Barnor Hesse and Debra Thompson

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Introduction:
Antiblackness—Dispatches
from Black Political Thought

The human who is black is a being, is of being . . .

the black one’s ontological dilemma is not in regard
to not-being or being-against; the ontological
dilemma, as such exists, is being.
—Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being

F or those of us working within the parameters

and possibilities of Black political thought, trying
to think about 2020, the global year of both the
COVID-19 virus and Black Lives Matter protests,
presents a unique set of challenges. The first is
genealogical; it asks, What Black history of the
present can account for the structural-racialized
meaning of these two global events without eras-
ing their racialized contingencies? The second
is political; it asks, What forms of Black political
thought are necessary for understanding these
racially convergent, conjunctural events? While
the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 are the
main focus of what we discuss, we want to insist
that the COVID-19 pandemic provided a political
horizon to those protests in ways that we are still
trying to work through, although we do begin
some of that work here. Both the genealogical and
political questions posed above are also interested
in how we should critically memorialize the BLM

The South Atlantic Quarterly 121:3, July 2022

doi 10.1215/00382876-9825919 © 2022 Duke University Press
448 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

protests during 2020 in the context of COVID-19. For Black political thought,
the principal issue with the critical interrogation of the past concerns the
retrieval from erasure of atrocities integral to the past that are then memorial-

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ized as exceptional or incidental to the past. Related to this is the problem of
the memorialization becoming more significant than what it memorializes.
Particularly in recuperating the absented memory of those massacred in the
past to revalue and re-narrate them in the present, memorialization can all too
easily assume a radically divergent temporal break with that past by virtue of
the present’s presumed discreteness and evolution as its basis of confronting
the past that long precedes it. Yet, the present, while always open to condemn-
ing the past, should not be thought of in the same way as the basis for consign-
ing the past to the past. The present needs to be excavated and confronted for
its contribution of atrocities to the past. It is not only that we are condemned to
repeat the past by not remembering it, as George Santayana famously once
warned, but also that we may be condemned simply to repeat the remember-
ing. With that in mind, what do we need to remember but not repeat?
On June 15, 2020, Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Attorney Gen-
eral Keith Ellison attended a public ceremony with over two hundred people
at the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial to acknowledge the one hundredth
anniversary of the Duluth lynchings. The people who attended were told
how, on June 15, 1920, three young Black men, Elias Clayton (nineteen),
Elmer Jackson (nineteen), and Isaac McGhie (twenty) were falsely accused of
raping a white girl and within twenty-four hours of being arrested were
hanged to death from a lamppost in the town center of Duluth, Minnesota.
An estimated ten thousand white people watched the lynchings, which was
20 percent of the Duluth population at the time (Magan 2020). According to
Dora Apel (2008), the lynchings were then documented in a photograph
widely circulated in a picture postcard that displayed Clayton, Jackson, and
McGhie’s murdered bodies, at the crime scene, “helpless, abject, partially
stripped, psychologically emasculated and dehumanized.” Also shown in
the photograph, gathered in a semi-circle around the barbarities, is a well-
dressed crowd of white men, all turned toward the camera, “nodding their
heads forward to insure their faces will be recorded for posterity” (Apel
2008: 217–21). The Duluth lynchings memorial was the first substantial
lynching memorial in the US when unveiled on October 10, 2003. Exhibit-
ing sculptures of Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie, the memorial bears the
inscription, “An event has happened upon which it is difficult to speak and
impossible to remain silent” (Uenuma 2020). Speaking on the one hun-
dredth anniversary of the lynchings, Attorney General Ellison recalled the
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 449

relevance of the inscription on the memorial to contemporary events when he

told the crowd, “Silent complicity is a type of malady that infected the popula-
tion then and affects the population now” (Lawler 2020). The metaphor of

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malady (which can be read as disease and/or disorder) chosen by Ellison on
that day to enrich his remarks was also notable for his relating it to the differ-
ent but connected idea of infecting and affecting. These biological and social
descriptors of contagion seemed to draw upon a likening of the circulation of
antiblackness to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, as if they were comparable
pandemics. Curiously enough, Ellison unwittingly inferred a historical prec-
edent that escaped the memorialization anniversary ceremony but was
extremely significant. The Duluth lynchings took place only a couple of
months after the global Spanish flu pandemic (1918–1920) was beginning to
subside, having hit Minnesota heavily and also not so long after the previous
year of antiblack riots by white supremacists across the US throughout 1919,
when Black people were gratuitously attacked and killed in over seventy dif-
ferent cities across the US, between January and December (Schlabach 2019;
McWhirther 2011). The conjunction of the Spanish flu pandemic and the
pandemic of antiblack riots during 1919 is not often narrated or conceptual-
ized in histories or analyses of either, nevertheless we need to remind our-
selves about the historical precedent of that conjunction when thinking about
COVID-19 and BLM during 2020. Clearly, we have been here before.

Minnesota Police Murder of George Floyd

Attorney General Ellison was undoubtedly aware of how the 1920 Duluth
lynchings represented a different historical precedent when he delivered his
reflections on their significance. He was aware, as indeed was the whole
world by then that on May 25, 2020, at the height of the global COVID-19
pandemic, Minneapolis police officers arrested a Black man, George Floyd,
on the accusation that he had purchased cigarettes with a counterfeit $20
bill. One of the officers drew his gun within six seconds of Floyd opening his
car door. Three officers pinned Floyd on the ground, with one white officer,
Derek Chauvin, kneeling heavily on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half min-
utes, looking nonchalant with one hand in his pocket. “I can’t breathe,”
Floyd said, at least twenty-six times. It echoed the last words of Eric Garner,
another Black man killed by the police over cigarettes six years earlier and
twelve hundred miles away. In those tortured last minutes of Floyd’s life, he
called out for his mother, begging for his life. After Floyd lost consciousness,
bystanders shouted at the officers to check his pulse. Chauvin didn’t move.
450 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

The other officers didn’t provide medical assistance. An ambulance arrived,

and Chauvin continued to kneel on an unresponsive Floyd’s neck for nearly
an additional full minute. The entire incident was captured in a phone video

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by then seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier, who was walking her nine-year-
old cousin to the corner store. Frazier uploaded the video to Facebook in the
early hours of May 26, later saying to the Wall Street Journal, “I opened my
phone and I started recording because I knew if I didn’t, no one would
believe me” (Stern 2020). That video went viral, nationally and globally,
unleashing a worldwide avalanche of demonstrations that defied sheltering
away from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A makeshift memorial was quickly installed on the corner where Floyd
was killed; a week after Floyd’s death, a police car drove through it. In
response, residents created George Floyd Square, where “an ad-hoc commit-
tee of activists and residents erected and staffed guard shacks at entrances.
An abandoned Speedway gas station was repurposed as the People’s Way,
and an improvised fire pit, set up between empty pumps, became a gather-
ing place. . . . It included a platform where visitors could leave flowers and
messages, and a nine-foot-tall steel sculpture of a fist that the artist Jordan
Powell Karis had designed, as a replica of an earlier wooden sculpture, and
that residents helped assemble. The Square was becoming more than a
shrine to Floyd’s life; it was a monument to others who had died in encoun-
ters with police, and a headquarters for an emergent movement” (Cobb
2021). We should note that George Floyd Square was removed in June 2021,
approximately six weeks after the funeral of Daunte Wright, another young
Black man shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer who claimed to
have mistaken her gun for a Taser. Not only had we been here before, we
were here again. The outcry over Floyd’s death at the hands of the police also
echoed two earlier instances of deadly police violence in the same city. In
July 2016, Philando Castile was shot during a traffic stop by police officer
Jeronimo Yanez, about a fifteen-minute drive from the place where George
Floyd was murdered. Castile, a school nutrition services supervisor in the
Saint Paul Public School District, advised Yanez that he had a licensed fire-
arm in his vehicle during a traffic stop; Yanez then fired seven close-range
shots at Castile. Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was in the car
along with her four-year-old daughter, posted a livestream video of the imme-
diate aftermath of the shooting to Facebook. Yanez was charged with sec-
ond-degree manslaughter but was ultimately acquitted. Then, in 2017, Jus-
tine Damond was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who mistook her for
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 451

an assailant. This time, the officer was convicted of third-degree murder and
manslaughter and sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison. However,
the conviction raised the question of whether the fact that Damond was a

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white Australian woman, and Mohamed Noor was a Black police officer of
Somali descent, had anything to do with the sudden shift on this occasion to
hold the police accountable.
That the police murder of George Floyd took place in Minneapolis, in
the state of Minnesota, should not pass without comment. Samuel Myers
has observed that the state of Minnesota is generally known for being nice,
which raises the question of how the sadistic police killing of George Floyd
can happen in that Midwest state. Minnesota is routinely celebrated as one of
the best American states to live in terms of quality of life, but it has also been
identified as one of the worst places for Black Americans to live. Myers
describes that extreme divergence between white and Black citizens and
their quality of life in the same state as “the Minnesota Paradox” (2020).
According to Myers, Minnesota produces the highest national average scores
on SAT exams, has housing prices below the national median, has a strong
regional transportation network, and has a large vibrant arts, theater, and
music community, having previously been the home of the musician Prince.
In contrast, African Americans are “worse off in Minnesota than they are in
virtually every state in the nation” when measured by racial disparities in
unemployment rates, home ownership rates, mortgage lending rates, and
standardized test scores. Of course, Minneapolis, like many American cities,
has a long history of structural racism at the base of its local policies and
municipal operations, including redlining practices by real estate brokers
and lenders, restrictive racial housing covenants, and segregation in employ-
ment, not to mention the Black neighborhoods destroyed in the postwar era
to make way for Interstate 94 (Myers 2020). And lest we forget, Minneapolis,
like many American cities, also has a long history of racial policing against
Black communities; indeed, in 2014, when the US Department of Justice’s
Office of Justice Programs launched the “National Initiative for Building
Community Trust and Justice,” Minneapolis was one of six cities chosen to
participate, and yet, as Jesse Jannetta puts it, “George Floyd was killed by a
police officer in Minneapolis” (2020). The account we have given of Floyd’s
death is probably close to what it would have looked like had 2020 not been
the year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the BLM protests, obliging us to
think about what happens to our analysis once we begin to factor in those
national and global dimensions that the pandemic and protests represent.
452 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

Two Pandemics
We are inclined to think of 2020 as the year of the two pandemics: COVID-19

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and antiblackness, the former structured as emergent, the latter structured as
longevity, with both exploding into the glare of national and global attention,
as much through mass anguish and protesting about these social and political
phenomena as through their respective epidemiological and antipolitical/
antisocial outbreaks in different places at different times. Although the term
pandemic is usually reserved exclusively for describing the expansive travels
and travails of a disease, we want to suggest that as a metaphor, pandemic
describes what has been symptomized by both the spread of COVID-19 and
antiblackness in their respective transmissions from person to person, city
to city, nation to nation, namely, a sudden or long-­term eruption or outbreak
of microbiological violence (COVID-19) or colonial racial violence (anti­
blackness) within a social gathering, or in an attack on a single person. We
should note that pandemic is much more of a social than scientific term. Since
the seventeenth century, this social imprecision has allowed it to convey
generically the idea of a large epidemic, insofar as its Greek roots, “pan (all)
and demos (people), reflect its widespread nature,” while the term epidemic is
often translated from the Greek as “that which is upon the people,” referring
to a “high-incidence or widely prevalent condition” when there is “rapid tempo-
ral and geographic spread” (Morens et al. 2020: 3–4). Another way of thinking
about the two pandemics can be derived from a reading of Laura Spinney, writ-
ing about the Spanish flu of 1918, which is frequently drawn upon as the near-
est and closest comparison to COVID-19, who has argued that “at the root of
every pandemic is an encounter between a disease causing microorganism
and a human being,” which in turn is shaped by “numerous other events tak-
ing place at the same time—as well as by the weather, the price of bread, ideas
about germs, white men and jinns” (Spinney 2017: 5). This suggests not only
that pandemics are frequently biological and social doubles but that they are
also routinely framed by the colonial-racial animations, if not machinations
of white supremacy.
We can develop this idea by turning to Brett Bowman’s discussion of
the global status of COVID-19 and the BLM protests during 2020. Accord-
ing to Bowman, pandemics comprise “public health threats so significant”
that they require a global response that “fundamentally alters the human,
social and economic dynamics of everyday life” to restrict possible transmis-
sions of the pathogen. Bowman reminds us that “struggling to breathe” is
an epidemiological symptom of the pandemic caused by the Severe Acute
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 453

Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and that “the world has

witnessed widespread protests against the killing of George Floyd, who like
Eric Garner, was suffocated to death” as part of a system of antiblack police

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violence (Bowman 2020: 1). For Bowman, when we think about the morbid
expression “I can’t breathe,” words repeated by both George Floyd and Eric
Garner and in chants by BLM protesters, we should realize that the “juxtapo-
sition of transmission risk for a respiratory disease through protest” takes
place against the background of “the suffocating effects of police violence”
that in turn, through the protests that it provokes, makes the protesters vul-
nerable to both the racial brutality of the police and the “communicable dis-
ease (COVID-19)” (Bowman 2020: 1). We can read this as a description of
two deeply entangled pandemics: on the one hand, the pandemic of microbi-
ological violence aka COVID-19 and the global policy reactions to it and, on
the other, the pandemic of colonial-racial violence, aka antiblackness, and
the global protest responses to it.

Pandemic One: COVID-19

Following George Floyd’s murder, the medical examiner’s autopsy report
revealed he had tested positive for COVID-19. In 2020, COVID-19 had become
a worldwide household name. COVID-19, the latest coronavirus, an infectious
disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, inflicts mild to extreme respiratory
illness, depending on any underlying medical conditions. It spreads rapidly by
person-to-person contact, through respiratory droplets deposited in the air peo-
ple breathe when speaking, singing, sneezing, or coughing. Throughout 2020
we learned that anyone can get sick with COVID-19 and become seriously ill
or die at any age. We also learned through recurrent studies that Black and
Brown people in the US and other Western countries disproportionally con-
tracted COVID-19 and disproportionally died from COVID-19 related condi-
tions; and that governments ill-prepared for tackling public health crises
struggled and mostly refused to switch from neoliberalism to social wel-
farism, while government and medical advice were contested for their verac-
ity by the populism of New World Order conspiracy theories. While many of
these developments mirrored experiences undergone during the Spanish flu
(Spinney 2017), on this occasion “what was unprecedented was the reaction”
(Tooze 2021). Across the world, public life was shut down, economic life was
downsized and reinvented by being moved online, creating a “massive inter-
ruption of normality” and stirring up in response “various degrees of incom-
prehension, indignation, resistance, non-compliance and protest” (Tooze
454 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

2021: 31). The year 2020 also exposed how dependent neoliberal capitalist
economies were on the stability of a natural environment it had chosen to
generally neglect and not protect, given a “tiny virus mutation in a microbe

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could threaten the entire world’s economy” (Tooze 2021: 17); and at the same
time, it exposed how even limited practices of society, or at least communi-
ties and populations tethered to or invested in social relationships and insti-
tutions, as regimes of normality, became fractured and easily dislocated
without emergency social welfare government support and public health
intervention.
In early 2020, as governments worldwide struggled to deal with the
global pandemic of COVID-19, in different and sometimes in indifferent
ways, the terms were set for an informal political referendum on the very
idea of an interventionist government, particularly where the ideal of public
health was concerned. After decades of the neoliberal dismantling and
repression of the social welfare state and the accelerated implementation of
social austerity measures since the global economic crash of 2008, many
Western governments found themselves not only unable to respond effec-
tively with public health protocols for COVID-19 but facing wide-ranging
public distrust in liberal democratic institutions. Right-wing populism
resurged across Europe and North America, solidifying the characteristi-
cally Western democratic deficit, and responding to COVID-19 death statis-
tics with disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories. Throughout
the year, national and subnational governments alike attempted to govern
public health by restricting public life through social distancing, face mask
wearing, and lockdowns. Although advocated as measures to protect public
health and deter privatized lives from becoming daily reported public deaths,
these public health measures also attracted the wrath of right-wing populist
protests that viewed them as unnecessary government overstep. COVID-19
came to symbolize the emergence of a new political conjuncture if not a new
ideological age.
Initially it all began so slowly. The first case of COVID-19 in the United
States was confirmed on January 20, 2020. However, such was the rapid
spread of the virus that by the end of March more than a dozen states had
closed schools and imposed shutdown orders; professional and college
sports suspended their seasons, international borders were closed to nones-
sential travel, the majority of Americans were living under stay-at-home
orders, and President Trump declared a national emergency. But the pan-
demic was not equally devastating for all Americans; nor were the policies
put in place by unprepared and desperate governments universally benefi-
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 455

cial. Early demographic data from April 2020 revealed that Black Americans
were infected with and dying from coronavirus at disproportionate rates
across the country. In Chicago, for example, Black residents were dying at six

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times the rate of their white counterparts (Thebault et al. 2020). In the
months that followed, it became increasingly apparent the that the burden of
the disease fell on poor Black communities and other communities of color,
where people are more likely to live in densely populated areas and be
employed in high-risk, low-wage, essential work, especially in the health care
sectors and the service industry. The risk to Black citizens and the virus’s
rampage of Black communities were compounded by longstanding vectors
of socioeconomic stratification, including unequal access to health care,
access to and quality of public services, the ability to shelter (safely and com-
fortably) in place, and the inability to benefit from the safeguards and accom-
modations put in place for many middle-class workers, such as working
from home. Between March and April, more than 22 million Americans
filed unemployment claims; Black workers experienced the highest unem-
ployment rate of any racial group—14.4 percent in July 2020, significantly
higher than the white unemployment rate (9.2 percent) or the average of the
total population (10.2 percent) (Long 2020).
The psychological toll of the pandemic is hard to account for and
impossible to measure. The sheer amount of human loss—nearly one hun-
dred thousand dead on the day of Floyd’s murder, and more than half a mil-
lion more by the time of Derek Chauvin’s sentencing—is on a scale that was
previously unimaginable, given the self-assuredly “advanced” nature of
Western societies and the United States’ self-proclamation as the world’s
only remaining superpower. The amount of grief and loss on both interper-
sonal and societal scales was paralleled by a dramatic, rapid increase in expe-
riences of vulnerability, economic precarity, and the threat of premature
death across the entire population. In the United States, blame fell squarely
at the feet of the Trump administration; the haphazard, halting, and wholly
insufficient federal response to the pandemic was, by all accounts, an epic
government failure. Perhaps more than anything else COVID-19 translated
into view the political horizon within which deeply structured racial inequal-
ities and racial injustices, compounded by police violence, allowed a captive
lockdown audience to see intimations of the slow violence structurally
instrumentalized particularly against Black working-class populations. Rob
Nixon describes slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of
sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and
space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”
456 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

(Nixon 2011: 2–3). This is how we understand terms like structural racism,
racial inequalities, and racial injustices, mobilized in Black political dis-
courses. They refer to the violence of wearing down and wearing out the

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physical and psychological well-being of Black people over decades of unac-
knowledged and publicly silenced suffering, sanctioned by the normativity
of routine white citizen supremacy. Slow racial violence is unrelenting and
opaque to a white society whose civil comfort resides in not knowing it is
there or not having it brought to its attention. As Nixon has noted about vio-
lence generally, it is “conceived as an event or action that is immediate in
time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensa-
tional visibility” (Nixon 2011: 2–3). This encapsulates effectively the specta-
cle of police antiblackness that captured national and global attention during
2020, but it was in the glare of that attention that Black protesters attempted
to illuminate the slow historical racial violence of what was increasingly
called white supremacy and antiblackness, and underlined the entrench-
ment of the second pandemic.

Pandemic Two: Antiblackness

In 2020 Black Lives Matter also became a worldwide household name. BLM
was in the air that nearly everyone breathed as a result of George Floyd’s
murder. Once the video of it went viral, in reaction it produced an avalanche of
BLM demonstrations and protests that spread rapidly across the US denounc-
ing police racism and white supremacy. These reactive protests circulated
across the globe in mass outrage at the murder and denounced police racism
and white supremacy in their own particular cities and nations. BLM pro-
tests in turn were condemned and opposed by right-wing and white nation-
alist protesters who disparaged the organization BLM as Marxist, criminal,
antiwhite, and manipulated by George Soros or Bill Gates.
The year 2020 was hugely combustible, conjuncturally and paradig-
matically, effectively ushering in a referendum on the idea and principle of
government by the people for the people, if indeed the neoliberal fiction of
the people was not an overreach in the age of the corporations’ subordina-
tion of the state to the market. And, at the same time, 2020 was also uncere-
moniously revealing in making visible what had long been visible to those
long made invisible, the radical precarity of economically impoverished and
racially violated lives, under a neoliberalism that had dispensed with the idea
of government, except in securing the conditions and prospects for corpo-
rate capitalism and the social mobility of small businesses for the enterpris-
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 457

ing middle-classes, as well as investing heavily in policing, immigration

control, and militarism. Government responses to COVID-19, particularly
through lockdowns, mask wearing, and social distancing, inadvertently

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lifted from what was already a bare-life, austerity-preserving government the
last remaining social contract restraints on the repressions, timings, and
placings of social protest. For example, lockdowns and working and school-
ing from home created and concentrated an unusual sensation of commu-
nity, albeit disaffected in different ways in different spaces, that pulled apart
the now seemingly tenuous idea that the national population comprised only
disparate, self-possessive, consumerist individuals while at work and school.
In addition, it liberated time during the day for any disaffection with con-
finement policies to be used or overcome by collective and creative uses of
that time in responding to issues that previously might have been circum-
scribed by lack of available time. These temporal factors that proved invalu-
able to the protests that took place were also mediated by the seasonal time of
year, the summer, which made it more conducive to be out on the streets,
even though congregating in the streets, especially if unmasked, was break-
ing the protocols of social distancing and lockdown and encouraging the dis-
persal of COVID-19 by those who were infected.
What the sheer persistence and proliferation of the BLM protests sug-
gested, both nationally and globally, was that many communities, cities, and
nations had been deeply affected by the historical-structural spread of racial
policing and white supremacy, manifest as antiblackness. Moon-Kie Jung
and João Costa Vargas (2021) have argued that “antiblackness is an antisocial
logic that not only dehumanizes Black people’s embattled bodies, spaces,
knowledge, culture and citizenship, but renders abject all that is associated
with Blackness. This generalized abjection helps us grasp all the ways in
which historically and contemporarily, Black people’s spaces and humanity
have served as counter-points to safety, rationality, belonging and life” (8–9).
We would add to this conception of antiblackness an antipolitical logic that
can be understood as the condition of possibility for the antisocial logic. The
antipolitical logic of antiblackness specifies all the racial regulatory ways in
which the post-slavery and postcolonial so-called Negro problem of autono-
mous, self-organizing, mobile, nominally democratically emancipated, res-
tive Black populations are designated social and political threats to the white
body politic and its public spaces that must be contained and repressed, if
not eliminated.
There are two significant ways in which the anti-political logic of anti-
blackness is at work. First is where Black protest, influence, advocacy, critique,
458 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

or popular culture insists against the regulation and normalization of social

life by white domination and becomes the focus of demonization and vio-
lence, unless these political forms of Black life can be appropriated and

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assimilated to the desires and ideals of white hegemony. The second is where
Black social and spatial mobilities are deemed out of control, out of place, as
well as intrusive, disruptive, contaminating, or threatening to white suprem-
acy’s occupation of public, visual, emotional, historical, institutional, and
discursive spaces, and can be met with policing interrogation and violent
evictions unless authorized and assigned by white supremacy to be there.
The anti-political logic of antiblackness obliges or encourages assimilation to
the normalization of white emotionality in everyday life and saturates the
social and political dissent of Black populations with the suffocation of being
racially policed and racially confined to inequalities and injustices of pro-
scribed Blackness in white valorized societies. This is the long historical,
structural, colonial-racial, routinely silenced pandemic of antiblackness that
permeates the US, UK, France, Canada, Brazil, and many other places where
BLM protests erupted in 2020. Antiblackness is exemplified in politically
besieged and neglected Black working-class and poor communities, affected
by socioeconomic areas of concentrated impoverishment, inadequate health
care, and the heaviest racial policing; confined by racially debilitating social
pressures in housing, education, health, environment, suffocating under
and symbolized by the antiblack respiratory metaphor, “I can’t breathe.”
The question of breathing is central here. Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS) describes the possible impact of COVID-19 once an indi-
vidual has contracted the virus and is acutely infected. That it has a social
and political analogue referenced in the protests mobilized against the police
killing of Black people and the suffocating ways in which they were killed,
should not be treated as fanciful, it is symbolic. “I can’t breathe,” the exces-
sively repeated, existentially consuming, anguished, ignored, dying words of
Eric Garner in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020 as they were slowly and vio-
lently choked to death by the police, echoes a number of observations Frantz
Fanon made about social suffocation under the French colonial occupation
of Algeria during the late 1950s to early 1960s. Writing in A Dying Colonial-
ism, Fanon depicts a colonial condition that bears a family resemblance to
Black people being racially policed by white supremacy in contemporary
Western nations, where, he argues, “it is the country as a whole, its history,
its daily pulsation that are contested, in the hope of a final destruction.
Under these conditions, the individuals breathing is an observed [sic] an
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 459

occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing” (Fanon 1965: 65). What Fanon

is suggesting by the idea of breathing is the capacity to embody self-expres-
sive, self-accountable, accommodative social life, all of which is denied and

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defiled in the colonial-racial condition. Breathing signifies uninhibited
capacities to inhale and exhale, to absorb and express, defined by one’s own
limitations and exertions, within an environment that provides social life
support to those capacities. Fanon is concerned with the ways in which colo-
nial-racial regimes and their apparatuses are intimately insinuated in dimin-
ishing those capacities, in reducing its social life-supports, regulating daily
social comportments through policing and constraining practices and
expressions from questioning that regulation, through colonial state sanc-
tions that effectively impede populations from being socially free to breathe
and thereby provoking socially resistant breathing. The statement “I can’t
breathe,” mobilized in BLM protests, reveals its socially embodied respira-
tory location in the nexus between occupied breathing and combat breath-
ing, sustained by the antipolitical logic of antiblackness. Racial urban polic-
ing is often the flashpoint, because “even as it comes from outside, even as it
maintains its pain-inflicting exteriority, it intimately interpenetrates the very
somatic fibers of its target, amplifying its wounding effects across the body
to the point that it reduces the subject to the state of combat breathing” (Per-
era and Pugilese 2011: 1). George Floyd was murdered in a state of the shift-
ing nexus between occupied breathing and combat breathing for all the
world to see.
Here we should note there is an important political homology between
the general public-health concerns of national and global populations being
infected by the viral circulation of COVID-19 and it spreading socially, and
the national and global Black social and political concerns about being
affected by the historical-structural violence of antiblackness and its spread-
ing through racial policing.
The idea of the two pandemics describes the simultaneous respective
emergence, the resurgence of two overwhelming, spatially diffuse social con-
tagions of microbiological and colonial-racial violence against human and
social bodies. It also conveys the idea of a doubling in different contract trac-
ing and tracking senses of what Jodi Dean has said of “affective networks”
that inhabit “the circulation of intensities” which “leaves traces we might
mark and follow” (Dean 2015: 91). As far as the pandemic of antiblackness is
concerned it is important that we follow its global traces through the affec-
tive networks of the political mobilizations organized under the banner of
Black Lives Matter.
460 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

Black Lives Matter 2020

How do we trace the significance of BLM protests since 2015? What should

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we be thinking about? We recognize the uprisings that catalyzed sustained
BLM protests were far from inevitable. Indeed, there is no reason why we
would expect that the murder of George Floyd would produce renewed sup-
port for Black Lives Matter. On the five-year anniversary of the Ferguson pro-
tests, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2019) argued that the BLM movement had
stalled because of internal politics and external obstacles. It struggled with
central questions of whether activists should seek inclusion with the political
establishment or remain outside the halls of power. The chasm between
reformers and revolutionaries played out in public forums, and personal dis-
agreements frequently became open attacks on social media for all to see.
“Measured by the number of formal organizations it sprouted,” Taylor admits,
“the movement was barely ever alive, but it thrived in the hearts and minds of
young black people who ached to be heard and seen.” Even the recent resur-
gence of 2020 could neither unite the movement nor silence its chapters’
demands for transparency and accountability from its leadership. In response
to the appointment of Patrisse Cullors as the executive director of the Black
Lives Matter Global Network Foundation in November 2020, a group of ten
BLM chapters, BLM10Plus, published a statement calling for more demo-
cratic accountability, financial accountability, collective decision-making, and
collaborative political analysis and agenda-building between the BLM Global
Network and local chapters on the front line of the struggle.
Yet, despite these organizational struggles, the social and cultural land-
scape of BLM appeared to have changed, perhaps generationally, in ways yet
to be understood. A radical political trajectory of opposition to white suprem-
acy had gained considerable traction, through the various organizations that
had been operating under the banner of BLM throughout the previous
decade. While the movement certainly had its problems—Minneapolis BLM
disbanded, for example—the longevity of the discourse around BLM, police
violence, #SayHerName, prison abolition, and more was important. Activists
were ready to mobilize their online and in-person networks; problem defini-
tions and issue frames were sorted; the messaging had long been established.
A week after the uprisings began, Alicia Garza, frequently identified as one of
the cofounders of BLM, told the New York Times that “seven years ago, we
were treated like we were too radical, too out of bounds of what is possible.
And now, countless lives later, it’s finally seen as relevant” (Wortham 2020).
The claims of BLM, though far from hegemonic in the eyes of white America,
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 461

were at least recognizable and readily mobilized any time a circumstance of

deadly police violence hit the mainstream media. The repetition time after
time of violent and viral Black death at the hands of law enforcement was a

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key element to the legibility of BLM for white citizens who were otherwise
predisposed to ignore it, and it also reminded Black citizens that “race as rep-
etition involves a commitment to the reproduction of white forms of life over,
above, and against black forms of life” (Hesse 2017: 589).
Perhaps it was that social media legibility and social media preoccupa-
tion time afforded by the COVID-19 lockdowns that explains the impact of
other high-profile antiblackness events that preceded and followed George
Floyd’s murder, in the early months of the year, adding textures of critical
framing as well as galvanizing critical outrage in their own right. First, there
were reports of Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man who had been jogging
in February 2020 near Brunswick, Georgia, when he was followed and then
murdered by three white men, who were not arrested and charged until
seventy-­four days after Arbery’s death, and only after a video of the murder
when viral. Second, in March 2020, Breonna Taylor, a young Black woman,
was killed in her home when officers from the Louisville Metro Police
Department used a “no-knock warrant” to force entry into her apartment.
Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, believing that the plain clothes officers
were intruders, fired a warning shot; the police fired thirty-two shots in
return, killing Taylor in an operation that had nothing to do with her. Third,
a few days after Floyd’s murder, as the video was still gaining traction online,
another video surfaced of an encounter between a white woman, Amy Coo-
per, and a Black man, Christian Cooper, in New York City’s Central Park.
Birdwatcher Christian Cooper asked Amy Cooper to put her dog on a leash,
and in response she called 911 and falsely claimed that an African American
man was threatening her life, while Christian Cooper was videoing her.
The pattern was undeniable. Police violence ended Breonna Taylor’s
life, just as it had ended George Floyd’s. Neither posed any kind of threat to
the officers that murdered them. Taylor’s death, in particular, also illus-
trated the kind of secondary attention that even an intersectional social
movement like BLM has trouble sustaining for the vulnerability faced by
Black women (African American Policy Forum 2015). Arbery’s murder and
Cooper’s confrontation also solidified tragic messages for the broader pub-
lic. Arbery was effectively lynched by white men who felt he didn’t belong in
their neighborhood while doing the normal, innocent, even mundane activ-
ity of jogging, which confirmed the danger Black people face simply for
existing in white spaces. And yet, for those who took Arbery’s murder as yet
462 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

another confirmation of Southern exceptionalism—that “real racism” only

exists south of the Mason-Dixon line, that racism is the abhorrent acts of
white supremacists—everything about Christian Cooper’s birdwatching

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situation eroded that logic. The incident took place in New York City, a
Democratic stronghold, in Central Park, a widely accessible public space,
and was initiated by Amy Cooper, a white woman who probably would have
voted Democrat if she could—it turned out that she was from Canada, a
place that white settlers have proclaimed to be a multicultural paradise.
Social media connected the dots between Christian Cooper and George
Floyd—how quickly one could have become the other, all because a white
woman was willing to weaponize her indignation at being called out for act-
ing irresponsibly with her unleashed dog. Admittedly, these were all dra-
matic episodes of racial violence, very different in homology and analogy to
the slow racial violence of structural inequalities and injustices we referred
to earlier, but arguably their repeated discrediting and interrogation of
white normativity momentarily broke its hold on white citizenship solidar-
ity, long enough for other possibilities of critical thinking and radical par-
ticipation to filter through.
We note that in 2020 there were extremely high numbers of white par-
ticipants, often in largely white cities, both in North America and Europe,
involved in these protests. This was in stark contrast to the BLM protests of
2015 to 2016. It is worth recalling that first iteration of BLM was Black-led
and Black-focused, with a reception by majority white citizens, white corpo-
rate media, and white political establishments that can only be described as
uncoordinated but nevertheless relentless demonization. By the time of the
second iteration in 2020, there were not only white participants in extensive
numbers sustaining protests, but white mainstream media, politicians, and
corporations expressed varying forms of support and solidarity that came
close to normalizing the ideals of BLM. Indeed, the protests of 2020 might
have begun as a rebellion against the normalcy of deadly police violence in
Black communities, but their impact soon deepened to infiltrate other parts
of the criminal punishment system and diffused across social realms, in
both circumstances offering a more sustained critique of the structural
nature of endemic antiblack racism. The claim that the police violence was
merely the outcome of the actions of a few unrepresentative “bad apples”
unraveled to reveal violence at the core of the state itself. The discourse of
police and prison abolition went mainstream, signaled by a watershed opin-
ion editorial by scholar-activist Mariame Kaba (2020) in the left-leaning but
not-that-far-left New York Times at the height of the rebellions: “Yes, We Mean
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 463

Literally Abolish the Police.” There were early victories for abolitionists,
including proposed cuts to the police budget in Los Angeles, a vow by mem-
bers of Minneapolis City Council to dismantle the Minneapolis Police

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Department, and the removal of police officers from schools in Portland,
Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. One year following Floyd’s murder, the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund reported that more than three thousand polic-
ing related bills had been introduced in state legislatures in response to the
protests, in addition to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, passed by
the US House of Representatives in 2020 and 2021.
The expansion of protest politics beyond the realm of criminal punish-
ment aligns with the 2016 vision of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL),
which had always contained an expansive view of the scope of antiblackness
and the efforts required for repair and redress. Alongside the demand that
the state end its war on Black people, the M4BL platform demands repara-
tions, a divestment from the police and reinvestment in Black communities,
economic justice, community control, and the political power necessary to
achieve self-determination. It was not until the uprisings of 2020, however,
that the broader public began to consider the persistence of other forms of
antiblackness in capitalist formations, popular culture, sports and media,
universities and corporations, vernacular discourse, and practically all other
major social, legal, and political institutions. In placing the police killings
of and assaults on Black people at the center of sustained public debate in
spectacles of mass media and social media scrutiny across months of protests,
the public language for talking about racial oppression radically expanded
beyond discrimination, individual prejudice, and unconscious bias to
include structural racism, white supremacy, and antiblackness. As in 2015,
the uprisings embodied a radically Black discursive intervention in the body
politic marking it as a white citizen democracy and thereby comprised “con-
stitutively fugitive formations of Black politics” that “cut into,” interrupted,
and exposed the ruse in the “modern capitalist, liberal democratic tradition
of representing the Western polity outside of its colonial-racial gestations”
(Hesse and Hooker 2017: 444). Certainly, it was the global circulation of the
uprisings in the formerly colonizing nations of Europe and formerly colo-
nized nations by Europe that confirmed the fugitivity and influence of Black
politics, particularly given the forms of police and political repression that
followed, principally inflected through the revenge of white liberal and white
nationalist narratives, where the former sought to minimize and assimilate
Black politics to policy statements on racial justice and the latter endeavored
to demonize Black politics and recast it as antiwhite.
464 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

It is also important to remember the BLM uprisings of 2020 were not

contained by the borders of the United States.1 The specific circumstances of
the fatal brutality inflicted upon George Floyd were propelled into a roving

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spectacle and moving commentary that propelled protests into a continental
American, and even worldwide, questioning of the white legitimation of
democracy. These were not disjointed, uncoordinated protests, but instead
strategic, globally inflected, locally nuanced, ideologically sutured rebellions
against various forms of police racism, white supremacy, and antiblackness.
Despite the US being in the eye of the storm of these mobilizations, the BLM
protests became and remained global. Their occurrence in nations like the
UK, France, Canada, and Australia, which all have long colonial-racial histo-
ries of degrading Black populations, while affirming white supremacy and
police brutality, remind us of their colonial-racial formations in the Europe-
ans empire of modernity. The global protests, as in the US, were multiracial
and multicultural. It was not just the friends and family of those directly
affected by the loss of loved ones who were protesting. Those protesting
exceeded the usual suspects of activism and agitation.
The global legibility of these protests appeared in two distinctive ways.
First, it appeared in the recognition that police violence in the Minnesotan
street can be linked through the extension of an equivalent logic to the top-
pling of statues of slave traders, eugenicists, and the architects of the Euro-
pean colonial-racial enterprise. This global dimension generated a public
space where it could be demonstrated that contemporary manifestations of
white supremacy and antiblackness are constitutive of the colonial, institu-
tional, and iconic inheritances of the modern world. Second, the global legi-
bility of BLM protests impressed upon the world that these were not only
historical but also historiographical. Their performativity, particularly in dif-
ferent Western cities and nations, radically disturbed the “power-knowledge
relation of Western societies, which in order to esteem liberalism, capitalism
and democracy as universal deny the continuum of their lineages in colonial-­
racial institutions.” In that way, by focusing on the violences of white suprem-
acy and antiblackness, the protests were engraving in the public sphere,
however temporarily or ephemerally, “a corrective to the ‘White man’s view
of history,’ which remains hegemonic in national public spaces across the
planet” (Hesse and Sayyid 2020).

Matters of White Nationalism

Throughout the BLM mobilizations on both sides of the Atlantic there were
public, vernacular indictments of institutional white supremacy, a term that
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 465

quickly became a familiar epithet in popular discourse. At the same time

there were also various mobilizations of what we call white nationalism. It is
important that we now clarify our understanding of these two different but

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related terms. Historically and politically, white supremacy is a European
colonial form of racial governance through the violence, authority and ideol-
ogy of we the white people, exercised over those designated, subordinated, and
inferiorized as non-white. White supremacy became increasingly codified
and elaborated at the height of late nineteenth-century European colonial-
ism and US Jim Crow. It was a political and cultural response to the abolition
of racial slavery across the Americas, exerted as public policy in punitive con-
trols on non-white immigration, entrenched in the spatial segregation of
non-white populations and symbolized by the emergence of self-proclaimed
“white men’s countries” in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa (Lake and Reynolds 2008).
By the early twentieth century white supremacy was increasingly culti-
vated, disseminated, and globalized through Western doctrines and practices
of white superiority, the civilizing mission, racial policing, racial science, and
racial caricatures and stereotypes of non-whites in newspapers, literature,
movies, cartoon strips, and commodity advertising. Up to the last third or
quarter of the twentieth century this was the liberal humanist modernity of
the Western colonial world, a white supremacist world dominated by capitalist
liberal democracies that hardly faltered along Left and Right distinctions. It is
worth recalling that after World War II, which was waged by Western powers
for democracy against fascism and racism, those powers continued to sub-
scribe to the white supremacy of colonialism and Jim Crow; it was anticolo-
nial, civil rights, Black power, and anti-racist movements that precipitated the
disestablishment of formalized white supremacy and the adoption by Western
governments of official stances and legislation against racism within appar-
ently inclusive democracies. However, we need to recognize it was under
these conjunctural circumstances that a different lineage of white supremacy
predominated. Although one lineage of white supremacy was now readily
pathologized as the legacy of Nazism, Jim Crow, eugenics, and the Far Right,
an alternative lineage of white supremacy emerged, reconstituted, influential,
and determining in the white citizen’s normative understanding and liberal
enforcement of it as a universally agreed “silent protocol,” enabled by the stra-
tegic and cynical removal from public discourse of any discursive evidence of
racism (Fureudi 1999). Consequently, what came to shape the Black politics of
the US post–civil rights era were racial antagonisms contextualized by asser-
tions of the silent yet palpable protocol of white supremacy and denials by the
white citizen body politic that such a protocol existed.
466 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

These racial antagonisms had two social formations. First, white

supremacy shifted from the largely representational, activated in public ideol-
ogies, to the largely performative, routinely institutionalizing the normative

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rule of white citizens over non-white citizens, underwritten by legislative and
policy-driven white privilege, political dominance, economic disparities, law
and order policies, and cultural wars of appropriation and demonization
against Black citizens. Second, seemingly paradoxically, the post–civil rights
era also saw the influence of Black politics on limited anti-race–discrimination
changes in law and public policy, immigration, affirmative action, diversity,
and equal opportunities, as well as the partial opening up of Black access to
the political, public, and corporate spheres, media, education, and popular
culture. The racial antagonism between these social formations was signified
in confrontational discourse that, on the one hand, insisted that anti-racist
changes to the white normativity of sociality had gone too far and, on the
other, insisted antiracist sociality had not gone far enough and white norma-
tivity was white supremacy in disguise. What more than anything else sym-
bolized the political incarnation of that racial antagonism as structural was
the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first African American president
of the US. In particular, Obama became a lightning rod for the for the griev-
ances of white nationalism, which is the contemporary political formation of
whiteness that was ignited to confront mobilizations of BLM during 2020.
Expressed at its most general level, white nationalism is the belief that
national identity should be built around white ethnicity and that white peo-
ple should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance
of the nation’s culture and public life. Hence white nationalism is about
maintaining political and economic dominance, not just a numerical major-
ity or cultural hegemony (Kaufman 2019). Michael Feola (2021: 531) has sug-
gested white nationalistic anxieties emanate from a “melancholic rage”
encapsulated by the feeling that not only is the nation “slipping away from its
racialized core but is being taken from its rightful heirs and given to unde-
serving others” (531). The suggestion is that in a Western democracy, a white
majority and white dominance ought to be irreplaceable. From this perspec-
tive we can think critically about the meaning of white nationalism in two
connected ways. First, as a white nostalgic imaginary of American patrio-
tism invested in a driven desire to restore the institutional and cultural aes-
thetics of a colorless heritage of the US, normatively white but unmarked as
white. Second, as an adaptable and flexible white supremacist strategy of
opposing and violating non-white influences, interventions, and identities as
a means of restoring paradoxically a national future based on its white nos-
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 467

talgia. White nationalism is a racially restorative desire that responds to the

perceived diminution or decline of white supremacy as general normativity.
That what we have called the two pandemics took place during the

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Trump presidency requires further comment about white nationalist politics
and ideology. As Alexander Laban Hinton reminds us, summarizing so
many commentators before him, Trump’s path to the presidency “was very
much intwined with demagoguery, hate speech, the demonization of non-
white others, and the increased visibility of neofascists and other white power
actors who supported him” (Hinton 2021: 13). Trump was both the mirror
and focus of white nationalism in a country whose meaning had always been
secured and defined by two white Americas, one conservative, one liberal,
sometimes different, sometimes the same, but always ensuring the authoriz-
ing rule of whiteness enforced as normativity. However, when Trump entered
the presidential arena in 2016, the apparent post–civil rights era silent proto-
col agreement, that explicit, uncoded forms of white supremacist discourse
had no place in public office, was broken by Trump. Instead, he played conser-
vative white America against liberal white America, and white America
against non-white America, re-signifying in public and popular culture the
visibility and audibility of a steadily growing white nationalist movement of
grievances. He symbolically and politically boosted the racist self-esteem and
confidence of various identities and movements in white nationalist America
who were deeply unsettled by what they perceived as the intrusions and con-
taminations of non-whiteness, immigrants, diversity, feminism, Islam, and
liberalism perceived as foreign and corrosive to the meaning of the real Amer-
ica. This mirrored the rising tide of white nationalism that was sweeping
through Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where, ideologically,
these movements understood themselves as righteous saviors and conserva-
tionists of white heritage, moving against what they described in Europe as
the “Great Replacement” and in the US as “White Genocide,” both of which
posited the conspiratorial idea that policies were being developed through
immigration, diversity, and affirmative action to either eliminate the white
population or reduce it to a powerless minority (Camus 2016).
We can see this illustrated in one the more eventful signifiers of
white nationalism in recent years that became unmistakably public and
identified with the Trump presidency. It took place in 2017, when a mass
gathering of different right-wing groups came together as protesting white
nationalists in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although
the protests were ostensibly and strategically concerned with opposing devel-
opments to remove statues that memorialized the Confederacy, it was more
468 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

significant for three events. First, the slogan the protesters chanted as they
marched through the university campus at night with burning torches
revealed to the world the political emotionality of white nationalism. The

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protesters chanted repeatedly “Jews will not replace us.” Second, the white
nationalist rally led to the murder of Heather Heyer, a white anti-racist counter­
protester, who was killed when a white nationalist drove a car at high speed
into an anti-racist counterprotest group. Third, Trump refused to condemn
white nationalism, providing cover and succor to it by declaring publicly,
“There were good people on both sides” (Tenold 2018). What these three
events signified was a white nationalism that envisaged a nation split and
torn between authentic and inauthentic whiteness; in particular the accusa-
tory reference to Jews indicted them as renegade whites, responsible for the
machinations of liberal policies of immigration, affirmative action, and
anti-racism that introduced non-white people, influences, and ideas into the
white landscape of the nation. Here we see the Nazi resonance of antisemi-
tism as white supremacy. It shares a political family resemblance with Adolf
Hitler’s observations in his 1926 autobiography Mein Kampf, about the
French military occupation of the Rhineland during the early 1920s and
their deployment of colonized African soldiers after World War 1. Hitler’s
white supremacist grievances condemned the Jews as “responsible for bring-
ing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the
white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level
so that the Jew might dominate” (Hitler 1926: 296). This too is a lingering
strain of contemporary white nationalism.
Trump’s white nationalist presidency, regularly replenished through
mass public, pseudo Nuremberg rallies, mobilized his personalized invest-
ments in white grievances as if they were public policy. In short, “Trump
played directly to white power sentiments and beliefs (‘this is our country’),
sometimes with hypermasculine and misogynistic language that valorized
white male virility” (Hinton 2021: 14). There were at least two main white
nationalist cultural and political developments that gained popular traction
in US culture between 2016 and 2020, each emphasizing white activist
convictions that white ownership of the US needed to be restored. The first
was the increasing visibility of demonstrations and rallies, by the Far Right,
neo-Nazis, and white militias, together with sporadic but not infrequent
mass public shootings by lone white gunmen. The second was the regular
spate of white individual citizens questioning the presence of Black people
in various social arenas, ranging from gateways to residential housing com-
plexes, hotels, parks, coffee shops, and threatening to call the police, and in
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 469

many cases calling the police. These were dominant activisms of white
nationalist grievance, that white citizens were losing the control and owner-
ship of their own country. It explains the populist appeal of Trump’s presi-

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dential campaign slogan while he was running for office, which continued
to resonate, while he was in office, taking on a life of its own among his sup-
porters: “Make America Great Again.”
As Juliet Hooker (2017) has argued, white grievances are the outcome
of political imaginations that have not been shaped by loss in democratic
politics. This orientation to political entitlement distorts white citizens’ polit-
ical views into a racial calculus in which they can only understand Black
gains as white defeats. A post–civil rights era history of white grievances
against civil rights, affirmative action, diversity, demographic decline, and
immigration has now become exacerbated by the emotionally political del-
uge of BLM protests and the surrounding rising tide of white nationalism.
The year 2020 was a time of urgent divergent protests in white and
Black. The anti-COVID-19 climate of protests was initiated by white-led and
dominated demonstrations against public health measures, such as social dis-
tancing, mask mandates, and lockdowns. In Michigan, for example, hundreds
of armed white citizens gathered inside the state capitol and attempted to enter
the floor of the legislative chamber in April 2020, where state lawmakers
debated Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer’s request to extend her
emergency powers during the pandemic. There were limited responses to this
kind of display of white anger by the police; predictably, the increased powers
granted to local law enforcement during the pandemic were designed and des-
tined to target and extract fines from poor and racialized populations.
In thinking about the symbolic meanings of the white and Black pro-
tests that would define the street politics of 2020, Carolyn M. Rouse has
written about social media meme commentary on this juxtaposition, sin-
gling out in particular contemporaneous TikTok posts that showed photo-
graphs of white Americans protesting against lockdown orders with signs
that read “don’t cancel my golf season” and “we demand haircuts” juxta-
posed next to photographs of Black protesters with signs that read “don’t kill
us” and “I can’t breathe” (Rouse 2021: 360). The image of white citizens pro-
testing against what was inconvenient to them and Black citizens protesting
against what was deadly to them was sustained throughout the year. This
was part of the context in which Minneapolis exploded in protest. As Tobi
Haslett (2021) writes, “Something deeper and more disruptive had breached
the surface of social life, conjuring exactly the dreaded image the conspiracy
theorists refused to face. This was open black revolt: simultaneous but unco-
470 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

ordinated, a vivid fixture of American history sprung to life with startling

speed. . . . But what emerged under the banner of blackness was soon blended
with other elements, flinging multi-racial crowds against soldiers and police.”

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In the weeks that followed, protests spread across nearly every major city in
the United States. They were the largest, longest-lasting, most diverse mass
mobilizations—possibly ever. The protests inaugurated an incredible albeit
temporary shift in white public opinion. According to one poll, white people’s
support for Black Lives Matter increased more in the two weeks following
George Floyd’s murder than it had in the previous two years (Cohn and
Quealy 2020). There was no precedent, comparison, or roadmap for the kind
of political action unleashed on the streets of America.
The politics of Black and white conflicting protests across the two pan-
demics, COVID-19 and antiblackness, were also embroiled in interrogating
the role white normative narratives play in suppressing the critique of struc-
tural racism, white supremacy, and antiblackness, as well as their role in
underlining the valorized discourse of the representative citizen as white.
A white normative narrative is a story, explanation, or representation of a
subject matter in relation to which it could reasonably be expected to make
some direct reference to or raise issues of race, racism, colonialism, or white
supremacy, but instead avoids making any of those references. A white nor-
mative narrative has the kinds of emotional emplotment and stage directions
that foreclose any facility to recall or reveal a colonial-racial grammar. It is the
story that is always being told as well as the story to tell one’s children. Seam-
lessly erasing evidence, memories, and resonances of social and political
forms constituted and shaped by racial hierarchy and racial segregation, a
white normative narrative fosters the routine illusion of an unremarkable,
ineffable white exclusivity and white domination in its representations as inci-
dental, natural, and universal, outside any historical context of race.2 White
normative narratives are the cornerstone of American universalism. One of
the ways we can think about the impact of the BLM protests is by examining
the extent to which the hegemony of the white normative narrative has been
dislodged, especially among white citizens expressing solidarity with BLM.
Of course we need to recognize there were three kinds of white citizen
protests during 2020, the first two of which were always going to congeal
around desires to restore the white normative narrative. The first was directed
against COVID-19 social protocols of lockdowns, face masks, and social dis-
tancing, eventually morphing into antivaccination protests. The second was
directed against BLM demonstrations and campaigns for defunding or abol-
ishing the police, and also associated with activism against Critical Race The-
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 471

ory, the 1619 Project, and the teaching of the history of race in schools. The
third was radically counter to the previous two and involved mobilizing active
support for and participation in BLM protests, especially in white-dominated

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cities. In their mobilizing Black languages and demonstrations of critique,
through conceptualizing and vocalizing “structural racism,” “white suprem-
acy,” “antiblackness,” and interrupting the normalization of racial policing
and even the conventional narration of US history that fails to account for the
issues underpinning the protests, they became involved in a wider Black cul-
tural politics of overthrowing the white normative narrative. Against that
background, we can only say 2020 (re)introduced some white citizens (who
knows how many or for how long?) to accelerating the working through and
confronting of white nationalism and returned others to the white defense of
Making America Great Again.

Conclusion
The uprisings that began as protests in Minneapolis, hitting a tipping point
and then bleeding across the country, continent, and globe in 2020, were
certainly unpredictable, and perhaps even unfathomable, to those of us writ-
ing about BLM protests in 2017 (Hesse and Hooker 2017), when we made
political sense of protests that emerged from Black rage (Thompson 2017),
revealed the limits of political action confined to the formal realm of voting,
public office, and policy proposals (Makalani 2017), and challenged the
mainstreaming of antiracist cultures through neoliberal appropriation
(Márquez and Rana 2017). However, what has come to pass in the months
and years following George Floyd’s murder is nevertheless far more familiar.
Support among white Americans for BLM and racial justice was temporary,
declining swiftly in the latter third of 2020, reaching levels lower than they
were before George Floyd’s murder (Chudy and Jefferson 2021). This leads
us to ask, perhaps only momentarily, was there a racial reckoning in the
summer of 2020, and if so, what exactly was reckoned, or reckoned with?
The idea of reckoning is interesting. Most commonly used to denote the pro-
cess through which debts are settled, promises are honored, and payments
are made, it is a phrase steeped in temporality, meant to imply a balance once
lost or never realized has finally been restored, but simultaneously an exper-
iment of futurology, in that “to reckon” is to imagine, to conjure, to dream, to
understand, and perhaps to expect. More often than not, though, a reckon-
ing faces the past, again and again, not unlike other words in its semantic
web: repetition, rehearsal, revision, reconnaissance, return. It also invokes
472 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2022

ideas of space and territoriality; in navigational terms, a dead reckoning is

used to calculate one’s geographic position relative to where we were when
we last knew where we were.

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This so-called racial reckoning was presumed to be an inflection point
in American history, when the abstraction of the nation was forced to come to
terms with the enduring legacy of slavery, to finally acknowledge its unpaid
debt to Black citizens and deliver on the promissory note of American citizen-
ship. Of course, the idea that some form of racial equilibrium could be put in
motion as if it is simply a matter of capitalistic transactions that compute and
compare costs and benefits, inputs and outputs, is overly simplistic. A reckon-
ing necessarily implies a judgment and an atonement. The determination of
what is owed and to whom is always an interpretive process and therefore
imbued with social power. Any kind of reconciliation—an inevitable exten-
sion of any reckoning—that occurs through the prism of the liberal demo-
cratic state will inevitably naturalize, privilege, and even extend the nature of
state power against which the reconciliation must take place. Given the expe-
riences of Indigenous peoples around the world, there are reasons to be wary
of the idea of “reconciliation,” which is not infrequently a hollow affair of lib-
eral democratic trickery and masquerade. But let us be clear, there was no
racial reckoning in 2020. The two pandemics allowed us to see momentarily
in a global idiom in real time that Black populations, their politics, culture,
thought, and solidarities, remain entangled in struggles with and oppositions
to racial policing, antiblackness, and white nationalism.

Notes
1 For example, in Toronto, activists connected Floyd’s murder on May 25 to the recent
death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black-Indigenous woman who fell from the balcony
of her twenty-fourth-story apartment after the police were called to assist with a mental
health crisis. On May 29, 2020, French legal authorities cleared police officers of wrong-
doing in the death of Adama Traoré, a Black man who died in police custody in 2016; on
June 2, 2020, more than twenty thousand protesters in Paris, Lyon, and Lille flooded the
streets in the name of both Traoré and Floyd. In Brazil, where police brutality has long
been a focus of Black activism, thousands of protesters marched in support of Black
Lives Matter and against President Jair Bolsonaro; in response, the president called the
demonstrators “thugs” and “terrorists.” According to preliminary data collected by the
authors, the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter also shaped protests in Kenya, Tunisia,
Nigeria, Japan, Palestine, Poland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Greece, Australia, Ber-
muda, Mexico, and even the McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
2 For example, consider the dominant leitmotif in any narration of the role of the US in
World War II. It’s a story that has been told countless times in passed down recollec-
tions, political speeches, textbooks, and movies, where the US is fighting for democ-
 Hesse and Thompson • Antiblackness—Dispatches from Black Political Thought 473

racy against Nazi Germany; and yet it manages to remain a story that mutes any recog-
nition of the absence of democracy for the majority of African Americans under Jim
Crow and obscures the presence of African Americans who fought in the war serving

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in racially segregated troops.

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