# Main Thesis: "Innocence" can perpetuate injustice The core argument of Wang's work is that the conventional appeal to 'innocence' in social justice movements can perpetuate systemic injustices. Wang argues that the concept of innocence is leveraged to uphold certain power structures by implying that some victims of systemic violence are more deserving of justice than others, based on their perceived conformity to social norms. # Summary ## § Opening section "Innocence" becomes the precondition for anti-racist campaigns which centers punishing individuals for overt acts of violence, "thus positioning the State and the criminal justice system as an _ally and protector of the oppressed._" Within the innocence framework, empathy can only be established when a (Black) person is made sufficiently non-threatening. >Within this framework, empathy can only be established when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires Black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be shaken free of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made non-threatening. The "spokesperson" model of activism individualizes, rather than collectivizes injustice. >The “spokesperson” model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases) also tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature of the injury. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from the larger picture. The reliance on appeals to "innocence" does not align with the evolved nature of racism today, which often operates under the guise of colorblind policies and structural mechanisms. >I also want to argue that a politics founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not address the transformation and re-organization of racist strategies in the post-civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively color blind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling or personal prejudice, though there is certain a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. >The liberal color blind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment. This effectively conceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime. >Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. >While there are countless examples of overt racism, **Black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via a coded discourse of “criminality”** and a mediated forms of state violence carried out by a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc). In other words — incidents where a biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. From 1975-86 Black leadership, via the NAACP and the Urban League, identified imprisonment as a central issue. However, between 1986-90, they shifted toward personal responsibility and tough-on-crime rhetoric. Black women are also vilified as "Welfare Queens": a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society. Meanwhile, the incarceration of Black men increased the burden on Black women. ## § White Space >[!summary] The problems of white spatial politics >The politics of white innocence and safety has been leveraged to target Black people, as well as other groups considered a threat. This includes the feminist movement of the 1970s and the increasing public awareness of sexual violence. Urban spaces also influence our political imagination, where urban ghettoes and prisons are unconsidered in white thought. The politics of safety changes the urban landscape, with Black bodies (as well as POC, trans people, homeless, etc.) targeted for removal. >The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. >With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. >At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement of women\[...\] >Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment. >If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. >The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility\[...\] ## § Translation >[!summary] The issues with reframing or "translating" Black resistance > This section analyzes and criticizes the tendency to reframe or "translate" expressions of Black rage and resistance, such as riots, into narratives that are palatable to white people and stripping them of their original context and specific experience. Additionally, white politics tends to not account for Black experience, particularly the violence. >I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible _only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that position._ This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. >Following the 1992 LA riots, 22leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. >\[...\] sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. >Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize. White anarchists and ultra-leftists appropriate racial events for their own (white) political aims. >White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists who adhere to and fetishize the position of being “for nothing and against everything” are equally eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. White leftists overshadow the more brutal aspects of state power and violence that do not operate solely through economic coercion but through physical and existential threat, particularly affecting people of color. >Tiqqun explore the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life (sometimes called “biopolitics”) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (sometimes called “necropolitics”). Frank Wilderson points out how Black experience does not fit neatly into traditional Marxist categories of labor and exploitation. >Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference between being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). >Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a by-product of capitalism, is deficient. ## § Safe Space >[!summary] Problems with the politics of safety >"Safe space" language can be misused to silence legitimate criticism. Appeals to personal safety can conflate discomfort with danger and undermine militancy in favor of reformism. We should critically examine the relationship between safety and violence. >The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro-level when white radicals manipulate “safe space” language to maintain their power in political spaces. They do this by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes them feel “unsafe.” >The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affective and emotional registers and can thus be manipulated to justify everything from racial profiling to war. >Likewise, people can also mobilize their experiences with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves. When people identify with their victimization, we need to critically consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power without being questioned. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors — but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts. >As a Fanonian, I agree that removing all elements of risk and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that just reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is undermined by the politics of safety. >When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. >Prioritizing personal comfort is unproductive, reformist, and can bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill. The politics of innocence and the politics of safety and comfort are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity. Comfort and innocence produce each other when people base their demand for comfort on the innocence of their location or subject-position. >When considering safety, we fail to ask critical questions about the co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We need to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and necessary underside of security, particularly white security. Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. >The violent foundation of US freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed because our lives are mediated in such a way that the violence is invisible or is considered legitimate and fails to register as violence (such as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections between our lives and the generalized atmosphere of violence is submerged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and — above all — are constituted by this repetition of violence. ## § Sexual Violence >[!summary] "Innocence" as legitimizing victims of sexual violence >A conception of innocence, predicated on sanctified white femininity, is used to determine who is considered a legitimate victim of sexual violence. This excludes groups such as sex workers, women of color, and undocumented immigrants. >When we use innocence to select the proper subjects of empathetic identification on which to base our politics, we simultaneously regulate the ability for people to respond to other forms of violence, such as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is inevitably used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity of a woman’s claim. >“Promiscuous” women, sex workers, women of color, women experiencing homelessness, and addicts are not seen as legitimate victims of rape — their moral character is always called into question (they are always-already _asking for it_). >Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus are unable to access the sexual purity at the core of white femininity. >But we should be careful when noting the widespread neglect of the most vulnerable populations by police, the legal system, and social institutions — to assume that the primary problem is “neglect” implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role is to protect us, and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order, protect white people, and defend private property. If these intuitions are violent themselves, then expanding their jurisdiction will not help us, especially while racism and patriarchy endures. The use of "innocence" as a basis for victimhood inherently creates a hierarchy of who deserves protection and who does not, prioritizing sanctified white femininity. >Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we challenge sexual violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap for ourselves by feeding into the assumption that white cis women’s bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated because only white femininity is sanctified. ## § Against Innocence >[!summary] Reject the politics of innocence and embrace more nuanced resistance >The politics of innocence forecloses other forms of resistance, particularly those that are destructive, ignores racial and gender power dynamics, aligns us with the State, and requires the acceptance of passive social death for Black people. Trayvon Martin, and CeCe McDonald and Akira Jackson, two Black trans women, all rightly resisted targeted attacks on themselves and paid the price with their life, in the case of Trayvon Martin, or carceral punishment. >The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the State as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. >The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and — in cases like Baltimore — anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. >The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. While it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then he could have defended himself by fighting back. >It is ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is already dead — no amount of prison time for Zimmerman can compensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point. >It’s not surprising that the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was recently convicted of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCe’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter. >Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized Black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the status of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). >Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective — it is a lived position.