Supreme White Sight: Statutes and Slavery
White sight is supported by infrastructures that include the state and the statue—backed up by statute. The Supreme Court’s reassertion of antiblackness as a guiding principle of the US Constitution re-articulates white sight as a state-supported settler-colonial technology.
If the Court’s ruling on affirmative action reads like the so-called Columbia (University) school’s racist caricature of Black Reconstruction—made central to 20th century white sight in D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation (2018)—its origins are in so-called “slave codes,” meaning the laws by which plantation slavery was regulated.
The State
In 1651, Thomas Hobbes imagined his Leviathan as giant white men, containing a range of white men, women and children. Leviathan manifested what Hobbes called “visible power,” the power to order and thereby govern by seeing what there is to see and being seen to do so.
Hobbes visualized this sovereignty in the British colonies. His state-as-a-machine was embodied by Barbados’s 1661 “Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes.” This Act held that Africans required “punishionary” ordering and governing, especially in preventing and apprehending fugitives. A punishing person was “white,” while a fugitive was “negro.”
Such was already daily life in what contemporaries called the “plantation machine.” On his 1657 map of Barbados, British colonist Richard Ligon drew fugitive Africans being shot by a white man using his superior vantage point from a horse. White sight sees from above. Such shooting has not ceased in the former British colonies of North America.
What required such punishment? You can see smaller plantations identified by name (above). In the middle of the map, Ligon simply wrote: “the ten thousand acres of land which belong to the Merchants of London.” Abstraction, extraction, financialization, violence. Racial capitalism in action.
This punishment-order reduced the Atlantic world complexity of Barbados—where in 1652 there had been English, French, Dutch, Scots, Irish, Jewish, Indigenous and African people—to a binary of white or not-white.
Statute
As the resistance of the enslaved and Indigenous continued, that divide became law. As media scholar Simone Browne has described, the 1712 uprising of the enslaved in New York led to detailed legal regulations as to how any “Negro or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets” (my emphasis). The presumption of appearance shaped white reality.
After the Stono Uprising of enslaved Africans in 1739, South Carolina passed another law requiring any enslaved person away from their “house or plantation” to be accompanied by “some whiter person.” Whiteness is always a comparative way of seeing. The law further required any enslaved person to undergo “the examination of any white person”—white sight— and if they did not:
it shall be lawful for any such white person to pursue, apprehend, and moderately correct such slave; and if any such slave shall assault and stricke [sic] such white person, such slave may be lawfully killed.
Here is white sight’s own right to strike. Law, technology and surveillance combined to keep the plantation machine running. One of its products was racializing, centered on the formation of whiteness. The Anglo-American Atlantic world is still living in that “plantation future,” as Katherine McKittrick calls it.
White Out
What the Supreme Court did yesterday was a specific assault—the “strike”— on Black reconstruction, which, in its radical heyday (1867-1875), offered a different future. One based around civil rights, a living wage and care. South Carolina created free public schools, including dedicated facilities for the disabled.
By using the 14th Amendment (1868), designed to end slavery, as the alleged justification with which to justify overturning mechanisms of redress, the Supreme Court sent a signal rejecting all post-bellum reform. Just as the 1857 Dred Scott decision relied on British colonial law to deny Africans any rights as humans, the Court deployed the very amendment designed to repair the wrongs of slavery to assert an end to antiracism.
Not so fast. As this rapid survey shows, from New York in 1712 to Stono and South Carolina—just to stop in 1868— there’s a “historic tradition” (to use the Supreme Court’s little phrase) offering an alternative to this reaction masquerading as reform. It is a systemic, systematic unbuilding of white sight and its infrastructures from statue to statute and the state. And the word for that is revolution.