Tournament: Greenhill Fall Classic | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harker PG | Judge: Elijah Smith
Warren ‘18 – Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies @ Emory University (Calvin L., "Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation," Published by Duke University Press, pages 170-171)Aakash
In figure 4.3, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper presents a vicious fantasy concerning the disposability of black being as a scene of war. "Contrabands" fled Confederate states and sought refuge from union soldiers during the Civil War. According to Barbara Tomblin, General Benjamin F. Butler declared blacks fleeing from Southern plantations and seeking protection "property of the enemy and subject to confiscation."30 Giving safe haven to blacks served a strategic purpose: to drain the Confederacy of valuable wealth. Once confiscated, Union armies pressed blacks into various forms of work. Thus, even in union camps, blacks were still considered equipment and property — value was not grounded in the invaluable for blacks (i.e., Being exceeding metaphysical value schemes), but freedom was codified in use value for the Union. Antiblackness, then, is not confined to the antebellum South but is the condition of possibility for the world, including the valiant North. But the question before the Union, and still before us, is this: what type of work will help configure the value of black waste, the fleeing black body? What type of use does confiscation justify? What value would such creatures have during a war — uneducated and unwanted? If one could not rely on natural law alone to ascertain value (i.e., the inalienable rights of man), then value must be found elsewhere. Hortense Spillers remarks, "The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless."31 Whether we call this being a "captive," "emancipated," "contraband," or "free," the distinctions are utterly useless when the question of value is foregrounded. These distinctions, which orient much of historiography and legal studies, are differences without a difference, ontologically. The question of value, then, reconfigures our proper metaphysical question. In essence, it inquires about how to ground value of a being lacking place in the world.32 The illustrators provide an answer to this inquiry: since black being exists for destruction, why not make this being an extension of war machines? In this fantasy, black being is a sentient weapon, blurring the distinction between machine and flesh, weapon and body. Warfare provides value for sentient refuse. Black bodies are literal artilleries of destruction — there is no self to protect, just an open vulnerability to deadly violence. We might also suggest that the black weapon prefigures the suicide bomber, which preoccupies contemporary analysis of necropolitics. But martyrdom is absent from such an analysis because the black weapon is pure use value. The weapon does not sacrifice itself; destruction is its reason for existence. Black weapons also lack any relationality between humans and a political community from which to ground such self- sacrifice. Black death, vulnerability, injury, and destruction are mere comedic by- products of a war between humans. In the image, soldiers easily affix cannons to black bodies and position these weapons in the line of fire. The battlefield is precisely the space of emancipation — a death- scape. And the being emancipation creates in this space is the black weapon. War allegorizes the metaphysical holocaust, which places black being in extraordinary harm without regard to any ontological ground of resistance. This war, unlike the Civil War, is without end. The black weapon is being for another within an economy of brutality, strategy, and calculation. This catachrestic fantasy realizes the terror Heidegger envisioned with his critique of technological reasoning. The complete collapse between technology and flesh could only be realized with black being, and the image articulates this understanding.33 It is unthinkable that the union soldiers would become weapons because they are human beings. Thus, it is not just that the image is viciously satirical, but also that the image exposes a kernel of truth: it is indeed plausible that black being could be used in such a way in an antiblack world. Humor encases a metaphysical truth. Black being lacks ontological security and is malleable in the hands of humans. This is ontological terror.
The topic is violent- the medical industrial complex (MIC) necessitates that Blackness be in a position of criminality and captivity in order to experiment on Black inmates. This means any attempt at topical discussion situates Black bodies in confinement to white exploitation.
Washington 07—Henrietta A. Washington ~a Writing Fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine~, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, 2007, pg. 319-32. ND
On a brightly promising early spring day in 2004, Jesse Williams and I shared brunch in a Philadelphia seafood house splashed with bright jewel-like colors. Against a backdrop of sunny seascapes and murmuring besuited executives, Williams affably recited his résumé, detailing the grim expertise in pain and survival he had accrued during his four decades imprisoned in the Holmesburg Prison system, the stygian scientific kingdom of University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Dr. Albert M. Kligman. The evening before, Williams, a massive, imposing man with a boxer’s build, a bald head, a piercing gaze, and stentorian delivery, had spoken eloquently at a showing of Acres of Skin, the documentary based upon Allen Hornblum’s incisive book of the same title, an exposé of the decades of Kligman’s medical experimentation at Holmesburg. "Williams told the audience of being burned by radiation and sulfuric acid, of immersing his arms in chemicals that had tanned his skin like leather, and of how physicians and technicians had rubbed acid into his scrotum until the skin fell away—all for three dollars a session. Researchers had cut his armpits to study the glands and had laced his back with scars in an attempt to induce the disfiguring ropy overgrowths called keloids. Not only patches of poison oak and ivy but also cadaveric tissue had been implanted in his back, and he had inhaled vapors infused with influenza and other viruses. Patch tests of various harsh chemicals and ointments had left a checkerboard of rectangular scars on his back; detergents whose names he did not know had removed his hair and abraded his scalp. Williams had offered himself up for as many as twelve experiments at once, bringing in from thirty to fifty dollars for each multisession research study. Yet, he said, "We were never told what was going on. We never had witnesses or a receipt for ~copy of~ anything we signed." Before the audience, Williams had been practiced and powerful, but I shared a tête-à-tête with a more subdued man, one invested with a gentle but direct manner and who spoke with complete candor about a violent past that included jail stints for robbery and assault. "I’ve done it all," he admitted quietly. He is now a Christian, and he spoke sadly of the many former inmates who died in broken health and of his concern for another seriously ill subject. Only after being prodded to speak of his own plight did he lament his myriad physical problems, from leg ulcers to mental changes to chronic skin problems, which he ascribed to the testing. "The doctors can’t tell me what it is. They don’t know what I was tested with." Williams confided his regret of never having achieved the education he desperately wanted and he voiced ambivalence about displaying his scars, physical and mental, for strangers in order to gain support for an inmates’ lawsuit. "I feel I’m on display in the zoo sometimes." He sat back and sighed softly. "No one should ever have to go through what we went through. Not again. Not in a civilized country."1 When Robert Boyle, the seventeenth-century father of chemistry, mused upon the feasibility of scientific research with humans, he proposed, "Trayal might be made on some genuine human bodies, especially those of Malefactors." From the testing of inoculation practices to the use of cadavers for dissection and display, the medical community has turned to jail inmates first when it sought experimental subjects. Even a 1910 editorial in the black physicians’ chief publication, the fledgling Journal of the National Medical Association, proposed that prisoners were the most appropriate medical research subjects. The JNMA suggested that prisoners might simultaneously expiate their debt to society and protect others, especially African Americans, by substituting for them as unwilling research subjects.2 Black physicians wished to pursue research while protecting their African American patients, and the use of prisoners was an alternative with which everyone, black and white, could be comfortable. But why are prisoners such universally desirable subjects for medical research? Boyle was only adhering to the inexorable logic of his profession when he suggested that medical experimentation was most acceptable when practiced upon prisoners. In his time, prisoners were vulnerable, stigmatized, and expendable; they tended to be poor and uneducated; they were likely to belong to despised and powerless minority groups; they had already lost most important civil rights; and their crimes or alleged crimes made them feared and hated. They were barred from assuming any useful role in society, which, in turn, begrudged them even the sparsest expenditures for their room and board—for which some eighteenth-century prisoners were billed. Few had families or much support from the family they had. In Boyle’s time, as in our own, prisoners were viewed as dangerous parasites who would not be missed should something happen to them. Boyle’s shrewd suggestion has even been shared by prisoners, as some clamor for inclusion in medical investigations for reasons that are examined hereafter. But in our time, there has been another motivation: Prisoners are ideal subjects for Phase I trials. Federal regulations dictate that modern human medical experiments consist of at least three formal phases. Highly simplified, these are: Phase I, which asks, "How safe is this drug?" Phase II, which continues evaluating safety while also seeking to determine "How effective is this drug?" and if the treatment seems safe and effective, the trial proceeds to Phase III, which compares the treatment to the standard treatment, using subjects treated with the investigative therapy and a control group treated with the current standard of care, if one exists. If not, the control group may be given a placebo, an inert sham treatment to enable a comparison with the new therapy. Phase I trials use healthy volunteers to test the safety of the treatment, looking for side effects and the best mode of administration. Because they are the first human tests, Phase I trials carry a higher risk of problems, such as side effects, than do other trials. For this reason, companies prefer Phase I trials to take place in institutions where subjects can be carefully monitored and are unlikely to be lost to follow-up: If serious problems develop, the researchers want to know. Prisoners fit the bill nicely. Around 1963, Robert Batterman, M.D., an expert in pharmaceutical experimentation, said, "Phase I is very big in prisons. The FDA prefers Phase I to be on an inpatient basis—the only place available for large scale toxicity studies is prison." He also added, "The vast majority of new drugs—more than 90 percent—never get into medical practice. They prove too toxic and fall by the wayside in Phase II."3 That Jesse Williams and thousands of his fellow incarcerated research subjects were African American is no accident. African Americans have always been dramatically overrepresented in jails and prisons (at national rates of 40 to 61 percent of all the incarcerated), so any discussion of U.S. inmates is closely bound up with race, and medical experimentation behind bars is no exception. Some influential white scientists, such as Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, whose theories were discussed in chapter 3, did not distinguish between blacks and criminals. In 1911, Lombroso observed, "There exists a group of criminals, born for evil, against whom all social cures break as though against a rock ~emphasis added~—a fact which compels us to eliminate them completely, even if by death." This group consisted of men who were inherently, immutably evil because of their deranged physiology. They were also, in his view, more likely to be black than white. When Lombroso sought to illustrate his theories of "criminal man," he unhesitatingly chose an African society, the Dinka of the Upper Nile, as the perfect example of born savage criminals. The Dinka were no more bellicose than many other societies on other continents, but their dark skin was enough to qualify them for this distinction. Among the physical stigmata that conclusively signaled their criminal nature were dark skin and the concomitant inability to blush. "Inability to blush has always been considered the accompaniment of crime and shamelessness," warned Lombroso. "Blushing is very rare among idiots and savages."4 Medical theories of criminality are important because medicine has long claimed a special provenance over criminality. The very frequent reference to a prison as a site of rehabilitation and treatment is the sine qua non of modern penology. Illegal behavior was medicalized in an 1870 statement of the Congress of the American Prison Association: A Criminal is a man who has suffered under a disease evinced by the perpetration of a crime, and who may reasonably be held to be under the dominion of such disease until his conduct has afforded very strong presumption not only that he is free from its immediate influence but that the chances of its recurrence have become exceedingly remote.5 Dr. Karl Menninger, often called the "dean of American psychiatry," was a psychoanalyst, Harvard professor, and scion of the dynasty of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. His lectures and readable books helped bring mental disorders out of the dark closet of shame and secrecy in which they had languished until the mid-twentieth century. He also had a special sympathy for prisoners, but he attributed criminal behavior not to the constitutional evil of Lombroso’s conscience-deprived "criminal man" but to a limited psyche, "the spasms and struggles of a sub-marginal human being trying to make it in our complex society with inadequate equipment…." African American behavior has long been pathologized in a similar manner. In fact, the imaginary black diseases dreamed up by the American school of ethology are psychiatric disorders with a strong forensic bias. As described in chapter 1, they ascribed illegal behavior as well as pathological behavior to blacks, and the "medicine" Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright prescribed was punishment by whips or hard labor. Twentieth-century corrections personnel perpetuated this medical pathologizing of behavior by making references to borderline personality disorders, antisocial personalities, and sociopaths within their walls who had never been so diagnosed by a medical professional. San Quentin prison psychiatrist Dr. Harvey Powelson, for example, discussed how in the 1950s, staff recklessly made diagnoses of inmates from Rorschach tests, a then-popular diagnostic tool that involved interpreting responses to "ink-blot" patterns. "My sense of the situation is that Adult Authority used the tests for rationalizations for what they’d already decided based upon their own intuition." "Dark Days at Holmesburg Prison In 1998, Allen Hornblum published Acres of Skin, which documents the abusive experimentation conducted at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison complex by Dr. Albert M. Kligman between the 1950s and 1970s. "Most of this research was practiced upon African American men," says Hornblum. "Not only that, but they were used for the worst, most dangerous experiments." Kligman, a dermatologist, was initially invited to Holmesburg Prison in 1951 to treat an outbreak of athlete’s foot. But his initial reaction to Holmesburg was far from therapeutic and gave Hornblum’s book its title: "All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time." Soon Kligman was inducing foot fungus, not treating it, because he saw the opportunity to conduct lucrative experiments upon thousands of captive bodies for at least thirty-three major pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies, such as Johnson and Johnson, Merck, Helena Rubenstein, and DuPont. During World War II, prisoners had been commonly used as research subjects, and after the war, the United States was the only nation in the world continuing to legally use prisoners in clinical trials.6 Federal, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic companies’ money catalyzed a thirty-year boom in research with prisoners. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Kligman gained exclusive experimental use of inmate bodies, testing 153 experimental drugs between 1962 and 1966 alone. Seventy-five percent of Holmesburg’s inmate population, including Jesse Williams, were administered cosmetics, powders, and shampoos that caused baldness, extensive scarring, and permanent skin and nail injury. Fingernails were removed or deformed by punch biopsies, in which a physician employs a special forceps or a biopsy punch to obtain a full-thickness circular sample of skin or nail. The subjects’ backs were so covered by flayed, discolored, and scarred skin from various patch tests of chemicals that the distinctive checkerboard or striped skin was a sure tip-off that the man was an ex-con. "If you ever saw guys on the beach you would know where the hell they’ve been," explained former guard Joseph Dade. Withers Ponton, a lifer in his eighties, complained of a back "all marked up with bad blackheads and scars" after a quarter century of patch tests. "That first test nearly killed me: It was so painful I nearly went through the wall." But he eventually participated in more than fifty tests during a forty-month stint at a county jail, for which he earned several thousand dollars. When Kligman used prisoners to devise the anti-acne medication Retin-A, it made him a millionaire. Jailed subjects were also inoculated with herpes, vaccinia, and wart viruses and were exposed to Staphylococcus and Monilia. Their skin was exposed to everything from radioisotopes to temperature extremes. Dow Chemical Company also paid Kligman to test dioxin, a suspected carcinogen, which he applied to the skin of seventy prisoners, mostly black. He also inoculated men with syphilis, gonorrhea, malaria, and amoebic dysentery. Each participant earned anywhere from ten to seven hundred dollars, depending upon the length, danger, and unpleasantness of the research. But in the fall of 1965, the FDA became alarmed when the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published Kligman’s article based on research in which he covered inmates’ torsos with the banned substance dimethylsulfoxide (DSMO), an oily industrial solvent. The FDA began scrutinizing his work, and its documents cite "irregularities and falsification of reports," alarm over Kligman’s extremely large number of investigations, and concern that he was dabbling in areas far removed from his specialty, dermatology. FDA documents also condemned Kligman’s practice of routinely enrolling inmates in multiple studies simultaneously, which multiplied their health risks and clouded the source of any adverse effects. What’s more, Kligman’s record-keeping discrepancies were rife—he, like many other prison investigators, destroyed or "lost" medical files. This allowed them to claim later, among other things, that African Americans were not disproportionately represented in abusive procedures. On July 19, the FDA removed Kligman from its list of approved researchers and notified sponsors that he no longer was eligible to perform drug testing. But just a month later, the FDA restored his privileges.7 The FDA’s concern that Kligman was venturing too far afield of dermatology, his area of expertise, was certainly warranted. He began performing chemical-warfare tests for the army and the CIA, using psychotropic agents. Perhaps the most harrowing experimental accounts are those of CIA mind-control experiments in which psychoactive substances, including Schedule II drugs (those with a high abuse risk), were administered to inmates as part of the MK-ULTRA program, a CIA research program conducted from 1953 through the 1970s to produce the perfect "truth drug" for interrogating Soviet intelligence operatives.8 According to Kligman’s own statements, he was operating essentially unregulated and with inmates who participated because they had been told neither the nature of the tests nor the risks they were taking. In 1972, he enthused, "It was years before the authorities knew that I was conducting various studies on prisoner volunteers. Things were simple then. Informed consent was unheard of. No one asked me what I was doing. It was a wonderful time."9 The government tests were conducted from three trailers on the prison grounds. Some inmates gave these tests a wide berth because it was rumored that they involved LSD and drove men crazy. But others eventually entered them, drawn by the money, which was much more than what was paid for skin tests. Half of these subjects reported frightening hallucinations that lasted for days, but prisoners say that they were never given consent forms or told what drugs they were being given. Edward Anthony, a black Holmesburg inmate during the mid-1960s, said that after he suffered rashes from the skin tests, he moved on to the more lucrative army experiments. "I don’t remember much of what happened after I was given the injection," he said. "But I know once it wore off, I was a different person than before. I used to be a mild-mannered person, but now I have drastic mood swings and have trouble controlling my temper." Jesse Williams gives a similar account of his time in the trailers. "I used to be into nonconfrontational crimes—burglary, stealing cars. But after the mind tests, I was a different person, more confrontational. I would go to bars actively seeking trouble; I never was like that before." Some drugs caused temporary paralysis or helplessness, or even placed the subject into a catatonic state, from which he could neither communicate nor react to his surroundings. Others caused prolonged nausea, and still others, such as the drugs Williams and Anthony took, provoked long-term violent behavior. We still cannot know which drugs the men were given because they were investigational and identified only by number. The test results are classified, but the army acknowledges that it conducted such experiments at Holmesburg. "There was limited Army involvement with the University of Pennsylvania many years ago," admitted Lt. Col. Bill Wheelehan, a Pentagon spokesman. "The Army does not engage in this type of medical research today." In a 1973 congressional hearing on human experimentation, the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee’s health subcommittee heard testimony from former Holmesburg inmates Leodus Jones and Allan Lawson, who charged the university was deceptive in the handling of consent procedures and informing inmates of possible risks. In January 1974, the Philadelphia prison system’s board of trustees terminated the program.10 Twenty-four years later, when Acres of Skin was published, many former subjects realized for the first time that they had rights as experimental subjects and could sue the University of Pennsylvania, Kligman’s home institution, despite the indemnification waivers that some had signed. In September 2000, 298 former Holmesburg prisoners filed a class-action lawsuit against the university, Johnson and Johnson, Dow Chemical Company, Dr. Kligman and his company—Ivy Research Labs—and the city of Philadelphia. But the years and the experiments had taken their physical toll. Most subjects are dead, and the survivors, now in their fifties and sixties, suffer from skin and nail problems, breathing difficulties, cancers, and stubborn, sometimes unidentified infections. Seventy former inmates have joined as Community Assistance for Prisoners to pursue legal redress, heartened by the $2.4 million settlement awarded in 2000 to Washington State prison inmates whose testicles had been cut and irradiated between 1963 and 1973. But the Holmesburg suit has been stymied by the statute of limitations. The University of Pennsylvania insists that its research was ethical because the inmates gave informed consent, signed waivers, and took payment. Senior vice dean Richard Tannen, M.D., of the university medical center, contends that because human research was widely accepted at the time of the Holmesburg experiments, Kligman was not considered to be in violation of any Hippocratic ideals. The hospital offered the men free evaluations and treatment, should its doctors find a causal relationship between the experiments and their current ailments. Jesse Williams responded, "We don’t trust them. How can we?" Kligman doesn’t respond to interview requests, but he defended his work in a prepared 1997 statement: "To the best of my knowledge, the result of those experiments advanced our knowledge of the pathogenesis of skin disease, and no long-term harm was done to any person who voluntarily participated in the research program." Holmesburg was no anomaly. In 1952, Chester M. Southam of the Sloan-Kettering Institute injected at least 396 inmates at Ohio State Prison—more than 180 of them black—with live human cancer cells. Southam said he wished to study the process by which healthy bodies neutralized and killed off cancer cells. One of the sponsors for Southam’s research was the National Institutes of Health, which also sponsored the PHS syphilis study at Tuskegee. Southam assured inmates that the experiments were perfectly safe because "any cancer that took would spread slowly…and could be removed surgically."11 Inmates also were used in flawed blood-plasma trials testing "high-volume plasmapheresis"—transfusions utilizing large amounts of plasma—between 1967 and 1969 throughout the state of Alabama. The study was managed by Dr. Austin R. Stough at Kilby, Draper, and McAlester prisons—very sloppily, by all accounts. According to the New York Times, there was no informed consent and no accurate records were kept, so no racial breakdowns of his subjects are available. The record keeping and the management of the study were so poor that many men sickened and died not from experimental risks but from simple poor hygiene and from plasma transfusions of the wrong blood type. Sterile technique was all but ignored by the poorly trained technicians, and the laboratory, where blood and fluids pooled on the floors and stained every available surface, was filthy. As a result, 28 percent of the subjects developed hepatitis, in contrast to only 1 percent of inmates who were not subjects. Dr. Stough was expelled several times from hospitals and prisons after his subjects sickened and died from a variety of diseases, but not before he netted roughly two million dollars in profits. In other prisons across the nation, hundreds of black and white inmates were subjected to flash burns (burns caused by excessive skin or corneal exposure to heat radiation, rather than the direct application of heated tools). Burns were specifically inflicted upon African Americans at sites such as the cornea of the eyes (where they sometimes led to permanent vision problems), forearms, and backs because scientists wished to learn how thermal radiation affected darker skins as opposed to white skin. Some of these experiments duplicated the experiments conducted by the Medical College of Virginia, which were described in chapter 9. Often under the guise of treatment, psychiatric experimentation with imprisoned African Americans has spanned the poles of barbarity and sophisticated personality destruction. In the 1950s, Tulane University psychiatrist Dr. Robert Heath selected black prisoners specifically for use in psychosurgery experiments. These involved implanting electrodes into inmates’ brains to repeatedly stimulate their pleasure centers. Heath also conducted CIA-funded drug experiments, which included LSD and a drug called bulbocapnine. In high doses, bulbocapnine produces "catatonia and stupor," a statuelike state, which Heath and his associate Harry Bailey, M.D., thought would be useful for controlling violent prisoners. According to one memo, the CIA sought information as to whether the drug could cause "loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, loss of will power and an increase in toxicity in persons with a weak type of central nervous system." They tested the drug exclusively on African American prisoners, whom Bailey routinely referred to as "niggers," at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Big pharma continues to use Black incarcerated people for profit and experimentation by overmedicating them under the guise of care.
Saisi 20—Boke Saisi ~a PhD Candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Graduate Specialization in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She previously graduated with an MA in Ethnic Studies from UCSD, an MA in Communication and Culture from York University in Toronto, Canada, and a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Her research and writing interests include Black feminist thought, Indigenous and decolonial feminisms, critical gender studies, mad studies, critical disability studies, carceral studies, media, and political economy~, "Big Pharma and the prison industry are colluding to overmedicate incarcerated populations," Black Youth Project, 17 March, 2020. http://blackyouthproject.com/big-pharma-and-the-prison-industry-are-colluding-to-overmedicate-incarcerated-populations/. ND
Large corporations that own brands such as Victoria’s Secret, Revlon, Old Navy and McDonald’s have come under public scrutiny for using Black and racialized prison labour to manufacture their commodities. Little attention, however, has been paid to Big Pharma’s predatory profiteering from prison labour and the practice of incarceration itself. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a structure that monetizes the warehousing of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC). Big Pharma facilitates the caging of BIPOC, largely through psychotropic/ psychiatric medication. Incarceration, a practice that produces and exacerbates mental unwellness, is the ideal market for selling psychiatric meds. Given the history of medical experimentation on incarcerated people in general, and the testing of psychiatric medication in particular, it’s clear that Big Pharma continues to rely on the anti-Black practices central to incarceration. Social scientific research maintains that upwards of 73 percent of people incarcerated in women’s prisons are "mentally ill" and are therefore prescribed psychotropic drugs as a form of mental health "care." The problem with these research findings is that they reproduce ideals of biological determinism–that disregard the social and environmental factors that produce distress in the first place. When we complicate the insistence that mental unwellness is simply "in the brain" and can be "fixed" by medication, mental health "care" in prisons starts to look a lot like the hyper-consumption of psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Mad activist frameworks insist that this complication is made abundantly clear. Psychiatric medications sold by Big Pharma to prisons can rightfully be used to aid in alleviating moments of distress. However, if deemed a necessity for the "maintenance of order in the prison environment," psychotropics are also easily dispensed in an attempt to control the behavior of inmates. Overmedication of psychotropics is a well documented practice in prisons, with prison employees regularly "prescribing" medications themselves, instead of medical doctors. The increased vulnerability in women’s prisons is particularly problematic as it inherently produces gender, sexual, and physical violence. People in women’s prisons are already pathologized and punished for exhibiting behaviours not ascribed to femininity (i.e. docility, heterosexuality). The history of gendered pathologization in psychiatric practice builds on this pathologization. All the volumes of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM)–a primary text in psychiatry and psychology– are full of examples that mark behaviours and expressions that do not align with heteropatriarchy as ‘disorders’ to be ‘treated’ with medication. These many diagnoses were created at a historical moment that simultaneously saw the rise of the mainstream use of psychiatric medications and the emergence of mass incarceration. That relationship is far from coincidental. The majority of early testing of psychiatric medications in the 1930s and 1940s were done on incarcerated people. Between 1962-1980 at least 90 per cent psychiatric testing was done on incarcerated people–or in other words Black people. Medical experimentation on Black people has a long sordid history, from the Tuskegee Experiments to dermatological testing coming out of the University of Pennsylvania. Psychiatric medication testing has been a staple for the consolidation of wealth for pharmaceutical corporations for a century. A 2007 quarterly report published by the California Department of Corrections (CDCR) about juvenile justice indicates the creation of a psychotropic study to be conducted on incarcerated children. Children in migrant detention prisons are currently being given psychiatric medications, prescribed by doctors receiving kickbacks from Big Pharma. The makers of Seroquel, Latuda, and Zoloft–Astrazeteca, Sunovion, and Pfizer, respectively–are a small number of corporations that profit from the overmedication of incarcerated persons and presumably drug related testing. This medication–under the auspices of psychiatric "expertise," is fallaciously framed as mental health care. Since incarceration produces and exacerbates mental unwellness, releasing incarcerated people would seem like a clear way to prevent– as opposed to "treat"–mental distress, but that would cut into the profit margins of pharmaceutical tycoons. Examining the relationship between Big Pharma, institutionalized psychiatry, and the prison industry is a necessary component in education, community organizing and political engagement. In order to disrupt and encourage divestment from prisons, we first have to know what these industries are complicit in. The abolishment of prisons requires a critique of institutionalized psychiatry. Given the fact that incarcerated persons are especially exposed to pharmaceutical and state sanctioned violence, it is the duty of pharmaceutical industries to transparently pinpoint their collusion with the police and prison state. The stories of incarcerated peoples’ experiences of being medicated–as scholar and abolitionist Angela Davis has highlighted in her own experiences of incarceration–are central to challenging those making big money off of the lives of BIPOC held in cages. An abolitionist praxis that centers disrupting the myriad violences produced by incarceration must now also include the violences manufactured by Big Pharma, as well as the institutions that produce and encourage profit from it. We can no longer leave these realities out of our focus on prison abolition.
The political operates through discourses of progress that promises hope for the black body when there isn’t any. This causes overburdening on black individuals because they are told that if they keep working harder they will achieve equality, but instead it locks them in a never-ending cycle of violence and sacrifice.
Warren’15 Warren Calvin L ~Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University~ "Black Nihilism and The Politics of Hope" The New Centennial Review Vol. 15, No. 1, (Spring 2015), pp. 215-248. TJ
Perverse juxtapositions structure our relation to the Political. This becomes even more apparent and problematic when we consider the position of blacks within this structuring.1 On the one hand, our Declaration of Independence proclaims, "All men are created equal," and yet black captives were fractioned in this political arithmetic as three-fifths of this "man." The remainder, the two-fifths, gets lost within the arithmetic shuffle of commerce and mercenary prerogatives. We, of course, hoped that the Reconstruction Amendments would correct this arithmetical error and finally provide an ontological equation, or an existential variable, that would restore fractured and fractioned CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015, pp. 215–248. ISSN 1532-687X. © 2015 Michigan State University. All rights reserved. 2 1 5 black being. This did not happen. Black humanity became somewhat of an "imaginary number" in this equation, purely speculative and nice in theory but difficult to actualize or translate into something tangible. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and extra-legal and legal violence made a mockery of the 14th Amendment, and the convict leasing system turned the 13th Amendment inside out for blacks. Yet, we approach this political perversity with a certain apodictic certainty and incontrovertible hope that things will (and do) get better. The Political, we are told, provides the material or substance of our hope; it is within the Political that we are to find, if we search with vigilance and work tirelessly, the "answer" to the ontological equation— hard work, suffering, and diligence will restore the fractioned three-fifths with its alienated two-fifths and, finally, create One that we can include zin our declaration that "All men are created equal."Weare still awaiting this "event." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed great emphasis on the restoration of black being through suffering and diligence in his sermon "The American Dream" (1965): And I would like to say to you this morning what I’ve tried to say all over this nation, what I believe firmly: that in seeking to make the dream a reality we must use and adopt a proper method. I’m more convinced than ever before that violence is impractical and immoral . . . weneed not hate; we need not use violence. We can stand up against our most violent opponent and say: we will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you . . . we will go to in those jails and transform them from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after night and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. . . . ~T~hreaten our children and bomb our churches, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win it for ourselves, we will so appeal to your hearts and conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be double. The American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule for the Democracy that is to come. In fact, it almost becomes impossible to think the Political without black suffering. According to this logic, corporeal fracture engenders ontological coherence, in a political arithmetic saturated with violence. Thus, nonviolence is a misnomer, or somewhat of a ruse. Black-sacrifice is necessary to achieve the American dream and its promise of coherence, progress, and equality. We find similar logic in the contemporary moment. Renisha McBride, Jordon Davis, Kody Ingham, Amadou Diallo, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Frederick Jermain Carter, Chavis Carter, Timothy Stansbury, Hadiya Pendleton, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Kendrec McDade, Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, among others, constitute a fatal rupture of the Political; these signifiers, stained in blood, refuse the closure that the Political promises. They haunt political discourses of progress, betterment, equality, citizenship, and justice—the metaphysical organization of social existence. We are witnessing a shocking accumulation of injured and mutilated black bodies, particularly young black bodies, which place what seems to be an unanswerable question mark in the political field: if we are truly progressing toward this "society-that-is-to-come (maybe)," why is black suffering increasing at such alarming rates? In response to this inquiry, we are told to keep struggling, keep "hope" alive, and keep the faith. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin, President Obama addressed the nation and importuned us to keep fighting for change because "each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes toward race" and, if we work hard enough, we will move closer to "becoming a more perfect union." Despite Martin’s corpse lingering in the minds of young people and Zimmerman’s smile of relief after the verdict, we are told that things are actually getting better. Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till. Black suffering, here, is instrumentalized to accomplish pedagogical, cathartic, and redemptive objectives and, somehow, the growing number of dead black bodies in the twenty-first century is an indication of our progress toward "perfection." Is perfection predicated on black death? How many more C a l v i n L . W a r r e n 2 1 7 black bodies must be lynched, mutilated, burned, castrated, raped, dismembered, shot, and disabled before we achieve this "more perfect union"? In many ways, black suffering and death become the premiere vehicles of political perfection and social maturation. This essay argues that the logic of the Political—linear temporality, biopolitical futurity, perfection, betterment, and redress—sustains black suffering. Progress and perfection are worked through the pained black body and any recourse to the Political and its discourse of hope will ultimately reproduce the very metaphysical structures of violence that pulverize black being. This piece attempts to rescue black nihilism from discursive and intellectual obliteration; rather than thinking about black nihilism as a set of pathologies in need of treatment, this essay considers black nihilism a necessary philosophical posture capable of unraveling the Political and its devastating logic of political hope. Black nihilism resists emancipatory rhetoric that assumes it is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances political apostasy as the only "ethical" response to black suffering.
Warren ‘18 – Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies @ Emory University (Calvin L., "Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation," Published by Duke University Press, pages 157-160)/Aakash
Nahum Chandler, in his beautiful philosophical meditation X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, would describe antebellum politics, law, and culture as resting on a certain "metaphysical infrastructural organization" that is often "not so recognized and is far less often thought."44 Any discussion of a historical subject, white subject, and especially the Negro is enabled by this infrastructure, which bears the weight of the culture in question and its devastating violence. In other words, this metaphysical infrastructure already presumes certain pure ontological positions, and these positions enable the unjust and inhumane. Chandler would argue that the Negro brings into relief the problem of purity — since its ontological constitution presents a problem for thought. Purity, then, constitutes a metaphysical fiction (and a racial privilege), and we could argue that ontological terror is precisely the threat the Negro poses, as always undoing ontological purity with contamination. But the project of purity, I would argue, is a response to the problem of black as nothing — where purity becomes a discourse of this nothing, its symptom or materialization. Antebellum culture deploys the discourse of purity (and its anxiety concerning amalgamation and integration) as a cover for the ontological terror at the heart of the metaphysical infrastructure. Put differently, this infrastructure is precarious and always at risk by its own invention, black being, stripped of its primary narrative (the flesh). This, then, is the double bind of the metaphysical infrastructure (or the "whole of metaphysics," as Heidegger would call it): black being is a necessary invention because it bears the nothing, which is uncontrollable with metaphysical instruments, but black being is also hated because its presence is a reminder that the human being itself is a metaphysical fiction — the very ground of humanity is precarious and unreliable (or, as Fanon avers, "Man is nothing, absolutely nothing"). It is at this tension (between necessity and hatred) that ontological terror turns into forms of physical, emotional, and psychic devastation. But we must also take very seriously Chandler’s statement that this metaphysical structure is "not so recognized and is far less often thought." This structure is often not recognized and unthought because we think politics, law, and culture on its surface and not its depth (its essence), the structure upon which it rests — thus, we rarely understand that politics is the symptom of this tense metaphysical structure. Ontological Terror is an attempt to expose this infrastructure and its presumptions. But to do this, we must think otherwise, or, as Miguel de Beistegui argues, we must look elsewhere for the essence of politics, law, and culture.45 It is with this strategy of thinking otherwise, of being mindful of the metaphysical structure that goes undetected, that I understand the antebellum free black as a paradigm of ontological terror. For at least syntactically, the term free black holds the tension of this metaphysical infrastructure: to be free is much more than a legal status (although it is often reduced to this); it is an onto-existential condition in which the human can engage in its primordial relation (between self, Being, and its unique project of care). Freedom, then, is the condition of the free, and it indicates a certain ontological orientation in an antiblack world. "Black," however, is the being stripped of this primary narrative, a being that is the target of antiblack violence, since black and nothing become synonymous. In an antiblack world, black being can never be free but can be emancipated — but emancipation fails to resolve the metaphysical problem of black as nothing, which is necessary for anything like black freedom to exist. As long as a metaphysical world exists, a world that obliterates nothing, blacks will never be free. The free black presents syntactical devastation in that it knots human being with black being and freedom with unfreedom. If we read this syntactical chaos as a symptom of the tension at the heart of the metaphysical infrastructure (necessity and hatred), then we understand that the concept of the free black is a problem for thought. One cannot think the free black within an antiblack world without resorting to the fantastical and the absurd. The free black threatens metaphysical purity by releasing this nothing into the realm of the human — which, of course, is exactly what an antiblack world is designed to prevent. This signifier terrorizes, and the beings inhabiting the position "free black" also terrorize, as they become the materialization of this threat to human being. When I suggest that the free black is a paradigm of ontological terror, I do this as an attempt to think otherwise, to think the metaphysical infrastructure that often goes undetected. Thinking through paradigms provides a strategy for this type of thinking. The strategy of the paradigm, according to Agamben, is to juxtapose two entities until at a point of concentration, or intensity, so that they reveal aspects of each other. Entities within a paradigmatic analysis become allegories of each other. One example, or instance, is used to provide insight into another.46 I think about the free black as an allegory of the problem of metaphysics and the problem of metaphysics as an allegory of the free black. Thus, although the free black marks a particular phenomenological and historical instance (as distinct from other forms of black existence), we can read the free black allegorically to provide insight into the metaphysical infrastructure that goes unnoticed. Free blacks were situated in diverse geographical locations — the upper South, the deep South, the North, the Midwest; despite these diverse geographical locations and the different forms of antiblack violence each location deployed, the problem of antiblackness and the problem of black being remained a constant.47 The discourse and debates concerning antebellum free blacks orbit around a tension, an unanswered question, that irrupts in forms of paradox and impasse. The Negro Question, then, pre sents itself as a political discourse, one obsessed with black citizenship, political inclusion, and rights. But the Negro Question is rooted in a metaphysical infrastructure that attempts to police the boundaries between the white human and its black equipment. This infrastructure is threatened, however, with the presence of the free black, and it is the free black that becomes the obsession of this question. Since the free black knots freedom with unfreedom and human with nonhuman, the boundary between the ontological entities (white human and black slave) unravels. What I am suggesting is that the political discourse about free black citizenship is the articulation of a metaphysical anxiety, one that threatens antebellum culture. Moreover, the Negro Question is, as I have suggested, a proper metaphysical question, since at its core it inquires whether black being can transform into human being. The free black brings this question to the fore in a way that the slave does not. The condition of the slave is one of property, the condition of invention and perverse utility. This, of course, is what modernity intended for black being — that it would serve the world as pure function, property, and use. But the word free in the term free black is more than a legal designation; it is an inquiry into the metaphysical structure itself. For if black being is brought into the world as utility (as Justice Roger Taney would argue in the Dred Scott decision), then a free black would index a different mode of black being. Is such a different mode of being possible in an antiblack world? The word free absorbs all these metaphysical inquiries and anxieties. This is precisely why the free black is such an important paradigm of ontological terror: because the free black resituates politics and exposes the metaphysical infrastructure. Thus, when Humen Humphrey, the second president of Amherst College, writes in The African Repository that free blacks "are not looked upon as men, in the true and proper sense of the term," he is responding to the proper metaphysical question: can black being transform into human being?48 Following Humphrey, freedom indexes the "true and proper" sense of man; the truth of man can be located in his primordial relation to Being. But black being lacks this properness, as it marks the execration of Being, and the metaphysical transformation that the word free is designed to indicate utterly fails. The free black is a problem for an antiblack world in that his challenge to the metaphysical structure leaves him without a proper place or any metaphysical position that is intelligible. This lack of properness and metaphysical truth is a symptom of the nothing, for nothing lacks any proper place in metaphysics and cannot be understood through its episteme. Black being as nothing, then, will always be out of place and improper in an antiblack world. It is the terror of the metaphysical infrastructure, and one can never be a true or proper man when one bears the weight of nothing. Through this analysis, we can understand the anxiety concerning black being, placement, and nothing in antebellum culture. In August 1842, for example, the free black population of Philadelphia held a parade commemorating the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. An angry mob of white citizens disrupted the parade, attacked participants, and commenced to destroy black homes and property. Seeking redress through the courts for loss of property and injury, the free black population realized that justice within such a context was impossible, as the grand jury acquitted the rioters and blamed free blacks for inciting this violence. Robert Purvis, a leader in the free black population of Philadelphia, responded to the grand jury’s decision with dismay:49 "The measure of our suffering is full. . . . From the most painful and minute investigation, in the feelings, views and acts of this community — in regard to us — I am convinced of our utter and complete nothingness in public estimation ~emphasis mine~."50 What sparked the riot, this devastating expression of antiblackness? We can locate this eruption of violence at the metaphysical fault line between necessity and hatred. Black being is both a necessary instrument for the human’s self-constitution and an object of ferocious hatred, since it bears the nothing of a metaphysical order. In other words, the riot is the symptom of a metaphysical problem: the public celebration of black freedom sparks a terror in that ontological boundaries are challenged and the transformation from black being, as invention/instrument, to human being, as free, is not only considered but celebrated. It is also no surprise that the grand jury blamed the victims for the riot, since black freedom is a form of violence for the human, a violence that must be met with extreme force. The riot is a response to ontological terror. "Free," when paired with "black," is recast as a weapon against the human and the metaphysical structure that sustains the human. We are dealing with two registers of violence — one is an ontological violence and another is a physical form of antiblack destruction.