects.


The subprime crisis showed us that in the U.S., creditworthiness itself is racialized, as there was an a priori association of blackness with risk. This is consistent with the general moral construction of race, which is undergirded by the assumption that black Americans are immoral (read: criminal) and that they don’t contribute to society or make good in social promises (read: lazy and welfare-dependent).


I don’t know how time is experienced on the inside of prison; I only know how prison mangles time from the perspective of a family member on the outside, looking in. Nine years we sat waiting for my brother’s hearing, while his appeal sat unread on some courthouse clerk’s desk. Time moved on the outside while my brother’s situation remained static. We were teenagers when he got locked up, and now he’s balding. My life slowly ambles along while my brother’s life stands still.


When people identify with their victimization, it is important to critically consider whether they use this gesture as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power in a social space. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.