Justice appears. At Standing Rock, for example. Law represents and negates. In North and South Carolina, for example. Law and justice stand in relation to, in and as the space of appearance. The dialectic of justice is possibility. Law is pure negation. more

When I visited Aotearoa New Zealand in 2005, the conference I attended was opened by a Maori rangatira (leader; chief, if you must). As the visiting rangatira, I had to respond. It was a moving way to begin the event and it reminded everyone of the realities of settler colonialism. more

How does white supremacy make itself normal and the given against which other actions are judged? In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon claimed that cartoons and other forms of popular culture taught (white) people how to be racist. What teaches them/us how to be ‘white’? Whiteness demarcates the boundaries of the space of appearance and makes it a space of representation. To be admitted to this space is to not be, or have been, enslaved. And to be of the imperial group rather than the indigenous. more

The clock of the world is showing a new time that we’re struggling to understand. Neo-liberalism became hegemonic in the doubled moment of Thatcher and Reagan coming to power (1979–80). Brexit-Trump heralds a toxic new formation of white supremacy, patriarchy and nationalism. What Stuart Hall called ‘the great moving right show’ in 1977 has become the ‘it’s great to be white show’ in 2016. more

Like so many others, I misjudged this. I had a draft of a post about how to undo whiteness post-Trump. Today these moves seem shallow, smug, self-righteous. It’s time to reflect. Trump and his followers are all about ‘them’: women, people of color, Mexicans. But what’s happened is on us, those people who are identified as white. We did this – or failed to stop it – and it’s mostly going to be people of color that pay the price. more

During the revolutionary upheavals of 2011 from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, a transformation of real conditions of lived existence seemed at hand. In 1958, philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the space of appearance’ to convey her sense of where politics takes place. This space, derived from the ancient Greek city-state, was constituted by exclusion of women, children, enslaved human beings and non-Greeks. more