User:Jlovejr/sandbox


 * 1) I would like to refine the overall operating definition of "social death" they have because it encompasses much more than just being viewed as less than human. That plays into it, but it is the complete expulsion from acceptance in civil society. This expulsion goes as far as alienation, never being fully integrated into society post emancpation from a harm (i.e. Jews are not socially dead because after the Holocaust they were easily integrated back into society,  but post slavery the black body still remains on the outskirts of society)
 * 2) There's no mention of the middle passage, but there's were many black scholars say the ontological death of the black body happened at the middle passage because what they were was stripped from them and that began the process of social death. Achille Mbembe said the slave suffered from a triple loss ("home", rights of their body, and political status) and says that led to expulsion from society. He also equates the slave's experience to a form of "death in life" because the massive dehumanization that must come for a master to express ownership over another's life. (“Necropolitics” Public Culture. Peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary academic journal of cultural studies, published by Duke University Press. Winter 2003)
 * 3) Afro-pessimism should be talked about. Which is the idea that the black body will never find agency or  life the confines of this current society so only a complete of thie current world in favor of an indescribable "new world" of self sustaining communities made by and for black people. I want to highlight Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton here. (“We’re trying to destroy the world” Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III. The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism)
 * 4) *We should make mention to afro-futurism as well. Which is the concept that takes into account social death, but instead of a complete destruction of this world it relies upon non-western depictions of science fiction, art, historical fiction, magic realism (i.e. #BlackGirlMagic) to critique the current position of people of color, but to also provide a meaningful interrogation and rewriting of historical events.
 * 5) *There also needs to be an opposition section. Many people say ascribing social death as an essential tenet to being black homogenizes all black people and essentializes what it means to be black and thus breaks apart the community rather than bringing it together. Others say that saying the black body is socially dead discounts and erases all that slaves did in their situation to seek and sustain life and the small victories they accomplished along the way. More contend that focusing on ontological death forecloses the possibility to ever find a solution because we doom ourselves to cynicism which actually opens up the black body to more harms.
 * 6) *(I need to do a little more digging for authors and sources here)