Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Abstract

In the aftermath of the May 14, 2022, violent shooting attack by an eighteen-yearold white gunman, Payton Gendron, which killed ten black residents of Masten Park, BuffaloNY, a predominantly black neighborhood located on Buffalo’s East side, a range of responses were offered by this community. As expected, there was pain and anguish at Gendron’s brutal, ideologically driven plan to inflict as much black death as he possibly could. Driving more than two hours north to the Tops supermarket on Buffalo’s East side from his home on the outskirts of Binghamton, NY, Gendron’s motivation for the shooting was clearly laid out, specific in its intent and execution. The arithmetical logic of Gendron’s manifesto is the product of a deliberate set of racial (racist) calculations. Gendron’s logic is, as we shall see, imbricated in a notion of the biopolitical focused upon the right to choose, a right fundamental to the logic of neo-liberalism. As such, the biopolitical so delineated works to unveil a series of rights in which the ability to choose follows sequentially from the possession of capital, both racial and economic. A series of biopolitical rights that, moreover, itself derives from the protection afforded to some by the state’s sovereign violence; or, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, by the state’s founding upon the principles of retaining unto itself an “excess” of “power.” Within the context of this symposium on abolition (of the police, principally), this essay offers an argument for expanding the targets for abolition—widening the contours of the abolition paradigm—by situating us within a discourse we might name, evocatively, a self-sublimating black fear.