“I Would Wish Death on You…”
Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime

The White Supremacist State: Race, Gender, Carceral Genealogy

While numerous scholars, activists, and public intellectuals have taken on the urgent work of addressing the social devastation and institutional monstrosities of the domestic and international “prison industrial complex,” the American regime of imprisonment cannot be adequately conceptualized through the absorption of empirical institutional data, compilations of imprisoned people’s legal testimonies, or even rigorous comparative examination across other carceral geographies and historical moments. While such forms of information gathering, advocacy, and scholarly analysis are certainly indispensable to the larger project of a critical counter-prison and prison abolitionist praxis, I am suggesting that they frequently fail to either illuminate or inspire a pragmatic (or activist) theoretical attention to the structuring logics of the U.S. prison regime at the constitutive intersection of violence and incarceration. We need, in other words, a theory of carceral violence that comprehends it as a complex production rather than utilitarian application of power and racially gendered bodily domination, and which attempts to comprehend carceral violence in its specificity as both spectacle and routine, and across the intensities of its production on the bodies and subjectivities of people in prison.

White supremacist social, economic, and cultural formations organic to the United States—from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide, to contemporary productions of neoliberalism and (domestic/undeclared) warfare—constitute the ongoing emergence of American technologies of human incarceration and punishment, although theoretical explanations of this entanglement vary widely. For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized “human” difference, enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical extermination and curtailment of people’s collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce).¹ As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is both based on, and constantly resurfacing, notions of the white (European and Euro-American) “human” vis-à-vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. To consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation (rather than an extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American globality and constitute the common sense organic to its ordering. Here, I am less concerned with the broad question of how the U.S. prison apparatus marks an extension of this national racial genealogy, than I am with the specific concern of how the prison regime has come to constitute a qualitative carceral formation that globalizes U.S. white supremacy as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized “human” difference.

The globalization of white supremacy is fundamentally shaped by the mobilization of the U.S. prison, in historically unprecedented ways, as both a material arrangement of strategically localized bodily domination (the localities of what Julia Sudbury has called the “global prison industrial complex”) and as a specific formation of violence that produces the U.S. prison regime as a modality of power relations. It is the technology of coercion crystallized in the institutionality of the U.S. prison (across its local variations) that expresses the constitutive logic of the current U.S. dominance in movements of hegemonic globalization. Perhaps most importantly, this is not a “coercion” that manifests uniformly (or even relatively evenly) across bodies, localities, and historical moments: it is, rather, a technology of carceral violence that draws from the essential historical components of white supremacy as a “substructure” (following Frantz Fanon’s appropriation and deforming of the Marxist lexicon) of U.S. national formation, civil society building, and globality.

While I am theoretically privileging the practices of power and domination that coagulate around the axes of “race” in this discussion, I proceed with the understanding (which I will further elaborate below) that U.S. white supremacy is historically overdetermined by hegemonic patriarchies and state-sanctioned racist misogynies, and is currently in the midst of a somewhat dramatic and theatrical symbiosis with the “ludic multiculturalism”² of dominant state and corporate bodies (yielding authentically “multiculturalist” productions of white supremacy). As scholars such as Angela Y. Davis, Julia Sudbury, Andrea Smith, Beth Richie, Cassandra Shaylor, and numerous others have indicated,³ the intersecting axes of gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence precipitating in the ongoing emergence of the U.S. prison regime exceed narrow masculinist definitions of white supremacy as a power relation shared primarily, if not exclusively, between (heterosexual) men and rigidly between empowered “white” subjects and presumptively disempowered subjects “of color.”

Here, it is crucial to recognize the methodological distinction between 1) addressing gender as a relatively coherent category of analysis, empirical description, and social scientific/ethnographic focus that examines, for example, the heretofore understudied and undertheorized problems of women’s imprisonment, regimes of queer criminalization, and transsexual bodily punishment in prison, and 2) conceptualizing the analytic of gender as a durable and multivalent carceral technology of state violence, both a changing rubric through which state violence articulates onto putatively gendered bodies, and, simultaneously, a modality of bodily punishment that actively constructs, disarticulates, and periodically collapses gender as a coherent conceptual apparatus. A brief juxtaposition clarifies the latter position, to which my overarching argument is largely tethered.

Tracing the organic institutional and juridical antecedent of the 20th and 21st century prison to the institution of racial chattel slavery encompasses a particular moment of deracination that refigures the social logic of gender in a specific moment of ownership and exchange. By way of historical example, Hortense Spillers suggests that the coercive reconstruction and bodily expropriation of Africans as chattel in the era of racial slavery both reifies and collapses the putative gendering of captives. Echoing the genealogical origins of the post-emancipation prison regime as it has distended the logics of U.S. slavery (through and beyond the juridical recodification of “involuntary servitude” as the state’s carceral prerogative under the Thirteenth Amendment), Spillers writes that under the conditions of enslavement, “one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into account as quantities.”⁴ Here, Spillers is neither denying the unique forms of gendered bodily violence characteristic of white supremacist slavery, nor is she reducing the concept of racial chattel to a vulgar notion of “dehumanization.” Rather, she is delineating the primacy of a racial analytic in considering the animus of gendered white supremacist (state) violence as a constituting institutional, technological, and affective structure of U.S. slavery. In this sense, the institutionalized vulnerability of the enslaved person to regimes of bodily disintegration that periodically differentiated boys/girls, women/men, mothers/fathers, etc. is not to be conflated with a differential subjection to the condition of slavery.

1. For a fuller discussion of this historical definition of white supremacy, see Dylan Rodríguez, “Introduction: American Apocalypse,” in Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. [↩]
2. E. San Juan, Jr., “One Hundred Years of Producing and Reproducing the ‘Filipino,'” in Amerasia Journal, 24:2 (1998), 21. [↩]
3. While there is a rapidly growing scholarly, journalistic, and grassroots literature addressing the intersections of white supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, state violence, and imprisonment, the following texts have been particularly useful in the development of this essay: Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. Beth Richie, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women. New York: Routledge, 1996. Julia Sudbury, “Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex,” Feminist Review, 80:1 (July 2005), 162-179. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005. Julia Sudbury, Ed., Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge, 2005. Angela Y. Davis and Cassandra Shaylor, “Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex: California and Beyond,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2:1 (Spring 2001), 1-25. And Cassandra Shaylor, “‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole’: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex,” New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement, Vol. 24 (1998), 385-416. [↩]
4. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 215. The essay first appeared in Diacritics, 17:2 (Summer 1987). [↩]