Queer politics and anti-blackness

Chapter 9 from Queer Necropolitics. Countering the popular fantasy that the 13th amendment marked the end of slavery’s reign, Sexton, along with Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, and others, have articulated what Hartman calls ‘the continuities of slavery and freedom’ (Hartman 1997: 13) – the ways in which the legal, social, political and emotional structures of slavery have been re-inscribed throughout an allegedly post-slavery society (and its global neoliberal dominion), highlighting how anti-blackness constitutes the condition of possibility for the United States itself. Within this predicament, Sexton argues, social movements of non-black people invariably are compromised by seeking redress from a political system hell-bent and built on the destruction of black life.