Keywords

The word “Black” is and always has been a banned word, intrinsically. This is not new. “Black” is a word that is perhaps better understood as a feeling, an articulation that comes out of struggle. It is a Herculean attempt to resignify and self-name a group of people who have otherwise been named through historic and ongoing practices of unspeakable violence, super-exploitation, dispossession, and genocide. And while such projects of self-naming always have their limits, even the attempt to do so was still disruptive enough, dangerous enough, to warrant full-scale counter-insurgency efforts, from the moment the architects of the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery and named all citizens, regardless of skin tone, “Noirs,” or “Blacks,” in their 1805 constitution.

Trump’s infamous attacks on the term “climate”—tainted by its association with “climate change,” which he dismisses as a “hoax,” “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” by so-called “prophets of doom”—are part of a broader assault on climate knowledge and action. This includes efforts to purge language from federal agencies, attacks on scientific research, the cancellation of federal grants, authoritarian repression of dissent, and so on. Together, these measures have intensified the political and legal threats facing climate justice movements and their advocates.

How are you feeling today? How do others make you feel today? What are the words you use to describe yourself, and how do you feel about them? Which ones change–are some words and labels yours forever, are some in flux? How do you know, what do you know?

This contribution reflects on “include” and “exclude” as binary, key terms of liberal political orders, focusing on how they have functioned in the United States. It considers the dialectic relationship between expanding inclusions and revanchist pull backs of those expansions. It examines immigration as key example of this dialectic that thinks through the contradictions of being included as subjects of US imperialism. It questions the goal of inclusion.

This contribution reflects on “include” and “exclude” as binary, key terms of liberal political orders, focusing on how they have functioned in the United States. It considers the dialectic relationship between expanding inclusions and revanchist pull backs of those expansions. It examines immigration as key example of this dialectic that thinks through the contradictions of being included as subjects of US imperialism. It questions the goal of inclusion.

Race is a relatively modern concept, whose origin can be traced to European expansion and the era of colonization. Distinct from the anthropological notion of a human race, the sociological concept of race is defined as a relation based primarily on skin color, which is then linked to other characteristics, like hair, eyes, nose, and lips, or cultural practices. More important, these traits represent the outward appearance of race, the essential issue being that race is essentially a relation of power.