Laundering Black Rage

Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits examines the dilution and commodification of Black Rage―conceived as a constructive response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings―in a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State. Interweaving academic criticism with journalistic essays, it presents a thoughtful challenge to popular narratives surrounding recent US events such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the death of George Floyd and other police killings, and cases of White vigilantism, arguing that the maintenance of capitalism increasingly requires the manufactured consent of the conquered. Essayist/performer Too Black and geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital, which must therefore be conquered by laundering, defined as a process • Incubation via the State, which places rage in circulation by setting both the oppressive conditions for its expression and seeding contradictions for it to be cleaned. • Labour, which sets mass uprisings in motion, layers the narcissistic rage of the Black elite over the illegal, militant rage of the masses to conceal class interests and collapse labour into capital. • Commodification, in which the now-laundered Black Rage is integrated within the State, ready to be withdrawn as a labour-crushed commodity to be bought, sold, or repressed by White capital. Entwining histories of Black resistance throughout the diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and activists engaged at the intersection of critiquing capitalism and combating systemic racism.