PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 7, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004

SPECIAL SECTION

Plantations, ghettos, prisons: US racialgeographies

EDUARDO MENDIETADepartment of Philosophy, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Stony Brook, NY, USA

Abstract In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucaults workshould be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucaultsarcheology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical,and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly relatedto racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions andideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history andspatiality in terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographiesof topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus onplantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces-institutions-geographies that consolidated theracial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the USracial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo-history in terms of racializing spatialities.

Introduction

This article is about race, space, and genocide. It is thus about the practices ofracialization that are enacted through the production and control of social space for thesake of making both possible and necessary the right to kill some for the sake of theputative health of the social body. It is thus about the normalization and routinizationof genocide. The essay, seen from a different angle, is about how to read MichelFoucault with American eyes; that is to say, how to read and make fruitful a theorythat has traveled quite far, and across time, which nevertheless speaks powerfully to ourcontemporary United States context. The United States has become what LoicWacquant1 has called the first world historical carceral society. It is a society that hastransformed slavery and legalized discrimination into the practices of gerrymanderingand gentrifying African-Americans in ghettos. These ghettos, in turn, have beenfunctionally and structurally assimilated into the prison-industry complex. This complexhas become what Foucault called the carceral archipelago.2 In the first part of theessay, I present a reading of Michel Foucaults work that links, originally and produc-tively, his insights into spatiality with his genealogy of racism. In the second, I turn, withFoucauldian tools, to an analysis of the racial geographies of the United States that

ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/04/010043-17 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1090377042000196010

44 E. MENDIETA

focuses on four major spaces, or spatial arrangements, for the containment andregimentation of African-Americans: the plantation, the ghetto, the prison industrialcomplex, and death row.

Foucaults Racial Geographies

Notwithstanding the spatial, or spatializing, turn of contemporary social theory and theproliferation of works that gravitate around the question of space, geography, cartogra-phy, and urbanization, Foucaults contributions to this turn have not received theattention that they deserve.3 A full analysis is of course beyond the scope of this essay.Yet, we can venture some preliminary insights and lines of approach. Michel Foucaultswork is uniquely marked by its use of spatial metaphors. From the earliest works to thevery last works, Foucault approached his object of analysis by way of geometrical,geographical and spatial metaphors. In his works, we find a plethora of topoi. There arediscursive fields, conceptual grids, regions of displacement, gazes that spatialize, institu-tions that domesticate and make docile the bodies of agents by rendering space eversurveyable. There are architectures of power, and the seat of the sovereign, the head ofthe King. There are also the taxonomies and semiotic matrices that render visible theordering of knowledge. There are regions, and providences, as well as archipelagos,landscapes, soil, horizon and domains. There are also besieged cities, with theirenvironments, and the carceral city with its imaginary geopolitics.4 The Birth of theClinic: an Archeology of Medical Perception opens with the lines This book is about space,about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.5 In fact, whileFoucault was studying the origins of clinical medicine, he considered the possibility offollowing up this book with another one on hospital or medical architecture.6 The Orderof Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences begins with the declaration that the bookfirst arose because of the laughter occasioned by a passage in Borges, one that awakenedin Foucault the suspicion that led him to the valorization of heterotopias.7 Madness andCivilization is centrally preoccupied with the question of confinement and containment,and thus with the development of institutions like the insane asylum.

His last works on the History of Sexuality deal with the spaces for the fulfillment ofdesire and the confessions of the flesh. The preponderance of the spatial and geographicin Foucaults writing is not aleatory or incidental, but rather methodological andconceptual. Foucaults concern with space, or rather with topos, is determined by threepreoccupations. First and foremost, Foucault is concerned with how we know, or makesomething, that is, an object of study and investigation, knowable, and how this makingknowable is linked to the ability to render something legible, visible, surveyable, andlocalizable. Thus, for Foucault, the question of epistemology is directly linked to theissue of topology, meaning how a place is a function of intelligibility. Spatialization andverbalization are entwined so as to render visible and sayable, but, in this way, they alsoconstitute the object of their discourse. It is this spatialization that allows for knowledgeto claim scientific status. As Foucault himself articulated it:

What is striking in the epistemological mutations and transformations of the17th century is to see how the spatialization of knowledge was one of the factorsin the constitution of this knowledge as a science. If the natural history and theclassifications of Linneas were possible, it is for a certain number of reasons:on the one hand, there was literally a spatialization of the very of object of their

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 45

analyses, since they gave themselves the rule of studying and classifying a plantonly on the basis of that which was visible The object was spatialized.8

A second concern that determines the spatiality of Foucaults thinking has to do with thedisciplinary grid that orders knowledges. Not only is knowledge spatializing, but systemsof knowledge themselves are spatialized, meaning that knowledges occupy a particularlocus within an epistemic topos. Knowledge itself is regimented by being contained andby being disciplined through the development of disciplines: Disciplines constitute asystem of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action ofan identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules.9 The third guidingpreoccupation certainly had to do with the very institutions that house these disciplines.Every one of Foucaults books deals with a social institution that is distinctly identifiableby its location and architecture: the insane asylum, the hospital, the prison, thebedroom, the monastery, and all the heterotopias that contest the disciplining power ofthe legitimate and normalizing spaces. Foucaults archeologies and genealogies ofknowledges are simultaneously archeologies and genealogies of social spaces and disci-plines. They are excavations of the plural sites for the production of knowledges.

I must note that in the mid-seventies Foucaults work underwent a recalibrationthat had effects on the ways in which space should be viewed, or rather approached. Ifwe use Foucaults language from 1976, his work up through the early part of theseventies concerned the how of knowledge.10 After 1976, there is a shift from descriptionto an analysis of origins, or the production of fields of force within which certainconfrontations can be creative, hegemonic, yet also contestational and confrontational,meaning subjugating but also insubordinating. This shift has to do with Foucaultsconcern with discovering or unearthing what he called subjugated knowledges.11

Thus, the shift was from an analytics of power to a creativity of power, from anarcheology of power to a genealogy of power. Here the term genealogy should be takenin its most literal sense, meaning a study of the origin or genesis of something. In thisshift, space is not just rendered accessible as the horizon against which things can bemade visible and verbalizable, but also as the horizon that is a field, a field ofconfrontation, of struggle and resistance. In this way, Foucaults earlier topologies turninto cartographies. From describing a topos that is inert, we proceed to an analysis of theproduction of spaces of knowledge, disciplinary regimes that encircle and containknowledges, and the tracing, partitioning, and gerrymandering of social spaces thatallow for the domestication and disciplining of subjects. Archeology is not abandoned,but rather is supplemented and transformed by genealogy.12 As he put it in an interviewwith members of the editorial board of the geography journal Herodote, the formationof discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analyzed, not in terms of typesof consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics andstrategies of power. Tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distribu-tions, demarcations, control of territories and organizations of domains which could wellmake up a sort of geopolitics.13

The seemingly paradoxical posture of a Foucault who appears to merely describe,without being able to give an account of his own locus of enunciation, is now dissipated.Genealogy is a form of analysis avowedly on the side of disqualified popular knowledge.Foucaults genealogies are dispositifs of resistance in as much as they bring togethererudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historicalknowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.14 Yet, whilegenealogy studies power, it is not solely for the sake of understanding power by itself.

46 E. MENDIETA

As Foucault affirmed, he did not write a treatise on power.15 Rather, he was concernedwith the different modalities of power, which had to do with the different institutions forits production. Behind the focus on power, however, is the preoccupation with modal-ities of agency, of subjectivity. The genealogical study of power is really a genealogy ofregimes of subjectivity. In response to a question by Dreyfus and Rabinow about howthe works in the series on the history of sexuality fit with his own works, Foucaultanswered: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, an historical ontology ofourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects ofknowledge; second, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of powerthrough which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historicalontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.16

I want to foreground the second domain, namely that domain in which we constituteourselves as subjects acting on others. How we constitute ourselves as subjects has todo with the partitioning, distribution, linking, closing off, mapping, and the surveying ofsocial space. The spaces that allow for certain truths to produce force effects andconversely, how certain powers produced certain truths, are spaces that come to bearupon the individual as a body. In Discipline & Punish, Foucault called the agents thatexercised this power to discipline the individual as a body the orthopedists of individ-uality.17 In the History of Sexuality, he called these disciplines anatomo-politics.18

This politics of the human body, which is about the making of subjects, is linked directlyand unambiguously to the production and creation of certain social spaces. Anatomo-politics is the other-side of social geography. In this way, the genealogy of the domainof a social ontology is also a genealogy of spatializing and spatialized political embodi-ments. Foucault put it eloquently in the following way: A whole history of spacescould be written that would be at the same time a history of powers, from the greatstrategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of housing, institutional architecture, from theclassroom to the hospital organization, by way of all the political and economicimplantations Spatial arrangements are also political and economic forms to bestudied in detail.19 A Foucauldian genealogy reveals to us how power produces certaintruths, and how certain truths have power effects. In revealing these power and trutheffects, genealogy brings us close to the way in which certain truths and powers makecertain forms of agency possible by territorializing and spatializing the body of the agent.In this way, the genealogies of truth and power are also genealogies of space, in whichthe power of space and the space of power are shown to be entwined in a furious embrace.

It may be easily argued, without too much contrivance, that racism is a form ofspatial regimentation, a way to enforce not just how subjects may conform and producethemselves as such, but also how they may or may not enter into interaction with certainother subjects. As Ronald Sundstrom put it eloquently: Race is not just expressedspatially, but it is experienced and produced spatially. Race is place, and racial placesbecome encrusted with racial representations that become all too often materialized dueto racist action and neglect.20 Racism is therefore about embodiment and socialgeography. Racism is about how one can and cannot be in a body. Racism is atechnology of embodiment, or, to use Foucaults terminology, it is an anatomo-politics.Whether we approach racism from the standpoint of the putatively scientific discourseto which it appeals for its justification, or we approach it from the standpoint of a visualmatrix that renders geometrical and spatialized a certain abjection or approval, racismhas do with what space may or may not be occupied, transversed, possessed by certainsubjects, and, concomitantly, what it has to do with what spaces are beyond reach, andare therefore unassailable, sanctified, and impenetrable. Succinctly put, racism is aboutspace, embodiment, and territory: it is about privilege and about building the walls of

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 47

exclusion that preserve and render invisible and acceptable that privilege and exclusion.Racism is a technology of subjection and agency that is enacted through the productionand regimentation of bodily, social and epistemologies spaces.21 The power and truthsthat grant legitimacy and stability to racist practices have to do with the spaces of powerthat subjugate subjects to the alleged truths of their flesh and the power of the space inwhich these same agents are contained and relegated. A genealogy of certain discoursesthat elucidates their spaces of power and the power that flows from its constructed andproduced spaces would also, by definition, be a genealogy of racism. To put itsummarily, on the basis of a Foucauldian genealogy we can match the matrices that mapsocial and cognitive space with the matrices that lash the tortured flesh of agents withracism. As significant and tactically indispensable as this type of analysis may be, it isby no means the best that Foucaults work can offer. In Foucaults work we can alsoencounter a more condemning analysis of racism.

While it could be argued that all of Foucaults work deals with racism insofar as allof it always deals with modes of agency and selfhood, the passions of the self, and thetorture of the flesh, Foucault wrote relatively little about racism directly. Foucault didaddress racism directly and explicitly, but in the context of his lectures at the Colle`gede France, from the academic year of 197576. A brief discussion of these lectures willallow us to appreciate the ways in which Foucaults approach to racism can be insightfuland useful in an American context. These lectures, entitled Society Must beDefended, have been known partially for at least two decades.22 The first twointroductory lectures of this course were published in Italian from a manuscript byAlessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, then translated into English in ColinGordons anthology of Foucaults writings.23 These two lectures are some of the mostcited texts of Foucaults because we find in them his critique of the juridical concept ofpower, which is based on the domination-repression model. We also have an extensivediscussion of the genealogical method, along with a discussion of five methodologicalprecautions for approaching questions of power. The discussion of these methodologicalprecautions concludes with the following admonition:

we should direct our researches on the nature of power not towards thejuridical edifice of sovereignty, the State apparatuses and the ideologies whichaccompany them, but towards domination and the material operators ofpower, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilizations of theirlocalized systems, and towards strategic apparatuses. We must eschew themodel of Leviathan in the study of power. We must escape from the limitedfield of juridical sovereignty and State institutions, and instead base ouranalysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination.24

These first two lectures constituted some of the most important methodological andphilosophical considerations of the study of power produced by Foucault. The lecturesthen proceed to discuss war and the emergence of historical knowledge, the develop-ment of historical narratives of wars among peoples, critiques of Thomas Hobbes, therise of a distinctly bourgeois form of power, biopower, and, finally, racism in relation-ship to biopower.25 It is this last discussion that makes these lectures particularlyimportant for an analysis of racism. In them we encounter an original analysis of racismin relationship to a new form of power, one that is not based on contract-repression, butrather on domination-subjugation. Racism, in short, is an expression of a new form ofpower, a power that is both individualizing and generalizing, a power that acts on theindividual by acting on a people as if it were a living entity. This form of biopower

48 E. MENDIETA

emerges at the end of the eighteenth century as an extension and supplementation ofwhat Foucault had called anatomo-politics, which is a power that seeks to domesticateand regiment the human body. This type of power acts upon the body as though it wasa machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of itsforces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, all this was ensured by theprocedures of power that characterized the disciplines.26 Linked to this form of power,there emerged another that focused on the species body, the body as the basis of allbiological processes: propagation, birth and mortality, the level of health, life expect-ancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Theirsupervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls:a biopolitics of the population.27 These quotes came from the last chapter of The Historyof Sexuality, a text written around the same time that these lectures were beingdelivered.28 In the lectures themselves, Foucault provides a more extensive discussion ofwhat fields biopower29 seeks to regulate. Among them we find control over relationsbetween the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as theyare living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live. This includes thedirect effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment: the problems,for instance, of swamps, and of epidemics linked to the existence of swamps this isessentially, the urban problem.30 But, notably, biopolitics also includes: accidents,infirmities, and various anomalies. Biopolitics, in short, is a form of power thatrules over a population, a people thought of as a living body, by attending, ensuring,securing and promoting its health. In short, biopolitics dominates and subjugates bymaking live.

The novelty of biopolitics is that it reverses the relationship between power, on oneside, and life and death, on the other. Classical sovereignty ruled by taking life andletting live. Its control over death was absolute. The power of the monarch was a powerto put to death, while life itself was beyond its purvey. Biopolitics, in contrast, isdeployed over the living, attending to it as a pastor tends to a flock, and, in this way,death begins to slip away from power. A destabilizing asymmetry emerges, one thatthreatens the very omniscience and omnipotence of this new form of power over theliving. It is the asymmetry between making live and letting die. Death slips away fromthe grip of biopower. Racism is biopowers response to this destabilizing asymmetry.

Racism allows biopower to reintroduce the threat of death into the exercise ofpower, while making death an extension of life. Racism is primarily a way ofintroducing a break into the domain of life that is under powers control: the breakbetween what must live and what must die.31 Racisms primary function is to tear andcreate fissures precisely in that which had been unified and made one by having beenseen as a living continuum. Racism introduces discontinuities and caesura that are to betreated as threats and contaminants precisely because they are gaps and brakes in aliving continuum. As it introduces these brakes into the living body of the population,we discern already its secondary, but equally important, function, namely to establish apositive relation that assures that killing is for the sake of the living. Racism bothnormalizes and makes imperative killing. Racism affirms that the more you kill, the moreyou let die, the more there is the possibility for living, for the living: if you want to live,you must take lives, you must be able to kill.32 Of course, Foucault grants, this positiverelationship was invented neither by the modern biopolitics state nor by racism. Rather,this has always been an axiom of war. In war, to live, you must ensure the death of theenemy. With this reflection and acknowledgment, Foucault takes up the thread of theselectures: war in society. But this is quite explicit, even if it is not said in as many words:

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 49

racism is the acme of the war that always simmers beneath the peaceful appearance ofcivil society, and racism reintroduces war, now as a war against the living body of thehuman race. Racism is the continuation of war by biopolitical means: it is a war on thebiological threats to the health, integrity, and unity of the living body of a people. If thepeople are to live, if a population is to be made to live in health and optimally, theninfirmities, pollutants, dysfunctions, illnesses, diseasein short, anything that threatensboth the natality and mortality of a populationmust be waged war on. Racism isbiopolitics war on the body politic for the sake of its life. Racism was first deployedagainst colonial peoples, represented as the other against which war must be waged.Later, this colonizing genocide is introjected and deployed against the colonizing peoplethemselves. If you are functioning in the biopower mode, how can you justify the needto kill people, to kill the population, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes ofevolutionism, by appealing to racism.33 In this way, racism legitimates and normalizesthe murderous and genocidal function of the state, while making quotidian andimperative that the killing of some, of the others, be pursued for the sake of the survivalof the living, the race, the species, the population. Racism, as a form of biopower,biologizes the foe and makes total war on it indispensable and absolutely necessary.The more we exterminate the threat, the more secure and healthy the peoplebecome. Racism, thus, is total war on the biological body of the people for the sake ofits health.34

US Racial Geographies

The history of power is also the history of space, the space within which that power wasdeployed and exercised. The history of power therefore has to be a history of localgeographies and local topographies. Such histories will also include histories of therelationship between industries and the appropriation and distribution of raw materials.Therefore, these histories will also be histories of roads, lines of communication, and thedevelopment of systems of transportation. In this way, these histories will be histories ofthe immigrations and emigrations of peoples, and the ways in which their flows were,and continue to be, instigated, regulated, monitored, sanctioned or penalized. But,insofar as the power of the modern state is a biopower, the history of its particular formof power will be a history of the ways in which it has attended to the living body of thepeople by regulating how that body extends and takes up geography.35 In this way, thehistory of biopower is a history of a racialized body politic, a body at war with itself. Thehistory of a people is the history of its biological body, which is also a history of its racialgeography and topographies. Few countries make this as evident as the United Statesdoes. For the history of the United States is above all a history of racial conflict, one thathas left its imprint in the very geography of the nation and the urban cartography of itsmetropolises.

The history of the United States is frequently periodized with reference to its racialquestion. Following this customary timetable, I will discuss US racial geographies interms of four racialized and racializing topographies: the plantation, the ghetto, theprison, and death row. Following Loic Wacquant, I will also assume that the UnitedStates has had not one, but several, peculiar institutions, which are not so peculiar butare integral to the very political, cultural, social, and geographical identity of thecountry.36 These institutions are the slave plantation, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and theprison industry complex (see table 1).

50 E. MENDIETA

Table

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(161

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1865

196

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,13

(Jan

Feb

2002

):42

.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 51

The Plantation

The plantation is a social, economic, and cultural system that emerged from institutingslavery as the core economic institution in the North Atlantic English colonies, and later,in the United States. Putting the plantation at the core of the colonies economic systemmade this emergent society shift from being a society with slaves to a slave society.37 Inthe early years of the colonies, African and English were distinguished not by the colorof their skins, but by their place of origin and whether they had a contract. Eventually,as labor needs increased, blackness and servitude began to converge: as the coloniesexpanded southward and westward, there emerged the legal difference between Englishindentured laborers, who could provide a contract, one which remained the same in theprocess of exchange and that stood in proxy for the laborer, on the one hand, and, onthe other, the Africans who did not and could not provide such a contract, and thus hadto stand for himself or herself as the guarantee of the exchange. This legal codificationof dispossession was biologized when the anti-miscegenation laws were introducedbeginning in 1662. These laws established matrilineal servitude status.38 It is not truethat anti-Black animus permeate the colonies, nor was blackness ipso facto associatedwith servitude. The conflation between skin color and the status of servant was slowlycodified in legal norms that had the specific goal of buttressing the power of theland-owing classes. As Steve Martinot put it, [t]he laborers body thus substituted itselffor the juridical instrument, the contract, in the market.39 In this way, not having aproxy in the market, meaning a contract, requires that ones own body stand in for thecontract. This resulted in codifying dispossession in the flesh of the indentured laborer.At the same time, the anti-miscegenation laws established the black body as possessionof the white master and as a polluting element within the body politic. Its presence isallowed but as the mark of dispossession. To be tainted by blackness entails servitude.This is what the one-drop of blood rules established, and which incidentally are onlylegally codified in the second half of the nineteenth century.40 Thus, absence in themarket turns into legal dispossession, but presence in it is only allowed as property ofthose who are untainted. In this way both are now indexicalized chromatically. Blacknessis both dispossession and servitude, that is, absence and inability to possess. In contrastand simultaneously, whiteness gets codified as possession and possessiveness.41 Just asblackness is to be property, whiteness is what grants property. The plantation was asystem of exploitation that sequestered and contained slave laborers for the expresspurpose of expropriating their labor power. It was a geography of dispossession andcontainment as it was an entire episteme and dispositif that simultaneously dispossessedthe black body. The plantation is an institution for spatial containment that is geared tothe maximum exploitation of the slave. This containment, however, is enabled by theprocesses of legal disenfranchisement that hides itself behind the veil of a naturalizedchromatic indexicalization that conflates blackness with servitude and dispossession.The geography of slavery, to use Ira Berlins felicitous expression,42 is matched by aracial topography that dislocated and displaced blackness into a cultural, legal, and evenontological negativity.

The Ghetto

To put it in simplest terms, the ghetto is the racial geography that takes over the roleof the plantation once the United States had abolished slavery. In other words, onceslavery, as a legal and political condition, had been abolished, a new mechanism was

52 E. MENDIETA

required to contain people with the end of exploitation. The ghetto is the spatialsegregation of the African-American, but it is at the same time the mechanism throughwhich their labor is made available for optimized exploitation. After the civil war, theemancipation of the slaves, and the derailed project of integration into white society thatwas undertaken under the reconstruction, White Americans countered with Jim Crow.Jim Crow extended and further codified the anti-Black animus that began to be codifiedunder slavery. In fact, Jim Crow went beyond the juridification of anti-Black racism. Itsvirulence and violence was more acute precisely because the African-American was nownominally and de jure a free being. In the words of Wacquant, Jim Crow consisted ofan ensemble of social and legal codes that prescribed the complete separation of theraces and sharply circumscribed the life chances of African-Americans while bindingthem to whites in a relation of suffusive submission backed by legal coercion andterroristic violence.43

The ghetto begins to emerge as a space of containment in urban areas as the Northreconstructed (although some revisionist historians may use the term colonized) theSouth after the civil war, and as the recently freed slaves begin a massive migrationnorthward. The exodus to the North was occasioned not just by Jim Crow, which nowhas become a euphemism for legalized political disenfranchisement, but also by theeveryday violence of quasi-legalized lynching. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,723reported lynchings of African-Americans. I must mention that lynching seems to havebeen a common practice and was originally used against whites, but as the nineteenthcentury comes to a close, it came to be used predominantly against blacks.44 It isnoteworthy that the paroxysms of this ritualistic violence reached its zenith at the turnof the twentieth century, almost half a century after slaves had been emancipated. Ageographical analysis of the distribution of these lynchings reveals that 90 percent ofthem took place in the Deep South.45 The decline of the southern agricultural economydue to natural disasters, plagues, and geopolitical competition from Latin America,India, and Africa, compounded with the emergent labor demand brought on byindustrialization in the metropolises of the North, and the policing and terrorizingviolence of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, led to what we should call a massiverefugee influx of persecuted African-Americans into northern cities. Between 1910 and1960 almost five million African Americans migrated northward, mostly to the Midwestand the Northeast.46

As African-Americans arrived in the North to the Fordist city of metropolitanindustry, they were relegated and cordoned off in those regions where they could beaccessed as cheap labor and also not present a threat to the property of the white orderof Anglo-America.47 It is significant that the process of northern urbanization takes placein tandem with the process of racial gentrification. This racial gentrification is overseenby the state itself through its housing policies. These policies ensure that the poor andcolored are concentrated in the dilapidated and poorly serviced urban centers whilewealthy whites, per definition the primary beneficiaries of state benefits, are granted thelicense and funding to flee to the suburbs. In other words, the development of the ghettohas to be seen in tandem with the suburbanization of the US. Both processes, however,were strategies of racial regimentation. An overview of the different agencies and actsused by Congress to regulate housing policies and availability reveals that the govern-ment conspired to segregate through its loaning practices, and actually participated inthe very act of destroying housing that was and could have been available to African-Americans and poor people in the inner cities. Martin Anderson has argued in hisnotorious book, The Federal Bulldozer, that the government has destroyed more low-

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 53

income housing than it actually built.48 The GI bill, which gave federally-secured loansto soldiers returning from WWII, and later the Fair Housing Act, and the Fair HousingAmendments of the sixties and eighties, have been mechanisms for extending thepossessive investments in whiteness and the dispossession of blacks, thus paralleling andexacerbating what began to be codified during slavery times. The economists MelvinOliver and Tom Shapiro estimate that these discriminatory policies have cost blackhomeowners $10.5 billion in extra mortgage payments, and that every black homeownerloses $4,000 as direct result of the 54 percent higher rate they pay on their mortgages.49

Since the 1930s the American government has pursued strategies to deal with thechallenge of urbanization. One was to encourage and finance homeownership throughlong-term, low-interest mortgages. The other was a housing initiative that involved thefederal government in the actual construction of public housing. These federally builtstructures were almost always located in the poorest parts of the major US metropolises.These two strategies were deployed over the following demographics: from 1960 to1977, as the number of whites living in suburbs increased by 22 million, 4 million joinedthem by flying from the inner city. During the same period, the inner-city African-Amer-ican population grew by 6 million, while its suburban counterpart only grew by500,000.50 As Kenneth T. Jackson noted in his celebrated Crabgrass Frontier, Americanhousing policy was not only devoid of social objectives, but instead helped establish thebasis for social inequities. Uncle Sam was not impartial, but instead contributed to thegeneral disbenefit of the cities and to the general prosperity of the suburbs.51 In short,the ghetto is, and continues to be, a major instrument for labor extraction, but also, andperhaps more importantly as de-industrialization desiccates the inner city, it has turnedinto a mechanism of ethnoracial closure52 that has transformed the inner city into aregion of racial war.

The Prison

The prison is an institutional space for confinement, punishment, and, allegedly, forre-education, but over the last half century it has turned into a major disciplinarysociospatial institution that enables dominant status group in an urban settingsimultaneously to ostracize and exploit a subordinate group endowed with negativesymbolic capital.53 This sociospatial institution takes over the structural and functionalrole that the ghetto played in the first part of the twentieth century, namely thespatialized racial containment and gerrymandering that perpetuated the exclusion andmarginalization of African-Americans. In Wacquants analysis, the prison enacts andreplicates the ghettos main mechanisms for ethnoracial control, which are: stigma,constraint, territorial confinement, and institutional encasement.54 Seen through theprism of these disciplinary and normalizing technologies, the ghetto ought to beunderstood as an ethnoracial prison or what Foucault called the carceralarchipelago. At the same time, however, the prison is an ethnoracial ghetto. To manyAfrican-Americans, prisons evoke the plantations of their slave forefathers and fore-mothers. The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center in New York is named after thefamily name of a slave-owning plantation. To a predominantly black inmate populationthis fact must have more than overwhelming irony.55

The rise of the ethnoracial prison has to be put in the context of suburbanization,the implosion of the inner city, the flight of industrial capital, the assault on the federalgovernment by Republican administrations, and, simultaneously, the launching of a waron drugs that has made the ghetto as violent and predatory as the jungles of Vietnam.

54 E. MENDIETA

Over the last half century, as the population has grown by about 28 percent, the prisonpopulation has risen by about 500 percent. Between 1985 and 1995, federal and stategovernments opened a new prison every week to house the influx of prisoners. By 1999,there were a total of 1.7 million prisoners.56 This means that there are about 645inmates per 100,000 citizens, or, approximately one out of every 155 American is inprison.57 In 1995, the United States was second to Russia for its rate of incarceration.Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States has a six to ten times higherincarceration rate.58 Yet, compared to these very same industrialized nations, the levelof crime tends to be lower, except when it pertains to violent crimes. Comparatively, theUnited States enjoys lower rates of crime. Yet, it has one of the largest inmatepopulations in the world. This has been directly linked to the punitive character of oursentencing laws, which continue to make more intense and lengthy the punishment ofcertain sentenced inmates.

Yet, when one looks at the ethnoracial composition of this inmate population, onewill discover exorbitant disparities. At the turn of the twenty-first century, we face DuBoiss race predicament, but now in an even more desperate way. Half of the presentinmate population is African-American, while 17 percent is Hispanic.59 But this numberdoes not betray the level at which both African-Americans and Hispanics are criminal-ized, stigmatized, and institutionally encased within a prison culture that spells forthem only the accumulation of negative symbolic capital.

The prison industrial complex does not just confine for a period of time. Over thelast two decades as the war on drugs has made the punitive retribution againstAfrican-Americans more acute, the juridification of political, economic and socialexclusion has been exacerbated. A study conducted jointly by The Sentencing Projectand Human Rights Watch disclosed the grim fact that approximately 3.9 millionAmericans, which is one in fifty adults, are either permanently or currently politicallydisenfranchised due to criminalization. Of this almost 4 million, 1.4 million wereAfrican-Americans; or, in other words, 13 percent of the African-American malepopulation.60 With a greater likelihood of being imprisoned and criminalized at a rate ofone out of every three young African Americans,61 this means that between 30 percentand 40 percent of African Americans will lose their right to vote. Thus, not only arecriminal justice policies resulting in the disproportionate incarceration of African Amer-ican[s]; imprisonment itself reduces black political ability to influence these policies.62

But exclusion is not just political. It is also economic, social, and cultural. OrlandoPatterson described slavery as natal alienation and a form of social death.63 Theethnoracial prison, as extension of the ghetto, continues this form of natal alienationand social death through its policies of cultural, social, and political exclusion. Theethnoracial prison is a landlocked slaveship stuck on the middle passage to nowhere.64

For instance, a 1996 analysis of state statuses concerning inmates revealed thatthere had been a rise in the number of states that (a) permanently denied felons the rightto vote (in fact now forty-eight states and the district of Columbia do not permitprisoners to vote65), (b) allowed the termination of parental rights, and (c) converted thestatus of felon into grounds for divorce.66 In addition, The Higher Education Act of1998 withdraws eligibility for felons convicted of a drug-related crime.67 In addition,The Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 banishes former felonsfrom Medicaid, public housing, and section 8 vouchers and similar forms of publicassistance. This act extends the punitive measures of earlier laws that suspended eithertemporarily or permanently welfare payments, veterans benefits and food stamps foranyone who was in prison for more than sixty days.68

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 55

The prison industry complex, which capitalizes on the so-called war on crime (inan age of declining crime rates) and the need to attract federal funds in lieu of industrialcapital that keep bleeding out of the nation, has expanded into one of the most lucrativeindustries. The state of California, which has the largest prison system in the world, hasaugmented its budget for state correctional facilities from $200 million in 1975 to $4.8billion in 2000. In 1994, in fact, the state funds invested in the prison system surpassedthose allotted to the University of California college system.69 The United States spendsabout $7 billion a year in prison building. In 1996 alone, contractors began twenty-sixfederal prisons, and ninety-six state prisons. Yearly expenses for running this prisonindustrial complex is between $20 and $35 billion, close to the annual military budgetbefore the war on terrorism was launched. These expenses certainly match the levels ofthe military budget at the height of the Cold War.70 In fact, such levels of societalinversion on the deliberate criminalization and imprisonment of African-Americans,which parallels the levels of inversion of the military industrial complex itself, signal thedevelopment and maintenance of a domestic war machine deployed against the bodypolitic itself. The prison industry complex is not just a mechanism for exclusion andmarginalization, it is also a mechanism for waging a war on the alleged criminal, thethreat, the pollutant felon and deviant. It is a war pursued by means of geographical andterritorial means. The prison is a dispositif for race marking and race making.71 It racesby stigmatizing, constraining, confining, and encasing. The prison betrays how race andplace, and race and topography, are intricately entwined. At the same time, however, wesee how these territories, fields, regions, and pyramids of power are also mechanism forwar making, in which the more you kill, the more you may live. The more we imprisonthe criminal and felon the more we can enjoy our lives. If racism is the means bywhich biopower reintroduces the right to kill, the prison is one of biopowers dispositifsfor executing this socially sanctioned and normalized killing. But this is not its only one.Nor is it the most blatantly racialized and racializing.

Death Row

Capital punishment is co-extensive with slavery and the ethnoracial prison. They wereand continue to be legal, institutionalized, and normalizing mechanisms and spaces forthe punishment, disciplining, and extermination of African-Americans. Again, as we sawwith the ghetto and the prison industrial complex, the uses of capital punishment reflecttopographies of power that seek to police the borderlands of racial encounter andfriction. There is no way to get around the fact that the death penalty is overwhelminglyused against African-Americans. The Bureau of Justice and the National Association forthe Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) statistics make this painfully evident.Between 1930 and 1990, 4,016 people were put to death by the state. Of these, 2,129were African-Americans, that is to say, 53 percent. In 2003, African-American are 42percent of the death row population, although people of color constitute 55 percent ofall death row inmates.72 Between 1930 and 1976, 90 percent of people executed for rapewere African-American. Furthermore, similar studies show that African-Americans are4.3 times more likely to be given the death sentence if the victims of their crimes arewhite.73 The death penalty is used precisely to police racial encounters, and thus theymark indelibly the racial geographies of US biopolitics. Thus, a report by the AmericanCivil Liberties Union (ACLU), notes that of the more than 700 executions carried outin the United States over the last quarter of a century, 82 percent were performed in tenstates (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South

56 E. MENDIETA

Carolina, Texas and Virginia). But Texas and Virginia together accounted for more thanhalf of these executions. Texas, more disturbingly still, executed 245 death row inmatesbetween 1976 and 2001;74 that is, almost one-third of all executions.75 These southernstates, which account for approximately 26 percent of the US population, accounted for83 percent of executions. Eighty percent of all federal death row penalties chargespresented by prosecutors come from five out of the ninety-two judicial districts.76

Indeed, the death penalty demarcates a deep racial line in the American body politicwith its particular racial topography.77

We have learned from Michel Foucault that the history of powers is the history ofspaces. From him we have also learned to see the relationship between space and race,and how geography and topography are entwined with the productivity of power. Powerdeploys itself by constituting a horizon of confrontation. In this field, power is resistedas it enacts its subjugation. Race is produced by the encounter between powers andspaces in the practices of subjectivity and subjection that makes our time uniquelymodern, uniquely our time. Racism is the name for a technology of subjection, ofagency, that regulates not just how we relate to ourselves, but most importantly toothers, and through them to ourselves. Racism, above all, is what allows diffusedbiopower to claim the right to kill. But biopower is social power; it is power over thesocial by the social; it is a power over a population that the population itself exercisesover itself via the techniques and technologies of making live. To live, a people mustmake the technologies of survival and the health of the people routine, quotidian, andnormalized. As Foucault noted, however, this is where racism is interjected: it intro-duces the need and right to put to death, but now as a routine, as a normalized science.Racism makes genocide quotidian, necessary and a right. Nothing makes this as patentlyclear as does the use of the death penalty in the United States. Death row is no lessgrotesque than the slave ship, the auction block, the tree with its lynched mutilatedcorpses, and yet we regard it or disregard it with the neglect that Hannah Arendt rightlycalled the banality of evil.

Notes

1. Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the Race Question in the US, NewLeft Review, 13 (JanFeb 2002): 4160. See also Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet andMesh, Punishment & Society, 3, no. 1 (2001): 95134.

2. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: PantheonBooks, 1977), 301.

3. Two exceptions are Chris Pilo, Foucaults Geography, in Thinking Space, eds Mike Crang and NigelTrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 20538, and Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present:Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London and New York: Continuum, 2001). Seealso the use of Foucault by J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed.Paul Laxton (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), especially chapter 2:Maps, Knowledge, Power, 51 ff. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and OtherReal-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996), chapter 5:Heterotopologies: Foucault and the Geohistory of Otherness, 14563.

4. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 307.5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Sheridan Smith (New

York: Vintage Books, 1975), ix.6. Michel Foucault, The Eye of Power, in Michel Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 19611984, Michel

Foucault, ed. Sylve`re Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 226.7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books,

1973), xviixviii.8. Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, and Power, in Michel Foucault Live, 346.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 57

9. Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language, in Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & TheDiscourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 224.

10. Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 19721977,Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 92.

11. Foucault, Two Lectures, 8283.12. See Beatrice Han, Foucaults Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward

Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially chapter 3: The Reformulation of theArchaeological Problem and the Genealogical Turn, 73107.

13. Foucault, Question on Geography, in Power/Knowledge, 77.14. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Knowledge/Power, 83.15. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,

Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209.16. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 237.17. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 294.18. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139.19. Foucault, Eye of Power, 228.20. Ronald R. Sundstrom, Race and Place: social space in the production of human kinds, Philosophy and

Geography, 6, no. 1 (2003): 8395, quote at 90.21. The idea of racism as a technology of subjection and agency determination can be made more precise with

reference to Foucaults clarification of the concept of technology. Foucault writes: [T]here are fourmajor types of these technologies, each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production,which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, whichpermit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determinethe conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject;(4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help ofanother a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way ofbeing, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom,perfection, or immortality. These four types of technologies hardly ever function separately, although eachone of them is associated with a certain type of domination. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self,in Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, andPatrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.

22. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 19751976, trans. DavidMacey (New York: Picador, 2003). The French version only appeared in 1997.

23. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge, 78108.24. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge, 102.25. See Pasquale Pasquino, Political Theory of war and peace: Foucault and the history of modern political

theory, Economy and Society, 22, no. 1 (Feb 1993): 7788.26. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.27. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.28. See Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, Situating the Lectures, in Foucault, Society Must be

Defended, 27393. See also the special issue of Cites dedicated to these lectures. Cites: Philosophie,Politique, Historie, 2 (2000): Michel Foucault: de la guerre des races au biopouvoir (Paris: Presses Universi-taries de France, 2000).

29. Foucault devoted his 1979 lectures to the birth of biopolitics. See the resume of these lectures: TheBirth of Biopolitics, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Volume One,Michel Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1997), 7380. See the following discussions: ThomasLemke, The birth of bio-politics: Michel Foucaults lectures on neo-liberal governmentality, Economy& Society, 30, no. 2 (May 2001): 190207, and his book Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: FoucaultsAnalyse der modernen Gouvernementalitat (Berlin and Hamburg: Argument, 1997), especially part two,chapter 1. See also Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London andThousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), chapter 5: Bio-Politics and Sovereignty.

30. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 245. Italics added.31. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 254.32. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 255.33. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 257.34. See the suggestive if misguided reflection on Foucaults similarity to Carl Schmitt by Mika Ojakangas,

Sovereign and Plebs: Michel Foucault Meets Carl Schmitt, Telos, 119 (Spring 2001): 3240.35. See David Theo Goldberg, Polluting the Body Politic: Racist Discourse and Urban Location, in

58 E. MENDIETA

Racism, the City and the State, eds Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (New York and London: Routledge,1993), 4560.

36. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 4142.37. The distinction is discussed by Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves

(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 9.38. Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 2002), 5460.39. Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, 50.40. See Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar

Strauss Giroux, 2000), 35657.41. Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993). Reprinted in Critical

Race Theory: The key Writings, eds Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas(New York: The New Press, 1995), 27691.

42. Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 7.43. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 46.44. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: The Modern

Library, 2002), viiiix.45. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in two American Centuries (New York: Basic

Civitas, 1998), 17576.46. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 47.47. See Loic J. D. Wacquant, The Ghetto, the State and the New Capitalist Economy, in Metropolis: Center

and Symbol of our Times, ed. Philip Kasinitz (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 41849.48. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. The Suburban-

ization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 228.49. Melvin L. Oliver and Tom Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 1995), 142.

Quoted in George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from IdentityPolitics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 32. Lipsitz has one of the most perspicaciousanalyses of the ways in which civil rights have been used by Whites to further codify what Cheryl Harriscalled Whiteness as Property.

50. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 7.51. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 230.52. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 49.53. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 50.54. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 50.55. See Bryonn Dain, Three days in NYC jails: BlackTerroristThug: The New Racial Profile?, Village

Voice, September 2430, 2003, 3031.56. Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999), 1, 9, 19.57. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 19.58. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 23.59. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 119.60. Marc Mauer, Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters, in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral

Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, eds Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: The NewPress, 2003), 51.

61. Young African-American male means a male between the ages of eighteen and fifteen. Of these, one inthree are under criminal justice supervision. See Loic Wacquant, Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs:On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United States, Studies in Political Economy, 69 (Autumn 2002):1930, quote at 19.

62. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 186.63. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University

Press, 1982), 714.64. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London and New York: Verso,

1999), 170.65. Mauer, Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters, 51.66. Jeremy Travis, Invisible Punishment: An instrument of Social Exclusion, in Marc Mauer and Meda

Chesney-Lind, eds., Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York:The New Press, 2003), 22. See also Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and theAmerican Condition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1624.

67. Travis, Invisible Punishment, 24.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES 59

68. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 58.69. Wacquant, Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United

States, 20.70. Parenti, Lockdown America, 213.71. Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis, 116.72. NAACP www.naacp.org/work/washington_bureau/DeathPenalty032803.shtml . The 55 percent

people of color statistic can be found in a report by the ACLU entitled Race and the Death Penalty,www.aclu.org/DeathPenalty/DeathPenalty.cfm?ID9312&c62 .

73. John Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press,1997), 160.

74. Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Bruce Shapiro, Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty andAmericas Future (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 71.

75. Report entitled Geography Determines Death Sentences, www.aclu.org/news76. Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future, 71.77. Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future, 70.

Note on contributor

Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is the editor andtranslator of Enrique Dussels The Underside of Modernity (1996). He is the author most recently of TheAdventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apels Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002).