Social Death

I think Cacho's fresh perspective on the complex ways in which inequality is structured as criminalization and denial of personhood in the United States reveals important truths about how we "group" society. For example, the unemployed and the "illegal alien," while radicalized groups, are not legally disempowered by their race. As Cacho points out, the law uses these supposedly "color blind" terms to identify these groups of people, although public discourse and identity politics are still overwhelmingly preoccupied with the racial identities. This is all rooted in the gap we are all familiar with which takes (for example) the percent of unemployed Americans and the percent of unemployed African Americans without treating them as the same issue. Politicians, pundits, and activists alike often speak of the economics of unemployment and racial discrepancies as separate issues (e.g. one to be solved by a stimulus package, the other by affirmative action). By investigating how other labels (such as gang vs family member) Cacho begins the important work of conflating the lines between these issues, encouraging, I think, the discontinuation of factionalized activism/lobbying and a closer look at the true underlying structures that cause social death.

This is not, of course, to remove race from the equation; Cacho makes that clear and I don't think any of us would disagree. However, I think her work suggests that race should not be the organizing structure through which these issues are confronted. The danger of neoliberal politics, as Duggan pointed out, is the treatment of the economy as independent from social/cultural/racial factors. It is equally dangerous, however, to brand various types of criminalization as a "black/latino/a/muslim/etc. issue" as opposed to recognizing that, "Because racial identities are commonsensical conceived of a s discrete, the production of racial difference and corresponding processes of radicalization are also assumed to be separate and parallel, rather than relational, intersecting, and interdependent," (79). As Cacho pointed out on page 16, focusing on the treatment of African Americans after Katrina rendered the equally disparate Vietnamese experience invisible. Coming from New Orleans having been forced to read various different accounts of the Katrina/post Katrina experience, I encountered a number of works that confronted the various racialized iniquities, including black and muslim experiences, but I never heard about how the Vietnamese population was affected. I know that New Orleans has a significant Vietnamese population, but I never even asked or thought about it in terms of Katrina because even the progressive academic responses to the catastrophe have focused on the racial problems as black problems. She does the same work in the chapter on terrorism by investigating the relationship between the changing popular discourses surrounding muslim terrorism and latino/a immigration. Branding issues racially can be just as detrimental as the colorblind approach, and considering Cacho's labels of the unprotected/criminalized/illegal/etc. is helpful for looking at new ways to confront and dismantle these systems of power.