Homeland Insecurities: Racial Violence the Day after September 11

Abstract

t would be naive to ignore how severely the systematic attacks of the Right since September 11 have stalled the critical project of the Left in deconstructing the current political moment. With much of the Left having abandoned its principled commitments and lined up, flags waving, in full support of the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war, a reconstructive project has yet to begin. The decampment of the Left is so dire that the Nation recently proclaimed, without apology, the opinionating of fictional character Huey Freeman in the comic The Boondocks to be “the most biting and consistent critique of the war and its discontents in the nation’s mass media.”1 For months we have been bracing ourselves for the next degradation; “things will get worse before they get better” seemed to be the mantra of despair. This may still be so: With Bush’s threatened expansion of the war beyond Afghanistan, U.S. antipathy toward the Geneva Conventions, and the continuing detention of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians, the crisis shows no signs of abating. But it is in exactly this moment of nationalist, nativist, and militaristic excess that we might develop greater acuity not only in our critique of prevailing politics, but in the imagined alternatives. Decentering of September 11, as Judith Butler suggests,2 is important to understand the meaning and import of the terrorist attacks. But decentering requires not only that we expand our frame of reference to include the world before September 11, we must envision a desired world after September 11 as well.