NOBODYNESS IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICA

Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint, foreword by Todd Brewster (New York: Atria Books, 2016) ("The law is but a mere social construction, an artifact of our social, economic, political, and cultural conditions. The law represents only one kind of truth, often an unsatisfying truth, and ultimately not the truest of truths, The rush of public emotion that spilled into the streets after the killing of Michael Brown alerted the world to the existence of a multitude of other, competing truths. Whatever the facts may have shown in this instance--including the forensic evidence and the parade of witnesses who recanted earlier statements--Michael Brown's life was taken with disturbingly casual ease. This indifference unmoored race and class antagonisms long held in awkward restraint." Id. at 9. "This is a book about what it means to be Nobody in twenty-first-century America." "To be Nobody is to be vulnerable . . . To be Nobody is to be subject to State violence. . . To be Nobody is to also confront systemic forms of State violence. . . To be Nobody is to be abandoned by the State. To be Nobody is to be considered disposable . . . " "Without question, Nobodyness is largely indebted to race, as White supremacy is foundational to the American democratic experiment, The belief that White lives are worth more than others--what Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude calls the 'value gap'--continues to color every aspect of our public and private lives. This belief likewise compromises the lives of vulnerable White citizens, many of whom support political movements and policies that close ranks around Whiteness rather than ones that enhance their own social and economic interests." "While Nobodyness is strongly tethered to race, it cannot be divorced form other forms of social injustice . . ." "Despite the centrality of race within American life, Nobodyness cannot be understood without an equally thorough analysis of class. Unlike other forms of difference, class creates the material conditions and relations through which racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are produced, sustained, and lived. . ." "This book is my attempt to tell the stories of those marked as Nobody." Id. at xvii- xx. NOTE: One form of a capacity for empathy is, in large part, the ability and willingness to see one's own potential vulnerability in others, to see one's own potential Nobodyness in others. Similar to the reality that each of us is potentially disable, potentially a disabled person--being a fall, a misstep, a car accident, an illness, etc. away from crossing the line from able to disable--, each of us is potentially vulnerable, potentially a Nobody. How confident are you that you are Somebody, and that you always will be such until the day you die? Food for thought.).