So, let's hope I can deliver, huh, that was a fantastic introduction. A couple of acknowledgments
I have to do, not simply out of obligation,
but just out of thankfulness. And so first I just want to say thank you to the philosophy department.
More generally, for those of you all who had a chance to sit with me last night. You know
I'm incredibly long-winded and had a great time
engaging with some of the projects that I got a chance to see and the philosophy department has not simply been welcoming in
terms of logistics, but also intellectually. And with that in mind. I also want to thank the Danieley residents.
Is that how you say it? Resident's neighborhood?
For graciously supporting that wonderful dinner we just had. I think it was delicious and fantastic.
So that was great as well. And lastly. I want us to give it up for Ryan.
Ryan has done a fantastic job of sort of like making sure that the trains run on time.
Because I'm a notoriously absent-minded person and and Ryan has done a great job of making sure that this thing get coordinated.
So if you all give it up for Ryan one more time.
With that in mind we're gonna go ahead and get into. This forgive me. I had initially had the
essay, the lecture printed out, but I ended up leaving it in my excitement to get over here back at the office.
So we're going to go ahead and get this in. The title of my lecture is "On Not Standing a Chance" and I'll leave it
right there.
The subtitle was something akin to "questions about objects"
But I began thinking about this and I wanted to expand it a little bit to think about bodies
more specifically. And we'll understand why in just one second.
And so there's an epigraph here. Here are the fragments put together by another me.
This is what Frantz Fanon tells us in "Black Skin White Masks." Here are the fragments
put together by another me.
So in that regard, let's begin.
Some time to go Frantz Fanon wrote these words as well:
"I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things and here I am an
object among other objects.
I'm not given a second chance. I'm over determined from the outside.
I am a slave not to the idea of there's half of me and we talked a bit about this earlier today.
But I'm a slave to my appearance.
Some time ago.
Jesus, I can't remember when he wrote these words.
I know it was in 1952 sometime, but the depth of his words, the reality that a black person
cannot help but be quote "an object among other objects" has had such a lasting impact on me that I really can't remember
when they were written.
You see memory is a rough terrain when you're black.
The safety of Husserl's "internal time consciousness," which essentially means that according to Husserl
internally our minds have a sense of time. That the world may or may not
corroborate. And so for him,
that your past in your mind is something that you can hold on to. It's a stream within which you find yourself.
But for black people they don't have this kind of... they don't have the luxury of this kind of internal time consciousness.
Objects can't remember or let alone have a memory. There is no stream of thoughts, no possibility for cognition.
Having been made part of the objective sphere. I can't think.
No, really. I can't think. The very possibility of philosophy, of thought, is denied to me. I'll give you a brief example.
I was in grad school taking a class in
Phenomenology. It's a fancy, and Ryan's told this story before, it's a fancy continental
philosophical paradigm. And I wrote a paper that eventually another person, a
brilliant guy by the name Calvin Warren, actually knew how to do way better than I did,
I was a grad student, but I wrote a paper
comparing the slavery to this notion of equipment in Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time." If you know who Martin Heidegger is, he's a huge
philosopher from Germany. And
my philosophy professor looks at my paper and puts at the end of the comments: "This is not philosophy,
this is sociology." And my grade was lowered only "A-" I got in grad school.
Only "A-" I got in grad school. But so, so in other words,
I can't think, according to properly professional philosophers, to think with blackness, to think with the slave is
tantamount to not thinking at all.
But there's another level in which I'm denied the possibility of thinking and this one is more existential at the level of life and death.
Beyond grades being lowered, beyond being labeled a sociological problem,
I and black people more generally cannot think because we cannot live.
More specifically we cannot live uninterrupted lives.
Thought is not only made possible by life, but by life unmolested.
Unbothered. In Decartes' "Meditations," for example, the meditator and scholars can't agree on who the meditator is.
So I'll say she or he. The meditator can reflect, meditate, sleep, fantasize, desire, and willfully engage. In other words
the meditator can think.
Because she or he is not interrupted by external distractions.
Here's the quote. "I realize that if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences then once in my life
I would have to raise/destroy everything and begin again from the original foundations."
Accordingly I have today suitably freed my mind of all cares.
Secured for myself a period of leisurely tranquility and I am withdrawing into solitude.
Freed of all cares withdrawing into a place of leisurely tranquility,  Decartes' meditator
recognizes that thinking and particularly philosophical thinking requires a life free of
interruptions, the meditator realizes that such tranquility is indeed leisurely.
There's a luxury, an excess, a gift afforded him or her, and subsequently all other properly philosophical thinkers.
Who for all intents and purposes
have overwhelmingly been white and male.
Philosophizing, thinking, is a luxury afforded only to those gifted the time, space and freedom to do so.
I so wish I could have the same luxury.
You see while philosophers out here luxuriously ruminating on whatever tickles their fancy,
I am interrupted, broken, halted, by a life of distractions. By life marked by perpetual disruption and
interruption. My life, if we can call it a life, is marked by fits and stops. By "White Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter" counter-protests.
 
I cannot sleep, smoke a cigarette, walk, run,
barbecue, fix my car, play music, play golf, swim in a pool, play basketball, or even sell water for a trip to Disneyland,
without being interrupted. And the worst part about all of these interruptions,
these halts in my stream of living and breathing is that they're not merely interruptions!
How many y'all know who Barbecue Becky and Permit Patty are raising hands, show of hands?
Anybody know who Barbecue Becky? Barbecue Becky Permit Patty. Both of them were viral on Twitter.
One of them called the cops on a family...
for, eh,
barbecuing in a park.
Permit Patty found a little girl who whose mom had just lost a job and so she was selling water to fundraise a trip for her
to go to Disneyland.
She called the cops on a young girl.
Permit Patty, Barbecue Becky. These interruptions. Walking, sleeping, smoking,
barbecuing, selling water for a trip to Disneyland. All of these interruptions are also potentially lethal ones.
So in other words, calling 9-1-1 is tantamount to attempted murder.
BBQ Becky and Permit Patty so heavily frequent my daily living that an
uninterrupted life, the Cartesian conditions for thinking, is impossible.
Not simply because they halt the stream of leisure. But because they carry within them the very spectre of death. I
cannot think because I cannot live. And maybe the "I can't," see, I can't think, the I can't live, the I can't breathe
is central to black life.
This rule tells us that subjectivity is structured by the "I can"
but it seems to me that black life is structured by not simply the "I cannot" but also what we, black people,
cannot do and I cannot live because I'm always already framed as threatening, as out of place, as angry, rageful, and
Rage-filled, as wicked, and ugly, and violent. And all of these characteristics whether they be real or not
invite unwanted attention and possibly death. I can't breathe,
I can't think because I can't live and I can't live because I'm always and already about to die.
But I want to think, I really do.
Well, I may not be able to philosophize, the desire to think still compels me, motivates me, to want to think even if this thinking
isn't understood as proper thought. So I'm resigned to think about that which is unthought, that which isn't properly philosophical.
I think at the level of contradiction, of broken logics. My cognition,
my thinking, is not and cannot be rational for no one told us that, so I think in the space of the irrational, the paradoxical.
And today I want to think about the paradox of thinking, or at least trying to think, when you're not allowed to think.
Ironically or paradoxically enough in the history of philosophy,
it is that which cannot think, namely the object, that opens up the possibility of thought. In
an earlier draft of this lecture,
I had long block quotes from three philosophers: Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
But I realized I'd probably bore you with my own nerding out. So I decided to forgo the quotes.
Trust me
and maybe you shouldn't, but trust me, all of them said something along the lines of "that the object motivates thinking to occur." And
it seems to me that the object the very thing that by its very nature cannot think makes thought possible. The object calls cognition into
operation. So today for the time that we have left together,
I want to explore what it means to live as an object, to
exist in and as the unthought and unthinkable space of those things that cannot think. I know that's weird.
We will get into it in just a bit. If the phrase "black lives matter" is to be taken seriously,
Then we must think about the possibility of what it means for black life to "be" matter.
To be matter formed into objects.
Into bodies.
Against Descartes, who thought the primary characteristic of the object was extension, and we'll get to that in a second,
I want to suggest that the primary characteristic of being an object is its powerlessness.
In other words the primary characteristic of the object is not standing a chance.
And in order to do this, we must return, and someone can unmute the screen, in order
and in order to do this, we must return to the morning of November 22nd,
2014.
You see on that morning, Tamir Rice didn't stand a chance. Earlier
in the day, he'd gotten permission from his mother Samaria
to go to the park and community center right across the street, from their apartment complex.
Upon making it to the community center, Rice traded his mom's old cell phone.
He had got it from his mother earlier that day. Rice... His mother's old cell phone for one of his friends' pellet gun.
But there's a problem. The orange cap that had clearly defined the gun as a toy had fallen off.
So at a distance, the gun looked real.
Or at least it looked real to somebody sitting in the park. Like barbecue Betty or barbecue Becky, the hashtags change on me.
Someone called 9-1-1 claiming that Rice looked suspicious.
He had a gun, the caller
suggested, but the caller also added that the gun was probably fake. In that, the person with the gun was probably a juvenile, a child.
None of this is known as factored into the dispatchers call. However, uh-oh...
Oh
Oh, oh, we're gonna have a... We're gonna have a fantastic time here if,
if, if, the screen is resisting me, alright, um...
None of this factored into the dispatchers call. However,
putting out a code one call, the dispatcher a claim that there was a suspicious armed subject at the park.
... We're working on them? Okay.
Putting out a code one call, the dispatcher claimed that there was a suspicious armed subject at the park.
Officers Frank Garmback and Timothy Loehmann
received the call and sped up to the scene,
pulled their cruiser right up to where Rice was, and
well, you know the rest. And,
right on time, I get a chance
to show this video.
Trigger warning for those of you who may be triggered by scenes of violence.
I've shown this image, this video in my class before
and I've had many students have to get up and walk out.
Because it plugged in well, there it is just one...
There we go, okay, can you lower the lights too. There's no sound, so don't worry about sound.
Could y'all see what happened. We do one more time...
Give it some time.
This is Tamir.
He's dead right there.
Did y'all see it? We don't have to watch it again. Okay, you can go ahead and...
Two seconds.
Within two seconds he was dead.
You've made it sexy on me now, huh -
All right.
Well.
I'm not sure I show up well in darkness, huh, but...
Okay, I'm sped up - where Rice was and well you saw the video.
Rice never had an opportunity to plead his case. He was already guilty, already presumed to be a threat.
He, like so many others, was dead on arrival. He a 12 year old boy.
Never stood a chance.
What I want to suggest here is that Tamir didn't stand a chance
because the officers who killed him and all and the people who call the cops on black people for, well, living,
Did and do not see people when they see black people.
They see objects quote "overdetermined from the outside" unquote as Fanon told us. Which is to say when people see blackness, they,
when they see black people, they only see properties.
We'll get to that in a second.
I want us to take a couple of looks at a couple of quotes to help illuminate my point. Quote one:
"The male appeared to be over 18 years old and 185 pounds."
Say that one more time: "The male appeared to be over 18 years old and 185 pounds."
Quote - "Tamir rice was a child in a man's body."
Bottom line, there's no denying that.
Nobody can dispute that.
Can you see the connection?
Both claims, one from the man who killed Tamir, and the other from the former head of the Cleveland Police Officers...
Cleveland Police Officers Union, speak to Rice's apparent maturity. Rice appeared to be a man, which is to say he had the physical
properties of a man. So we can't blame the officers for shooting and killing him so quickly. Or,
Jamelle Bouie makes clear, if Rice were an adult or even a teenager,
his shooting would have been more than justified. Jamelle Bouie is being sarcastic here.
He wasn't, but in that moment,
it didn't matter because all the officers saw were the physical characteristics,
the properties, of a man. In other words the problem here is one of perception.
The officers were mistaken in their perception, and because they mistook Rice for man instead of a boy,
they were reasonable in using lethal force because they felt threatened the moment
they encountered him. Tamir Rice then was an unfortunate casualty of the kind of human error anyone might make in similar circumstances.
You can't demand that a person be judicious when a man holding a gun in a park, who is holding a gun in the park,
misperceiving the boy for man, or man for boy... I never get that order correct.
It's just part of the process when you're under so much stress. In this regard, Rice's death was an unfortunate mistake,
but a mistake nonetheless.
His death was a one-off, limited to the specifics of his particular circumstances.
The problem then is not a widespread one.
It isn't that Tamir didn't stand a chance. But instead a problem of misperception, of mistaken identity.
That was caused by poor actions on the part of the police officers.
In other words, it's not that Rice didn't stand the chance.
He would have stood a chance if the officers had been trained, or had used their training
better, or at least this is what
police analyst Jeffrey Noble tells us.
They were reckless, Noble tells us, and while this recklessness occasionally through encounter, we'd be wrong to suggest
that this is nothing more, nothing less, than a mistake.
But would we really?
Is it really a one-off? In a recent study, a group of social psychologists
invited 116 police officers to look at pictures of black and white children and then guess the age and criminality of each child.
The results are, to say the least, disturbing. Black children were deemed older and more criminal than their white counterparts
consistently, and add an age at about a 3 to 4 age gap.
So a 12 year old white boy would be understood to be 12.
12 year old black boy would be understood to be 16, 17, 18. And they also, all these officers,
understood these black kids to be more guilty as well.
I
want to be clear here though. This study wasn't conducted in heightened or tense situations.
This is not a situation where we're thinking about life and death.
The officers were not responding to code one calls when they did this study, and nevertheless,
they still thought black kids were getting older and guiltier. In other words,
Rice's case wasn't a one-off. His death was not simply the result of fear induced irrational reaction.
Rice may have been killed because he was misperceived as a threatening, fully adult man who needed to be stopped,
but this misperception is not a mistake. In
the West, in the United States more specifically, this misperception is part of the structure of reality.
It is quite simply the way things are. It is what it is, and the way things should be.
Rice didn't stand a chance because
blackness doesn't stand a chance. Because
black children are perceived as guilty on arrival and black adults are deemed violent and threatening before they speak before they even get a chance
to plead their case.
And I want to underscore something here. We cannot solve this problem with better training.
This is something that I tell my students all the time.
We cannot solve this problem with better training, with more useless body cameras, or sustained criminal justice
reform. In fact what I want to suggest here, is that, at a philosophical level, this problem in need of
solving is not a problem at all.
Tamir Rice didn't stand a chance,
I don't stand a chance, and black people in general don't stand a chance, because we are for all intents and purposes
objects. And more specifically, black people are Cartesian objects by which I mean to say black people are nothing more than mere
bodies. So I'm going to go through this really quickly or try to get through this relatively quickly.
Despite the continual attacks against Decartes' thoughts so we're gonna turn to Descartes' Meditations. For those of you all who are familiar with
this it's going to be a bit of a rehearsal. For those of you all who are not familiar with this,
hopefully this is something that you all can learn from.
Despite the continual attacks against social rules thought, I mean, against Decartes' thought, I want to suggest that his thinking still pervades
contemporary life. And Descartes may not be more famous or infamous for
what philosophers now call his "dualism." The split between the mind and the body as distinct substance.
And so we'll start
with the mind now. I do want to shout out Ryan again.
He's put me on to this other text that Descartes wrote, that I read and missed the line in. Decartes revises this idea of
dualism in a second text. But in the Meditations, he keeps mind and body separate.
And so we'll start with mine. Each substance, mind and body, has a primary characteristic and a primary function. And we'll begin with mind.
Mind has the primary characteristic of activity.
I want you all to follow this.
Mind has the primary characteristic of activity.
Descartes meditator tells us that she or he is a thing that thinks which is a thing that doubts,
understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and also that which imagines and senses. All of these things are actions, and
irrespective of their various functions, they are activities that entail life and living. But these actions are not mere actions,
what the mind also does is use these actions in connection with each other to determine, or
constitute, the meaning of something.
What are you all sitting in right now? We'll do a brief thought experiment.
I will be creepy and wait.
What are you all sitting in right now?
Thank you.
Appreciate you. We're sitting in chairs. And
according to Descartes, we know what a chair is because we can perceive the chair as a chair.
The chair is a chair because we perceive it as a chair.
We're gonna come back to this because this is of utmost importance. So right, and we're going to come back to chairs as well.
These actions aren't mere actions. They are essentially constituting activities.
We think of chairs, we think of these things that we sit in as chairs. And so we constitute these chairs as chairs.
And
the third thing I want to add here in terms of the active mind, is that we determine or constitute the meaning of things in
favor of truth. This is what Descartes tells us.
So the mind is active, it determines the meaning of something, and it determines the meaning of something in favor of truth.
We'll go ahead and move
through this. If the active mind determines the meaning of ends in the service of clear and distinct truths, then
what is the body's primary
characteristic? According to Decartes meditator, the body's primary characteristic is
extension, or what we might understand is having presence in time in space.
Cartesian extension is unique because extension is given, in other words, the chairs are given to us,
through the particular properties of that specific body or object.
For Descartes, we might say there are at least three kinds of properties. So the object is defined by extension, and
extension comes to us through properties.
Through properties, extension, comes through us through properties. And there are at least three kinds of properties in Cartesian thought or at least in the
Meditations. The first one is sense properties. The second one is mathematical properties. And the third one are mechanical properties.
And what I want to show is that black people have not been seen as people, but instead been seen as these kinds of properties.
Senses,
Mathematics, and Mechanics. So we'll begin with sense properties.
Decartes' meditator tells us in the second meditation that the body is all that is capable of being perceived by the senses.
The body then comes first to us through the senses. In other words,
we know bodies are extended because we can see, smell, touch, taste, and hear them. And to give you some sense of this, I want
us to return to the 17th century.
There is a physician by the name of Marcel... Marcello Malpighi.
Who blistered the skin of a black man in an attempt to find out the source of black skin.
We all know what the source of skin color is, right?
Someone tell me.
Yeah, there we go now. Y'all now y'all talking to this*inaudible* now y'all talking to this *inaudible* boy, I appreciate it.
Melanin is the source of
skin color. In order for to find this out,
however, this scientist had to blister the skin of a black person and cut it off of him, in
order to find this layer. And they were doing this because of a scientific
contest that happened during the 1600s that wanted to find out what made black people "black." And
while old boy got close, there were other theories that came out of that as well. One theory was that
black people had blacker brains.
So if you cut the skull open, you cut my skull, open... Don't try it.
If you cut my skull open, you would see a black brain.
Someone else said that they theorized that black men had black sperm.
So I'm not even going to go into details, you can imagine what they're trying to get at.
Both of these theories are incorrect.
My point here is, is that they were asking the question of what makes black people black, because they sensed blackness.
They saw blackness, in these black bodies.
But it doesn't end with sight. I want to tell you two stories. A Mark Smith is a sense historian. He was at here
He was at a dinner party one day.
And so he's at this dinner party, Mark Smith is a white guy and so he's at this party with a whole
bunch of white people and sometimes white people get froggy when ain't nobody
listening. And so one of the things, one of the people at at the party comes up to him ,and tells him this story.
My grandmother years ago, probably in the 1920s, left a house, left a house on some errands. She returned,
walked in, and discovered her house had been broken into.
He paused, because you know southerners know how to tell a good story.
Know what she said?
I smell nigger.
I want I want us to think about that. "I smell nigger."
A story too - there's another story that I want to point us - how many I listen to Serial podcast?
Y'all got to get into it. It's
fantastic.
Okay, we, this is not the time. Anyway, so we're on the third...
We're on the third season right now in this most recent episode. Um, there's a guy named Eremius Spencer. Sarah
Koenig who's the host of Serial, is, is
looking at this young man named Eremius Spencer who was trying to get a cigarette from one of his boys in his apartment
complex. His boy wasn't home. But he was, he was, so he was knocking on the door. Two cops
saw him. Long in the short, they found marijuana on him, and
they beat the living daylights out of him and arrested him for resisting arrest.
When the case went to trial, one of the officers made an interesting claim.
"I walked past him, and as I approached him I smelled the odor of marijuana, it got stronger. It was clearly coming from him."
Now this claim about smelling of marijuana is not only crucial to justifying while the officers beat the living daylights out of this boy
and eventually arrested him.
It's also a specious claim. Sarah Keonig went to the same building and said "yo it was thick in there."
It was "loud," for those of us who know what "loud" means y'all know what loud means right? It was loud, right? It was loud.
So she walks in the building, knows it's loud and wonders. How can an officer
walk by one person in a building that's loud and smell the weed on him?
She says it's impossible. And, and she's not alone in this, Eremius Spencer's
defense attorney says "so y'all must be some bloodhounds then." And,
and then of course objections happen.The claim about smelling marijuana is
not only crucial to doing this kind of stuff. It again,
it goes back to the to the building being loud, in all of these cases though were confronted with the possibility
maybe not the factuality,
that both the grandmother and the officer were perceiving objects, bodies, properties, and
not people. Again we're talking about sense perception.
Scientists saw black skin, so they tried to find the source of it. A grandmother smells nigger,
so she knows who broke into her house. And a cop smells weed, so he knows who the person is who's carrying it. I
want us to move on, because in the Meditations, this however could be not enough.
Descartes tells us that since perceptions can be faulty...
So in other words, you can misperceive things according to the senses, but where a sensation
is faulty
mathematics is not. In the Fifth Meditation, the meditator connects
extension to the thing quantified in length, breadth, and depth. And in the Sixth
Meditation, the meditator makes the following claim: "A body by its very nature is always divisible.
There is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of that I may not, in any way, any thought,
easily divide into parts."
Decartes elaborates on this mathematical approach in the principles of philosophy
when he tells us that the nature of matter or body does not consist in its being hard or colored, but simply in its being
a substance extended in length,
breadth, and
depth.
Length, breadth, and depth are not sense properties. They are not smells, sights, feelings. They are geometric properties,
mathematical ones. By framing the body in terms of these geometric properties,
Decartes has mathematized the body. And Decartes doesn't only do this in terms of geometry.
Recall that he also talks about division. A body can be divided, and if it can be divided it can also be quantified,
which means the body can be counted, added, multiplied.
So we have geometric extension, and
mathematical combinations.
Quantify ability and measure ability.
And I want, and I want us to think about these dimensions, in relation to slavery
There remains a debate about whether or not Descartes himself was an advocate of slavery.
But it is undeniable that his metaphysical framework was put to use during the Middle Passage.
This is most seen during the slave trade itself. As literary theorist Hortense Spillers points out, slavery was so heavily organized around
mathematics. That gender fell away as a form of difference. In the bellies of slave ships,
and I wish I had the image up, there was no distinction between male and female bodies.
Because you're trying to pack as many bodies into the belly of a ship as possible.
Females, female slaves and ships were no different from their male counterparts except that they were smaller physical masses.
What mattered was the length, breadth, and depth of each slave. The smaller one  was the more cargo you could pack in.
But then slavery took this mathematization even further. Cargo must be measured and measurable, but it must also be valued.
Which is to say, these are arithmetic and geometric properties carry within them
monetary value.
Stephanie Smallwood tells us that by the time West Africans were perceived as slaves, their lives were no longer beyond price.
And so, and if you don't believe me, I want you to listen to the following quote:
"I wish to get an insurance effected on a Negro man for seven years renewable if I choose. I refused him last week for
$1,200 because if he lives and he is good property and or would rather pay me twelve or fifteen percent at that valuation
which will well justify me in buying some insurance. I hope to insure him at
$1,500
Will you insure him at that valuation?
If Negro should decline in value,
would it make a difference hereafter in the sum at which he is insured?"
Before life insurance was actually life insurance, the idea of placing a monetary value on life was enacted upon slaves.
Sharon Ann Murphy, the historian who found this quote, tells us that Southern whites were much less likely to seek insurance on their own
lives, because their lives were beyond value.
The slave's life was not beyond price, but white life was beyond value. You can't value
white life, it is beyond that
system.
If sense perception made it possible for people to perceive black bodies as mere objects,
it's just bodies with sense properties, then the mathematical-turn-monetary properties that make black people true objects, true bodies.
They make black people true
objects, true bodies, and nothing more. And as I will show in this next section, the third section the sensory and mathematical schema has
devastating effects on enslaved black people.
Next section. Fixing machines. In
the Sixth Meditation, Descartes claims, or Desartes meditator claims,
"I might regard a body as a kind of mechanism that is outfitted with and
composed of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood, and skin in such a way that even if no mind existed in it, the
body, the man's body would still exhibit all the same motion that are in it now.
Except for those motions that proceed from the mind."
What Descartes means by this, and he elaborates on this in the *inaudible* is that the body is purely mechanical.
Which is to say purely reflexive.
Like a watch without a battery, the body relies heavily on circumstantial forces to keep it functioning. And
just like a watch that doesn't work, a sick body requires a dissection of its parts, a
conceptual mapping, that allows that helps to determine how it functions and how it should function.
We call this mapping nowadays "anatomy" you have, y'all taking an anatomy or physiology...
Yeah, you all know what I'm talking about.
You turn them you turn the body into a machine.
To map it out, to make sure that you think about it in terms of functioning. Well the source of this
historically emerges from slavery.
Or at least this is what my research's
pointing me towards. And so instead of, instead of thinking about this in terms of mere anatomy and physiology,
I want to think about black bodies as machines. And so I'm going to focus on two things here. One:
black broken machines need fixing. Sick bodies need surgery. And
broken machines cannot feel, or at least they feel less.
Sick slaves then were not conceived of as merely sick. But instead,
understood as broken tools in needs of fixing. Fixing came in the form of surgery, and black women were
particularly susceptible to this kind of mechanical determination. J .Marion Sims,
for example,
the father of modern for gynecology, would put out ads for broken slaves. If you ever have
heard about this, J.
Marion Sims would put an ad out in the newspaper and say "If you have a slave who was sick
send them to me and I will fix them."
And one of these women was Anarcha. An
enslaved black woman who suffered from a, from a vesicle vaginal fistula. As a result of childbirth, her torn vagina began
eroding, quote "and she was left with openings between the remains of her vagina and bladder and rectum."
Sims took on the task of trying to fix this broken slave. A
narcissist in his own right he operated on her 30 times
to fix this without anesthesia.
I'll say that again, 30 times.
Without
anesthesia.
And if that's not enough, there's a, there was a slave named Sam who eventually we found out had jaw cancer.
Sam didn't want to go through this particular procedure. So Sims ties him down to a barber chair, barber's chair and proceeds yet again
to remove his entire jaw.
Without
anesthesia.
Without
anesthesia.
What's worse about all this? Is that these
surgeries may not have took. It was difficult to remove cancer without the help of x-rays at the time. No worry for Sims,
however,
upon finishing the surgery Sims wrote "The surgery proved its practicality whether the patient was willing or not."
In both cases we are confronted with the mechanical fixing of black bodies as machines.
The mechanization of black bodies was so deeply connected to their mathematic and sense properties.
Slaves were slaves because they were black, which is to say they were perceived as black, and they were mathematically accounted for as monetary properties.
Mechanically fixing them was a matter of profit margins, then.
Referring to Sam, Harry Washington put it this way. "Sam was enslaved,
so the decision to undergo the surgery was not up to him but to his owner.
Who was eager to return his slave to profitable labor."
Broken machines aren't productive which means they need fixing. And more than this ,machines
can't feel. Even if anesthesia was not useful or was not it hadn't, hadn't quite been
systematized in in the 18th and 19th centuries. This does not give us an excuse for why in contemporary times
doctors continually give black women less anesthesia.
I want to say that again, multiple studies have come out and black women are consistently understand, understood as having higher pain
thresholds, and are therefore delivered lower anesthesia during pregnancies, during surgeries and during operations.
This is why we don't move away from some of these historical materials.
Decartes work is still doing work on us now.
The legacy of the black body as machine is still with us.
So what does all of this mean? And more specifically what does it have to do with Tamir Rice?
For this, I want to return to Officer Loehmann's statement the one who killed him. If you recall,
Loehmann was the one who killed Rice, and here are his words:
"The description was of a black male
camouflage hat, gray jacket, and black sleeves at or near the swingset.
The male appear to be over 18 years old and about 185 pounds."
I also want us to hear from Steve Loomis, the guy who claimed that Tamir was a boy in a man's body.
He claims that rice was 5'7",
191 pounds. What we're dealing with here, is an object.
We're dealing with the description of a body situated in time in space on all levels. 
Sensory,
mathematical, and
mechanical. At a sense level, Lohmann eyeballs the age and physical size of
Tamir Rice. At a
mathematical level, Loehmann gives us the autopsy, the dimensions the geometric properties, of his body.
5'7", 185 pounds.
But if you think mechanical properties aren't present, consider yet again what Sims said.
"Surgeries proved their practicality whether the patient was willing or not."
With regard to Tamir. I want us to hear from Timothy McGinty.
The prosecutor who essentially was arguing to get these officers indicted, but they did not get indicted.
It is likely that Tamir, whose size made him look much older and who had been warned by his mother
that his pellet gun would get him in trouble one day,
either intended to hand it over to the officers or show them that it wasn't a real gun.
But there was no way for the officers to know that because they saw the events rapidly unfolding
in front of them from a very different perspective.
In other words, Tamir's intentions, like *inaudible* willingness is
immaterial to the events that day.
Tamir's intentions are relevant to the guilt or innocence of the officers. All that mattered,
all that matters is the officer's perceptions.
If you remember I said earlier that the active mind determines or constitutes the meaning of objects in favor of truth.
For the sake of that time
I can't discuss all of the complexities of truth in the Meditations.
What I want to point out here is that it is the mind that has the capacity for truth,
not objects.
Although objects might have true and immutable natures they themselves do not get to determine or understand what truth is.
Rice was killed, he was killed because he looked like a man, and he and it looked like he had a real gun, and
even though he wasn't a man, and even though he had a toy,
none of this matters.
Because his true and immutable nature had already been determined.
Over, over-determined, we might say, from the outside.
What this means then, and this is my central point, is that the primary characteristic of the Cartesian object is not extension.
It's not being spread out in time and space. It's not being measured. It's not being mechanically reproduced or mechanically functional or dysfunctional.
The primary characteristic of the object is powerlessness.
I'll say that again, the primary characteristic of the object is powerlessness.
Tamir Rice's intentions are irrelevant because he was 5'7" and 191 pounds.
That's all that mattered. And he had no power, no say, in pushing against that. As
Hortense Spillers tells us, as a category of otherness, the body embodies
sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general powerlessness.
Because the body can only give itself, that is, that is it can only be understood through the senses through math or through its
functions, the body is defined not by its
extension, but by its total subordination to the active determining and constant constituting mind.
In fact, the body can't move by itself. Let Descartes tell it, the body has to be moved by something external.
I have a quote here, but we're going to move quickly.
And if my analyses are correct here, then black people having become slaves, having been made into
machines, and having been discerned by sight and smell amongst other
senses, are also
objects. Which is to say they too like Tamir Rice did not and do not
stand a chance. If powerlessness is the primary extension, primary characteristic of the object, and
if the object, and if Tamir Rice is an object,
then what I've tried to show them to this point is that that's not limited to him.
And that all black people are subjected to this powerlessness.
As an aside, one of the reasons why black people cannot stand a chance is because of God. I'm a philosopher of religion
so I couldn't, I couldn't help it. Sorry. I cannot say much here as we're running short on time,
but what I want to underscore is that one of the reasons that the mind can determine the meaning of objects, is
because the mind mirrors, albeit in a much less perfect fashion.
God then gives the mind the possibility of discerning truth, and in Tamir Rice's cases.
you all saw,  if some of you all saw in the paper that I, um,
that you read, the state operated in this, in this manner as God.
Even if the officers misperceived Rice as a man with the weapon, their non-indictment speaks to a vindication
that their perceptions were valid. That is,
if only for a moment, their perceptions were true. And true enough to get them off. As
another aside, I also want to say that this is why white officers and white people more generally can call the cops
on people and perceive culpability where it's not. If you follow Permit Patty and Barbecue Becky
you know that, what happened? The cops actually did show up to the phone call.
That in and of itself is
vindication.
No charges were filed against  Permit Patty or Barbecue Becky.
Because their perception at the time was good enough.
Having already been deemed criminal and inescapably so, neither in life nor in death do black people stand a chance.
Zimmerman was acquitted.
Loehmann and Garmbeck weren't indicted.
Darren Wilson who killed Mike Brown wasn't indicted. And neither was Daniel Pantaleo who choked Eric Garner to death on camera.
They were all acquitted or vindicated because the objects that they killed weren't really alive in the first place
And the objects they killed couldn't be alive because they couldn't speak, because they couldn't think or plead a case for themselves.
It doesn't matter that Loehmann shot first and ask questions later.
Well, actually it does and I'll conclude here with why.
I began earlier by talking about me not being able to think. I can't think because I can't live and I cannot live because I'm an
object. Objects are powerless. They do not stand a chance, but there's something about the object that makes it unique. They make ideas,
thoughts,
possible. I would have given you all those block quotes at the beginning, but I'll give you this one from Descartes:
"Ideas can only be of things.
Even if one is mistaken in perception,
even if one's thoughts are proven to be false, the fact nevertheless remains ideas, thought, and reason
erupt because of their encounter with things, with objects.
This is why Loehmann had to produce a statement after he killed Tamir. As philosopher Emmanuel Levinas tells us, encountering
the other is not merely an encounter. You have to give a reason why you kill somebody, if you kill them. And
for Levinas, this is the beginning of reason of thought of thinking.
Encountering the other, encountering the object, encountering
the thing gives rise to thinking, to reason, and this reason becomes subject to verification, to truthfulness or falsity. In
this regard objects matter. And
they matter in fact because they are matter.
Let us return to the chairs really quickly.
You all are only able to sit in those chairs
because their density resists your weight.
I'll say that again. You're only able to sit in those chairs because they hold you up, which is to say that they resist you.
They keep gravity... They suspend gravity long enough to keep you held up.
Chairs by their very nature
resist.
And in and if these chairs, actually
let me move down here...
We don't think of chairs... This is what I wanted to say,
We don't think of chairs as mattering, as having significance.
Y'all had, y'all didn't think about sitting in these chairs. Before I told y'all about sitting in the chairs.
Y'all just sat down. Copped a squat. Where do I find my friends at right, right?
They don't matter to you, but because they don't matter, they matter like absolutely.
They hold the possibility of significance. Even,
and especially if significance is misplaced or denied. You can deny that chairs matter and they're still gonna hold you up.
Even if I cannot think, even if I'm denied access to reason's party,
I am nevertheless the very thing that makes thinking possible. And
this isn't merely the case for black people,
we can see this occurring right now with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
If you'll recall, the Republican senators have consistently claimed that there was no corroborating evidence
For Dr. Christine Blasi Ford's claim.
They have to do this because,
for all intents and purposes, they have treated her like an object.
They have silenced her, reduced her, to her physical properties. Someone called her attractive in the middle of the hearings.
To her mathematical properties, what did you see?
To our mechanical properties and I don't want to go into that...
What that means.
They've already reduced her to these particular things, and the president has has mocked her at a
rally just last night, and they're able to do this because they've given a reason for it. There is no corroborating evidence.
I'm neither here to verify nor falsify
either one of their claims, although if you push me, and you don't have to push me hard, I believe, Dr. Ford.
But the...
Verification here, or the
verification of falsity of these, of this, doesn't matter, because they've already produced a reason for why Brett Kavanaugh is going to be pushed through. in
In other words, Dr. Ford's testimony and Dr. Ford herself.
Did not stand a chance.
Her life has been ruined behind this.
We are told that, that objectification is a space of total subjection, and I agree.
Philosophically, or at least according to Decartes' meditator, the object, the body is subjected to the activities of a determining  and
constituting mind. In the face of the mind, the object doesn't stand a chance, but
total subjection is not the end of the story. If
objects are immutable, if they cannot change, then as I've said before,
objects resist.
It is, is precisely in not standing a chance that the possibility of resistance, of pushback, of dare I say it, justice
emerges. Because even if they, even if we, are mere matter.
Objects. Bodies. They matter. They matter to those who would try to make them not matter. If my
analyses above are correct,
then black people as
objects, black lives as objects, matter.
Even if the world refuses to acknowledge that they do.
You cannot give a shit about the chairs that you sit in and they're still going to constitute your very being.
Black lives matter, and if this is the case, if it is the case that black lives matter,
even when the world denies it, then the movement black lives matter is not simply making an aspirational claim.
Not simply telling us
that black lives should matter.
They are already describing the powerful force of blackness in this world as it is. And
in this regard it is up to the rest of the world to catch up to what black people already know.
Or at least I think
this is the case. Thank you.
