Professor Brackette Williams
School of Anthropology, University of Arizona
Black at the Bone:
Race as a Semaphore Language for Assessing the Moral Order
May 2019
Guinier and Torres (2002) treated the miner’s canary as a metaphor for political race and, earlier, Copeland (1939) had investigated Negro as a moral contrast conception. Building on these insights, I argue that within the Atlantic World and its circuits of influence, race-as-blackness-descended-from-slavery-indentureship-conquest is a syncategorematic in semaphore language by which the social order’s morality is assessed. The signs, signals, symbols, and metaphors of this language shape practices that legitimate a mode of production that converts suffering and degradations and its conditions of existence into capital.
As the exemplar for worst conditions under which individual character-building occurs, the slavery and colonialism mode of production creates the units of morality central to the conversion of degraded labor into demerit. By individual fortitude, demerit becomes merit and the individual’s contribution to identity group moral capital. Degradation by slavery, indentureship, and conquest produces the core symbol—made morally black at the bone—which is made meaningful only when contrasted with other beings spawned by the bottom of the well.
Brackette F. Williams’ work focuses on classification, cognition, identity, and morality. Initially, her research and publications addressed these issues in the Caribbean region. There she conducted research on the colonial labor market production of ethnic entitlement, and the impact of these on relations between identity formation and contesting nationalist ideological precepts in Guyanese post-independence state formation. This research culminated in Stains on My Name War in my Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Duke 1991); “Classification Systems Revisited: Kinship, Caste, Race, and Nationality as the Flow of Blood and the Spread of Rights” (1995), and the edited volume, Women Out of Place: The Gender of Agency and the Race of Nationality (Routledge 1996).
Awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1997-2002), she expanded her research to include influences of criminal justice processes on categoric identity formation, classification practices, and the socio-moral production and management stigma, disdain, and resentment. With special attention to the co-formation of the race and class concepts in political ideologies and identity politics, Williams explored these issues in a five-year field investigation of law, social justice and death-penalty abolition activism, and morality in the United States. One intended book manuscript became two, tentatively titled: Classifying to Kill Killers: An Ethnography of the Post-Furman Death Penalty Schemes in the United States, and Owning up and Laughing Off: Executing Justice the American Way.