Social Death, Pt. 2

This week's readings, the closing half of Lisa Marie Cacho's Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, continues in many ways some of our discussions from last week, which centered around the idea of "social death" and the permanent(ly) unmournable criminalized. However, for a number of reasons, Cacho pulls us out of abstraction so that we might grapple more completely with the material effects of criminalization–rather than social death being a "killing abstraction"..."it becomes the premise and precondition for actual death" (98). In her discussion of the "War on Terrorism," Cacho examines the ways in which this permanent class of "non-citizen" is created through a mesh of intricate signifiers that denote who belongs; who does not belong; who deserves understanding and compassion; who does not deserve understanding and compassion. As Cacho reminds us: "The 'illegal alien' is the signifier, which should concern us because it signifies persons fundamentally unentitled to rights, and it refers to a category of nonpersonhood that institutes discrimination" (113). This is an important juncture in our theorizations and discussions about not only this work, but the work of transnational projects more broadly because they force (perhaps in a more nuanced way, coerce) us to contend with our own necessity for a "racialized/criminalized Other" against whom we are able to measure our own appropriateness as citizens, as law abiders, as capitalists, as human beings. Cacho must likewise contend with this very proposal in the conclusion via the death of her cousin. In this chapter she states, "On some level, the violence of Brandon's death was perversely and disconcertingly a source of value for us because it valorized the life choices that each of us made but he did not. It naturalized how and why he died while simultaneously reaffirming our social worth and societal value. His violent death validated the rightness of our choices and the righteousness of our behaviors, thereby illustrating Barrett's insight that 'relativities of value [are] ratios of violence.'" (149). Moreso, Cacho necessitates an examination of how/why the choices that we have made "to become valuable members of society validated U.S. society's exclusionary methods for assigning social value" and therefore our own immersion within the complex web of neoliberal ideologies that we seek to critique–constantly reminding us that we are not able to escape yet this is no reason to be complicit.

In thinking more generally about the application of Cacho's work onto discussions of the #BlackLivesMatter movement–including its subsequent and causal iterations #AllLivesMatter and #BrownLivesMatter–there is a necessity in examining, however partially, the role of valuation in our considerations about who, literally, matters and who does not. Cacho would certainly be critical of the tendencies in #BlackLivesMatter to focus on the lives of Black men, which has the unfortunate implication of rendering women of color, at least unintentionally, illegible or unimportant. Yet, I also think that #BlackLivesMatter and #BrownLivesMatter seek to push against a hegemonic (White) desire to maintain the status quo within our neoliberal capitalist culture in a way that Cacho very much articulates. #AllLivesMatter, on the other hand, is an exercise by the White hegemony to silence the calls for justice that are being made by People of Color in response to the state sanctioned violences that are taking place against them, both in immigrant communities and in "criminalized" neighborhoods around the country. The main thing that I see as being important in communicating between the #BlackLivesMatter/#BrownLivesMatter movements and Cacho is the insistence upon highlighting the inconsistencies between the neoliberal (homophobic, racist, classist) ideologies of the State, which is perennially seeking to maintain an unconscious/silenced group by whom appropriate humanity can be measured, and the material violences that are a result of those ideologies. I see them as being fundamentally important to the task that Cacho has taken up; though highlighting or rendering these practices evident may not seem important to their end, it is inarticulably necessary and, I would argue, essential for them to be revealed, which is, in itself, an ostensible impossibility. Thus, this work works in the interstices between what is believed to be possible and what is necessary. Perhaps someone else can articulate this better than I...