“[Existing] While Black”: Race, Gender, and the Surveillance of Blackness

Abstract

This manuscript carefully examines racialized surveillance, a mechanism of anti-Black violence, or what Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery, that persists in society despite the formal end of enslavement. To accomplish this, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of an incident in the public sphere and one in an educational context to show the ways anti-Black sentiments flow between them in similar ways. Specifically, this analysis examined the controversial Starbucks incident that involved a White manager calling the police on two Black men, and the experience of Lolade Siyonbola, who was napping in a commons at Yale University. Responding to the pressing question, how do we exist, in the bodies that we hold, in this historical moment and into the future, methodologically, I think with histories of Black men and Black women in the white imaginary and Foucault’s instruments of power to interrogate anti-Black logics affecting Black people in public and educational contexts.

Notes

1 I follow Matias (2016) in my capitalization of Black and White, and lowercase for whiteness. Black and White represent racialized groups, whereas  “whiteness is a state of being that goes beyond an individual’s identity” (p. xvii). Where white is lowercase, it is intended to reflect the larger system of whiteness.