provisional membership in that hierarchical community. On such terms, it may be easier to understand how an annihilating violence may be one form of this justice. Yet even then, the imperative of expansion guides violence in the direction of inclusion. Just as those racializing processes typically understood as inclusion’s opposite actually prove to be modes of incorporation—for example, Jim Crow segregation and Oriental exclusion, in practice, bound unfree subjects within heavily restricted and regulated socioeconomic locations—so, too, should processes of inclusion be understood as necessitating a differentiating and refining violence.
Readers who seek to refashion and reactivate the allied projects of antiracism and anti-imperialism, rather than merely perform their critical autopsy, may find these propositions disabling. To think of contemporary U.S. imperialism’s deployment of diversity-talk as an appropriation requires imagining a chain of appropriations and counterappropriations stretching back to the onset of European imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade, and positing that the conception of racial justice properly originates with the agents of conquest. Such a model may itself be too simplistic, in seeking to secure a transhistorical autonomy of legitimate and illegitimate conceptions of justice—even if, in local practice, it makes sense to oppose the pragmatic compromises of a liberatory movement to the disingenuous propagandizing of an oppressive regime. Nonetheless, I contend that imperialism’s racial justice should be approached as an animating contradiction, logically necessary but unpredictably volatile. No mere alibi, it must be taken seriously even—especially—if you hope to reject it.
What readers of any political inclination may find most difficult to accept is that imperialism’s claims to justice are not immediately and unambiguously debarred by its reliance on forms of excessive, repetitive, and spectacular violence. Even so, it may be acknowledged that civilizing missions past and present have at times been indistinguishable in practice from overwhelming violence. If such violence proceeds from intentions and premises reflexively represented as benevolent, innocent, and idealistic, this paradox may be explained away as betrayal, corruption, or human frailty, or dismissed as deception or bad faith. Across a political spectrum, histories of imperial violence become separable from theories of racial justice. Against this common sense, I contend that violence is the vehicle of imperialism’s racial justice, the very means of its actualization, and that the practical identity between the two is experienced as a quotidian reality. How, then, does their separation come to be taken for granted?
To approach this question as a problem of ideology or epistemology may not sufficiently express how deeply the operations of race pervade social experience. What manages the contradictions of race and justice is also a matter of aesthetics: a set of enabling constraints on the senses that conditions perception. Students of black literature and culture will be familiar with its paradox of invisibility and hypervisibility, and scholars of race will recall the duplicitous language of color-blindness, two examples of a larger dynamic not reducible to the visual or to any single sense. Angela Davis captures it succinctly in asking why older forms of racism are called “overt,” as if racism is somehow “hidden” in the post–civil rights era (“Civil Rights”). Similarly, Patricia Williams describes the successful police defense in the Rodney King case as less a rationalization than a painstaking lesson in an “aesthetics of rationality” (54). An elaborate system of looking, charged with fear and desire, which intuitively apprehends a prone black body as a threat demanding overwhelming preemptive force; or again, the socialized habits of perception that instruct you to perceive mass incarceration as a natural function of government, and that evoke the specter of the prisoner to teach you to see yourself as free—such are the broader set of phenomena I conceptualize as an aesthetics of racial terror, a training of attention that allows its subjects to distinguish between forms of freedom and unfreedom, between differently racialized and gendered bodies, and between the gospel of imperialism’s racial justice and its expression as overwhelming violence.
The violence’s tendency toward repetition and excess points to its intrinsic inability to fully and finally achieve its ends, revealing an anxiety over the limits of domination and the nonidentity of coercion and consent. By the same token, its corresponding tendency toward spectacle and ritualization suggests how that anxiety demands a periodic renewal of its lessons. These must be compulsively reenacted in an increasingly formalized manner, whose slightly disjunctive relation to any given situation both extends their temporal reach and invites their eventual collapse. Because the violent operation of imperialism’s racial justice is unable to fix its terms, they are shown to be historically contingent. What passes for racial justice under imperialism in one period—expulsion, wholesale slaughter, engineered extinction, religious conversion, cultural erasure—might provide the very definition of racial injustice in another, even as the extent to which imperialism dominates the terms of what can be imagined as racial justice in the present is difficult to properly perceive.
This is why I do not turn to the past to recover an exemplary politics. Such an impulse rests on unacknowledged presumptions regarding history as progressive enlightenment, upholding images of freedom’s betrayal in an unfree past to train its optics to mistake the privileging of hindsight for freedom of judgment in the present. By contrast, this book seeks to dwell within the strangeness of the past as a means of defamiliarizing the present, casting its lot within the predicaments of the past in order to read a shared condition of unfreedom in the desire to become estranged to it. This task of reading, or learning how to read, draws on the aesthetic resources of black radical traditions that improvise a countertraining of perception, whose appearance may be anticipated within the ritual sites of training in the aesthetics of racial terror—in its very forms, practices, and protocols. It pursues the chance that what imperial inclusion in the violence of its embrace must exclude bears the clues to what yet eludes it.
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The predominant form of imperialism’s racial justice discussed in this book, recent enough to seem at once familiar and foreign, is racial uplift. At the twentieth century’s dawn, uplift encompassed both the range of projects to improve the social conditions of African Americans and the guiding rationale for U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Looking back through a perspective shaped by post–World War II conjunctions of formal racial equality and formal national independence, on one hand, and Third Worldist antiracism and anti-imperialism, on the other, these two senses appear incommensurable. Examples of Negro uplift, as collective protest or moralizing conservativism, are regularly represented as antecedents of various contemporary strains of African American politics. By contrast, the attitudes and expressions of Anglo-Saxon uplift, when not ignored or discarded, are recognized as outmoded or racist. Whether the racial politics of U.S. colonialism are seen as aberrations or vestiges in an essentially benevolent tradition, or as alibis or paternalistic delusions exposing the immorality of power, their discontinuity from traditions of racial justice is taken for granted. Yet at the time, black intellectuals regularly presumed the coherence and continuity of an overarching category of uplift, upholding it most strongly when they subjected its Anglo-Saxon variant to criticism. On what terms can this continuity be understood?
In his influential work on uplift, Kevin Gaines argues that an older sense of the term rooted in “antislavery folk religion” (Uplifting the Race, 1) largely gave way, after Reconstruction, to an ideology stressing “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth.” While “espousing a vision of racial solidarity uniting black elites with the masses,” Gaines argues, uplift ideology functioned to establish a fragile class division within the race. In the teeth of racism, “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority; hence the phrase, so purposeful and earnest, yet so often of ambiguous significance, ‘uplifting the race’ ” (2). Tenuous and aspirational, this social distinction intensified the values and practices of service and duty to the race, inscribing it even as they worked to overcome it.
Anglo-Saxon uplift was similarly concerned as much with its privileged subject as with its benighted objects. While the stated aim of conquest was to better
