White Sovereignty (…), Black Life Politics: “The N****r They Couldn't Kill”

The subtitle of this article comes from an interview with Denzel Washington in which he recalls rejecting the lead role in a movie about a man convicted of raping a white woman and facing a death sentence that could not be carried out because the executioners had trouble killing him. The N-phrase can be read as reinscribing a post–civil rights archive of repetition in the police killings of black civilians and the racial policing of black populations in a “white citizenship democracy” as previously suggested by Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. DuBois. It argues that the racial policing of black populations underlines a democratic-racial social order constituted by and accountable to a white citizenship. Its logic of white sovereignty is increasingly revealed by black protests attached to the signifier BlackLivesMatter, which can be read in part as black life politics.