Étiquettes
In particular, poor Black and Brown children are being treated as what Teju Cole calls “unmournable bodies.” Rather than being educated, many are being imprisoned; rather than living in communities that are safe and clean, many are relegated to cities where the water is poisoned and the police function as an occupying army.
In the age of Trump, children of undocumented workers are stripped of their humanity, caged in internment camps, sometimes sexually abused and subjected to the unethical grammars of state violence. Sometimes they lose their lives, as did two children from Guatemala who died while in custody of Customs and Border Protection: seven-year old Jakelin Caal and eight-year-old Felipe Gómez. In this way the dual logic of disposability and pollution becomes the driving force of a machinery of social death.
Removed from the sphere of justice and human rights, undocumented children occupy a ruthless space of social and political abandonment beyond the reach of human rights. This is a zone in which moral numbness becomes a central feature of politics, power and governance. How else to explain Republican Congressman Peter King responding to the deaths of these two children by praising ICE’s “excellent record,” stating that since there are “only two children that have died,” the death count is a testament to how competent organizations like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actually are. This is a fascist discourse marked by the rhetorical tropes of hate, demonization and violence.
The Politics of Disposability
Disposable populations now labor under what sociologist Richard Sennett has called the “spectre of uselessness” and are catapulted out of the moral universe central to any notion of humanity. Such populations have their children forcibly taken away from them by immigration officials, are chased out of their homes, forced into exile, pushed into homelessness and poverty, excluded from the rights that grant them full-fledged citizenship. Too many of the poor and other vulnerable populations are frequently left to fend for themselves in the face of often devastating political and social costs caused by the financial elite and exploitative corporations such as the pharmaceutical companies partly responsible for the opioid crisis in the United States. These vulnerable populations are also removed from their material goods, denied crucial social provisions, and lack control over their bodies. Under the reign of neoliberalism, such populations are viewed with scorn and disdain. At best they experience the burden of a social death, and at worse they fall prey to the looming danger of real death.
Disposability, pollution and dispossession have another destructive register in that they attempt through a range of cultural, social and pedagogical apparatuses to make people unknown to themselves as potentially critical and engaged citizens. As public spheres increasingly become sites where politics thrive on the energies of a racially coded fascist politics, critical modes of subjectivity and identification are under siege. That is, new powerful cultural pathways work to choke democratic values, modes of agency, values and social relations normally rooted in the virtues of social and economic justice, compassion for others, and also the public goods and institutions that make such values and relationships possible. In the age of a culture of immediacy and hypersensationalism, critical thinking, civic courage and collective resistance are diverted into the private orbit of therapy, the isolated space of emotional management, the atomizing logic of wilful self-change, and a landscape of fractured identities.
This assault on democratic modes of agency and values is particularly aggressive and widespread under a political formation that merges neoliberal ideology and the structures of white supremacy. The public sphere now becomes a phantom empty space, a barren presence next to neoliberalism’s celebrated ethos of unbridled individualism. Neoliberal fascist politics is strengthened through the domestic machineries of inscription that extend from schools and the social media to the world of celebrity culture and corporate-controlled sports events. The corporate-dominated circuits of culture depoliticize people by defining them as both consumers and as isolated individuals for whom all the problems they face are both self-induced and only subject to change through the register of individual responsibility. This narrative of individual freedom and responsibility is constructed through the false notion of unlimited choices detached from any realistic material constraints. As such, this fictional idea of individual freedom is both overburdening and politically debilitating given its refusal to provide a language for individuals to be able to translate private problems into broader social and systemic considerations.
It is in the midst of a culture steeped in a growing plague of social atomization, loneliness and a race-based right-wing populist nationalism that the false dreamscape of a fascist politics gains ascendency. This bogus dreamscape provides individuals with a misleading sense of community and simple answers to complex problems, mobilizing anger against the neoliberal global economy into totalitarian impulses. In this instance, agency becomes unmoored from democratic communal relations and disconnected from a legitimate critique of existing power relations. Immiseration on both the material and psychic levels along with a state-sanctioned culture of fearmongering and bigotry is producing political and pedagogical landscapes that mobilize the highly charged emotive appeals of a fascist politics. This is a politics, as the writer Ian Hughes points out, that is embraced by tyrants who function as entrepreneurs of hate. He writes:
For each of these tyrants, their first goal was to exacerbate the feelings of separateness and otherness felt towards their chosen target out-group, whether they were Jews, kulaks, ‘capitalist railroaders’ or other ‘enemies of the people.’ Their second goal was to inflame feelings of anger and fear towards that out-group. And their third goal was to spread stories that explained, in false and simple terms, why that outgroup was a deserving target of people’s hate. These stories varied widely but they had certain elements in common: ‘the enemy is repulsive in looks and habits;’ ‘the enemy is contaminated and is spreading disease;’ ‘the enemy is part of a conspiracy seeking to control us;’ ‘the enemy is a criminal;’ ‘the enemy is a seducer and a rapist;’ ‘the enemy is an animal, an insect or a germ;’ ‘the enemy is the enemy of God;’ ‘the enemy is a murderer who delights in killing;’ ‘the enemy is standing in the way of our making our country great again.’
Groupe Gaulliste Sceaux 